ABSTRACTThe remarkable philosophical present-day turn to Paul pays a lot of attention to the particular role played by the famous distinctions that structure Paul’s rhetoric such as the distinction between faith and law, life and death, and spirit and flesh. These distinctions lead to the question of whether Paul endorses a dualism or not. In this essay, the author investigates Badiou’s and Agamben’s readings of Paul and asks whether one cannot find a form of dialectics rather than dualism in these (...) readings. The concept of the exception seems to corroborate this suggestion. To examine whether this suggestion makes sense, the author first discusses Badiou’s focus on the antidialectics of death and resurrection as well as the dialectical remnants in Badiou’s reading of Paul. Subsequently, the author analyses Agamben’s dialectical account of the Pauline terms katargein, chrēsis and charis. (shrink)

The political philosophy of radical democracy has made innumerable invaluable contributions to theories of democracy. However, while radical democrats tend to focus on the political, a cogent and comprehensive framework of law appropriate to radical democracy has only recently been begun to be developed. Interpreting the vast tradition of radical democracy to be based at least on the fundamental tenets of radical equality, anti-foundationalism, and to a lesser extent conflict, this paper argues that the oft-forgotten work of the American legal (...) philosopher Robert Cover may provide critical resources for a radical democratic theory of law. According to Cover, every agent living under law is embedded, or embeds themselves, within a nomos or normative universe. From this nomos legal texts become imbued with widely different meanings, many of which will be mutually incompatible. Cover’s legal anarchism, moreover, gives way to the argument that no agent or institution has a particularly privileged view of the ‘correct’ law. Accordingly, every legal texts gives rise to a proliferation of normative universes which due to their mutual incompatibility will eventually come into conflict with one another. This paper shows that Cover’s normative commitments are highly congruent with those professed by many radical democrats, and that therefore Cover’s legal philosophy furnishes a fruitful basis on which to further theorise a framework of radical democratic or agonistic law that incorporates struggle while remaining committed to equality and disavowing of any determinate foundations. (shrink)

The present article investigates the rhythm of study as described by Giorgio Agamben in ‘The idea of study’, present in Idea of prose. In this short treatise, Agamben presents Melville’s scrivener Bartleby as the exemplary embodiment of study. Bartleby’s paradigmatic status, according to Agamben’s interpretation, does, however, exclude him from belonging to the ‘class of study’. Bartleby’s exclusion leads to the discovery of an unmentioned member of the ‘class of study’: Eros. The surprising absence of Eros dissolves, however, once he (...) is recuperated as the image of ‘The idea of the work’. Bartleby’s exclusion and Eros’s absent inclusion and presence as the ‘The idea of the work’ not only demonstrate the close relation between study and work, but also explain Agamben’s considerations on the connection between study and the nature of his own work. The article concludes with a call for the remaining importance of Agamben’s festina lente, the rhythm of study, within the broader context of our contemporary university institutions. Once the incessant shuttling between passion and action has been called to a halt—in favour of one of the two extremities—study becomes impossible. (shrink)

Energy forms and their extensive scale are remarkably significant for the ways that societies are organized. This article shows the importance of how societies are ‘energized’ and especially the global growth of ‘fossil fuel societies’. Much social thought remains oblivious to the energy revolution realized over the past two to three centuries which set the ‘West’ onto a distinct trajectory. Energy is troubling for social thought because different energy systems with their ‘lock-ins’ are not subject to simple human intervention and (...) control. Analyses are provided here of different fossil fuel societies, of coal and oil, with the latter enabling the liquid, mobilized 20th century. Consideration is paid to the possibilities of reducing fossil fuel dependence but it is shown how unlikely such a ‘powering down’ will be. The author demonstrates how energy is a massive problem for social theory and for 21st-century societies. Developing post-carbon theory and especially practice is far away but is especially urgent. (shrink)

