This essay provides readers with a critical analysis of the ethnographic sciences and the psychological warfare used by the British and Kenyan colonial regimes during the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. In recent years, several survivors of several detention camps set up for Mau Mau suspects during the 1950s have brought cases in British courts, seeking apologies and funds to help those who argue about systematic abuse during the times of “emergency.” The author illustrates that the difficulties confronting Ndiku (...) Mutua and other claimants stem from the historical and contemporary resonance of characterizations of the Mau Mau as devilish figures with deranged minds. The author also argues that while many journalists today have commented on the recovery of “lost” colonial archives and the denials of former colonial administrators, what gets forgotten are the polysemic ways that Carothers, Leakey, and other social agents co-produced all of these pejorative characterizations. Kenyan settlers, administrators, novelists, filmmakers and journalists have helped circulate the commentaries on the “Mau Mau” mind that continue to influence contemporary debates about past injustices. (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, (...) but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

This paper describes the construction of the visual space of surveillance by the global anti-doping apparatus, it is a space inhabited daily by professional cyclists. Two principal mechanisms of this apparatus will be discussed—the Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport; in order to illustrate how this space is constructed and how it visualises the invisible act of doping. These mechanisms act to supervise and govern the professional cyclist and work to classify them as either clean or dirty in terms of (...) the use of prohibited doping substances or methods. Contrary to the analysis of liberal anti-doping scholars such as Hanstad, Loland and Møller this paper argues that Foucault’s Panopticon paradigm is a useful tool for the analysis of this apparatus. The Whereabouts System and Biological Passport are the instruments by which the anti-doping apparatus intensifies the construction of the space of surveillance in professional sport. This space of surveillance not only locates and makes visible the physical location of each individual cyclist, but it also makes visible their internal bodily functions, in this case the composition and the fluctuations of the composition of their blood. In making the cyclist visible the instruments do not allow the cause of doping, or the event of doping to be known or observed. Rather what they do is cast the body in terms of abnormalities of time, place or blood. In the case of an abnormality of the cyclist’s blood, the cause itself cannot be identified with any certainty, all that is made visible is a suggestion, or a probability, that doping may have occurred. The ultimate effects are twofold—an internalisation and continual monitoring of one’s self as well as by the authorities, and a radical change in the nature and the definition of the offence of doping. No longer is it positive evidence of doping that is punishable, but what becomes punishable is an abnormality, in the cyclist’s location, or their body, which suggests a probability that the invisible act of doping may have occurred. In the course of this process accepted manners of proving an offence by the use of scientific evidence and expert commentary are transformed. The Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport open up a new manner in which the invisible can be visualised. Through the discourse and the attendant commentary of the expert a new alliance between doping and the law is constructed. The result is a redistribution of the way in which the law visualises and treats the symptoms (the signifier) and the signified act of doping. The Whereabouts System and Biological Passport are the instruments by which the anti-doping apparatus intensifies the construction of the space of surveillance in professional sport. This space of surveillance not only locates and makes visible the physical location of each individual cyclist, but it also makes visible their internal bodily functions, in this case the composition and the fluctuations of the composition of their blood. In making the cyclist visible the instruments do not allow the cause of doping, or the event of doping to be known or observed. Rather what they do is cast the body in terms of abnormalities of time, place or blood. In the case of an abnormality of the cyclists’s blood, the cause itself cannot be identified with any certainty, all that is made visible is a suggestion, or a probability, that doping may have occurred. The ultimate effects are twofold—an internalisation and continual monitoring of one’s self as well as by the authorities, and a radical change in the nature and the definition of the offence of doping. No longer is it positive evidence of doping that is punishable, but what becomes punishable is an abnormality, in the cyclist’s location, or their body, which suggests a probability that the invisible act of doping may have occurred. In the course of this process accepted manners of proving an offence by the use of scientific evidence and expert commentary are transformed. The Whereabouts System and the Biological Passport open up a new manner in which the invisible can be visualised. Through the discourse and the attendant commentary of the expert a new alliance between doping and the law is constructed. The result is a redistribution of the way in which the law visualises and treats the symptoms (the signifier) and the signified act of doping. (shrink)

