Homo Sacer, Bare Life and Refugees

"Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-publics and Non-publics of Technoscience"

by shiju sam varughese

Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, Vol. 50, No. 2, 2012 (Special Issue: Young Scholars Take a Forward Look), DOI 10.1007/s11024-012-9197-3

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose... more The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ‘political society,’ and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement, based on the empirical contexts of public engagement with technoscience in non-western contexts like India.

Agamben, the Exception and Law

by Tom Frost

Frost T. Agamben, the Exception and Law. In: Frenkel, D, ed. Legal Theory, Practice and Education. Athens, Greece: Athens Institute for Education and Research, 2011, pp.227-238.

Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy is currently the subject of intense study and critique. Agamben’s later ‘Homo Sacer’ work... more Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy is currently the subject of intense study and critique. Agamben’s later ‘Homo Sacer’ work in particular has spawned a large secondary literature over the past several years. Many scholars, such as Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler, have tried to use Agamben’s work to fashion a critique of Western politics and offer avenues of resistance for oppressed peoples. To do so misses the key point of Agamben’s work, namely that it concludes that the entirety of Western political and philosophical thought is trapped in a nihilism that it cannot escape from, no matter how ‘radical’ such thought tries to be. The law to Agamben is part of a biopolitical system that has operated from the time of Aristotle until the present day, a system that makes life the central nexus of law and power. This paper outlines Agamben’s theory of the State of Exception, a phenomenon that Agamben argues is not only relevant to how law operates in emergencies or exceptional circumstances but is the basic structure of modern political life, and challenges the basic act of lawmaking itself. Agamben concludes that the exception allows sovereign power to violate international law with impunity whilst at the same time claiming that they are following the law. Any attempts to ‘reform’, ‘improve’, ‘critique’ or ‘reimagine’ the legal system only serves to perpetuate the suffering of individuals, as paradoxically the more individuals are empowered or protected with legal rights the more they are likely to suffer at the hands of sovereignty.

Populism as Conflict of Values

by Pelin Tan

text on tophane, urban conflict and art text on tophane, urban conflict and art

The Unconditional Experience of Space

by Pelin Tan

a text about Derrida's notion of hospitality and urban conflict, ethics of locality.

the text was commissioned by artist Sevgi Ortac for the book the monument upside down. the text was commissioned by artist Sevgi Ortac for the book the monument upside down.

Bear Life

by Jennifer Gabrys

Co-authored with Kathryn Yusoff, in Focas: Forum on Contemporary Art and Society, Vol. 6: Regional Animalities, ed. Lucy Davis (National University of Singapore Press and the Documenta 12 Magazines Project, 2007; ISSN 978-981-05-8681-2), 66-83

This paper discusses the keeping of polar bears in the Singapore Zoo, where they undergo a displacement from the... more This paper discusses the keeping of polar bears in the Singapore Zoo, where they undergo a displacement from the Arctic to the tropics. In the context of this bear life, which is at once contingent upon the status of environments, and is also faced with the threat of extinction, we ask, ‘What is life?’ and ‘What is “bare life”?’ The philosopher Giorgio Agamben suggests that bare life emerges at the ‘mobile border’ that separates human from animal. For Agamben, bare life occurs at the divisions between that which is conscious in the world and that which is vegetative, or in an in-between state of living death. It is these multiple practical and political divisions between human and animal life that make a conceptualization of the human possible. Crucially for Agamben, that which constitutes bare life is neither animal life nor human life, but rather is this politics of separation that inform life. Aping Agamben, we explore the bare life of bear life in the Singapore Zoo and beyond, to suggest that the life of polar bears significantly qualifies and extends the concept of bare life.

Geography of the World’s Ending: Capital and the Production of Terminal Spaces

by José Manuel Bueso Fernández

Apocalypse happens all the time and is no longer a time, but a place. Catastrophes are no longer singular events, but... more Apocalypse happens all the time and is no longer a time, but a place. Catastrophes are no longer singular events, but geographical structures with their own spatial and juridico-political configuration: disaster-spaces that confine what Agamben calls Homo Sacer. Their territorial counter-poles are the maximum security, luxury enclaves of the world’s new sovereigns in Carl Schmitt’s sense: the global super-rich, who live outside
state regulations in high-tech neoliberal utopias symbolised by Dubai. These terminal spaces are not Foucauldian heterotopias, nor can their complexity be captured by other outmoded theoretical vocabularies. Today’s capitalism is anisotropic: it generates and interconnects different types of spatiality, with different laws of movement, for which only some forms of science fiction and contemporary art offer valid tropes.

Enacting the Right to Have Rights: Jacques Rancière's Critique of Hannah Arendt

by Andrew Schaap

European Journal of Political Theory 10 (1) 2011: 22-45.

In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as... more In her influential discussion of the plight of stateless people, Hannah Arendt invokes the ‘right to have rights’ as the one true human right. In doing so she establishes an aporia. If statelessness corresponds not only to a situation of rightlessness but also to a life deprived of public appearance, how could those excluded from politics possibly claim the right to have rights? In this article I examine Jacques Rancie`re’s response to Arendt’s aporetic account of human rights, situating this in relation to his wider criticism of Arendt’s conception of the political. According to Rancie`re, Arendt depoliticizes human rights in identifying the human with mere life (zoe ̈) and the citizen with the good life (bios politikos). For, in doing so, she takes the distinction between zoe ̈ and the bios politikos to be ontologically given whereas politics is typically about contesting how that distinction is drawn. For Rancie`re ‘the human’ in human rights does not refer to a life deprived of politics. Rather, the human is a litigious name that politicizes the distinction between those who are qualified to participate in politics and those who are not. In contrast to Arendt, Rancie`re’s approach enables us to recognize contests over human rights, such as that of the sans papiers, as part and parcel of social struggles that are the core of political life.

Violent accumulation: a postanarchist critique of property, dispossession, and the state of exception in neoliberalizing Cambodia

by Simon Springer

Springer, S. Forthcoming. Violent accumulation: a postanarchist critique of property, dispossession, and the state of exception in neoliberalizing Cambodia. Annals of the Association of American Geographers.

Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign... more Employing a poststructuralist-meets-anarchist stance that advances conceptual insight into the nature of sovereign power, this article examines the dialectics of capitalism/primitive accumulation, civilization/savagery, and law/violence, which are argued to exist in a mutually reinforcing 'trilateral of logics'. In deciphering this triadic system, this article offers a radical (re)appraisal of capitalism, its legal process, and its civilizing effects, which together serve to mask the originary and ongoing violences of primitive accumulation and the property system. Such obfuscation suggests that wherever the trilateral of logics is enacted, so too is the state of exception called into being, exposing us all as potential homo sacer (life that does not count). Proceeding as a diagnostic assessment of sovereign power, where although signposted by Cambodia's contemporary experiences of violent land conflict, this article is not intended as a fine-grained empirical analysis. Instead, it forwards a theoretical dialogue where Cambodia's neoliberalizing processes offer a window on how sovereign power configures itself around the three discursive-institutional constellations (i.e., capitalism, civilization, and law) that form the trilateral of logics. Rather than formulating prescriptive solutions, the intention here is critique, where in particular it is argued that the preoccupation with strengthening Cambodia's legal system should not be read as a panacea for contemporary social ills, but as an imposition that serves to legitimize the violences of property.