Straipsnyje analizuojamos biopolitikos sampratos, suformuluotos Michelio Foucault ir Gior­gio Agambeno darbuose. Foucault biopolitiką apibrėžia kaip galios ir gyvybės santykį, kuris istoriškai kinta: suvereno turimą galią pakeičia disciplininė galia, o pastarąją – biopolitika. Biopolitikos atsiradimą Foucault tiesiogiai sieja su kapitalizmo raida ir ekonominiais procesais, todėl politinę teoriją jis siūlo keisti politine ekonomija. Agambenas, priešingai, biopolitiką suvokia kaip kvaziontologinę sąlygą: jo manymu, biopolitinių kūnų produkavimas ir tą produkavimą pagrindžianti išimties būklė apibrėžia tiek senąsias imperijas, tiek šiuolaikines demokratijas. Toks išimtinai negatyvus biopolitikos suvokimas (...) verčia klausti, kaip įmanoma pasipriešinti galiai ir kokios galimos tokio pasipriešinimo formos. Tiek Foucault, tiek Gilles’is Deleuze’as teigia, kad galiai priešinasi būtent tai, ką ji siekia pajungti, – pati gyvybė. Tačiau svarbu suvokti, jog biopolitinė galia ir gyvybinė galia yra visiškai kitokios prigimties, todėl yra nebendramatės. Taigi gyvy­bės galia turi būti apibrėžiama remiantis naujomis sąvokomis, kurios perimamos iš Deleuze’o filosofijos. Straipsnyje siekiama suformuluoti gyvybės filosofijos, arba biofilosofijos, pagrindines charakteristikas bei atskleisti, kaip įmanomas pasipriešinimas galiai. (shrink)

A wave of interest in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as bio-political thinkers was initiated by publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. The intellectual connection of these two figures is, however, broader than their bio-political considerations. Arendt and Foucault both offer detailed accounts of an ethico-political self. Both Arendt’s and Foucault’s later work explores the meaning of living ethically and politically. By examining the relationship between self, ethics and politics, I suggest there are two general points of convergence in Arendt (...) and Foucault regarding the ethico-political self: a shared suspicion of ethical or political systems presented as universally applicable; the attempt to undermine prescriptive moral and political models by fostering a dynamic and critical self-relationship. In the shared attempt to develop a dynamic ethico-political attitude Arendt and Foucault present their respective alternatives to universally applicable moral and political structures, which both consider to be potentially dangerous. (shrink)

This contribution investigates the intimate relation and the tension between legal and literary procedures of personification and subjectivation. In order to do so, the contribution turns to Kafka’s The Trial and examines the proximity of the juridical procedure depicted in the novel, intending to establish Josef K. as a subject, to the narrative procedures of the novel itself that aims at bringing forth an accountable protagonist. The intimate relation of the legal procedures described in the novel and the narrative ones (...) of the novel itself is rooted in a shared historical heritage that impacts both. I argue that the fundamental configuration of advocacy in the classical rhetorical procedure: speaking for someone, against someone, in front of an other, lies at the basis of both legal and literary procedures. Against this common rhetorical background I investigate developments in legal procedures and the formation of the modern novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Both developments occlude the rhetorical mechanisms of speaking-for and speaking against and turn the rhetorical procedures of personification into mechanisms of subjectivation. Kafka’s Proceß reflects these developments, yet does not affirm this transformation and ultimately does not result in a guilty subject and a ‘believable’ character. Rather, the novel embodies a gesture of resistance against certain modes of subjectivation that seem to be prevalent both in modern law and in the novel of formation. (shrink)

This article argues that greater theoretical attention should be paid to the figure of the zombie in the fields of law, cultural studies and philosophy. Using The Walking Dead as a point of critical departure concepts of legal personhood are interrogated in relation to permanent vegetative states, bare life and the notion of the third person. Ultimately, the paper recommends a rejection of personhood; instead favouring a legal and philosophical engagement with humanity and embodiment. Personhood, it is suggested, creates a (...) barrier in law allowing individuals in certain contexts to be rendered non-persons and thus outside the scope of legal rights. An approach that rejects personhood in favour of embodiment would allow individuals to enjoy their rights without being subject to such discrimination. It is also suggested that the concept of the human, itself complicated by the figure of the zombie, allows for legal engagement with a greater number of putative rights claimants including admixed embryos, cyborgs and the zombie. (shrink)

