BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

A new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.     

Arendt in the refugee camp: The political agency of world-building

Refugee camps are frequently conceived as spaces in which social and political life is reduced to biological concerns of survival or ‘bare’ life. Yet, for researchers who focus on life in the camp as it is lived, through material adaption, social negotiation and resistance, this Agambenian perspective is unsatisfactory. Instead, a relation is made apparent between practises of everyday life and the manifestation of a politics. This paper argues for the importance of Hannah Arendt's writings for a new understanding of how refugee camp inhabitants can develop and sustain political agency. First, it will highlight the relation by observations and analysis of ‘the jungle’ in Calais, France. This unofficial camp, although short-lived, has influenced a broad spectrum of research including examination of spatial political practice. Second, applying a phenomenological reading of Arendt's work, I argue that political agency emerges through the concept of world-building. World-building results from the conjunction of human activities – from the quotidian, like labour and work, to the exceptional cases of action – and their orientation towards a specific type of visibility. World-building manifests as camp inhabitants erect spaces of meaning that engage a plurality of persons, transforming them into political agents.     

Agamben,Postcoloniality, and Sovereignty in South Korea

This paper examines modern Korean politics through the framework of Giorgio Agamben's theories of sovereign power, bare life, and the state of exception. Though his political analysis draws from the European history, we contend that the nature of his method attests to the possibility of analogical examples in non‐Western places. Thus, we argue that a postcolonial encounter with Agamben may enrich our understanding of sovereignty and political geography. In the Korean context, such an analysis needs to consider that sovereign power has been shaped by the itineraries of colonialism and empire. Korea's political space is deeply marked by the legacy of Japanese colonialism, the imperial interventions by the U.S., and the division of the peninsula. Thus, Korea offers a valuable lens through which to read Agamben's critique of sovereignty. Our paper offers such a reading to argue that a state of exception functions as the underlying nomos for postcolonial Korea.     

Topographies/topologies of the camp: Auschwitz as a spatial threshold

This paper, largely inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the camp, reflects on the relationship between the ‘topographical’ and the ‘topological’ in reference to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its spatialities. After having discussed the concept of soglia (threshold), we briefly introduce the ways in which the historiographical literature on the Holocaust treats the relationship between modernity, rationality, and Nazism. The second part of the paper is dedicated to an attempt to read ‘geographically’ the entanglements between the camp, Nazi spatial planning, bureaucratic rationalities, and the Holocaust. The notion of the camp-as-a-spazio-soglia is central to this interpretation. Auschwitz, conceived as a metaphorical and real space of exception, is contextualized within the broader regional geography planned by the Nazis for that part of Poland; while ‘Mexico’, a specific compound within the camp, is described as a key threshold in the reproduction of those very geographies. The aim is to show how the topological spatialities of the camp were a constitutive element of the overall biopolitical Nazi project of ‘protective custody’ and extermination and that, for this reason, they deserve further investigation and need to be discussed in the relation to the crude calculative and topographical aspirations of that same project.     

“Refusing to be a victim,refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism

This paper focuses on practices of non-violent resistance as they are played out in the ongoing Palestinian struggle against the Israeli settler colonialism in the occupied West Bank. By looking at the resistance of expanding settlements, demolition and land confiscation orders, and livelihood destruction in two Palestinian sites, the paper shows how Israeli settler colonial apparatuses, and the variety of techniques and practices of erasure they mobilize, can be fruitfully studied through site-specific ways of Palestinian resistance. In order to do so, the paper turns to discuss a peculiar form of non-violent resistance grounded in what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘destituent power’. It shows how the acts of destituent resistance in the two sites under study function by playing with the apparatuses of control in creative but non-violent ways; namely, by using the potentialities of that form-of-life that the settler colonial apparatuses try to cancel, overrule, control, weaken, criminalize, and erase. The idea of ‘destituent play’ is hence elaborated, and special attention paid to its ability to slow down and hamper the repressive functions of the settler colonial apparatuses through the creative use of the potentialities of Palestinian everyday life.     

