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Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life
... Besides, the power constantly not recognize where it come up but there is it. Meanwhile, the abstract of power have controlled inhabitant through discourses and rules and the inhabitant do not recognize those practical Carl Schmitt on (Agamben, 1998a) In addition, the power is also his decision of state of exception that commonly understand as a doctrine, concept or law within the power. In doing so, it is becoming the border for inhabitant in their life, action and fade it away. ...
... This animal nature of human is reached by the political technique. In contrast, social sciences has already saved the life but there were another fact that many of massacre, genocide in the era of Holocaust (Agamben, 1998a). This cleaning ethnic have been condemn by their offspring and the world need to look it back to anticipating the same thing. ...
... "The sovereign exception (as zone of indistinction between nature and right) is the presupposition of the juridical reference in the form of its suspension" (Agamben, 1998a) Journal of Translation, Linguistics, and Translation (TRANS-LITE) Vol. (Tohari, 2015, p. 95) Another uprising narration, cited when communist partly penetrate in Republic soldier. ...
This research of Lingkar Tanah Lingkar Air aimed to investigated the position of state regarding Kafilah Darul Islam/Indonesian Islamic State (DI/TII) a groupthat had been reducing towards sovereign power. Darul Islam appearance in that era was officially not avowed by the government, so they were losing their civil rights. Critic of Lingkar Tanah Lingkar Air Novel revealed that problem using Agamben politicalideology in the relation between society and state. The research foundthat sovereign politic which used the state of exception to produce bare life under DI/TII group. Lingkar Tanah Lingkar Air gave a respond to the characters of the story. From the state of exception, they keep their effort with fellows to be able to defend andraise their ideal life. The role of state should give the whole-secure and fair upon the DI/TII member, but with their sovereign; DI/TTI troop was homo sacred by the government becomes their official part.
... Bourdieu defines symbolic capital as "the form that the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognized as legitimate" (Southerton, 2011). Agamben (1998) characterizes the refugee as neither a beast nor man, an outlaw that can be exposed to violence without facing legal sanctions. The camp's inhabitants are "stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life" (Agamben, 1998, p. 171). ...
... Movlud, personal communication, September 20, 2022). The refugee is thus homo sacer in a system that exerts control over bare life (Agamben, 1998). ...
Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Volume 27 No 2 2024,84-99 © Khazar University Press 2024 DOI: 10.5782/2223-2621.2024.27.2.84 84 Exceptionality of Space: Sexual Violence in “The Camp. A Little Girl from Karabakh” by Gunel Movlud Eva LennartzNazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstaneva.lennartz@nu.edu.kzAbstractIn the autobiographical novel “The Camp. A Little Girl from Karabakh” the Azerbaijani author Gunel Movlud describes her experiences of living in a refugee camp in the Sabirabad region of Azerbaijan. Movlud was forced to flee her home town in the Nagorno-Karabakh region during the First Karabakh War (1988-1994). For five years, she lived in the tent camp. In the novel, Movlud describes the hardships of the life in the camp and different characters from her personal perspective. What is striking from her observations is the amount of sexual violence apparent in the camp and the seemingly tacit acceptance of the camp inhabitants. This paper seeks to find a theoretical explanation for the violence encountered in the camp. The analysis is based on the novel itself as well as an interview conducted with the author. It is found that Agamben’s ideaof the exceptionality of space and Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic violence can help explain the violence encountered in the camp. In the author’s view it was women in the end who appeared stronger than men and who held the social fabric of the camp together.
... The monopoly of violence relates to sovereignty (etymologically related to 'a ruler'), but since the French Revolution, sovereignty is widely believed to belong to 'the people' (even if there is no agreement on quite who 'the people' are) (Wallerstein 2011). If 'the people' have become the ruler-the entity that can stand both inside and outside the juridical order (Agamben 1998)-the logical consequence would be to acknowledge 'no ruler', the very definition of anarchism, which rejects the state entirely. As such, the state is on shaky ground and does not tend to justify its violence by claiming a priori legitimacy, but instead defends the violence on more contingent grounds. ...
... Yet when state violence is reframed as violence done against the state, it has the power to make its 'victimization' and violence continuous. The discourse of victimhood strongly relates to that of 'security', which has risen in the context of liberalism and which, Agamben (2001) suggests, has become the 'sole criterion of political legitimation' . The state constructs its picture of vulnerability by making the state a proxy for 'the people', so that any defence of the state is tantamount to defending its subjects. ...
Resistance to entering the UK government’s modern slavery victim identification mechanism is widespread and part of normal practices of state evasion that shape the lives of large numbers of insufficiently documented people. This article provides evidence of the role practitioners play in producing referrals into that mechanism in spite of such resistance and in spite of the harms caused by the identification mechanism itself, which is integrated into the immigration system. Though referrals are driven by practitioners, those entering the mechanism are said to be ‘abusing’ the system. This dynamic is considered in relation to a common trend of the liberal state, in which state practices are externalized onto others, while it claims to itself be the victim of violence.
... The creation of abjection occurs through repetitive actions of marginalizing the people through a social and political process that they are no longer considered subjects of the government (Anand 2012). It can also be interpreted as the exclusion of peoples by the state such that the state is not accountable for them (Agamben 1995). Being disconnected, unlike unconnected, involves a process through which people are gradually pushed out of a system. ...