This paper draws upon automobile semiotics and legal semiotics to argue that the car in Australian social security decisions becomes an avatar for the applicant that is then decoded into meaning streams concerning deservingness and prudence. It is suggested that this has two implications. The first it highlights the techniques where by a technical object and the ‘life’ of the applicant became bridged in law; and through that bridging life becomes ‘formatted.’ The second highlights the extent of automobile culture. The (...) car has meaning beyond the highways and parking lots. The paper shows how these meanings have become integrated into processes of biopolitical governance. (shrink)

This article is about time. It is about time, or more precisely, about the absence of time in law’s digital future. It is also about time travelling and the seemingly ever-popular BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Further, it is about law’s timefullness; about law’s pictorial past and the ‘visual baroque’ of its chronological fused future. Ultimately, it is about a time paradox of seeing time run to a time when time runs ‘No More!’ This ‘timey-wimey’ article is in (...) three parts. The first part looks to a hazy remembered past of the legal emblem tradition as presented in Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law to learn visual literacy and also to glimpse the essential elements of modern legality with authority, decision and violence. The second part maps how these images and icons of modern legality are manifest in the Doctor Who fiftieth year anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The third stage looks beyond these first order meanings to understand the chronological chaos of ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The technicity of the image as a portal through time and space that the narrative revolves around charts the implications for the digital end of time for law. (shrink)

The article formulates the main issues that form the research field of the anthropology of sacrifice. The first group of problems is associated with a description of the fundamental anthropological nature of the phenomenon of sacrifice and answering the question of whether sacrifice is a cultural universal, and if so, what this universality can be based on, what prototypical forms of sacrifice can be identified and how they can be described. The second group of problems is associated with the task (...) of understanding how the phenomenon of sacrifice is changing today and what anthropological meaning these changes have. In a situation where explicit human sacrifice is taboo, one can speak of the emergence of substitute practices and the emergence of analogs in which the structural elements of the classical ritual are distributed in space and time and are presented in a different order. As a result, in modern society, victims-sufferers are analogous to classical sacrificial victims and therefore often go through sacralizing rituals and practices. However, a fundamentally important question is whether a structure change in distributed sacrifice incurs a change in social functions? And if these changes exist, how essential they are, how much they affect the very semantic core of the anthropology of sacrifice. The third group of problems is associated with the sphere of praxis in its classical understanding, i.e., it represents issues related to political, economic, and ethical implications associated with the phenomenon of sacrifice and analogs of the ritual of sacrifice in modern societies. Here it is also impossible to avoid relating modern discourses and practices to archaic prototypes and identifying similarities and differences, and most importantly, describing transformations and problematizing their anthropological meaning. Since modern society is immersed in the media environment, it is extremely important to discuss the influence of the media on these processes. In general, the anthropology of sacrifice as a research project allows us to look at many of the most pressing social issues of our time from a new angle. (shrink)

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 33, Issue 1, Page 5-9, Spring 2022.

In the final volume of his Homo Sacer series, The use of bodies, Agamben claims that for Foucault ethics never escapes the horizon of governmentality and therefore his conception of ethics is ‘strategic.’ In light of this criticism, motivated by Agamben’s Pauline conception of ‘use,’ we reassess the status and function of ethics in Foucault’s late lectures. We investigate how Foucault’s approach to ethics develops from his treatment of liberal governmentality and also how its methodological foundation is developed in an (...) interpretation of truth-telling in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Our interpretation emphasizes the ambiguous status of ethics in Foucault’s late work: on the one hand, Agamben is right that Foucault assigns an irreducible strategic function to ethics thereby connecting it intrinsically to governmentality. On the other hand, Agamben overlooks how Foucault’s interpretation of Sophocles implies a conception of governmentality which emphasizes how ethical practices cannot be captured solely in strategic terms. Foucault’s ‘anarcheological’ approach thus articulates a dimension of ethics that remains, using Agamben’s own terms, ‘ungovernable’ and therefore also genuinely creative. Even so, Foucault’s approach to ethics remains in Agamben’s perspective on the deepest level faced with an antinomy that Agamben seeks to mediate with his Pauline conception of ‘inoperativity.’. (shrink)