Drawing on the recent concussion litigation from the United States’ National Football League, the paper examines the emergence of neuroscience knowledge as part of a defining rationale for the justification and rationalization of the lawsuit. The paper argues that neuroscience knowledge is best understood as a regulatory discourse that is attached to larger social, political, and economic realities that bring it into being as a legitimate type of knowledge. This larger socio-political governance logic is one that scholars call ‘biopolitical’ which (...) emphasizes the protection of individual life over and above other ways of being. Risk discourses that frame risk-taking practices as immoral thus emerge within this biopolitical regime of governance that frame morality in terms of public health that individual citizens ought to pursue. With this in mind neuroscience knowledge plays an important role in concussion litigation. It emerges as a technology of biopolitical governance in that it is used to justify legal decisions on concussion. This is despite the fact that neuroscience knowledge remains nascent and even scientifically uncertain. Because of this, the paper argues that scholars ought to not only consider neuroscience research skeptically, but also ought to be aware of the dangers of neuroscience’s emergence as an ‘anticipatory discourse’ that has the potential to reduce human behavior to matters of the brain that thus transforms our very ontology of ourselves and the practices we perceive as ‘good’. (shrink)

Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt focused on organ transplantation, this paper examines the ways in which the “scientific” criteria of determining death in terms of brain function are contested by Egyptian doctors. Whereas in North American medical practice, the death of the “person” is associated with the cessation of brain function, in Egypt, any sign of biological life is evidence of the persistence, even if fleeting, of the soul. I argue that this difference does not exemplify (...) an irresolvable culture clash but points to an unsettling aspect of cadaveric organ procurement that has emerged wherever organ transplantation is practiced. Further, I argue that a misdiagnosis of the problem, as one about “religious extremism” or a “civilizational clash,” has obfuscated unresolved concerns about fairness, access, and justice within Egyptian medical spheres. This misdiagnosis has led to the suspension of a cadaveric procurement program for over 30 years, despite Egypt’s pioneering efforts in kidney transplantation. (shrink)

This paper critiques the rise of scientific approaches to central questions in the humanities, specifically questions about human nature, ethics, identity, and experience. In particular, I look at how an increasing number of philosophers are turning to evolutionary psychology and neuroscience as sources of answers to philosophical problems. This approach constitutes what I term a biological turn in the humanities. I argue that the biological turn, especially its reliance on evolutionary psychology, is best understood as an epistemology of ignorance that (...) contributes to a climate of hostility and intolerance regarding feminist insights about gender, identity, and the body. (shrink)

Bioethics influences public policy, scientific research, and clinical practice. Thinkers in Continental traditions have increasingly contributed scholarship to this field, and their approaches allow new insights and alternative normative guidance. In this essay, examples of the following Continental approaches in bioethics are presented and considered: phenomenology and existentialism; deconstruction; Foucauldian methodologies; and biopolitical analyses. Also highlighted are Continental feminisms and the philosophy of disability. Continental approaches are importantly diverse, but those I focus upon here reveal embedded models of individualized autonomy (...) in medical discourses and encourage awareness of medicine's normalizing edges, thereby drawing attention to lacunae in traditional bioethical frameworks. (shrink)

This essay explores the two main objectives of Bishop’s book, which he analyzes in the context of the care for the dying: the medical metaphysics underlying medical science and biopolitics as governance of the human body. This essay discusses Bishop’s claims in view of newer developments in medicine, especially the turn to the construction of life, and confronts the concept of the patient’s sovereignty with an alternative model of vulnerable agency. In order to overcome the impasses of contemporary bioethics, the (...) essay argues that practical reason requires a two-fold ethics: first, it must develop a new hermeneutics of illness and disease, and second, in order to protect the individuals in the process of dying, moral claims concerning death must be based on the concept of human rights. (shrink)

Insofar as border policing and wall construction symbolize the reassertion of nation-state sovereignty, the fact that they exacerbate the problems they seek to contain makes them complicit...