Darjeeling lies in the Eastern Himalayan Region, one of the highest rainfall receiving regions in India. But, the communities have been facing water scarcity for decades perpetuating extreme inequalities in the form of water injustice; realities of these everyday sources of harassment and crisis are obscured within ‘larger political questions.’ The Darjeeling Himalaya has historically been a site of multiple political disruptions over the demands of creating Gorkhaland, a separate State from the State of West Bengal, within India. In this paper, I examine the informal nature of water supply as an outcome of insufficient developmental processes and malgovernance furthered by the marginal condition of the region. The extensive presence of informal systems and their intertwining with the formal, the pseudo-municipality systems, and the over-dependence on community organizations spell out the inability or unwillingness of the state towards alleviating the water scarcity. This also highlights the ingenuity of the local suppliers and communities as the chance taken by for profit or as forms of survival. Among households, everyday marginalization is visible through activities of water acquisition from a plethora of water suppliers and disconnections from the state supplies due to legality of residence and being, and social and spatial differentiation—both underpinned by their social and political status. With the Darjeeling Municipality being my ‘site’ of study, I lay bare its waterscapes to highlight the determinants of informal water vendors. Adding to existing rich literature on the region, this paper explores marginalization foregrounding issues of everyday practices of malgovernance, corruption, and red-tapism that defines the political spaces of the Hills. In doing so, it is my purpose to argue that economic, underdevelopment, and governance are not separate from but are an integral part of the ‘identity crisis’ that defines the socio-political and historical realities of the Darjeeling Hills.
... According to Hannah Arendt (1963), "The conception of human rights is based upon the assumed existence of human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships except that they were still human. In the system of nation state the so called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality of the moment in which they no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state" (Arendt, 1963in Agamben, 1998. In the above quote the question that Arendt posed is that: why is the human rights framework which stands on universalistic ideals fails when it confronts those who do not possess the same rights i.e the ones that are at the margins of the society? ...
The idea of equality is not new to the disciplines of social sciences and education. The notion penetrated into the lexicon of the modern democratic societies through the Constitutional and the legal frames since the need for treating all citizens equal had been the cherished goal of the states in democratic systems. However, in India, the situation is different or rather complex. The historical fault lines along ascriptive/ primordial identities continue to persist. Yet, some of the social welfare reforms post-independence did take the initiatives to address the discriminatory, hierarchical and stratified conditions that posed hindrance towards attaining education. But, despite the efforts at the policy level, the counter claims of exclusion and marginalisation rooted in the policy-practice/implementation gap remained or rather got intensified with the rise of neo-liberalism. The unscrupulous privatisation, driven by capitalist mode of thinking and market oriented ideology that the neoliberal turn brought in, entrenched the divide further in complex ways between the privileged and the marginalised. Today, the notion of equality is experiencing a conceptual void that further becomes critical in the welfare-neo-liberal conundrum. What got missed or rather neglected is a certain engagement with modernity as the void can be traced to have its roots within it. The pertinent questions therefore that need to be asked are: what is the relationship that modernity shares with education? Can something new emerge in the discourse of education if we attempt to critically understand equality from the realm of modernity? Can it create possibilities to emerge new ways of thinking, understanding and practice to address the anxieties around equality in the contemporary educational discourse? These are some of the questions the paper would attempt to reflect and delve upon.
... In the Ancient Greek worldview, zoē was life itself, or biological life, and bios was the life led within a societal context associated with certain rights and responsibilities -in other words, political life. 15 Here lie the roots of biopower: by making use of human lives as if they were mere biological life, their bios is put at stake, and violence against those lives is justified. It is biopolitics that produces the very idea of a pure 'life itself' -a product Agamben denotes as 'bare life' -as it would not be thinkable without the notion of bios. ...
... The Fordist revolution increased the alienation process of the worker to the extent that the worker became the means of the machine (Gramsci 1971: 597). The post-Fordist revolution characterized by the computational metaphysics shapes a new hegemonic culture by disintegrating the physical interaction among the workers through the intermediation of digital machines and making the bare life of the workers to become the product itself (Agamben 1998). The datafication process has its own material counterpart in the transformation of the cognitive events of our lives into mere data to be aggregated, transformed, and analyzed by AI models. ...
In the famous ‘Fragment on Machines’ of the ‘Grundrisse’, Marx points out how social or collective knowledge (the ‘general intellect’) has become a ‘direct force of production’ through its embodiment into technical devices. The rhetorical wording ‘artificial intelligence’, with its own misleading anthropomorphic connotations, looks, from a Marxist perspective, the apex of this process in which knowledge becomes the core of the fixed capital that ideally must be re-appropriated by the workers. In this context, AI Art appears as one of the many expressions of the commodification of the collective knowledge in which, for using the expression of Guy Debord, ‘all that was once lived has moved into representation for being commodified’. However, the progressive availability of AI tools for generating art also opens the doors to a ‘detournement’ strategy by allowing a decolonization of the artistic scenario in which each of us becomes the ‘author’ without being the author. Maybe in future, rather than asking ‘who is the author?’ we will find ourselves asking ‘what is the author?’. A move of this kind achieves automatically the ‘death of the author’, with the corresponding subversion of the notions of artistic intention, authorship, and genius, while disrupting the present commodification process behind the artistic ecosystem, in a fashion beyond the best intentions of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the age of mechanical reproduction’. This move is ultimately disruptive from a metaphysical point of view as well to the extent that the human centrality is dispossessed by the recognition of forms of creativity different from our own creativity.
