This paper offers an interpretation and discussion of the later Foucault’s multifaceted concept of ‘critique’. It argues that critique for Foucault is composed of three main elements: the ‘spirit’ (though not all of the substance) of Kant’s understanding of the Enlightenment; the practice of parrhesia that emerged in Ancient Greece and became central to Christian subjectivity; and the transfigurative aesthetic experience of modernity that was most richly depicted by Baudelaire. In the second section, there is a discussion of Foucault’s view (...) of an event that continues to perplex Western observers, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, juxtaposed with a Marxist understanding of the upheaval. Rejecting both historical materialist and liberal historiography, Foucault offers a unique perspective on the Iranian Revolution, deeming it to be a practical manifestation of critique in an ‘irreducibly’ religious context and based on a reformation of the self situated within a wider ‘political spirituality’. However, the trajectory of politics in Iran since 1979 bears resemblance to those of other, resolutely secular post-revolutionary societies, and thus raises the questions of whether Foucault ignores the universal in privileging the particular and in refusing synthesis between the West and the Orient, adopts an Orientalist epistemology. (shrink)

This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievement. This article examines and evaluates Han’s argument that Foucauldian biopolitics is obsolete in today’s neoliberal (...) age because of biopolitics’ primary focus on the body over mental processes. We suggest that, instead of emphasizing the need to move beyond biopolitics, Han’s theorization of psychopolitics could benefit from paying closer attention to some of Foucault’s insights on biopower and from identifying key connections between biopolitics and psychopolitics. By highlighting some important continuities between Foucault’s biopolitics and Han’s psychopolitics (instead of emphasizing the discontinuities between both theorists’ perspectives, as Han tends to privilege), this article seeks to move towards improved theorizations of concepts like achievement, subjectivity, otherness or optimization, concepts that are key to Han’s understanding of contemporary neoliberal practices. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to measure various prevailing democratic theories against an argument that Carl Schmitt advances in the first chapter of his ‘Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy’. In practice, he claims there, democratic politics is compelled to introduce a distinction between ‘the will of the people’ and the behaviour of the empirical people, thus justifying the bracketing and unlimited suspension of the latter in the name of the former, even to the point of dictatorship. I argue that no contemporary (...) approach to democracy as a fundamental value is able to mount a compelling response to this critique and that we should therefore reconsider the status of democracy as a normative commitment. I proceed by carefully and closely reading Schmitt’s chapter and then by juxtaposing various currents of democratic theory (including liberal, deliberative, epistemic and various hybrids thereof) with the trajectory of Schmitt’s argument. This essay is therefore less of a contribution to Schmitt scholarship, in the sense that it does not take a panoramic view of his corpus to determine his final stance on democracy, and more of an intervention into contemporary democratic theory using Schmitt’s argument as a kind of lever. (shrink)

Comparative political thought has long been defined by a major project to widen the horizons of Western thought by attending to non-European and non-western speculative traditions. This chapter explores not only the implications and potentialities of such a move, but also its possible flows. It addresses some of the limits determining the idea of ‘non-Western’ thought across comparative projects, pointing to the internal tensions, accidental assumptions and integral betrayals through which the Western tradition has constituted itself. Our approach here is (...) to expose the contingent roots of the ‘Western referent’ in its problematic association with the idea of Europe, highlighting the way in which ‘orientation’ and ‘Orientalisation’ have helped to consolidate the normative ideal supplied by these two terms. We then proceed to examine a ‘minor tradition’ lying behind the unifying image of the Western canon, where an insight provided by Spinoza’s philosophy supports a critical transition from ‘comparative’ to ‘world’ thought. Functioning not as the synthetic sum of totalising local traditions but the constituent space of a nomadic thinking, ‘world’ thought embodies and valorises difference and production, opening up new possibilities for a synesthetic thought. (shrink)