This article argues that Foucault’s account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. Taking Malthus into account brings to the fore how deeply the question of population is tied to a colonial hierarchy that differentiates between dangerous ‘savage’ and economic ‘civilized’ life. ‘Savage life’ is depicted as a catastrophic form of life, which uses resources in a non-economic way due to its forgetfulness of the (...) future. The article shows how this notion of ‘savage life’ broadens the concept of liberal economic governmentality. Most importantly, it highlights the role of passions and futurity for liberal governmentality. As the discussion of Malthus’ texts demonstrates, the passions of hope and fear assume a crucial role for engendering futurity in the economic subject. As will be shown, while the more ‘savage life’ is considered to be made governable through fear, the more civilized life is supposed to be allured by hope. The article points out the implication of this analysis for Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in relation to liberal economy. (shrink)

This paper considers the theoretical circumstances that urged Michel Foucault to analyse modern societies in terms of biopower. Georges Canguilhem’s account of the relations between science and the living forms an essential starting point for Foucault’s own later explorations, though the challenges posed by the molecular revolution in biology and François Jacob’s history of it allowed Foucault to extend and transform Canguilhem’s philosophy of error. Using archival research into his 1955–1956 course on “Science and Error,” I show that, for Canguilhem, (...) it is inauthentic to treat a living being as an error, even if living things are capable of making errors in the domain of knowledge. The emergent molecular biology in the 1960s posed a grave challenge, however, since it suggested that individuals could indeed be errors of genetic reproduction. The paper discusses how Canguilhem and Foucault each responded to this by examining, among other texts, their respective reviews of Jacob’s The Logic of the Living. For Canguilhem this was an opportunity to reaffirm the creativity of life in the living individual, which is not a thing to be evaluated, but the source of values. For Foucault, drawing on Jacob’s work, this was the opportunity to develop a transformed account of valuation by posing biopower as the DNA of society. Despite their disagreements, the paper examines these three authors as different iterations of a historical epistemology attuned to errancy, error, and experimentation. (shrink)

In this paper we look at the relations between knowledge and thinking through the lens of ignorance. In relation to knowledge, ignorance becomes its “constitutive outside,” and as such it may be politically organised in order to delimit the borders of the right to knowledge [the “ignorance economy,” see Roberts and Armitage : 335–354, 2008)]. In this light, the notion of a knowledge-based society should be understood as a society structured along the lines of knowledge distribution: the rights of possession (...) of and access to knowledge demand that ignorance is planned and executed as the condition of their establishment. In relation to thinking, ignorance appears differently. According to Rancière, the teacher's ignorance conditions the student's appearance as Anthropos, a being who can be asked: what do you think about it? Hence, we are dealing with the ambiguity of ignorance which seems to be both the criterion of social exclusion, and the condition of emancipation. Following this thread with reference to Heidegger's discourse on thinking, we would like to explore the possibility of comprehending knowledge and education beyond the relations of ownership and demands of productivity. Following Rancière, we may say that thinking—as displacing the notion of ignorance—stands in the position of “politics” and questions the ways knowledge societies are structured as “police orders” along the lines of knowledge possession and exclusion. (shrink)