... The detention camps are often seen as the place where the 'state of exception … becomes the rule' and the state operates directly upon the 'bare life'. 50 The power of the state to regulate not just political life but also the condition of a human being is reflective of the 'state of exception'. 51 This control and the subsequent deprivation of life is facilitated by the conception of illegal migration as a 'security threat' by the Court in the Sonowal case. ...
... An estimated 40 million litres of oil leak are cleaned up either poorly or not at all, leaving the region a biological and ecological wasteland that portends untold suffering for the residents of the region (Uyigue and Agho, 2019; Ratcliffe, 2019;Cox, 2021;and Ugoh and Ukpere, 2017). The oil companies have not lived up to expectations in the region neither has the Federal, State and Local governments been firm with policies that bind these oil companies to cardinal imperatives of environmental service to the people, resulting in violence, militant protests (oil bunkering, bombing of pipelines and the kidnapping of oil workers as against the initially peaceful protests to attract local and international authorities to the squalid 'bare life' (Agamben, 1998) in the region and consequently, militarisation of the region by the government (Aghalino, 2004). The court decision on the case between Kiobel and Shell in 2013 as well as the killing of Ken Saro Wiwa and other eight environmental activists in the region by the Nigerian government further exposed? ...
Scholars in the environmental humanities have engaged critically in how literature and the performing arts have absorbed the spirit of environmentalism as other disciplines have done. The greening of the humanities has been a subject of discussion from the last quarter of the 20th century. Ecoliterary discourse,
ecofilms and ecomusicology have become buzz concepts in the arena of the environmental discourse. However, we argue in this study, that there is a paucity of critical works on how indigenous dance art forms can be used to communicate environmental stability, ecological consciousness, and be used as a medium
to resist anthropocentric ideals. The questions that this paper raises are: In what ways can indigenous dances in Nigeria communicate ecological consciousness in the country? How and to what extent can indigenous dances be employed to discuss culture-nature entanglements in degraded sites? The researchers relied on
Indigenous Standpoint theory, existing literature, interviews, and focus group discussions with stakeholders (indigenes, ministry heads, and oil company employees) and visits to oil-degraded sites in Ohaji/Egbema for information on the taxonomy, politics, and conflicts of space and oil in the region. In line with data
gathered, indigenous songs and dances were packaged and performed to provide the much-needed platform for stakeholders (indigenes, government and oil firms) to rethink environmentally oppressive actions in the region toward ensuring environmental stewardship. This study examines the ways in which indigenous dance in Igbo land, Nigeria, can embody indices of indigenous environmentalism. It can also be a path towards decolonizing colonial ecological frameworks and epistemologies.
Keywords: Environmentalism, Ecosystem, Ecological consciousness, Decolonization, Indigenous Standpoint Theory, Indigenous Dance, Ohaji/Egbema
... Jednostavno, država ne može predvidjeti ni osigurati protumjere za »iznimku« od vlastitih zakona, osim načelno, »normativno otvorenom« političkom odlukom. 42 No takva je politička odluka, čak i o privremenom ograničavanju građanskih sloboda, uvijek rizična i onaj presudni »rez« 43 kojim vlast riskira otpor i građanski neposluh. 44 Stoga je cilj Schmittove političke teologije ponajprije osigurati neospornost političkog djelovanja, tj. ...
Po mnogočemu upitne epidemiološke mjere s kojima su vlasti tijekom pandemije COVID-19 ograničile javni i privatni život, osporile su mnoge predodžbe o nepovredivosti prava i sloboda građana, kao i o poslušnosti autoritetu države. Riječ je o problemu nesumjerljivosti slobode i zakona kroz dilemu između osobnih prava i zahtjeva općeg dobra. Stoga ovaj članak ispituje kako izvanredna situacija, poput pandemije, utječe na percepciju vjerodostojnosti države. Pritom se oslanja na neke ključne elemente iz političke teologije Carla Schmitta, kao što su »iznimka«, »sociologija juridičkih pojmova«, »narav suvereniteta«, formalni kriterij političkog kao specifičnog načina mišljenja i djelovanja te »stasiološka« narav onog političkog.
... As footage recorded undercover by Callum Tulley, a custody officer employed by G4S, 19 for the BBC documentary programme Panorama 20 shows, these detention facilities subject detained persons, who have never been accused (let alone convicted) of any crime, not only to a prison routine but sometimes also to verbal abuse and physical mistreatment. 21 Immigration Detention Centres (IDCs) and Immigrant Removal Centres (IRCs) are our time's manifestations of the concentration camp, as Giorgio Agamben already pointed out in the 1990s, theorizing them as sites of 'inclusive exclusion', 22 as 'the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule' (emphasis in the original). 23 They are the most sinister of 'non-places', in the sense of Marc Augé, 24 and characterized, as Stephanie Malia Hom maintains, by the 'via negativa lived by the people within them'. ...
