Dwelling in Diaspora: Judith Butler’s Post-secular Paradigm

Abstract

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands.     

Expanding the Australian Empire?: The Australian Council for the World Council of Churches,the Menzies Government and the New Hebrides in the late 1950s

In the late 1950s the Australian Council for the World Council of Churches (AC‐WCC) inspired primarily by the Presbyterian Church, undertook a concerted campaign to pressure the Australian government to assume a greater role in the affairs of the New Hebrides. The AC‐WCC wanted the Australian government to take over the United Kingdom's role in the administration of the Anglo‐French Condominium. It was motivated to undertake this campaign by the dismal social and economic conditions in the islands, the neglect of the British and French colonial authorities, and their failure to offer the indigenous people a way forward to self‐government. The high point of the campaign was a meeting between Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister and a delegation from the AC‐WCC in early 1958. As a result of this meeting Australian ministers and officials, for the final time, gave extended consideration to expanding Australia's empire in the South Pacific to include the New Hebrides. This article examines the AC‐WCC's campaign, explores the Australian government's response, and analyses the outcome of this important episode in Australia's involvement in the colonial territories of the South Pacific.     

The Last of Australian Imperial Dreams for the Southwest Pacific: Paul Hasluck,the Department of Territories and a Greater Melanesia in 1960

This paper is a study of the vision held at the beginning of the 1960s by Paul Hasluck, the minister for external territories, and his department of the path to decolonisation for Melanesia. Faced by the ongoing West New Guinea crisis, Hasluck and his officials proposed to keep the western part of New Guinea out of Indonesian hands by expanding Australia’s empire, step by step, to include most of Melanesia. This greater Melanesian empire would eventually be guided to self-government. The proposal stood in a long line of ideas by Pacific-minded Australians going back for 100 years for an expanded Australian empire in the southwest Pacific. Consequently the Menzies cabinet’s rejection of Hasluck’s proposal was not just an important step towards changing its policy towards WNG; it marked the end to a century of Australian dreams and designs of a greater formal empire in the southwest Pacific.     

Anarchism,utopianism and hospitality: the work of René Schérer

Abstract

René Schérer (born 1922) is lamentably almost unknown to the Anglo-American world as his work has, as yet, not been translated. He is one of the main specialists of the French ‘utopian socialist’, Charles Fourier (1772–1837), and a major thinker in his own right. He is the author of more than twenty books and co-editor of the journal Chimères. Colleague and friend at Vincennes University (Paris 8) of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Jean-François Lyotard, François Châletet, Alain Brossat, Georges Navet, Miguel Abensour, Pierre Macherey..., he continues to host seminars at Paris 8 (now located at Saint-Denis). He is a living testimony to a radical past, and a continuing inspiration to a new generation of young thinkers. This article aims to convey the original specificity of his understanding of anarchism. By so doing, it will stress the importance of his work for any thinking concerned with a politicised resistance to social conformity and the supposed ‘state of things’ today.     

The secret life of Ian Fleming: spies,lies and social ties

This article explores the fascinating interactions and experiences of James Bond creator, Ian Fleming, with the real world of intelligence. It has long been known that Fleming worked in Naval Intelligence during the Second World War. However, accounts of his time there tend to portray him as a lowly and slightly eccentric administrator. Drawing on newly discovered archival materials, plus memoirs and histories, it is argued here that Fleming was a respected and influential figure in the great game of espionage for some three decades. During the war, he was a central cog in the machinery of naval intelligence, planning operations, working with partners in American intelligence and liaising with secret Whitehall departments, including the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. Before and after the war, he was involved in a range of intelligence networks, often using journalistic cover to hide his clandestine connections. Throughout his life, his social circle was a ‘who’s who’ of spies and saboteurs, including CIA Director Allen Dulles. In short, he straddled the state-private divide. Taken together, these dealings with real intelligence paved the way for and gave veracity to his fiction, which continues to shape public perceptions of intelligence to this day.     

‘This Community Which Nobody Can Define’: Meanings of Commonwealth in the Late 1940s and 1950s

Assessments of early postwar understandings of the power and potential of the Commonwealth have suggested the body either failed to shield the British public from a sense of national decline or that it comforted them that there was no need to worry about decolonisation because the organisation enabled the maintenance of British authority by other means. However, historians and political scientists who provided public comment on the present and future of the body in the late 1940s and 1950s complicate such assessments, wracked as they were by a profound uncertainty over what the Commonwealth could achieve. Their sense of uncertainty was not derived from a pessimistic reading of the tangible events and processes of the period that we might today assume blunted commentators’ faith in Commonwealth cohesion, such as Britain’s relationship with Europe, neutralism, apartheid, or even Suez. Instead, uncertainty over the Commonwealth’s capacity to realise a latent potential supposedly rooted in its members’ willingness to work together was rooted in something more elemental, namely sustained uncertainty regarding the nature of the body’s connections and functions. The body was judged an abstraction, a nascent and unparalleled experiment whose bonds were extensive yet impossible to measure. Its perceived opacity rendered it neither a cause for concern nor a salve to a wounded British morale.