Derrida’s way out of the dead end of contemporary messianism

This article seeks to determine which role Jacques Derrida’s notion of messianicity without messianism (1993) plays within the contemporary discussion of the value of the messianic tradition for political theory. My point of departure is the belief that Benjamin’s, Taubes’, and Badiou’s antinomic approaches to the issue of justice oversimplify some aspects of law. Is there a real need to abrogate the law? I also claim that even Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Lévinas, who believe that a certain law, namely divine law, serves to overcome natural law, fail to provide a consistent account of the interaction between law and justice. This paper is an attempt to demonstrate, firstly, that a messianic narrative that develops a way to achieve justice without needing to turn to transcendence can be found in Agamben and Derrida. And secondly, that they also provide the most complete understanding of the law. They base their arguments on a subtle distinction between the laws in force – which in their messianic narratives must be surpassed – and the force of law, a force that keeps its validity but is not translated into concrete laws [Geltung ohne Bedeutung]. Yet while Agamben considers that even the force of law must be overcome in order for justice to arrive, Derrida says it constitutes the most redemptive stage to which we can aspire. I compare their messianic narratives and claim that Derrida seems to offer a more substantial strategy – not completely exempt from problems, though.     

The Political Subject of Self-immolation

Abstract

This article examines the political practice of protest by self-burning. Focussing on Mohammed Bouazizi's self-burning in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in 2010, I explore the intellectual background for, and implications of, conceptualising such acts as ‘self-sacrifices’ or ‘self-immolations’. I argue that the use of the concept of sacrifice to define the politics of the act, given the difficulties in determining intentionality, is to focus only on its retrospective interpretation or semiotic capture. The result is that the self-annihilating subject is bypassed altogether, and his or her distinctively suicidal politicality is ignored. I argue that these subjects do not occupy political space due to a myth-making appeal to transcendence, heroic urge to sovereignty or assumed desire for community. Rather, drawing on Walter Benjamin, I argue that in such acts we bear witness to the shattering of sovereign order by a reminder to a politically constitutive excess.     

SCALING GOVERNMENTALITY

This article explores contemporary uses of museum co-production for public policy through a sustained theoretical engagement with Tony Bennett's work on museums as an ‘object of government’. The specific focus is a theoretical discussion of the ‘logic of culture’ as it relates to new UK policy uses of participants' ‘experience’ as the desired site of authenticity at the very same time as the process of expressing this authenticity is located as a site for reform. It is argued that Bennett mobilizes two techniques of scale (fixing the analytic lens of governmentality and drawing on a strong scalar correspondence of power) in order to secure a relatively disciplinary reading of governmentality and to foreclose the resistant possibilities of cultural politics. Drawing on the differences between practices associated in UK museums with ‘access’ (which works through the dis-intensification of the difference between the museum and everyday life) and with ‘social impact’ (which requires a re-intensification of this difference in order to increase the visibility of effect), this article concludes by countering Bennett's more disciplinary uses of Foucault with the Foucault of ‘The Subject and Power’. It is argued that the ‘logic of culture’ can be calibrated to varying intensities in considering the coming-into-relationship between the museums and those-to-be-involved. It is specifically argued – following Foucault's spatializaton of ‘thought’ as distance (limit-attitude) and ‘counter-conduct’ as proximity – that the ‘logic of culture’ might be actively re-calibrated to use the spatialized dynamic of distance and proximity to create spaces which might allow the museum and its associated policy – not just those involved – to be affected by the co-production encounter.     