This cluster took off from an interdisciplinary and international workshop hosted at the University of Vienna in May 2022. Some of the original contributors turned their presentations into articles for this cluster; other articles were recruited later on. The original idea for both the workshop and cluster was inspired by the UK’s Refugee Tales project, founded and organized by David Herd and Anna Pincus. Some of the articles collected here discuss the life writing aspect of this project from different angles and positions: Patience Agbabi as contributing author to the first Refugee Tales volume, Sandra Mayer as a scholar of literary celebrity, and Sylvia Mieszkowski as cultural analyst. Other articles take a look at other projects in which displaced persons work on life narratives alongside citizens of the host countries: Jessica Gustafsson writes about the Swedish Flyktpodden podcast and Helga Ramsey-Kurz about the Austrian ARENA initiative. Two articles provide the collection with an opening frame, as they focus on the paradoxes that are perpetually produced by immigration law and the cultural conceptions of ‘the refugee’ in the European context (Judith Kohlenberger) and in Austria, specifically for minors (Ayşe Dursun and Birgit Sauer). An Afterword by one of the founders and organizers of Refugee Tales (David Herd) closes the cluster, offering an assessment of the project’s role in the context of the UK’s political situation in the summer of 2023, just after both Houses of Parliament passed the Illegal Migration Bill, which the UN has publicly denounced as contrary to international law.
... In the previously quoted remark (Lévy 2020, 14-15) he puts his finger on the source of the trouble-"heads of state" deferring to medical authorities unmistakably signals that what is at stake is "unquestionable" power-power over citizens of putative democracies. The philosopher who saw this almost immediately after the advent of the "pandemic" is the redoubtable Giorgio Agamben-author of the classic Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998; see also Olivier 2022a). ...
Phronimon, https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/Phronimon ISSN 2413-3086 (Online)#13440:
This paper focuses on the theme of "how (most) philosophers have been struck by blindness in the age of the 'great reset' and failed humanity." I have been able to trace only a few philosophers or intellectuals who have seen through the fog of dis-and misinformation to grasp the iatrocratic and corporatocratic aims of private global organisations, namely to reduce the numbers of, and enslave the rest of humanity by various lethal and otherwise destructive means. The paper initially concentrates on the question of what a philosopher is, followed by a discussion of the contributions of four exemplary philosophers who have had the perspicacity and courage to grasp the true nature of forced global events since the start of the "pandemic." It further focuses on some criticism against their position(s), where necessary providing evidence to either support or invalidate the positions concerned. Evidence is adduced for the claim that those who submitted to Draconian rules and unjustified injections did not think through the manner in which this happened, nor did the necessary prior research concerning the vaunted safety of the "vaccines" or the probable ultimate goal of forces driving the neo-fascist transformation of contemporary society.
The past two decades have seen many social, political, and international relations (IR) theorists make extensive use of Michel Foucault’s theory of biopolitics—or how political power interacts with biological life. What has so far passed unnoticed, however, is that Foucault formulated his highly influential theory about how living populations became political objects in the context of an overarching concern with what he termed “the power to kill life itself.” This essay reassesses Foucault’s biopolitics in light of his broader discussion of the potentially existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and gene editing technology. In doing so, it invites readers to reassess Foucault’s famous critiques of both sovereignty and political universalism, while also providing a succinct introduction to his theories of power and the general history of anthropogenic existential threats. The article concludes by raising fundamental questions for political and IR theory concerning what happens when the biological survival of the human species ceases to be a necessary prerequisite for politics and instead becomes a contingent outcome of politics.
One of the most sensitive representations in cultural, moral and political discourses is that of motherhood. The idea that a mother would feel estranged from her child, or even regret having a child, is a taboo that has only begun to be considered in the twenty-first century. What is a "bad" mother, how and why are idealized representations of motherhood now being questioned? In this analysis, the work of Julia Kristeva stands at the forefront. Through her reworking of Melanie Klein's object theory above all, Kristeva challenges "natural" motherhood as a fetishized construct. Most importantly, Kristeva's theory of the abject presents a critique of the fetishization of motherhood and its entwinement with consumer society. This essay mobilizes Kristeva to analyze fictional and cinematic works by Rachel Cusk and Maggie Gyllenhaal concerned with the undoing of idealized ideas of motherhood. Cusk's novel A Life's Work (2001) offers an autofictional narrative of her first experience of motherhood, one of boundlessness, exasperation, sleeplessness and fear; of fluids, smells and noise. Unable to fulfill her daughter's needs, unfulfilled herself, critical of her environment and her peers, she provides witness to an alienated experience, that of a "bad" mother. Further, in Cusk's novel, this is intimately connected to the development of consumer society and its mythology of motherhood. For its part, Gyllenhaal's film The Lost Daughter, which adapts a novel by Elena Ferrante, tells a story of abjection at the edge of the loss of self, and puts the question of what it means to be a "natural" mother in focus. Having recourse to theories of the object in capitalism, assisted by C. B. McPherson and Sigmund Freud, this essay argues for the contemporary significance of Julia Kristeva's work in the face of fantasies about motherhood in capitalist society.
This research examines the ways the hostile environment in the UK utilises domestic violence as a deterrent measure, weaponising this endemic form of interpersonal violence against migrant women. I argue that the state’s own processes of accountability and responsibility for domestic violence fatalities, and the active exclusion of migrant women from state-provided services that are key in intervening in cases of domestic violence, are sufficient for domestic violence against migrant women to be constituted as state violence. I frame this in the context of what an ontological security approach can offer to our understanding of the multiplicity of encounters and experiences that migrant women have with a state apparatus that is designed to offer both security and accountability to address the particularly gendered insecurity of domestic violence. The active exclusion of migrant women from these monitoring mechanisms embeds both an affective and a very real empirical insecurity in the lives of migrant women. This ontological insecurity is both inside and outside of state, making ontological security for some while unmaking it for others.