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

After centuries of relative neglect, the notion of the messianic is again in vogue in radical discourse. This paper explores the meaning and significance of this concept in the work of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben. They have been chosen not only because of their biographical and theoretical linkages to the thinker most responsible for the current resurgence of the concept of the messianic – Walter Benjamin – but also because they offer two alternative readings of precisely this concept. After (...) exploring the meaning of this concept in Benjamin, Arendt and Agamben, the analysis turns to the related concepts of sovereignty and the “camps” in our principals in order to further elaborate the difference between them and to bring into focus the strengths and weaknesses of the theoretical/political deployment of messianism in contemporary leftist thought. (shrink)

This paper attempts to assess the state of the contemporary debate over humanism. Beginning with a brief recap of the main historical meanings of the concept of humanism itself, it details both the most recent articulation of the humanist standpoint in the work of Tzvetan Todorov and his "critical humanism" and the most potent anti-humanist replies in W.G. Sebald and Giorgio Agamben. While concerned to critically evaluate these new constellations of the debate, its main contention is not to wholly endorse (...) either position nor to consign the opposition itself to the past but rather to explain why this has not happened and consider where the figure of humanism stands today. (shrink)

The relation between truth and violence is explored through the logic of sacrifice presented in the Book of Job. Job, as an arbitrary sacrificial victim, learns the truth of the violence perpetrated against him. Such violence is also shown to be constitutive of Western reasoning, including its practices of the truth.

Giorgio Agamben presents us with one of the most powerful and controversial criticisms of human rights. He contests conventional understandings of human rights as normative setbacks on sovereign power, and shows instead how these rights reinforce sovereignty by producing bare lives that are irredeemably exposed to violence. This essay aims to understand the distinctive aspects of Agamben's critique and assess his concluding call for a politics beyond human rights. It suggests that this call is necessitated by a counternarrative of Western (...) politics that ties human rights inextricably to the logic Agamben ascribes to biopolitical sovereignty. Within this stringent logic, any politics organized around human rights cannot help but reproduce sovereign violence. The essay questions this counternarrative in two ways: First, it shows how this counternarrative, which aims to unveil all the myths that sustain sovereignty, ends up repeating what it identifies as the distinctive mythologizing gesture: rendering the contingent necessary. Second, it turns to Agamben's notion of ‘potentiality’ to break the binding spell of his narrative of fated necessity and reclaim the contingent, equivocal and unpredictable effects of modern rights declarations and struggles. The essay concludes with a discussion of contemporary rights struggles of sans-papiers to illustrate the strengths and limits of Agamben's critique of human rights. (shrink)

This article explores how and why contemporary nationalist ‘defence leagues’ in Australia and the UK invoke fantasies of law. I argue these fantasies articulate with Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘nomos’, which holds that law functions as a spatial order of reason that both produces and is produced by land qua the territory of the nation. To elucidate the ideological function of law for defence leagues, I outline a theory of law as it relates to (political) subjectivity. Drawing on the work (...) of Foucault, Agamben and Brown, I demonstrate how subjects form and are formed by historically contingent relationships to law in the contemporary neo-liberal moment. Turning to Lacan, I show how nationalistic invocations of law provide nationalists with a fantasy that the nation’s law represents them and holds them together (as the nation itself). Similarly, I argue that nationalists imagine that the other has their own law as well, which not only corresponds to the other, but functions as a legible index of the other’s otherness—a metonym for the threatening uncertainty and radical difference that the other represents. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the big Other, I ultimately argue that nationalists aggressively (re)assert law not only to defend the nation, but to ensure their own symbolic and ontological security therein. (shrink)