Citing history

ABSTRACT

Although rarely considered within the existing scholarship on social movements, even a cursory analysis of protest activity suggests that movements regularly invoke historical citations (whether consciously or not) while working to clarify aims and mobilize constituencies. In order to make sense of this process, and to account for the variations that arise among the different citation modalities favored by movements on opposite ends of the political spectrum, I draw upon the theoretical contributions of Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin and, in particular, on his exploration of ‘wish images’ and ‘dialectical images,’ their attributes, and their interrelationship. According to Benjamin, such images summoned the past either to project visions of future happiness (as with the wish image) or to deposit the witness before a moment of decisive, present-tense reckoning. After outlining the role of historical citation in social movements and in the broader cultural field through which these movements find expression, I analyze two recent protest events – the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, VA, in which wish images were actively deployed, and the 2017 Women’s Strike in New York City, where a dialectical image arose from the constellated nodes of the march’s route – to consider the relationship between citation modality and protest outcome. Following from this analysis, and in keeping with the unapologetically partisan nature of my investigation, I conclude by advancing some strategic recommendations for movements seeking – as Benjamin once enjoined – to ‘improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.’     

Life and death in Hong Kong in an age of cosmopolitanism

Recent events in Hong Kong direct attention to a disturbing trend – the neglect of (selected) life. The society is increasingly discarding its policies and practices concerning immigrant workers, foreign pregnant women and impoverished men and women, whom it deems unworthy of protection or assistance. In this article, I argue for a radical cosmopolitanism that would entail a commitment not only to preventing the taking of life and building a non‐killing society but also to the elimination of the structural conditions that disallow life to the point of death. Drawing on recent bio‐political debates in Hong Kong, I consider the sovereign right over life and death within the neoliberal state. I argue that the state predicates neoliberal sovereignty on a systemic indifference to life; it calculates its bio‐political decisions according to a bio‐arithmetic of economic productivity and social responsibility; and it allows those whom it deems unworthy ‘to die’. As a potential counter discourse, I outline the coordinates and discuss the implications of a commitment to a radical cosmopolitanism.     

Translating deconstruction

Abstract

This paper argues that insofar as the ‘translation’ of deconstruction in America has become a discourse on the sacred, it mis‐recognizes what Derrida calls the trace, and identifies it as the radical outside to thought, or as ‘God’. The ‘trace’ on Derrida's account is indeed unknowable, but it is not the radical outside of thought. Rather, it is a disruptive force that is internal to thought. Reconstructive analyses investigate (among other things) the way that thought is breached, and necessarily so, by what thought cannot think. This breach, this unsignifiable opening, is intolerable to philosophical undertakings because philosophy must totalize; this is what philosophy does. Following Walter Benjamin, I argue that translation is possible, precisely because of this breach. Thus, just because this breach or opening is intolerable to thought or to philosophy does not prevent it from happening. On Jacques Derrida's analysis, this opening has a name: it is deconstruction. To this extent, those variants of ‘deconstruction in America’ which misrecognize the trace as God, miss the very political force of deconstruction in the first place, which is to say, a philosophical undertaking which thematizes the intolerability of refusing what philosophy does and must do.

The breach in thought (or language) is precisely what Walter Benjamin suggests is untranslatable. It cannot be communicated by any sign. Notwithstanding the great difference between Benjamin and Hegel's political commitments, comparing Benjamin's work on the untranslatability of language's ‘languageness’ to Hegel's semiological theory (which requires that we forget’ this very uncommunicableness at the heart of language) is instructive. It establishes that both thinkers argue that the practice of language should be the practice of learning each word as though it were a proper name. Each argues in their own way that the practice of language should erase the trace. It is precisely this erasure — the identification of the trace as radically exterior to thought ‐ that covers over what is at stake, not simply philosophically, in an investigation into the breach of language, but what is at stake politically. What is at stake politically is what Derrida calls the ‘risk of absolute surprise’ which is nothing less than the risk of a political philosophy with no guarantee.     

Governmentality,subjectivity, and the neoliberal form of life

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today.     