Die Demokratie, einst als Gipfel politischer Errungenschaften gepriesen, zeigt sich zunehmend als fragile Illusion, ein System, das nicht durch äußere Feinde, sondern durch seine eigenen Mechanismen langsam erodiert. Diese Reflexion untersucht das Rechtssystem als Spiegel und zugleich als Katalysator dieses Zerfalls. Statt als Instrument der Gerechtigkeit zu fungieren, hat sich das Recht in eine bürokratische Selbstverteidigungsmaschine verwandelt, die Macht zementiert, anstatt sie zu regulieren. In Teil I wurde, ausgehend von Ulrike Guérots "The Three United States of Americas I Have Known", die transatlantische Ordnung nicht nur als geopolitische Verschiebung, sondern als schleichende Erosion demokratischer Prinzipien seziert. Teil II setzte diese Analyse im Gesundheitswesen fort und zeigte auf, wie sich gesellschaftliche Dysfunktionalitäten in lebenswichtigen Bereichen manifestieren, indem Marktmechanismen über soziale Bedürfnisse gestellt werden. Teil III führt die Argumentation weiter und offenbart das Recht als den eigentlichen Ort der Machtverhandlung: eine Bühne, auf der nicht nur Gesetze ausgelegt, sondern auch politische Kräfte gebündelt, kanalisiert und verfestigt werden. Auf der Bühne des Gerichts entfaltet sich das Drama der Macht nicht in reiner Rationalität, sondern in Inszenierung und strategischem Kalkül. Wer die subtilen Dynamiken des Rechtssystems nicht versteht, wer glaubt, dass Gerechtigkeit eine Frage der Norm und nicht der Interpretation sei, wird 1 zum bloßen Zuschauer im großen Schachspiel der Institutionen. Die wahre Kunst der Prozessführung liegt nicht nur in der Präzision der Argumente, sondern in der Fähigkeit, das narrative Feld zu dominieren, das Timing zu beherrschen und das System gegen sich selbst zu nutzen. Die Digitalisierung der Rechtsfindung, von Künstlicher Intelligenz bis zu Smart Contracts, verstärkt diesen Wandel weiter. Was geschieht mit einem Rechtssystem, wenn es nicht mehr von Menschen interpretiert, sondern von Algorithmen exekutiert wird? Wie lässt sich eine demokratische Ordnung bewahren, wenn Entscheidungen zunehmend aus den Händen der Bürger in die kalten, unbestechlichen Prozesse automatisierter Mechanismen überführt werden? Diese Reflexion verfolgt keinen moralischen Imperativ, sondern eine strategische Analyse. Es setzt an der Nahtstelle zwischen Theorie und Praxis an, zwischen der politischen Fiktion der Demokratie und der realen Mechanik der Macht. Wer glaubt, dass das Recht neutral sei, irrt. Wer versteht, dass es ein Werkzeug ist, besitzt den Schlüssel zur Gestaltung der Zukunft.
Este artigo explora o desaparecimento de corpos dentro da burocracia da morte na cidade de São Paulo, Brasil, focando na cumplicidade entre o aparato de repressão durante o período militar e as normas da administração pública, que visavam dar uma aparência de “legalidade” aos casos de desaparecimento forçado dentro das instituições estatais do país. Ao longo do trabalho se evidencia como a burocracia da morte despe os corpos e os despersonaliza, na qual a falta de cuidado com o registro dos detalhes tornase estratégia para negar identidade ao cadáver de uma pessoa classificada como uma vida que importa menos. Fazendo uso de relatórios de autópsias de corpos de pessoas não identificadas em São Paulo na década de 1970 como categoria analítica, demonstro que uma perspectiva arqueológica pode mostrar como um “estado de exceção” opera sobre tais indivíduos. Em particular, mostro como a presença ou a ausência de detalhes sobre o vestuário é um fator significativo na despersonalização dessas pessoas.
'Body horror', a horror subgenre concerned with transformation, loss of control and the human body's susceptibility to disease, infection and external harm, has moved into the mainstream to become one of the greatest repositories of biopolitical discourse. Put simply, body horror acts out the power flows of modern life, visualising often imperceptible or ignored processes of marginalisation and behavioural policing, and revealing how interrelations between different social spheres (medical, legal, political, educational) produce embodied identity. This book offers the first sustained study of the types of body horror that have been popular in the twenty-first century and centres on the representational and ideological work they carry out. It proposes that, thanks to the progressive vision of feminist, queer and anti-racist practitioners, this important subgenre has expanded its ethical horizons and even found a sense of celebratory liberation in fantastic metamorphoses redolent of contemporary activist movements.
The article discusses deeply rooted linguistic comparisons as stereotypical images in the form of name-callings. A very common element of these comparisons are animals as living beings with their own characteristics, living in a common environment: A human characteristic is compared to a prescribed, but not necessarily intrinsic, characteristic of a particular animal. The characteristics ascribed to animals are socially stereotyped and disseminated as generalised images using a metaphorical language that form so-called collective symbols.
