HISTORY AND KAIRÓS

The recent wave of interest in the “theological‐political” has focused scholarly attention on the constellation of ideas associated with “messianic time.” The term kairós belongs to this constellation, and Giacomo Marramao's brief but ambitious text of the same name both proposes and performs a “kairological” reconfiguration of the close relationship between philosophy and time. Marramao's argument for the productive potential of “cosmic disorientation” and contingency will merit the attention of historians interested in Benjamin's blend of messianism and historical materialism, and of anyone who is intrigued by the prospect of a messianism without apocalypticism.     

Illusions of a Future: Ishiguro,Liberalism, Political Theology

ABSTRACT

This article explores the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly. To pursue a reading of Christianity that extends from Hegel through Lacan to ?i?ek, the article argues that political theology’s future may perversely lie in a materialism emptied of all transcendental guarantees: political theology is the historically privileged master fantasy or illusion which reveals the fantastic or illusory status of our entire relation to the real in (neo-)liberal modernity. In conclusion, the article argues that Ishiguro’s fiction may thus be read less as a melancholic dystopian study in total ideological capture or surrender than as the representation of a state of immanent freedom beyond the power relations of (neo-)liberal subjectivity.     

Leopards and Invisible Calculators: Violent Incorporation,Political Theology,and Kafka’s “Leopards in the Temple”

ABSTRACT

This essay reads Kafka’s aphorism “The Leopards in the Temple” together with some of the concerns of political theology to think about visibility and agency, the sacred and the profane, the violence of incorporation, and the field of political theology itself. Methodologically, it brings literary studies and political theology into richer engagement without consuming one into the other, either as mere illustration or as gloss. The condensed power of Kafka’s aphorism draws us right into the midst of questions about the dangers of consumption and incorporation, as well as the possibilities for meaningful interaction between these fields of study.     

Beyond Revolution,Beyond the Law: Christian Anarchism in Conversation with Giorgio Agamben

ABSTRACT

The Christian anarchist tradition and the work of Giorgio Agamben fit within a subversive trajectory of political theology that critiques the state paradigm, while also operating at a distance from it in their creation of a newly imagined political community. This research asks what it could look like to conceive of a political community beyond the state, imagined from the subject position of the marginalized. It also seeks a mutually informed path towards the practical formation of such communities, as elaborated through a case study of the Anabaptist tradition. Agamben’s concepts provide a renovation of the political themes of Christian anarchism, including the ideas of moving beyond revolution, voluntary exile through the abdication of rights, and messianic vocation. As the space for political praxis within Agamben’s work continues to evolve, the Anabaptist tradition provides helpful practices to imagine a withdrawal from the governmental machine as a community of voluntary exiles.     

The Struggle for Identity: A Personal Reflection

This article explores Agamben's revisionist presentation of the anarchy of the Son and the void of power in the Trinity in his genealogy of economy and government in the West. It argues for a reading that sustains the actual self-depiction of orthodox theology on these points of doctrine in order to evaluate and critique orthodoxy's impact on politics in the West. Only after a thorough assessment of orthodoxy's doctrinal self-understanding can Agamben's reading of potential or suppressed meaning in orthodoxy be appreciated and possibly applied.     

Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp: an introduction

The Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben's conclusion that the camp has replaced the city as the biopolitical paradigm of the West is as difficult to digest as it is easy to see how it responds to contemporary political tendencies in the world today. In this introduction to this theme issue on Giorgio Agamben and the spatialities of the camp, a detailed exposition, emulating the structure of Agamben's seminal book Homo Sacer, is conducted, tracing the genealogies of Agamben's ideas and commenting on his swiftly enhanced importance in the social sciences and humanities. The introduction concludes by outlining some possible research fields in human geogrphy where much insight could be gained if Agamben's work is given more detailed consideration.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

The invasion complex: the abject other and spaces of violence

This article examines how the image of the refugee has been defined through the fear of the other, and how the mechanisms of detention have transformed the conditions of belonging. I examine the contemporary geopolitical forces propelling the rise of a new authoritarianism, growing border anxieties and hostility towards refugees, and argue that these emerging shifts provoke an urgent need for a new conceptual framework to understand the dynamics of contemporary global flows and concepts of belonging. I introduce what I call the ‘invasion complex’, a new conceptual hybrid that draws upon elements of psychoanalytic theory and complex systems theory, and Giorgio Agamben's analysis of sovereignty and ‘the camp’, to explain heightened border anxieties and the legitimization of violence towards the Other. I consider the value, applications and limitations of Agamben's analysis, and contend that both the state‐centric moral debate on the refugee crisis, and Agamben's method of privileging political agency in terms of sovereign power, tend to discount the role of complexity. Drawing on the Australian political and public discourse on refugees, and the 2001 Tampa crisis, I argue that the hostile reactions can be traced to a complex interplay between old phobias and new fantasies. I conclude by urging the need to move beyond nation state centric critiques of racism, and propose the development of a new paradigm — a potential politics that recognizes the complex dynamics of global flows, and which opens the way for a discourse of hope based on the rights of the human being, rather than the citizen.     

Polis and Oikos: The Art of Politics in the Greek City-State

ABSTRACT

The Greek city-state has traditionally been viewed as an entity that was divided into two distinct spheres (oikos and polis) and governed by two distinct arts (oikonomia and politikê technê). The aim of this article is to show that this image of the Greek city-state is not very accurate. The relationship between the oikos and the polis was not exclusive in classical poleis. Particularly in Athens during the democratic period, the polis was depicted as a family writ large, and to the extent that oikos was seen as an entity of its own, it was a part of the polis, not excluded from or opposed to it. My aim is to show that the art of the household and the art of politics were not distinct arts as has been claimed in modern political theory. Furthermore, although the collapse of the classical city-state during the Hellenistic era entailed a privatization of the household, it was not until modern times, from the late eighteenth century onwards—when the concept of the natural right to life and property became firmly established in juridical and political discourses—that the private sphere attained genuine autonomy.