South Atlantic Quarterly recent issues

Introduction

Culbert, J. L., Sarat, A. — 2008-06-25

The Innocuousness of State Lethality in an Age of National Security

Wagner-Pacifici, R. — 2008-06-25

Due Process and Lethal Confinement

Dayan, C. — 2008-06-25

The Child in the Broom Closet: States of Killing and Letting Die

Povinelli, E. A. — 2008-06-25

Death in the First Person

Brooks, P. — 2008-06-25

Open Secrets, or The Postscript of Capital Punishment

Reichman, R. P.-L. — 2008-06-25

Ethical Exception: Capital Punishment in the Figure of Sovereignty

Thurschwell, A. — 2008-06-25

No Mercy

Sitze, A. — 2008-06-25

Notes on Contributors

2008-06-25

Bunker Busting and Bunker Mentalities, or Is It Safe to Be Underground?

Bell, D. F. — 2008-03-06

Troubling Safe Choices: Girls, Friendship, Constraint, and Freedom

Probyn, E. — 2008-03-06

Jump City: Parkour and the Traces

Thomson, D. — 2008-03-06

Viral Sex and the Politics of Life

Tomso, G. — 2008-03-06

Somehow We All Survived: The Ideology of the U.S. Backlash against Risk Management

Brown, M. — 2008-03-06

Safety Begins at Home

Harvey, R. — 2008-03-06

"It Couldn't Happen Here": A Cross-Cultural Rhetoric

Mandrell, J. — 2008-03-06

There's (Always) Something about Cuba: Security and States of Exception in a Fundamentally Unsafe World

Goldman, D. E. — 2008-03-06

Forensics of Spinach

Willis, S. — 2008-03-06

Food Safety and the Abject: Mad Cow Disease and a Racist Rhetoric of Contamination in the Southwest

Houston, L. M. — 2008-03-06

The Sky Is Falling: Risk, Safety, and the Avian Flu

Squier, S. — 2008-03-06

The Cronulla Race Riots: Safety Maps on an Australian Beach

Evers, C. — 2008-03-06

"Mine Shaft Gap": Vigipirate and the Subject of Terror

Schehr, L. R. — 2008-03-06

Notes on Contributors

2008-03-06

Introduction

Ross, A. — 2007-11-26

This introduction places the key themes of Giorgio Agamben's suite of works on biopolitics next to some of the concerns and problems that motivate the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy. It considers the interrelation between Agamben's ontological mode of approach to political problems and his claim that a new vocabulary is needed for politics now that the categories of the citizen and the worker have lost their original meanings. It is argued that Agamben treats political topics with the tools of philological analysis and merely presumes the explanatory hold of extreme examples on our general political situation. He thus lacks the historico-institutional perspective necessary to support his claims.

Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice

Mills, C. — 2007-11-26

This essay examines the notion of "playing with law" that Giorgio Agamben proposes in State of Exception and, more broadly, his understanding of "play" as developed in works such as Infancy and History. In this latter text, Agamben provides his most extended discussion of play, throughout which he ties it to the necessity of a reconsideration of history and the experience of "infancy." The first part of this essay discusses the conceptual nexus of play, experience, and history and shows its importance for the later reflections on law and politics, particularly in relation to a conception of justice that is established with the deposition of law. The second part of this essay builds on this to briefly consider the theoretical and political implications of this conceptual nexus.

The Saturday of Messianic Time (Agamben and Badiou on the Apostle Paul)

Kaufman, E. — 2007-11-26

This essay examines the way in which Giorgio Agamben's work is marked by a persistent inquiry into that space where what appears as one thing is in fact two. This dynamic characterizes his "state of exception" as well as the notion of "messianic time" central to his book on the apostle Paul, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. By contrast, Alain Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism serves as the most extended example of Badiou's philosophical system, Paul's fidelity to Christ's resurrection being the model of a Badiouian militant engaged in a "truth procedure." Badiou's book has only three categories (the Greek, the Jew, and the privileged term of the law-surpassing Christian) compared to his customary four (politics, art, science, and love), and in Saint Paul he casts suspicion on what would be the potential fourth category, the mystical. However, his other work on counting and number reveals his sensitivity to the problematic of a difference of one between two numbers in a count. In this fashion, there is in Badiou a hidden messianism of number that links his work, in spite of its diametrically opposed reading of Paul, to Agamben.