In this paper, I work through the possible contours of an anti-genocide based on a framework informed by the work of Giorgio Agamben. Such a framework posits the inherent need to circumvent sovereign power within any form of normative activism. To begin, I show how the nascent anti-genocide movement promotes an ideal in which ?Western? states, particularly the USA, accept the global responsibility to protect persecuted life beyond national boundaries. Using Agamben, I argue that this vision also entails an acceptance (...) of a sovereign framework for the valuation of life, thus failing to confront the inherent power of the sovereign to condemn life in the first place. I then highlight the limitations that Agamben's ontology places on us in dealing with this inherent problem within the sovereign-subject relationship. By positing an alternative ontology, I suggest the possibility of establishing communities of solidarity that challenge the sovereign's self-ascribed role as the absolute valuator of life. Counter to Agamben, I argue that the basis for such communities could be a dedication to the universal sacredness of human life, which is maintained independently of, and in challenge to, sovereign power. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates some salient features of the fascination for the monk in contemporary scholarship. Interestingly, the figure of the monk has attracted the attention of authors engaged in fields as diverse as political philosophy and liturgical theology, clearly without referring to one another. On the one hand, the much talked-about Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben discusses the liturgical heritage of Western civilization to better understand the mechanisms behind modern politics and economy. In that context, he sees the monk as someone (...) in whom rules and life have become indistinct. On the other hand, liturgical theologian David W. Fagerberg extensively deals with the monk in his groundbreaking study on liturgical asceticism. He seems to make a similar point as Agamben: the monk exemplifies not simply obedience to rules but embodies the very life a Christian is supposed to live. This article compares both frameworks of thought to see whether the one can be used to critically evaluate the other and to propose some reflections about formation. (shrink)

Muselmannwas a term used in German concentration camps to describe prisoners near death due to exhaustion, starvation, and helplessness. This paper suggests that the inhuman conditions in the concentration camps resulted in the development of a defensive sense of disownership toward the entire body. The body, in such cases, is reduced to a pure object. However, in the case of theMuselmannthis body-as-object is felt to belong to the captors, and as such is therefore identified as a tool to inflict suffering (...) and pain on theMuselmannhimself. In this situation, lacking cognitive resources, theMuselmannmay have no other alternative than to treat his body as an enemy, and then to retreat or disinvest from the body. This response is a form of somatic apathy, an indifference that is tied to a loss of the self/non-self distinction. This may, in turn, lead to suicidal inclinations, even after liberation from the camp. (shrink)

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the ‘messianic tone’ in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to render (...) the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter’s sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a ‘European’ tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer, a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer’s anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today. (shrink)

Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this essay focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens a space for a politics not founded on a form of belonging grounded in a particular property, such as national identity. To illustrate this event this essay turns to Agamben’s construction of whatever-being, which is constructed hyper-hermeneutically. This term is chosen deliberately. Whatever-being retains a hermeneutic structure, but (...) is constructed through singular paradigmatic examples. These examples are evidence for whatever-being’s existence as a pure singularity, unable to be reduced to a particular quality. Such examples are gestures that allow future modes of belonging to separate themselves from oppressive foundations and dominating constructions of political existence, through revealing the possibility of a new way of being that does not require a revolutionary “zero hour” to be brought about. (shrink)

This article investigates the recent martyrdom of the French Catholic priest Jacques Hamel in order to assess the possibilities of sacrificial commemoration in a world that is increasingly globalized, increasingly secularized, and also increasingly subject to the capricious violence of religiously-infused terrorism. I argue that under contemporary conditions it has become increasingly difficult to articulate a meaningful form of sacrifice that exists beyond the logic of sovereignty. However, I conclude by identifying rare and fleeting instances of martyrdom which seem to (...) promise the return to the concept’s counter-sovereign heritage. (shrink)

In this article I bring Giorgio Agamben’s notion of ‘whatever singularity’ into critical pedagogy. I take as my starting point the role of identity within critical pedagogy. I call upon Butler to sketch the debates around the mobilization of identity for political purposes and, conceding the contingent necessity of identity, then suggest that whatever singularity can be helpful in moving critical pedagogy from an emancipatory to a liberatory project. To articulate whatever singularity I situate the concept within the work in (...) which it appears, and then take a detour into Agamben’s general philosophical project. I propose that, for critical pedagogy to take whatever singularity seriously, it must uphold a respect for the ineffability of being, which entails in part the suspension of dialogue. To help flesh out what I mean by this proposal, I turn to a fragment of Lyotard’s philosophy and his critique of democracy. I conclude by addressing a pressing ontological critique of Agamben, which leads me to argue for a materialist appropriation of the figure of whatever singularity, one that is held in tension with ontological concerns of identity. (shrink)

This paper responds to the violence inherent in modern ‘formal’ conceptions of justice which sever the ‘cultural’ from the ‘political’. As a counterpoint to this dominant rendering of justice the paper explores an alternate justice whose character is typified by the disposition and exigencies of the viscera.