Variegated neoliberalization: geographies,modalities, pathways

Across the broad field of heterodox political economy, ‘neoliberalism’ appears to have become a rascal concept – promiscuously pervasive, yet inconsistently defined, empirically imprecise and frequently contested. Controversies regarding its precise meaning are more than merely semantic. They generally flow from underlying disagreements regarding the sources, expressions and implications of contemporary regulatory transformations. In this article, we consider the handling of ‘neoliberalism’ within three influential strands of heterodox political economy – the varieties of capitalism approach; historical materialist international political economy; and governmentality approaches. While each of these research traditions sheds light on contemporary processes of market‐oriented regulatory restructuring, we argue that each also underplays and/or misreads the systemically uneven, or ‘variegated’, character of these processes. Enabled by a critical interrogation of how each approach interprets the geographies, modalities and pathways of neoliberalization processes, we argue that the problematic of variegation must be central to any adequate account of marketized forms of regulatory restructuring and their alternatives under post‐1970s capitalism. Our approach emphasizes the cumulative impacts of successive ‘waves’ of neoliberalization upon uneven institutional landscapes, in particular: (a) their establishment of interconnected, mutually recursive policy relays within an increasingly transnational field of market‐oriented regulatory transfer; and (b) their infiltration and reworking of the geoinstitutional frameworks, or ‘rule regimes’, within which regulatory experimentation unfolds. This mode of analysis has significant implications for interpreting the current global economic crisis.     

Scotland's tartan army in Italy: the case for the carnivalesque*

This short paper seeks to explain the activities of Scottish fans in Genoa and Turin, during the 1990 World Cup, by drawing on some key concepts offered by contemporary writers in the field of post-modernism and post-structuralism. These writers include Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and Baudrillard. All emphasize a re-empowerment of agency, evading more conventional forms of domination: Foucault within the domain of enabling discourse, Derrida on the open interpretation of the sign's apparent meaning, Barthes on the ‘nature’ of jouissance and the body principle, and Baudrillard on the public toying with their media representation. It is argued that Scottish fan behaviour in Italy was structured by two opposing forms of ‘self-knowledge’, relating to either expressions of violent machismo or instrumentally ambassadorial conduct. The eventual triumph of the latter is most clearly shown through an application of Goffman's conception of ‘impression management’, as the social interaction of Scottish fans with other ‘teams’ in Italy is detailed chronologically. The paper concludes with some recommendations aimed at the relevant authorities, with a view to maximizing the internationalism of Scottish fans at future competitions.     

A position embedded in identity: subalternity in neoliberal globalization

ABSTRACT

Gayatri Spivak asserts that subalternity is a position without identity and has no examples. This paper demonstrates that identities – imposed and subscribed to, contingent yet naturalized – have to be taken into account, particularly when we consider that such identities are inscribed into a war of positions. It argues that the notion of ‘subaltern’ in Gramsci, followed through in the idea of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in Foucault, read commonly as marginality, intervenes in established social relations to expose that Time is asynonymous with History. Subalternity, emblematized through positions, which are held by identities, plays a crucial role in negotiating that discontinuity between Time and History. The paper ‘relocates’ subalternity by redefining it as a process – in order to convey this, I use ‘subalternized’ instead of ‘subaltern’; identity, then, is also necessarily a process, captured temporarily in the course of political–cultural engagement. The essay reads the positions of racialized and gendered subalternized knowledges in the contexts of neoliberal globalization, in North America and South Asia, through the processes of identity-makings of two groups – the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (Minneapolis, USA) and the Feminist Dalit Organization (Lalitpur, Nepal).     