The Inversion of Exceptionality: Foucault, Agamben, and "Reproductive Rights"

Deutscher, P. — 2007-11-26

Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women's bodies in the politicization of life? The woman about whom a ruling is passed forbidding an abortion is sometimes figured as a potentially murderous competing sovereign whose self-interest would thwart the intervening motivations of the state concerned with the interests of a threshold life. She is attributed with a pseudo-violent decision that this fetal life is not to be lived. Neither zoe, bios, bare life, nor homo sacer, the fetus is rhetorically and varyingly depicted as all of these, in an imitation of these patterns as they take place around zoe, bios, and the production of bare human life as vulnerable excess to which political life can be reduced. Agamben's analyses illuminate the way in which fetal life can come to be considered, particularly in antiabortion contexts and erroneously as a politicized bare life exposed to sovereign violence. Moreover, women's potential reducibility to naked life intertwines with their reducibility to reproductive life. If the fetus is falsely figured as homo sacer, it might be argued that this simultaneously reduces the woman to a barer, reproductive life exposed to the state's intervention. As she is figured as that which exposes another life, is she herself gripped, exposed, and reduced to barer life?

Particularity and Exceptions: On Jews and Animals

Benjamin, A. — 2007-11-26

This essay presents a critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben's conception of "bare life." Central to the argument is that bareness is produced, and therefore, that which is produced as "bare life" is always marked in advance by the process. What this means is that bareness cannot escape the mark of particularity. This has important implications for how concepts such as sovereignty are understood. The limits of Agamben's position are to be found in the ontological presuppositions that underlie it. In order to counter the inability of Agamben's position to deal with problems of practicality, a relational ontology is proposed as an alternative. The essay centers on Agamben's discussion of the animal and the Jew in the context of his books The Open and Homo Sacer.

Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender

Ziarek, E. P. — 2007-11-26

In this essay, I argue that Giorgio Agamben's revision of biopolitics poses the pressing political question of whether bare life itself can be mobilized by emancipatory movements. Yet, in order to develop the possibilities of resistance, we need to reconsider first of all the way bare life is implicated in the gendered, class, colonial, and racist configurations of the political and, because of this implication, suffers different forms of violence. The central paradox bare life presents for political analysis is not only the erasure of political distinctions but also the negative differentiation, or privation, such erasure produces with respect to differences that used to characterize a form of life that was destroyed. In order to show how this paradox opens up new possibilities of resistance, I supplement Agamben's genealogies of bare life with two different political cases—the first one represented by Orlando Patterson's discussion of premodern and modern forms of slavery, and the second case being the hunger strikes of militant British suffragettes at the beginning of the twentieth century. At stake is not just a diversification of the genealogy of bare life but a new feminist reflection on the possibilities of political praxis in the age of biopolitics.

Agamben: Aesthetics, Potentiality, and Life

Colebrook, C. — 2007-11-26

Throughout his philosophical, political, exegetical, and aesthetic writings, Giorgio Agamben refers ceaselessly to the concept of potentiality. Only if we understand this concept, and the peculiar status it has for the definition of the human, will we be able to forge a new politics. It is through humanity's potential not to realize its proper being—evidenced both in the horrors of the death camp and in the fall of art from its proper essence—that we also understand what humanity ought to be. This essay argues that Agamben's appeal to potentiality harbors a normative and gendered image of life.

Except for Law: Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, and the Politics of Exception

Spinks, L. — 2007-11-26

The concept of the "state of exception," which is so crucial to Giorgio Agamben's claim for the continuity between the ancient founding of the polity and modern biopolitics, enables us to rethink more local and specified historical and aesthetic changes. By examining the genre of the roman noir in the works of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, I will argue that we can witness a generic shift in the status of the "state of exception." This shift concerns the relation between commodity culture, the law, woman, and the border figure of the detective, who is at once within and beyond the legal code.