Geographies of the camp

Facing the current growing global archipelago of encampments – including concentration, detention, transit, identification, refugee, military and training camps, this article is a geographical reflection on ‘the camp’, as a modern institution and as a spatial bio-political technology. In particular, it is about the past and present camp geographies and the apparatus of dispositifs that make them an ever-present spatial formation in the management of custody and care characterizing many authoritarian regimes as well as many contemporary democracies. I especially focus on the works of Paul Gilroy, Giorgio Agamben and Reviel Netz to discuss camp spatialities, the normalization of camp geographies, and related biopolitics. In doing so, I advance the argument to resist on present-day proliferating manifestations of camp and ‘camp thinking’, calling for the incorporation of ‘camp studies’ into the broader field of political geography to considering the geographies of the camp as constitutive hubs of much broader, modern geo-political economies.     

Mobile sovereignty: The case of ‘boat people’ in Australia

State sovereignty, in terms of the organisation and expression of political authority by nation states, is traditionally interpreted as a political container that is being weakened by increasing human and non-human mobilities. However recent research indicates that states are themselves becoming more mobile as executive bodies move and sovereign spaces are tactically reduced and expanded to intercept and control global mobilities. While challenging dichotomous notions of mobility and sovereignty, such research frames the movements of governments, territory and sovereign agents as the tactics of already established states. This paper builds on extant research by drawing on both a mobile ontology and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty to examine how mobilities constitute modern state sovereignty. To do so I examine Australian sovereignty and the related material and symbolic exclusion of asylum seekers arriving by boat. My analysis finds that mobilities, in terms of material movements and their representation, are essential to the construction of Australian sovereignty and the position of maritime asylum seekers as its outsider and limit identity. Through their mobile interception and management, and their representation as mobile ‘others’, maritime asylum seekers are used to create sovereign borders between specific types of movement; between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ (im)mobilities. I argue that this form of state sovereignty is disarticulated from space and follows populations who construct territories as being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the Australian state as they move.     

HISTORY,THEORETICISM, AND THE LIMITS OF “THE POSTSECULAR”1

In this collection of critical essays, Dominick LaCapra, with characteristic verve, takes on a variety of authors who have addressed issues relating to intellectual history, history generally, violence, trauma, and the relation between the human and the animal. LaCapra offers two types of criticism—of historians for ignoring or misappropriating theory, and of theorists for engaging in “theoreticism,” a theorizing that rides roughshod over historical specificity and context. The present essay focuses on LaCapra's discussion of the theoreticism of the critical theorists Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. Santner, and Slavoj ?i?ek, and in particular on their and LaCapra's attempts to engage with the “issue of the postsecular.” Although Agamben, Santner, and ?i?ek highlight some important and provocative issues, this brand of critical theory provides too limited a base for coming to an understanding of current debates over the relation between religion and secular perspectives. Instead, one must approach “postsecularity” with attentiveness to the larger “secularization debate,” and to the way the term postsecular is used by such writers as Jürgen Habermas and John Milbank. LaCapra rightly draws attention to the recent emergence of a discourse of “the postsecular.” Both the term and the concept now cry out for a deeper, more critical, and more historical examination than has so far been attempted.     

Book Reviews

Abstract

I begin with an attempt to discern the contours of the "debate" contained in the edited volume Theology and the Political: The New Debate. While the Radical Orthodox contributors are eager to critique those outside the fold, only two authors seem to talk back to them: Kenneth Surin and Mary-Jane Rubenstein. I agree with Surin's rejection of ontological hierarchy and Rubenstein's recommendation of Nancy's notion of "being-with," and I use their arguments to critique Radical Orthodoxy's ontology and their simplistic approach to "secular" authors, respectively. Insofar as one must discuss ontology in relation to theology and the political, I propose that we must actually develop a new ontology rather than simply reassert some version of the Thomistic synthesis. Finally, I fault the relative lack of reference to actual political practice, and above all the complete absence of Latin American liberation theology, in a volume ostensibly discussing "theology and the political."