Treatment is Prevention

The past 15 years have seen the waning of both cultural analysis and activism dedicated to HIV/AIDS prevention, especially in relation to the enduring epidemic in the United States. However, current mutations in the American HIV prevention landscape, driven by the biomedical promise of a ‘Test and Treat’ strategy, are producing potentially destructive outcomes for vulnerable and dispossessed communities, a situation that demands renewed investment from cultural critics. The aim of this article is to mobilize a specific strand of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) to examine recent federally orchestrated prevention measures dedicated to a scale-up and integration of HIV testing, treatment and ‘linkage to care’, in order to move beyond their reductive approach to the preservation of life and advance a more capacious, politically engaged prevention model rooted in communal rather than individual forms of immunity. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in Baltimore, MD, I attend to ways in which local HIV prevention initiatives are courting the city's precarious Ballroom community – a kinship system of black queer youth structured around competitive dance and performance – in an attempt to materialize their ‘target population’ for testing purposes. Previously neglected by governmental and medical institutions, members of the Ballroom community now find themselves addressed as responsible sexual citizens who are expected to protect their bodies by getting tested and, if tested positive, start treatment. Yet, this emphasis on the medical rights and responsibilities of HIV positive youth threatens to abandon large groups of youth who have managed to stay uninfected. I conclude by locating this problem in the incongruity between the biological life protected by current ‘Test and Treat’ strategies and the forms of life that allow the Ballroom community to persevere under often dire circumstances, constituting an indigenous resource for an alternative take on HIV prevention     

ENGINEERING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL INFANT: BRAIN SCIENCE,INFANT DEVELOPMENT TOYS,AND GOVERNMENTALITY

This essay re-situates current neurological research on infant brain development in terms of a matrix of cultural practices and pre-occupations. It contends that infant ‘brain science’ functions – in conjunction with the marketing promises of developmental toy manufacturers – as a form of ‘ritual magic’ (Nelson-Rowe, 1994) that ensures the transformation of ‘normal’ infants into idealized entrepreneurial subjects. Simultaneously, the discourse and practices of brain science extend and legitimize the extension of (Foucauldian) governmentality over lower income populations, which are perceived as threatening social and state security.     

Reconfiguring Sovereignty in Foucauldian Genealogies of Power: The Case of English Master and Servant Law and the Dispersion and the Exercise of Sovereignty in the Modern Age

This paper is a critique and partial reconfiguration of the Foucauldian genealogy of sovereignty. Sovereignty is largely conceptualized as the antithesis of governmentality and disciplinary power in the modern age; presented as a negative case as a juridical and centralized power of interdiction and containment in the classical age. I argue that we can genealogically examine how sovereignty in the modern age underwent transformation and dispersion. My empirical focus is on how master and servant law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, along with the development and transformations of local courts, led to the increasingly dispersal of sovereign power as it as practiced in specific industrial sites and regions.     

Return to Freedom: Anti-GMO Aloha ‘Āina Activism on Molokai as an Expression of Place-based Food Sovereignty

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of food sovereignty on the island of Molokai, where the Hawaiian value of aloha ‘āina, or love for the land, guides local efforts to preserve and promote local food production. This organizing concept also has political undertones—food sovereignty requires access to land and resources, both of which Native Hawaiians have historically been dispossessed of since colonial contact. In the paper, I examine current anti-genetically modified organism (GMO) activism as one example of the uniquely Hawaiian food sovereignty efforts taking place on Molokai. I present two key arguments. First, I show how the anti-GMO platform, which has garnered support from both native Hawaiians and more recent settlers, reflects a strategic alliance that gives greater momentum to Hawai‘i's food sovereignty movement, which in turn is viewed by a growing number of Native Hawaiians as a pathway toward Indigenous sustainable self-determination. I also draw from the Molokai case to illustrate a perceived tension between community-based work and political engagement that exists within both the food sovereignty paradigm and the contemporary Indigenous sovereignty framework. I argue that aloha ‘āina as a cultural and political praxis suggests ‘ways out’ of this apparent paradox, by showing how Hawaiians have historically engaged simultaneously in both community-based practices and political activism as a means to care for their land and people. While food sovereignty on Molokai calls for the privileging of place-based knowledge, there are lessons to be learnt for social movements elsewhere that are also struggling internally to deconstruct and define what is meant by food sovereignty, and how best to achieve it.     

Disposition and determinism – genetic diagnostics in risk society

This article investigates the relationship between genetic determinism and the discourse of risk by making use of an elaboration of the concept of governmentality developed by Michel Foucault. After a short outline of the theoretical profile of the employed risk analysis, the main part of the text distinguishes three core level of analysis. With a view to illustrating several aspects of a ‘genetic governmentality’ the increasing social impact of genetic information is examined from the angle of truth programs, power strategies and technologies of the self.     