This article places Hannah Arendt’s fundamental view of the instrumentality of violence in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in order to demonstrate the importance for each of a notion of ‘mere life’ or ‘life itself’ to an understanding of the agency of violence in modernity. Arendt’s critique of vitalism is most fully developed in The Human Condition, where she describes an entanglement of the instrumental activity of homo faber with life and labour in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche (...) and Marx. I suggest that Bergson’s treatment of life as creative evolution unexpectedly yields an accurate description of politics as spontaneous, unpredictable motion that Arendt takes as typical of modernity. Since Arendt also credits Bergson with a decisive influence on what she takes to be a growing commitment to the life-enhancing, creative potential of violence in the oppositional movements of the 1960s, which she explores in her late essay, On Violence, I trace out the continuity between Arendt’s earlier account of homo faber and her later critique of postmodern oppositional violence. (shrink)

This paper argues that Foucault’s genealogy of racism deserves appreciation due to the highly original concept of racism as biopolitical government. Modern racism, according to Foucault, is not merely an irrational prejudice, a form of socio-political discrimination, or an ideological motive in a political doctrine; rather, it is a form of government that is designed to manage a population. The paper seeks to advance this argument by reconstructing Foucault’s unfinished project of a genealogy of racism. Initially, the paper situates the (...) genealogy of racism within the context of Foucault’s work. It belongs to a period of transition between the mature and the late part of Foucault’s work, more specifically a period of transition from discipline to governmentality. The paper proceeds by reading closely key passages from the 1976 lectures at Collège de France in which Foucault proposes to rethink racism as a form of biopolitical government. While Foucault’s genealogy of racism remains an incomplete project, lacking for example any substantial treatment of European colonialism, the paper proposes to expand the Foucauldian analysis by linking it to the pan-German discourse between 1890 and 1914. Finally, the paper reflects on some of the implications of the Foucauldian analysis, in particular attempts to understand and counter contemporary forms of racism. Foucault’s genealogy of racism, in short, shows us the constructedness of our racialized world and challenges us to develop new and more effective strategies to change it. (shrink)

This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the market. Following Foucault’s transition from biopolitics to governmentality, this article articulates the mechanism that generates the ability for human beings to give shape and value to their lives. Through a reading of Schmitt and Hayek, as well as an updated reading of Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism, this article argues that we must (...) turn our attention to the Christian motifs that shape our contemporary understanding of the ‘economy’. (shrink)

In search for the “missing links” of queer posthumanist discourses, some nonhuman animals play a crucial role in setting up new possible ontologies of sexual diversity. However, the desire to trace “natural” evidence for sexual diversity and a non-binary gender system that goes beyond the simplistic “social constructionism” vs. “biological essentialism” dichotomy in the nonhuman world should be critically examined. In this article I analyze both the scientific and popular representations of “wild and weird” nonhuman animals that became rich semiotic-material (...) referents to human sexuality and gender diversity in order to propose “transpecies intimacies” as a strategy for overcoming the deadlock present in naturalizing and essentializing discourses. This essay focuses on the case of the spotted hyena, because this nonhuman animal functions as an important signifier and material resource for sexual differences on multiple levels of power relations – institutional, scientific, educational, somatic, discursive, and even affective. I consider how biomedical narratives on sexualized nonhuman animals employ hegemonic economies of sexual difference to build stories of a naturalized sexuality and an embodied gender difference wherein some chemical substances, like hormones, and some body parts, like genitals, serve as primary actors in this semiotic-material system. (shrink)

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben’s disturbing diagnosis that ‘bare life’ – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben’s proposed ‘cure’ for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three (...) main concepts of Agamben’s positive philosophical program – ‘infancy,’ ‘potentiality,’ and ‘form-of-life’ – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben’s philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben’s philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. (shrink)

This article utilizes the work of Judith Butler in order to chart a queer and feminist animal studies, an animal studies that celebrates our shared embodied finitude. Butler's commentary on other animals remains dispersed and fragmented throughout books, lectures, and interviews over the course of the last several years. This work is critically synthesized in conjunction with her work on mourning and precarious lives. By developing an anti-anthropocentric understanding of mourning and precarious lives, this article hopes to create ontological, ethical, (...) and political concepts that resist the violence of the present. In so doing, the article contrasts Butler's understanding of precarious life with Giorgio Agamben's understanding of bare life in order to conceive of precariousness as constitutive of social reality. This intellectual labor lays the groundwork for understanding mourning the lives of other animals as a political act that produces new communities, rather than as an individuating and isolating emotion. (shrink)