This paper explores the thermodynamic property ‘entropy’ as a metaphor for aesthetics and politics, law and resistance in the case of the Summer Riots 2011. The aim of the paper is to use the framework and structure of entropy to demonstrate a political aesthetics of property. This shall be done by firstly linking entropy with aesthetic concepts of order, disorder, symmetry and equilibrium. Works on complex adaptive systems to account for collective behaviour, combined with Benjaminian and Adornian accounts of the (...) commodity, shall be used alongside the relevance of crowd theory in explaining not the riots themselves but the sentencing of collectivity in the case of R v Blackshaw & Others [2011] EWCA Crim 2312. Following Rancière and the arts and crafts movement, utility and beauty, the breaking down of the divisions of art, life, philosophy and science are summarised as the lesson of entropy for law. This re-visiting of the Summer Riots 2011 hopes to re-evaluate the sentencing procedures in light of ‘Riot-Related Offending’ through an aesthetic politics of collectivity, property and commodity. (shrink)

This article critiques the idea of instrumental justification for violent means seen in Hannah Arendt's writings. A central element in Arendt's argument against theorists like Georges Sorel and Frantz Fanon in On Violence is the distinction between instrumental justifications and approaches emphasizing the `legitimacy' of violence or its intrinsic value. This doesn't really do the work Arendt needs it to in relation to rival theories. The true distinctiveness of Arendt's view is seen when we turn to On Revolution and resituate (...) the later arguments of On Violence in the context of her ideas about the separation between revolution and liberation. Arendt's commitment to the American discovery in revolutionary politics of a means that needs no further ends to justify it permits a rereading of her conception of liberation as an attempt to envisage a violence that, while tactically instrumental, is at the same time politically non-instrumental. But while Arendt's view is distinct, the article also highlights important thematic continuities with the writings of Sorel and Walter Benjamin. (shrink)

Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of (...) human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively "conceptual" and more firmly grounded in social theory. (shrink)

Judith Butler’s meditations on precarity have received considerable attention in recent years. This article proposes that an undertheorized strain of her argument offers productive resources for theorizing violence. The question extends beyond material acts, to ask how certain groups are rendered eligible for heightened, regularized violence – and, by extension, how liberal subjects are rendered complicit with policies at odds with their universalist commitments. At stake is a politics of sensibility that complicates and enriches juridico-institutionalist models. That said, when Butler’s (...) account is brought to bear on a wider range of cases, it encounters a set of questions it is not prepared to answer on its own terms. Accordingly, I propose some directions the argument would need to be expanded to do justice to its own normative intuitions. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 73-85, December 2011.

With his concept of ‘potentiality,’ Agamben offers a promising means of approaching questions of power and agency. Yet arguably, by situating potentiality as a reserve created through the sovereign ban, Agamben neglects the inter-subjective context of ordinary everyday agency. This means that while Agamben’s theory is particularly well suited to the analysis of interactions between states and their citizens, and those excluded from citizenship, it provides poor tools for understanding how social disparity develops within communities, understood as networks of individuals (...) of varying capacities and ways of being. By revisiting Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality from which Agamben’s concept is drawn, the essay develops from potentiality ways of thinking about agency. The essay focuses upon a class of individual who are increasingly seen to embody the political community’s potentiality, to the extent that their ability to exercise agency is reduced: that is, the ‘innocent child’—glossed at once as humanity’s future and best hope, and as its most vulnerable and unrealised quotient. While human potentiality is thought only in terms of childhood innocence, not only will these individuals’ agency be stymied, but citizens will also continue to separate themselves from their own unrealised potentials and frailties. (shrink)

Sexualized naked protest using young and attractive women's bodies have long featured in the repertoire of protest tools for interventions in public space. Antirape feminist groups and nonhuman-animal rights activist groups, in particular, have mobilized these bodies to attract attention to their causes. Contemporary debates have suggested that these sorts of protest are objectionable, and that they are entwined with contemporary rape culture. This article complicates these accounts by considering what happens when the naked body is presented as a grotesquery (...) in the service of these apparently emancipatory politics.Analyzing two instances of naked protest as case studies, this article examines what happens to naked protest when the bodies protesting are “ugly” or are rendered so. The analysis suggests that naked protest featuring bodies that are “ugly” harbors the possibility of mobilizing a transgressive politics beyond contemporary rape culture. This article has implications for better understanding how to mobilize protest in a way that is transgressive and bold without further enshrining rape culture as the normative background against which it takes place. (shrink)