Despite hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees, Malaysia does not legally recognize them. Instead, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) conducts the refugee status determination process, and Malaysia expects them to take care of refugees, although community-based and nongovernmental organizations do most of this work. The Malaysian government, concerned by the increasing number of foreigners registered by the UNHCR, introduced the Tracking Refugee Information System scheme to form a national database for “security reasons.” Contracted to a private company, this yearly registration scheme with high fees provides no rights to cardholders. This article highlights the role of the Malaysian government, the UNHCR, community organizations, and a private company to make sense of the variable refugee registration regimes that increasingly use technological tools to collect refugee biodata to police refugees without increasing refugee protection.
The medieval distinction between the official and the personal bodies of the state sovereign was recently played out before the International Criminal Court. This scenario involved the President of the Republic of Kenya willingly submitting to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in his personal capacity and not as president. Essentially this argument is based on the medieval doctrine of the ‘King’s two bodies’. The distinction of describing two bodies united in one, sits at the cross roads of legal theory and political theology. Seeing the ancient doctrine of the King’s two bodies manifested in a contemporary context provides the opportunity to observe a longstanding legal theory applied to a novel factual situation. It demonstrates that this legal fiction remains stubbornly useful and effective in navigating between political imperatives and legal strictures.
The paper situates the massacre of Dalit refugees of Marichjhapi Island (1978-79) in West Bengal, India through a multidisciplinary reading of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide (2004) along with local history, vernacular literature, reports and experiential narratives. The refugees from East Pakistan/Bangladesh who settled on the island of Marichjhapi at Sundarbans (currently one of the most ecologically endangered places on Earth) were forcefully evicted by the government citing ecological issues. Utilizing a framework that incorporates both ecocriticism and postcolonial theory, this paper reads the vulnerable humans and non-humans, especially the island's unique ecosystem and fauna as victims of anthropocentrism and biopolitics, propelled by ecological and political factors acting together. Taking up from Ghosh’s own interventions on ecological thought and the Sundarbans, the paper further delves into the concept of “the disaster unconscious” in postcolonial literature as suggested by Pallavi Rastogi through a close reading of The Hungry Tide. It describes the co-constitution of precarious lives (both human and non-human) and fragile environments during disaster as what Blanchot would call “outside of temporality” marking the ‘necroeconomy’ of the nation-state, as conceptualized by Achille Mbembe.
Η παρούσα μελέτη αποπειράται να διαγνώσει τη διαδικασία με την οποία καθίσταται δυνατή η κοινωνική και πολιτική κατασκευή των παράτυπων μεταναστών ως «λαθρομεταναστών». Λαμβάνει ως περίπτωση μελέτης την Ελλάδα των τελευταίων τριάντα ετών (1994 – 2024). Αφού γίνει λόγος για τα
βασικά στοιχεία της έννοιας της «παρανομοποίησης», περιγράφεται το ευρύτερο πλαίσιο της «μεταπειθαρχικής» κοινωνίας, ως προσκήνιο της σύγχρονης κοινωνικής πραγματικότητας, όπου πρωτεύοντα ρόλο δεν διαδραματίζει η πειθάρχηση των αποκλινόντων ατόμων, αλλά η αποτελεσματική διαχείριση
δυνητικά αποκλινουσών ομάδων, προκειμένου να διατηρηθεί η επικίνδυνη συμπεριφορά εντός ενός αποδεκτού μέτρου επικινδυνότητας στην πολιτική κοινότητα.
Έπειτα, αναλύονται οι μηχανισμοί της ασφαλειοποίησης και εργαλειοποίησης της μετανάστευσης στην Ελλάδα, με ορισμένα παραδείγματα, έτσι ώστε να αναδειχθεί ο τρόπος με τον οποίο λειτουργεί στη χώρα η παρανομοποίηση των παράτυπων μεταναστών. Αναλύεται ο πολιτικός λόγος αναφορικά με την αναπαράσταση του «λαθρομετανάστη» ως κινδύνου για τη δημόσια τάξη και τη δημόσια υγεία,
συντελόντας στη διαμόρφωση της μετανάστευσης ως ζητήματος ασφαλείας. Επίσης, αναλύονται οι απόπειρες νομιμοποίησης των παράτυπων μεταναστών, οι δυσκολίες πρόσβασής τους στο σύστημα χορήγησης ασύλου, καθώς και η εργασιακή εκμετάλλευση που υπόκεινται προς όφελος ανάπτυξης της
παραοικονομίας. Βασικό στοιχείο της διαδικασίας παρανομοποίησης, φαίνεται ότι είναι η ευαλωτότητα των παράτυπων μεταναστών, η οποία συνδέεται άμεσα με την «απελασιμότητά» τους, τον φόβο δηλαδή να απομακρυνθούν από την Ελλάδα λόγω του παράτυπου καθεστώτος τους. Η μελέτη καταλήγει με κάποιες σκέψεις σχετικά με τη μορφή που τελικά λαμβάνει ο αποκλεισμός των «λαθρομεταναστών» από τον κοινωνικό ιστό στην Ελλάδα.