This introductory essay discusses how the trope of “religious violence” is operative in contemporary discussions concerning the so-called “return of religion” and the “post-secular constellation.” The author argues that the development of a genuine phenomenology of “religious violence” calls on us to critically reconsider the modern discourses that all too unambiguously tie religion and violence together. In a first part, the paper fleshes out the fault lines of a secularist modernity spinning out of control. In a second part, it demonstrates (...) how the “liberal imaginary” revolves around individualist conceptions of freedom and sovereignty that, on their part, become parasitic upon imaginations of disorder, otherness and violence. In a third part, the author demonstrates how these insights call for developing a transformed phenomenological framework in order to give a more sensible account of “religious violence.” Finally, in presenting the articles gathered in this “special issue” of Continental Philosophy Review, some pathways into such a sensibilized phenomenology of “religious violence” are outlined. (shrink)

In the educational strand of cosmopolitanism, much attention has been placed on theorizing and describing who is cosmopolitan. It has been argued that cosmopolitan sensibilities negotiate and/or embody such paradoxes as rootedness and rootlessness, local and global concerns, private and public identities. Concurrently, cosmopolitanism has also been formulated as a globally-minded project for and ethico-political responsibility to human rights and global justice. Such articulations underscore cosmopolitanism in anthropocentric terms. People can be cosmopolitan and cosmopolitan projects aim to cultivate cosmopolitan subjectivities. (...) What is striking about scholarship in educational cosmopolitanism is its lack of serious attention placed on the greatest global threat facing not only but largely created by human beings: environmental degradation. In this paper, I provide an overview of key texts written on the who in educational cosmopolitanism which helps lay the groundwork for an analysis of what is cosmopolitan. Regarding the what, I examine a range of boundary-defying emergencies described in cosmopolitan terms including climate change, radioactive poisoning of the planet, and bioinvasion. In the last analysis, I consider what it would take and what the possibilities are for our species to be truly committed to caring not only for the human world. (shrink)

The concepts of ‘biopolitics’ and ‘naked life’ have become increasingly relevant in the debate on substance dependency due to the growing prominence of neuroscience in defining the nature of addiction1 and its threat to agency. However, these concepts are not necessarily well understood, and therefore may lead to oversight rather than insight. In this article we review the literature on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose founding works on both concepts shed a different light on addiction. We argue that the current (...) debate is missing a key insight from Agamben's work: the idea of agency past the subject, of agency past identity. We will illustrate how this can be an important form of agency against the stigmatization of users, making use of empirical data from our ongoing work on addiction and agency. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related (...) to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the (...) modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of sovereign debt in both political‐economic and theological registers. Elaborating the dynamics of monetary economy, I demonstrate how postures of indebtedness characterize the relationship between sovereign power and the governed. While taxation signals the debt of obedience and fealty owed to sovereignty, the monetary circuit reveals that sovereign power exists in a state of indebtedness to the governed. The morally valenced proximity between debt and guilt helps to perpetuate such relations. Tracing these resonances and resemblances (...) in the theological realm, I consider the centrality of debt as a structuring principle in key soteriological traditions within Christian thought. Not only does God appear to uphold debt logic, but God, I claim, becomes identified with debt and marked as a debtor. The divine sovereign as debtor and as enforcing debt provides cues for earthly sovereigns and legitimates cultures of debt. In light of the theopolitical legacy in the West, the mutual influence between theology and the political realm, refiguring this set of influential theological concepts may prove helpful in decentering debt as a governing principle in modern life. (shrink)