This is an attempt to clarify the relation between Schmitt and Hobbes by examining Hobbes's thinking about enemies and enmity. On the one hand, Hobbes shares a strong war/crime distinction with Schmitt. On the other hand, Hobbes never suggests that lethal enmity gives a ?meaningful? tension to human life. Hobbes also describes the way feverish human minds may imagine enemies where none exist. This is another non?Schmittian theme. Although Schmitt was a profoundly anti?Hobbesian thinker for these and other reasons, an (...) examination of Hobbes with the Schmittian question (?who is the enemy??) in mind, proves exceptionally fruitful, opening up aspects of Hobbes's political theory that have hitherto lingered in obscurity. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt, an increasingly influential German law professor, developed a provocative and historically oriented model of “political theology” with specific relevance to legal scholarship and the authorship of constitutional texts. His “political theology” is best understood neither as an expressly theological discourse within constitutional law, nor as a uniquely legal discourse shaped by a hidden theological agenda. Instead, it addresses the possibility of the continual resurfacing of theological ideas and beliefs within legal discourses of, for instance, sovereignty, the force of (...) law and states of emergency (or “exception”) that present themselves as relentlessly secular, even—in the case of Kelsenian jurisprudence—”scientific”. This article illustrates and then critically evaluates Schmitt’s theory in terms of the authorship of constitutional texts in particular. It includes two case studies—genocidal colonial land appropriation and Kelsenian positivism in order to illustrate aspects of his political theology. Whilst Schmitt is defended against reductionist interpretations, I show that there remains considerable unfinished business before a Schmittian approach to legal theory merits full acceptance. (shrink)

This response to Robert Knox’s very kind and constructive review1 of my 2008 book The Degradation of the International Legal Order: The Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics gives me the opportunity not only to answer some of his criticisms, but also, on the basis of my own reflections since 2008, to fill in some gaps. Indeed, to revise a number of my arguments. First, I restate my attempt at a materialist account of human rights. Next I explain (...) why, for me, the right of peoples to self-determination is absolutely central to a materialist understanding of human rights; and also fill a serious gap in my own account in the book. This leads me not only to a reply to Robert Knox on the question of ‘indeterminacy’ in international law, but also to a disagreement with him on the use or misuse of the language of self-determination. My fourth section returns to our very different evaluations of the significance and meaning of the work of Yevgeny Pashukanis, and what, for me, is Pashukanis’s misunderstanding, for reasons consistent with his general theoretical trajectory, of Marx and Lenin on the Irish question. Finally, I present an outline of a re-evaluation of Marx’s principled position on self-determination. (shrink)

Enlightenment thought is widely considered to consist of four key features--atheism, democracy, humanism, and modernity. Common to all is an explicit process of desacralization. Yet the intellectual history of these concepts reveals that in the process of desacralization new sacred spaces arose in their name. The aim of Nothing Sacred is to question this second-order sacralization and consider, in a form of negative dialectics, whether (and how) these domains can argue against themselves in order to once again desacralize their own (...) self-sacralization. Secular critique is not simply an attack on religion but rather on the range of society's unavowed self-occlusions. Its object is to elucidate the politics and practices of knowledge that animate them. In the field of religion critique challenges the alleged permanence of political theology and transforms the epistemologies of both sacred and secular. For Stathis Gourgouris the state of nature that he terms political animality critiques political theology much as the anarchy of democracy, inhabited by it, critiques sovereignty. He takes aim at the desacralizing capacity of these historical formations, which produce their own historical conditions for self-sacralization, in order to demonstrate their dynamic subversive power against deeply ensconced conditions of disempowerment and incapacitation and to understand how societies and individuals are driven to self-subversion and self-disempowerment. These forces are alive today in the form of discursive "posts"--posthumanism, postdemocracy, post-truth, postracial--which are just as self-sacralizing. Exposing them is not a nostalgic liberal return to an idealized past but an expansive anarchic ontological affirmation of the political dimensions of human animality on a planetary scale and of a radical politics in which democracy has severed its bind to capitalism. Nothing Sacred thinks across orders, obstacles, and intersectional spaces in a world of warring multipolar oligarchies and psychotic rage. (shrink)

This article develops a line of theorising the relationship between peace, war and commerce and does so via conceptualising global juridical relations as a site of contestation over questions of economic and social justice. By sketching aspects of a historical interaction between capitalist accumulation, natural rights and state hegemony, the article offers a critical account of the limits of liberal international law, and attempts to recover some ground for thinking about the emancipatory potential of international law more generally.