The article aims to initiate a dialogue with Étienne Balibar’s writings on borders, Europe, and universalism, in the context of the contemporary transformations of the borders of Europe and the current crisis of universalist politics. Its first motivation is to demonstrate how Balibar’s work could serve as a theoretical framework for border studies to understand the link between the vacillation of borders and the crisis of European universalism. The figure of boundary, limit, or horizon played a key role in the emancipatory narratives on the idea of Europe. Balibar recognized how the metamorphoses of borders revealed the fundamental aporia of European universalism of any kind: each universalism, no matter how inclusive and radical, has to adopt the particular carrier and designate its limits. Hence the politics of universality tends to be border politics: it rests on constant and infinite transgression of the limits to universalism, without the prospect of overcoming the aporia. The second motivation is to revisit Balibar’s philosophy of borders of Europe by drawing out lessons from contemporary research on border transformations. Answering Balibar’s call to the need to theorize pluriversalism, the article shows how European borders became recently the new sites of pluriversal politics.
Characters within The Dark Knight access intersectional, systemic privileges linked to the performance of masculinity, whiteness, neoliberal class consciousness, and heteronormativity. Using cultural studies as the framework and intersectionality as the point of departure, this paper interrogates how kyriarchy—a way to understand intersecting layers of privilege—buttresses neoliberal ideologies, especially in the first decade of the 21st century. Hegemonic masculinity is both reinforced and reinvented in a homosocial erotic triangle between Batman, Harvey Dent, and Bruce Wayne, which is subsequently shattered by the Joker, a queer failed masculine subject who fosters intimacy through excessive violence. Even this powerful disruption, however, emerges from the intersecting privileges of a cis white man and contrasts sharply with both the situations of Black characters in the film and lived encounters between Black Americans and the State. Batman’s appropriation of Blackness in his suit, juxtaposed with the undeniable whiteness read on his bared chin, signals a privilege that allows him to act outside the law, reinventing kyriarchal and neoliberal sovereign exceptionalism. Examining The Dark Knight through the lenses of cultural studies and intersectionality allows a better understanding of systemic inequality as conveyed through media, which is crucial to undoing conferred dominance and the exploitative hegemony of our world.
This study explores Michel Foucault’s critique of human rights and his concept of droit des gouvernés, particularly with regard to refugees and migrants. It analyzes how Foucault’s ideas can revitalize democratic elements within the context of neoliberal governance and reframe our understanding of human rights. His approach encourages rethinking the foundations of democracy and challenging the monopoly of political decision-making.
KEYWORDS:
Michel Foucault; droit des gouvernés; human rights; neoliberal governance; refugees
This article discusses the Bulgarian response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bulgarian case is characterized by an ineffective constitution of the individuals as subjects of responsibility for the health of the population, which resulted in a vaccine coverage considerably lower than the European average. The article argues that the fragile responsibilization is an effect of the response to the pandemic that, building on older post-socialist regulations of the access to healthcare, instead of restricting the circulation of bodies in general, tried to differentiate between economically productive and unproductive circulation and to limit only the latter by progressively increasing its differential costs (both in terms of time and efforts and in terms of risks). An analysis of the legal actions against quarantine violators, however, suggests that such a strategy stimulated the public to respond to the pandemic by calculating risks, and if the social actors nevertheless behaved irresponsibly, it was often because they took into account not only the risks posed by the virus but also smaller-scale risks affecting their social support networks. The authorities, however, tried to repair the unreliable responsibilization by articulating an ad hoc right to health defined at the level of the population. That biopolitical right to health was crucial to the implementation of certificate requirements. It was harmonized with individual rights by opening up fields of choice such as the choice between vaccination and daily testing. However, since the differential costs of the higher-risk options seemed irrational, the constellation of individual rights and right to health left a growing residue of irresponsible conducts justifying a further intensification of control.
This essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into pandemicariat. To meet our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like biopolitics, anatomo-politics, governmentality etc— and ideas like transmuted biosociality, truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat etc. Current conditions of truncated sociality render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more synthetic biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the pandemicariat against heavy odds.
Within migration studies, there has been an emphasis on the economic aspects of forced migration from the countries of the Global South to the Global North. The Global North’s measurement-heavy and largely economistic perceptions of the need to migrate obscure the humanity of forced migration. Where research and development work engage with arts and culture, it typically does so to communicate findings, educate, or mediatise. This chapter considers how art and cultural works serve as methods practised daily by migrants in contexts of violent (b)ordering, (dis)counting, and survival. It opens by unpacking necropolitics of the (b)ordering and (dis)counting that are not only drawn between the here and there, the us and them, but also between the knowable and the unknowable. The intention, here, is to rebuke the creation of “death-worlds and their minions” (Schaffer, 2020) with the forms of resistance which demonstrate and persist where people are manifestly, often gloriously, alive. It then moves on to conceptualise ways of destituting these violent structures of (b)ordering and (dis)counting through artistic, poetic, and cultural work. The chapter concludes by stressing the need for cultural work mediated by arts-based research to unmask not only the humanity within the South–South migration but also the potent forces of comfort and discomfort.
The article is devoted to understanding cultural trauma as a biopolitical concept. Biopolitics is presented as a system of certain strategies in relation to human corporeality, the basis of which is the economic power of capital. The key concepts conceptually included in the semantic field of biopolitics - bare life, homo sacer, state of exception and others - are considered. Cultural trauma is comprehended on the basis of understanding the specificity of a victim in contemporary culture. The discourse of trauma transforms sacredness into grief, guilt and resentment. Accordingly, the victim unites the collective body not through purification, but through involvement in violence as a traumatic event. The sacrifice is conceptualised as a biopolitical tool, contradictorily suggestive of humanist pathos and biopolitical exploitation.