Conflicts between bioethicists and disability theorists often arise over the permissibility of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. Where mainstream bioethicists propose universalist guidelines that will direct action across a range of effectively disembodied situations, and take for granted that moral agency requires autonomy, feminist bioethicists demand a contextualisation of the circumstances under which moral decision making is conducted, and stress a more relational view of autonomy that does not require strict standards of independent agency. Nonetheless, neither traditional nor feminist perspectives (...) have fully engaged with the critique of disabled people that they are consistently subjected to discriminatory, even life-threatening, practice and policy in biomedical and health care. The paper revisits some of the issues that drive the often highly polarised debate between bioethicists and disability theorists around the question of end of life decisions involving disabled people. While many bioethicists have doubtless been indifferent to the difference that disability makes, I am also concerned that the very proper demand of disability activists and theorists to scrutinise all end of life decisions for signs of discrimination and even violence has segued into something damagingly restrictive that silences internal dissension and stifles external debate. Given that euthanasia and physician assisted suicide may be issues where conventional argument on either side will founder on deeply felt convictions, I make the radical move to speculate on an entirely different, quasi-Deleuzian, approach to the value of life in order to shake up entrenched positions, and begin to think differently. (shrink)

Law clings to rules to stabilize a preferred normative reality. But rules never suffice. Character is the dark matter of law. Ethos anthropos daimon. “Character is fate.” This paradoxically reversible saying by the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus asserts that we are defined by the daimon – the god or messenger angel – with which we identify most. As Plato queried in the Phaedrus: which god do you follow, whose love claims you? In contemporary terms we might say, what character type, (...) what emotional ideal, what deep story do you hold most sacred? Out of the maelstrom that is the state of exception, choices must be made. What emotional field shall we occupy when we do politics and law? Bound by what sovereign values or ideals, embodied within what sort of character, emplotted in what sort of political or legal narrative? In synergy with culture, character plays out the emotional conflicts and aspirations of the time. Whether we witness this in the mostly silent resistance of unassimilable characters like Barnardine in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure or in the silent prayer of nineteen-year-old Emma Gonzalez, in public protest against uncontrolled gun violence in American schools, we are all called upon, as citizens in public life, to occupy an emotional space that attains centrality within deep narratives that vie for political dominance. Reverse engineering liberal society, we might ask: what emotional and character ideals are optimal in order for a particular kind of political society to arise and be sustained? There is a reciprocal relationship between the sovereign authority of law and the character ideals that express a capacity and willingness to accept that authority. What will the configuration be? Addressing this question constitutes the ethical, esthetic, and epistemological calling of our time. (shrink)

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L’État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague, remarkably anticipate Foucault’s celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power. Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the ‘Panopticon’ begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes following the advent of plague. Part III argues that, although Camus was cited as an inspiration by the nouveaux (...) philosophes, he does not accept the reactionary motif of the total bankruptcy of the modern cultural and political worlds as hopelessly implicated in the totalitarian crimes. Indeed, Part IV highlights how Camus defends modern, descriptive scientific rationality against its totalitarian appropriations, alongside ‘the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention’ – positions which Part V suggests as Camus’s continuing poignancy and relevance in the period after post-structuralism. (shrink)

The rise in popularity in recent times of dystopian fiction is reflective of contemporary anxieties about law: the inhumanity of judicial-coercive machinery; the influence of corporate power; the lack of democratic imagination despite the desperate need for political reform; and the threat of order imposed through violence and victimisation. These dystopian texts often tell fear-inducing stories of law’s failure to protect; or of law’s unsuccessful struggle against unbridled power; or even sometimes of law’s ‘bastardised’ reconstruction. Indeed comics, with their visual (...) and narrative intricacies, thrive on dystopia as a key vehicle for contributing to collective notions of fear and trembling about the future. Yet, at the same time, these texts also contain within them the blueprints for hope—the idea that with transformation, heroic intervention, and/or faith in ‘justice’, the law will ultimately prevail. Law’s ability to be transformed is thus simultaneously portrayed as society’s downfall, AND as the key to enlivening humanity. This article attempts to understand this schismatic role of law as presented in the recent dystopian comic book series From Above by Australian creator Craig Bruyn. In this series set in futuristic Melbourne, where law has given way to an unaccountable corporate rule, the social divide is made manifest by the absence of ‘order’, ‘law’ and ‘justice’ in certain segments of society, and yet hope in law’s return is ever-present. The paper will interrogate expectations of law and justice that is mediated through the complex interaction of fear and hope, and contextualise this within current contemporary anxieties. (shrink)