The question addressed by this article is whether a form of constituent power exists at the EU level. It is argued that European integration has not suppressed the idea of people as constituent power. Instead, the idea of ‘people’ has been constructed through the discourses of security and rights. Ever since the early stages of European integration, the security and rights discourses have consisted in the articulation of a meta-constitutional rationale, which is here called the ‘security of the European project’, (...) i.e. a form of political morality that is pursued by the EU as a polity over time and aims at its own survival. Security and rights discourses have contributed to constructing two ideas of ‘people-as-constituent-power’. The first idea is that of ‘mobile people’, i.e. people exercising EU free movement rights. The second idea is that of ‘peoples’ in the plural, conceived as States and citizens at the same time. Nevertheless, these discourses are characterised by a certain degree of ambiguity and have been unrolling as if the development of the EU polity was a mere technical, neutral matter. This state of affairs cannot continue: the European project has always been a political project, and, as integration reaches its more advanced stages, the time has come to disclose its political nature and address conflict openly. (shrink)

The design office of Charles and Ray Eames was a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia affair linking Hollywood, the State Department, universities, the corporate sector and international fairs during the height of the Cold War. Bringing together design, furniture, cutting-edge technology and experimental, avant-garde informed-multiscreen projections, the Eames Office operated as a humanities/IT/media/arts lab. For the 1964 World’s Fair, the Eameses created ‘The Information Machine’ for IBM. The techniques of display and experimental juxtaposition of images, sound and new media capacities later migrated (...) to the many ‘happenings’ following in the wake of Allan Kaprow’s medial and performative experiments. The Eames Office crafted for the 1964 World’s Fair a vision of global change and possibility grounded in avant-garde visual techniques and aesthetics that continue to constitute a specific globe crafted by the US Cold War military-industrial-university-entertainment complex that remains the grounds for our current collective nomos. (shrink)

In this article I argue for a transdisciplinary approach to the human or social sciences. There is little ontological or epistemological justification for a division among these disciplines. I recommend that sociology stop worrying about policing its disciplinary boundaries and begin to encourage various forms of intellectual transculturation. I then analyze barriers to transdisciplinarity by comparing disciplines to states and comparing the relations among disciplines to different sorts of imperial practice, or interstate relations. The most common interdisciplinary strategies are analogous (...) to the informal, nonterritorial imperialism practiced globally by the United States. Three other forms of interdisciplinarity are discussed: the annexation of one discipline by another — a situation that is analogous to colonialism; nonhegemonized systems of equal disciplines (analogous to the Westphalian state system); and nonimperial `traveling' and transculturation among disciplines (analogous to the practices of members of weak or declining imperial states). (shrink)

Investigates, by way of Derrida's engagements with Kant, how the foundations of modern constitutionalism can be differently conceived to address some of the challenges of the twenty-first century.

The relationship between anarchy and the law is, to say the least, an uncomfortable one. The so-called ‘classical’ anarchist position – in all its heterogeneous tendencies – is, usually, characterised by a total opposition against the law. However and despite its invaluable contribution and the ever-pertinent critique of the state of affairs, this ‘classical’ anarchist position needs to be re-examined and rearticulated if it is to pose an effective nuisance to the current (and much complex) mechanisms of domination and the (...) oppression of dogmatism and dominance of the law. Taking into account the aforementioned challenges, in this article, I examine and develop two notions of the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, namely that of the institution and that of the nomos of the nomads. In doing so, I aim to think anew the relationship between anarchy and the law and, ultimately, to point towards an ethico-political account, of what I shall call an an-archic nomos which escapes(or, at least, tries to) the dogmatism and “archist” mentality of the law. (shrink)

This is a commentary on the two previous chapters in the same book. It draws on the author's and colleagues' research in Kenya to comment on the other contributors' arguments about the 'right to democratise'. It considers the arguments of an Islamist scholar interviewed in the research for a right to reject democracy, and interprets Kant as rejecting a right of states to impose a republican constitutions on other states. It argues that Kant's position, so interpreted, remains essentially sound.