Suspended Animation: Thinking and Animality in Neurocultural Selfhood

Mackenzie, A. — 2007-11-26

This essay analyzes a genre of self-improvement literature based on scientific models of animal behavior and neurophysiology. Popular science books such as Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, or Mind Wide Open: Why You Are What You Think, by Steven Johnson, and academic books such as Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed, by William Connolly, argue that everyday thought or thinking includes animal behaviors and responses. These authors suggest that these behaviors and responses should become the object of managed self-awareness. Their broadened understandings of thought have dramatic implications for contemporary selfhood, sociality, and political life. This essay situates their understandings of animality, selfhood, and thinking through the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben's concept of the "anthropological machine" offers an alternative framing of the relation between human and animal and of any attempt to manage that relation. It suggests how this relation changes historically, generating instabilities in political and metaphysical formations, and why the collapsing of human-animal differences encounters obstacles. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's analysis of animals and boredom, Agamben's work implies a different way of thinking this relation. Thinking, for Agamben, is a form-of-life that lies close to animality.

Witnessing the Inhuman: Agamben or Merleau-Ponty

Deranty, J.-P. — 2007-11-26

Much of twentieth-century continental philosophy has defined its task as "witnessing the inhuman." With this is meant, first of all, a critical diagnostic aiming to uncover the nihilism that brought the modern world into the abyss. The philosophical side of this critique is famously the deconstruction of metaphysics. But witnessing the inhuman also has a positive meaning: the imperative to move beyond the separation of the human and the inhuman forces philosophy to correctly identify the inhuman at the heart of the human. This essay engages two attempts at solving the double task of witnessing the inhuman. In the first part, Giorgio Agamben's ethics of testimony is situated in his general project of a deconstruction of what he sees as the inherently dangerous metaphysics of Western logos, conducive to the destructive biopolitics that found in Auschwitz its fateful realization. Rather than a critique at a conceptual level, Agamben's overall project is questioned here on the basis of its practical consequences. Against the disempowering of praxis, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's alternative mode of constructing the witnessing of the inhuman is upheld. Merleau-Ponty's critique of humanism is the most fruitful one, I claim, because it is the one that opens the most promising horizon for truly effective models of ethical, political, and aesthetic praxis.

After Humanism: Agamben and Heidegger

Ziarek, K. — 2007-11-26

Placed side by side, Giorgio Agamben's The Open and Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" might read like two versions of the critical question about the aftermath of humanism. For Agamben, the answer lies in the rendering inoperative of the anthropological machine of humanism and the resulting liberation of the human-animal relation into the figure of nonknowledge. For Heidegger, the questioning pivots on the issue of the human in relation to Da-sein, "being-there," taken as the site of the event (das Ereignis). This difference becomes decisive because Agamben's critique remains marked by a certain trace of humanism, namely, by the vestige of the central role that "human animality" plays in the understanding of the human. While Agamben cuts and suspends the animal-human passage, Heidegger attempts to move not only beyond the horizon of humanism and anthropocentrism but also beyond the human/animal doublet as the framework for the reflection on the human. For Agamben, at issue is the anthropological machine of humanism, that is, the human, the animal, and their inescapable relation, which needs to be suspended. For Heidegger, by contrast, it is neither the animal nor the human but being; as he announces already in Being and Time, it is the question of being that he intends to explore and not one of humanity. For this reason the "strange" humanism that Heidegger proposes in "Letter on Humanism" is less about thinking the human-animal than about nearness to being.

Disaster, Crisis, Revolution

Cazdyn, E. — 2007-09-25

Detroit: Disaster Deferred, Disaster in Progress

Herron, J. — 2007-09-25

No Shelter from the Storm

Stabile, C. A. — 2007-09-25

When Disaster Is a Bureaucrat

Frye, I. S. — 2007-09-25

Postcolonial Failure and the Politics of Nation

Hitchcock, P. — 2007-09-25

Politicizing Weather: Two Polish Cases of the Intersection between Politics and Weather

Koczanowicz, L. — 2007-09-25

Disastrous Accumulation

Smith, N. — 2007-09-25

Public Health Preparedness: Social Control or Social Justice?

Wing, S., Schinasi, L. — 2007-09-25

System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster

Szeman, I. — 2007-09-25

Incoming: Globalization, Disaster, Poetics

Kalaidjian, W. — 2007-09-25

Introduction to Isozaki Arata's "City Demolition Industry, Inc." and "Rumor City"

Jameson, F. — 2007-09-25

City Demolition Industry, Inc.

Arata, I. — 2007-09-25

Rumor City

Arata, I. — 2007-09-25

Notes on Contributors

2007-09-25