The ‘body’ has remained the pivotal and essential mechanism for analysis within disability scholarship. Yet while historically conceptualized as an individual’s fundamental feature, the ‘disabled identity’ has been more recently explained as a function of ‘normalcy’ through social, cultural political, and legal discriminations against difference and deviancy. Disability studies’ established tradition of consultation with philosophical endeavour remains apparently unwilling to exploit or utilize Martin Heidegger’s understanding of ‘Being’ and interpretation of Dasein as a possible framework for unravelling the complexities of (...) contemporary discrimination and oppression of those others. This paper in tracing Heidegger’s explanation of humankind, inspired by arguments proposed by Cerbone (Int J Philos Stud 2:209–230, 2000) and in consultation with Levin (The body: classic and contemporary readings, Blackwell, Malden, 1999), Aho (2009), Malpas (Heidegger’s topology: being place, world, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008), and Rae (Hum Stud 33:23–39, 2010) among others, will interpret the ‘embodied’ reality of ‘Being,’ of being-disabled-in-the-world as primarily involved within the practical context and structured according to impersonal, normative social norms, rather than detached, theoretical contemplation or observance. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOver the last decade, Europe’s immigration regulations have raised concerns regarding human rights and divided the public opinion on transnational movement, particularly with the ever-growi...

The concept of the republic is a complex meta-principle that facilitates and conceals global relations of domination. Specifically, it enables the invisibility of racism as the core of political power. From its very origins the concept of republic serves to seize constituent power or politeia. In modernity, as it merges with private property, it will serve as the launchpad of a vast colonization project that then evolves in a new form of power in coloniality. The article applies the theory of (...) the ‘encryption of power’—to decrypt the historical concept of the republic. In doing so, we will demonstrate the key antidemocratic role it has played at the heart of global coloniality. We will bear witness as to how, from within the concept of republic, a refined mechanism of domination raises and expands, conforming the most magnificent and lethal form of power of our times. We exemplify our theory showing that the concept of ‘republic’ is the common thread between the law that abolished slavery in Brazil and the 1988 constitution. Within this scope, we propose a vital space of reconsideration of political ontology through radical democracy as the only means to build the world from immanent difference. (shrink)

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to (...) this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and Esposito’s (...) is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

Declarations of law, of politics and of ethics have proliferated in contemporary discourses of public life. In this article, a terrain of research is unfurled that addresses the demand and repetition of declaration. Declarations are understood as relations of speech addressed between the masks of law, of sovereignty, of critic and of enemy. It is argued that what is instituted in the declarations of our time is a melancholic relation of speech which disavows the insistence of the remainder. The remainder (...) persists. How then to bear witness to the remainder? Mourning provides some headway in the effort. What remains undeclared here must be mourned. (shrink)

The text of this interview is based on a conversation between Bagryana Popov and Juliane Römhild on 1 September 2021. In this interview, Bagryana discusses two works which unite her research into political trauma and site-specific performance in the context of political repression under the communist regime in Bulgaria. For her choreography He is not here and the performance event Traces Bagryana returned to Sofia, the city of her birth, to explore her own family history and her grandfather’s incarceration as (...) a political prisoner. He is not here is a meditation on the body at the receiving end of political power developed in collaboration with dancer Simon Ellis. Traces takes the audience first to the courthouse in Sofia, where Bagryana’s grandfather was trialled, and then to her family’s flat where Bagryana’s daughter reads from the diaries of her grandmother. Both works were a part of Bagryana’s PhD project at Melbourne University. (shrink)