William Lynch has provided an informed and probing critique of my embrace of the post-truth condition, which he understands correctly as an extension of the normative project of social epistemology. This article roughly tracks the order of Lynch’s paper, beginning with the vexed role of the ‘normative’ in Science and Technology Studies, which originally triggered my version of social epistemology 35 years ago and has been guided by the field’s ‘symmetry principle’. Here the pejorative use of ‘populism’ to mean democracy (...) is highlighted as a failure of symmetry. Finally, after rejecting Lynch’s appeal to a hybrid Marxian–Darwinism, Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes are contrasted en route to what I have called ‘quantum epistemology’. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes different positions on the relationship between politics and the experience of time, both those which defend the legitimacy of institutions and those which claim to liquidate them. Recognizing the links between certain theological arguments and certain modalities of time and politics, the article describes and analyzes three different theses: the one that defends institutions against the erosion of subjectivity in capitalist societies, the one that proposes a mystical anarchism with a messianic profile and, finally, the thesis that (...) argues for the need to accelerate the contradictions of capitalism in order to overcome it and, at the same time, to preserve its conquests. Finally, I vindicate certain experiences that involve and prioritize the body against sense or meaning. To do this, I make use of some ideas of Agamben and Hans U. Gumbrecht. (shrink)

Schmitt insists that the sovereign decision is unavoidable, that even an anarchist is caught in the trap of sovereignty when he tries to ‘decide against decision’. This article begins to think about a critical legal vocabulary that might suspend the necessity of the will to constitute, while emphasising the creativity of the constituent moment. The terms inoperativity, dis-enclosure and dissensus are developed and deployed in order to think about certain aspects of the Tunisian revolution. In particular, the article focuses upon (...) the refusal of the state of the situation, the subtraction of loyalty and the insistence of a form of life beyond Ben Ali’s sovereign order. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Peter Fitzpatrick provides a unique contribution to international studies, most especially to contemporary interdisciplinary studies of International Law (IL) and International Relations (IR). Peter provides a significant theoretical contribution to the interdisciplinary study of IL and IR not only as a critical thinker of modern law, but also as a critical thinker of the modern international. On the one hand, his supplementary critical legal thinking contributes to a ‘decolonial deconstructionist’ rethinking of the politics of (...) international law. His close reading of how modern international law (auto)grounds ‘itself’, for instance, offers a strident critique of the racist, imperial, and colonial lines of discrimination involved in the negative (auto)constitution of this (supposedly) universal legal being. On the other hand, he provides a conception of the ‘(inter)national’ which displaces conventional, modern understandings of the legal and political organization of ‘humanity’ and ‘the world’, problematizing their foundational assumptions and spatialized geometrical frames as being based on oppositional dualisms (‘inside/outside’, ‘national/international’, ‘empire/modernity’, ‘theological/secular’, etc.), while offering a deconstructionist engagement with the ‘constitutive outside’ of the modern (inter)national. As a form of postcolonial counter-archive, Peter’s work enacts a decolonial deconstruction of ‘our’ (inter)national ‘selves’, including the (inter)national commonality ‘itself’. Before an incalculable, quasi-ontological heteronomy, a dissymmetrical Law of originary sociability which I (re)articulate here with/as the ‘and’ of the world(s), Peter’s supplementary critical thinking of the (inter)national contributes to imagining the world, humanity, and our social being(s), including law and language, otherwise. (shrink)