Silent dark: the orders of silence

ABSTRACT

This article examines anxiety, arguing that it is a systemic feature of neoliberalism which regenerates the economy and acts in a conservative manner, thereby effectively preventing social change. Anxiety is explored using psychoanalytic theory to extend Foucault’s conception of neoliberal governmentality as proposed in his lectures on neoliberalism at the Collège de France. Relying on Foucault’s notion of governmentality as an analytic perspective, this article does not present the economy or the state as the origin of power in neoliberalism. Rather, these are seen as mediums of power, whereas the anchorage point of power relations is understood to be a particular form of governmentality. In neoliberalism, this anchorage point of power is largely supported and strongly characterised by anxiety. While examining the psychic life of power in neoliberalism, I avoid positioning and thus analysing anxiety either on the individual or the macro level of society. Rather, showing that anxiety exposes the weakness of such clean divisions, it is argued that neoliberal subjects are nowadays governed through anxiety.     

Toward a genealogy of the liberal government of youth

While discourses that define and demarcate young people such that they become legitimate targets of negative practices of marginalisation and exclusion have not disappeared, these are no longer the dominant discourses and modes of governing youth. Constructions of youth as self-determining subjects and empowerment polices of youth participation increasingly animate contemporary approaches to governing young people throughout the West and beyond. Until recently, the dominant critique of such developments consisted of accusations of failed attempts to realise certain principles in practice or of their ideological functions. There is however an emerging critical youth studies literature that analyses such developments drawing on the work of Beck and Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’. In this paper, I argue that while these studies challenge some of the assumptions upon which such developments rest, they are yet to challenge the extent to which these contemporary ways of constructing and governing youth are new. Using Foucault’s genealogical method my research traces an unacknowledged nineteenth century history of these common ways of constituting and governing youth today. To conclude I consider the strategic usefulness and ramifications of these findings for critical youth studies and policies of youth participation.     

Sexy and sovereign? Aboriginal models hit the ‘multicultural mainstream’

Long argued by post-colonial scholarship, Indigenous sexualities have been variously cast as pathological and abject, or fetishized and exotiziced. In the Australian context, Aboriginal sexualities have never been granted a normalized, agentic visibility in the white Australian imaginary. Since the 1990s, however, there has been an increase of ‘sexy’ Aboriginal ‘stars’ in the Australian media. This newfound visibility invites fresh questions about race, beauty, appropriation and resistance, most particularly in ways that centres Aboriginal narratives: What does it mean to be visible and ‘mainstreamed’ in a media that ‘values diversity’, whilst denying sovereignty for Indigenous people? This question is significant in the Australian context, but also has relevance for rethinking race, sexuality and media representations in colonial contexts internationally. The paper explores this newfound exposure through the voices of two Australian Aboriginal women, Samantha Harris and Magnolia Maymaru. These women have come to national and international fame as celebrated models in a fashion industry priding itself on becoming more inclusive and multicultural. It focuses on their responses to journalists over the course of their careers, as well as how the stories construct beauty and Aboriginality. I draw on Indigenous feminist scholars, particularly the work of Irene Watson, who foreground the subject of sovereignty and remind us that discourses of multiculturalism have a charged meaning for Indigenous people. I also draw on the insights of Elizabeth Povinelli who considers how sexuality intersects with discourses of empire, and how Indigenous people employ ‘creative engagements’ with liberal multiculturalism. Positioning sovereignty and multiculturalism side by side, I reflect on how Samantha and Magnolia enact a sovereign sexuality, and what this might look like. Rather than fix colonial alterity or reproduce multicultural ‘inclusions’, their narratives skirt, sidestep and ‘dance’ with the discourses constructing their lives, attending to race while transcending its colonial limits.