To analyse office in Lear, I begin with the most spectacular: kingship. Lear’s initial entrance, speech acts, and exclusions display his sovereign power. Yet he formally detaches those sovereign powers from the ‘name’ of ‘king’, relegating himself to merely nominal kingship (1.1.137). This ‘gift’ is criticised not just on technical, pragmatic grounds but as a moral ‘evil’ (1.1.165, 167). This reflects the sacred quality of sovereign kingship. European intellectual discourse posited an analogy between the king and Christ, which produced the iconic Tudor doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies. Both this and proto-republican contractualism demonstrate kingship’s cipher-like, instrumental quality. The jurisprudential concept of majesty binds together law, religion, metaphysics, and physiognomy into a spectacular sovereign sanctity. Yet, ‘majesty’ is precisely one of the qualities that Lear conveys to Cornwall and Albany. Troubling questions—given treason’s legal definition as crimen lesae majestatis (lit. the crime of injuring majesty)—therefore emerge about Gloucester’s blinding. Dispensing with every duty, power, and right of his office, Lear’s title of ‘king’ becomes a vestigial term of address that advertises his negation. From this perspective, Agamben’s hidden affinity between the banished and the ex-sovereign becomes legible.
In political office and masculinity, Lear suffers overlapping anxieties of impotence. As his daughters suggest: he has failed to know himself. This reference to nosce te ipsum points to classical philosophy as an antidote to the dangers of politics, like flattery, as described by Socrates to Timon’s Alcibiades in Plato and Plutarch. Lear’s self-recognition through the figure of Poor Tom—who he insistently identifies as an ascetic, Cynic philosopher—prompts a discarding of his ‘sophistication’, his unnatural complications. Lear’s madness therefore can be read as a descent into wisdom. This is not a “process of purification,” but of profanation—in which the allure of sanctity, the allure of purity, is dispelled through parodic misuse. In his unhinged meditations, Lear intuits his problem was not only flattery, nor sovereignty, but the underlying instrumentality of office: “thou, rascal beadle” (4.6.156). The hypocrisy permitted by angelic, instrumental office is a theme Shakespeare already explored in Measure for Measure. The recognition scene with Cordelia is also a self-recognition scene. Lear envisions a new life defined by sociability, rather than sanctity. The play’s tragic force derives from the foreclosure of this liberated dream of ‘the good life,’ through violence, executed by Edmund’s dutiful officer.
Political theory has long depended upon a clear boundary between life and non-life. Even work which emphasizes non-human beings (e.g., in animal rights, posthumanism or “new materialism”) continues to reinforce the divide between the organic and the inorganic. This article undermines that division, highlighting marginal cases of life. The organicity of certain rocks and biochar, the growth of crystals, the machinic qualities of viruses: all point to an instability in the excluded middle between life and non-life. The article suggests alternative philosophical traditions to which political theory could turn—namely, panpsychism, hylozoism, and traditional animism—as conceptual and theoretical resources to examine these interstices.
Nomadism is perceived as an essential trait of the Romani ethnic identity, both inside and outside the Romani communities. This paper explores the meaning of nomadism in the Romani culture by considering how this practice has been represented in the sociocultural imaginary. In particular, the paper analyzes the depiction of nomadism in the ethnopolitical discourse and the literary field, both in oral tradition and in written texts. The analysis examines works authored by representative Romani writers, such as Bronislawa Wajs “Papusza”, Mateo Maximoff, Menyhért Lakatos or José Heredia Maya, among others. Finally, the paper considers how in the literary text, the image of nomadism is produced and consumed as a mark of ethnic authenticity.
In this article we deal with the possibility of emancipation against and beyond the conditions of social discipline imposed by governments under the pretext of the pandemic. We employ John Holloway's notion of Crack, approaching the pandemic as a crisis-ridden spatiotemporality which entails a new process of social class-ification. Consequently, a chain of social explosions and rebellions against it emerges. Then, we move through Félix Guattari's perspective which permits a reading of the Body not only as carrier of the social cohesion of capital, but also as a material base of emancipation. Combining Holloway's and Guattari's thinking, this article brings to the surface of the pandemic the notion of encounter: a social experience of the collective body that defies the medicalization-biologization of life and clashes with the forms of capitalism, creating and extending cracks in which social relations can change unpredictably at different levels of coexistence.
In the article, the author addresses with two ways of dealing with life, biopolitics, and necropolitics, and connects them to the excess of power over life and death in the era of neoliberal global capitalism. Dealing with necropolitical processes requires a different analysis of spaces and temporalities, of necrospaces and necrotemporalities. It also requires consideration of the possibilities of resistance to necropolitical processes by those who are by no means silent witnesses, by no means mere victims, but subjects who have undergone a process of (de)subjectivation in a way that, as Achille Mbembe would argue, leads to a process of destruction of their own subjectivity.
This second volume of my Habilitation dissertation presents a research on how the executants of the so called “Global war on terror” make sense of the violence they perpetrate. It compares two cases: the torture policy implemented by the Bush administration and French aerial bombings. I defended the Habilitation on September 18, 2020 at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. The examination committee was made up of Didier Bigo (rapporteur), Raphaëlle Branche (présidente), Thomas Hippler, Nicolas Mariot (garant) and Valérie Rosoux (rapportrice)
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