The concept of sovereignty is one of the central concepts of modern political philosophy. However, faced with processes of economic globalization as well as legal and political universalism, contemporary political theory struggles to account for the exercise of state power in terms of the traditional understanding of sovereignty. This survey article reviews the most influential conceptualizations of sovereignty in contemporary continental political philosophy. These include Schmitt’s defense of sovereignty and Agamben’s rejection of sovereign politics as well as a number of (...) theoretical attempts to account for the complexities of sovereignty and its adaptation to new political circumstances. (shrink)

This article uses Walter Benjamin's theoretical claims in the 'Critique of violence' to shed light on some current conceptualisations of terrorism. It suggests an understanding of terrorism as an essentially contested concept. If the theorist uncritically adopts the state's account of terrorism, she occludes an important dimension of the phenomenon that allows for a rethinking of the state's claim to a monopoly on legitimate violence. Benjamin's essay conceptualises the state as resulting from a conjunction of violence, law, legitimacy and power (...) that rests on mythical ideas about nature and history. It shows why the state claims to be justified in taking exceptional measures when this link is challenged and when its prerogative to the legitimate use of force is called into question. This, I argue, is what terrorism does. Thus, Benjamin's essay adds to a more nuanced and less one-sided understanding of both terrorism and state violence. (shrink)

This article disputes the premise dominant in moral philosophy and the social sciences that a strict definition of terrorism is needed in order to evaluate and confront contemporary political violence. It argues that a definition of terrorism is not only unhelpful, but also impossible if the historicity and flexibility of the concept are to be taken seriously. Failure to account for terrorism as a historical phenomenon produces serious analytical and epistemological problems that result in an anachronistic, ahistorical, and reductive understanding. (...) Because there are no historically or contextually stable answers to the question what terrorism is, this article argues for a novel account of terrorism that replaces the attempt to define terrorism with an analysis of its meaning and function within a specific context. (shrink)

Against the well-established critical rejection of rights a growing literature in the tradition of agonistic democracy asserts their emancipatory role in the struggles for social change. However, agonistic theorists, invested as they are in the idea of democratic innovation as a process of gradual ‘augmentation’ of existing rules, institutions and practices, fail to account for the ruptural capacity, and hence for the full radical potential, of rights. Using the performative approach, I develop a conception of rights claiming as a defiant (...) practice to express the ruptural dimension of certain forms of rights politics. I demonstrate how defiant rights claiming articulates immanent critique by declaring the incapacity of putative duty-bearer institutions and governments to uphold the claimed right due to structural constraints, thereby generating inevitable contradictions within the extant order and creating the necessity for an alternative one. Moreover, in order to fully capture the emancipatory potential and creative capacity of rights, this article argues for understanding certain forms of rights politics both as augmentation and rupture, taking the two to be different dimensions of the same radical democratic practice. I present the creative use of rights discourse by the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil and the transnational network of agrarian movements, La Via Campesina, as precisely such a combination of the practice of augmentation and defiant claims, which has led to the transformation of the right to food and land into the right to food sovereignty, demonstration of the structural embeddedness of rights violations in the existing global regime of food production and distribution, and authorisation of an alternative vision of the future. (shrink)

This article analyses Foucault’s 1972–3 lecture course, La société punitive. While the course can certainly be seen as an initial draft of themes for the 1975 book Surveiller et punir, there are some important differences. The reading here focuses on different modes of punishment; the civil war and the social enemy; the comparison of England and France; and political economy. It closes with some analysis of the emerging clarity in Foucault’s work around power and genealogy. This is a course where (...) Foucault makes use of Marxist language and categories, engages with historical materialism, and offers a complementary and at times corrective focus. (shrink)

