Sovereignty,bare life and the Arab uprisings

Five years after people took to the streets in protest at political organisation across the Middle East, the consequences of these actions remain. As the protests gained traction, states began to fragment and regimes sought to retain power, whatever the cost. While a great deal of focus has been upon what happened, very little attention has been paid to the role of agency within the context of the fragmenting sovereignty and political change. This article contributes to these debates by applying the work of Giorgio Agamben to the post-Arab Uprisings Middle East, to understand the relationship between rulers and ruled along with the fragmentation of the sovereign state. The article argues for the need to bring agency back into conceptual debates about sovereignty within the Middle East. It concludes by presenting a framework that offers an approach building upon Agamben’s bare life.     

Responding to my interlocutors: a subject in the making...

In this response to Ronnie Lippens’ and Erik Claes’ critiques of a paper entitled ‘The Lore of Criminal accusation,’ Pavlich notes the ways in which his work might be compared to, yet differentiated from, abolitionist approaches to crime. Working through Lippens’ comments, he notes a possible way to understand the analysis and politics of crime (through accusation). Pavlich challenges Claes’ optimistic hypostatization of ‘criminal law’, idiosyncratic understandings of deconstruction and refocuses attention on the centrality of accusation to creating criminal subjects.     

Love and Communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Community

This paper takes as is its point of departure Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument that the occidental idea of community in the modern era has always meant a kind of project or work whose intention was to glorify death in order to redeem and make it meaningful. It does so in order to return the community to its self-identity; to inter or assimilate what intrudes. In so doing, it also produces us as beings who cast this glorious lost past retrospectively. Recalling a lost original communalism, then, is not only politically dangerous, it is a symptom: it operates as a kind of compensatory reinstatement of an imaginary lost unity. On this view, casting ‘back’ to a glorious communal past must not only be resisted on political grounds, it also provides, as a symptom, a way to undertake that resistance. In this paper, I investigate a narrow dimension of Nancy’s strategy for resisting this lure: Nancy’s notion of shattering reveals that the ‘lost object’ of community is a melancholically interred, narcissistically invested retroactive creation of the very work of mourning he resists and re-thinks. The work of mourning on this view, can itself only be resisted by a certain disouevrement or unworking.     

No exceptions: authoritarian statism. Agamben,Poulantzas and homeland security

This article outlines and compares two different ways of making sense of counterterrorism and the configuration of political power in its context. Against the backdrop of US homeland security, it first outlines Agamben’s thesis on the permanent state of exception. Despite its resonance with key aspects of homeland security, this thesis is found to be analytically limited and theoretically brittle. To overcome its shortcomings and provide a better understanding of contemporary organisation of political power, a strategic-relational approach is suggested, derived from Poulantzas’s state theory.     

Abjects or agents? Camps,contests and the creation of ‘political space’

The ‘Urdu-speaking population’ in Bangladesh, displaced by the Partition in 1947 and made ‘stateless’ by the Liberation War of 1971, exemplifies some of the key problems facing uprooted populations. Exploring differences of ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based displacement, this article represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. Semi-structured and narrative interviews conducted among ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based ‘Urdu-speakers’ found that citizenship status has been profoundly affected by the spatial dynamics of settlement. However, it also revealed the ways in which ‘formal’ status is subverted – the moments of negotiation in which claims to political being are made. In asking how and when a ‘stateless’ population is able to ‘access’ citizenship, through which processes and by which means, it reveals the tension, ambiguity and conceptual limitations of ‘statelessness’ and citizenship, unearthing a reality of partial, shifting and deceptively permeable terrain. In doing so, it also reveals the dissonance and discord (constitutive of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide) upon which the creation of ‘political space’ may rely. Citizenship functions to exclude and, therefore, it is very often born of contestation.     

“Hidden Behind the Supplement”

Abstract

In contrast to functionalist explanations of themes of purity and impurity as an expression and affirmation of the social order (e.g. Emile Durkheim, Mary Douglas), Giorgio Agamben considers purity and impurity as comparisons of phenomena with their imputed essence. From the perspective offered by Agamben, judgements regarding purity and impurity can be seen as in part constructing the essence against which they supposedly simply measure phenomena. Agamben’s investigations suggest that on occasions when themes of purity or impurity are invoked within Western discourses on subjectivity, the full human subject tends to be placed as relatively pure: neither too close nor too distant from human essence. FollowingWalter Benjamin, he suggests that such a classification gives the full human subject a certain social protection and inviolability, separating relatively pure and protected human life from impure subjectivities unprotected by social or legal conventions.     

Potential,freedom and space: reflections on Agamben’s potentialities in the West Bank

A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel's capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben's work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben's spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks on the search for alternative theoretical construction of Agamben “potentialities”. The paper allow speculations on the heterotopian nature of Israeli produced infrastructures, perceived at once as actualised potentials in space, and spaces of potential.     

Particular Rights and Absolute Wrongs: Giorgio Agamben on Life and Politics

Over the past decade, as human rights discourses have increasingly served to legitimize state militarism, a growing number of thinkers have sought to engage critically with the human rights project and its anthropological foundations. Amongst these thinkers, Giorgio Agamben’s account of rights is possibly the most damning: human rights declarations, he argues, are biopolitical mechanisms that serve to inscribe life within the order of the nation state, and provide an earthly foundation for a sovereign power that is taking on a form redolent of the concentration camp. In this paper, I will examine Agamben’s account of human rights declarations, which he sees as central to the modern collapse of the distinction between life and politics that had typified classical politics. I will then turn to the critique of Agamben offered by Jacques Ranciere, who suggests that Agamben’s rejection of rights discourses is consequent to his adoption of Hannah Arendt’s belief that, in order to establish a realm of freedom, the political realm must be premised on the expulsion of natural life. In contrast to Ranciere, I will argue that far from sharing the position of those thinkers, like Arendt, who seek to respond to the modern erosion of the borders between politics and life by resurrecting earlier forms of separation, Agamben sees the collapse of this border as the condition of possibility of a new, non-juridical politics.

Without Negative Origins and Absolute Ends: A Jurisprudence of the Singular

This paper is a preparatory analysis for a jurisprudence of the singular. Through a critical analysis of the negativity and the absolving character of the transcendental metaphysics of law and justice it reads mainly through M. Heidegger, Heraclitus, G. Agamben and J-L. Nancy a realignment of the questioning of justice that takes its provisional name in ‘dike’, at thepoint where the routes of ontology, the juridical and the political intersect and reveal the pseudo-propriety of their presuppositions. Without the transcendental dialectical discourse of the origin and its absolving-absolute ‘ends’, this paper re-poses the urgency of thinking the singular-multiple ‘right’ otherwise. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Sovereign Event in a Nation's Law

This article interrogates the relationship between the sovereign event and a legal decision that purports to place sovereignty beyond law. It argues that sovereignty cannot be regarded as unitary, and elaborates the process of iterability by which the sovereign event is split from the outset. This dynamic is examined through an interrogation of the non-justiciability of sovereignty in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2)(1992). Along with the unitary conception of sovereignty, Mabo (No. 2) deployed an absolute measure for community in the form of the ‘skeletal principle’ of the doctrine of tenure. The paper argues that a conception of the political that affirms the One sovereign source of community and law instead of the original dis-position of law, nation and community repeats the original violence, and will, at best, run aground on the righteous (mis)recognition of the ‘appropriate savage’. It concludes with an indicative rethinking of community through the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.