This paper examines how aesthetic ideals shaped the practice of Nazi medicine. It proposes that Nazi eugenics relied on the conflation of norms of health with norms of beauty determined and performed by Nazi cultures of action. Though theories of biological holism served as vehicles of Nazi ideology, they did so contingently. The anti-totalitarian thinking of biological holist Kurt Goldstein shows that the use of biological holism to promote Nazi ideology was not inevitable. This examination of aesthetic influences on Nazi (...) medicine shows that traditionally speaking ‘non-rational’ factors shaped the Nazi biomedical program’s aims and methods. (shrink)

The article argues that the contentious and complex concept of ‘authenticity’, which Agamben develops from Heidegger, forms a central continuity between Agamben’s earlier work, which focuses more on language and art, and his later work, which focuses more on politics. Moreover, I suggest that although this concept is often unquestioned and elided in his work, it plays a crucial role in the deep structures of his thought. Moreover, the ‘unthought concept’ of ‘authenticity’ is of concern because, while authenticity might possibly (...) have a role to play in the sphere of how we come to understand and relate to artworks, there are reasons to be suspicious of this concept in the political realm if, indeed, these two ‘realms’ can be understood separately. If these two spheres cannot be clearly separated, as seems more likely, then it is even more important to explore and question the terms and cluster of concepts around ‘authenticity’. (shrink)

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and (...) that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community. (shrink)

In contrast to functionalist explanations of themes of purity and impurity as an expression and affirmation of the social order (e.g. Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas), Giorgio Agamben considers purity and impurity as comparisons of phenomena with their imputed essence. From the perspective offered by Agamben, judgements regarding purity and impurity can be seen as in part constructing the essence against which they supposedly simply measure phenomena. Agamben’s investigations suggest that on occasions when themes of purity or impurity are invoked within (...) Western discourses on subjectivity, the full human subject tends to be placed as relatively pure: neither too close nor too distant from human essence. FollowingWalter Benjamin, he suggests that such a classification gives the full human subject a certain social protection and inviolability, separating relatively pure and protected human life from impure subjectivities unprotected by social or legal conventions. (shrink)

In the nearly 800 pages that comprise the three volumes of his Graphology Poems 1995–2015, John Kinsella demonstrates an exemplary moral anger registering iterations of colonial “omni-speak” as unethical. This paper reads Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer by way of apprehending the rhetorical substrata underpinning discourses of Australia as not just determining a sovereign colonial space; in a place where “history is absurdity […] history is overlay”, Kinsella shows how indigenous and non-colonial others are consistently cast as extra-juridical and merely sub-human. (...) These Graphology Poems not only anathemise and hex historical falsehoods of nation: Kinsella dares sound out the bullshit, and his iconoclastic language games refuse outright to acquiesce to the epistemically violent nullifications of antipodean identity. (shrink)

This paper explores the gendered and temporal dimensions of the political ontology of hospitality that Derrida has developed from Levinas's philosophy. The claim is that, while hospitality per se takes time, the more that hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time it takes is given by women without acknowledgment or support. The analysis revisits Hannah Arendt's claim that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is disclosure of "natality" (innovation or the birth of the (...) new). This can be described as accounting for the "temporalisation of time": the disruption of the past (cultural tradition) in the present that is a condition of agency and political hospitality. On the other hand, the unpredictability and instability of human affairs that this temporalization of time engenders can, in times of heightened insecurity and fear, give birth to political conservatism that would contain "natality" and dampen the hospitality that characterizes democratic pluralism. The paper examines the connection between this idea of the temporalization of time and feminist observations, overlooked by Arendt, that "lived time" is gendered, that is, that the condition of "natality" and political hospitality is an unacknowledged stability provided by women giving lived time to others, beginning with reproduction in the "home." The inequities that result are exacerbated, and democracy is further compromised, if this re-gendering of domestic space is accompanied by the deregularization of labor time. (shrink)

This article describes the new strategic discourse of network-centric warfare that has come to dominate US operational doctrines and concepts as well as strategic thinking. It also describes 11th September as a network attack. The state of exception becomes the rule via the confluence of geopolitical with biopolitical power and the strategic logic of network-centric thinking, and with it the problematization of security goes hyperbolic in the form of `The Terror'.

ABSTRACTThe paper addresses the ways in which the cultural, the affective and the political intersect, counter and/or feed upon one another in the context of contemporary terror. Initially, buildin...