Notes on an Ex White Man’s Form of Life Toward Social Death

Religion & Literature 192 tion of the human-made commonalities between theatrical and religious narrative, masques, and musical deceptions is rather a cause for cautious celebration” (189). Her reading of The Winter’s Tale, in which she suggests that the potentially deceptive qualities of music are the same qualities that allow it to function as a means of healing, is particularly persuasive. Staging Harmony is admirable both in its historical scope and its meticulous attention to detail. The readings of the individual plays are impressively nuanced. Brokaw is particularly sensitive to the ways in which parody can prove unstable, particularly when music is involved. She frequently reminds the reader that even a mocking send-up of the liturgy, for instance, may recall to some listeners the moving power of the original. Throughout, Brokaw draws on previous scholarship and a wide range of historical materials to cast new light on how early modern audiences might have responded to musical performance in the theater. This book will be of particular value to readers interested in the drama, music, and religious controversies of the 16th century. Erin Minear William & Mary Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity Nichole E. Miller Northwestern University Press, 2014. x + 245 pp. $79.95 cloth, $34.95 paperback. Nichole E. Miller’s Violence and Grace: Exceptional Life between Shakespeare and Modernity is an important recent contribution to a now well-established body of scholarship that stages encounters between early modern drama and twentieth-century political, and especially politico-theological, thought. Moderns including Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Kantorowicz themselves turned to early modern texts to articulate genealogies of their own historical moment and of the problem of political theology, understood variously as an inherent religious dimension of political authority, as a historical and conceptual crisis that arises when theological legitimation of political power no longer appears convincing, or, more broadly, as the analogies, exchanges, and oppositions that at once bind together and pull apart religious and political life. In part as a result of their unorthodox theses and in part because they often seemed to subordinate textual commentary BOOK REVIEWS 193 to argumentation of a different kind, to larger claims about modernity as such, works like Schmitt’s Political Theology, Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies have long occupied some middle ground between early modern studies, on the one hand, and theory, on the other. In recent years, however, early modernists such as Julia Reinhard Lupton, Victoria Kahn, Christopher Pye and others have in different ways reclaimed them for their field. As Miller points out, such efforts are always most successful when they seek out and attend to the “productive excess” (3) of encounters between early modern and modern texts: if reading Shakespeare and his contemporaries through the lens of modern politico-theological thought allows us to arrive at unexpected insights about the plays, then early modern texts in turn throw new light on modern thought, illuminating aspects of political theology that the latter may have distorted or left out. Miller’s book identifies one such zone of partial exclusion: she is concerned with “exceptional,”—that is, extra-political—life, with dramatic characters “suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially ‘political’ form of life as that of a man among men, a citizen among citizens” (3). According to Aristotle, life apart from political community is either less or more than human, either the life of a beast or that of a god. It belongs either to the outcast who is stripped of citizenship or to the sovereign who transcends the state. Exceptional or bare life is of course already important in Benjamin and later becomes central in Giorgio Agamben’s work. Jacques Derrida, too, engages the Aristotelian distinction between forms of exceptional life, arguing that it ultimately threatens to collapse: the sovereign is always also bestial, and the beast is always also sovereign. According to Derrida, efforts to maintain the distinction between the two rely not least on hierarchies of sexual difference, that is, on figuring the sovereign as masculine and the bestial as feminine. Miller follows this line of thought, aiming in this...

Race, Politics, and Nation in Albion W. Tourgée's American Historical Novels Series: The Example of <i>Hot Plowshares</i>

Swearing to God:Agamben's The Sacrament of Language Charles Barbour (bio) Giorgio Agamben , The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Adam Kotsko (trans.), Stanford University Press: 2011. 104 pages. US $45 (cloth). US $16.95 (paper). ISBN 9780804768979 The human being is that living being that, in order to speak, must say 'I', must 'take the word', assume it and make it his own. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language Those who follow Agamben's work have been waiting for him to articulate its positive or affirmative aspect - his promised consideration of the, as he puts it, 'form of life' that somehow might elude or point beyond the otherwise intractable regime of modern biopower, and the (entire) history of metaphysics on which it is said to be based. This study or intervention, it is believed, will constitute the fourth volume of Agamben's Homo Sacer project - a project that, to date, has included Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, or volume one; State of Exception and The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, or the first two sections of volume two; and Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, or volume three. Agamben's most recent book, or most recently translated book, is not the much anticipated fourth volume. Rather, it is the third section of the second volume. It would, therefore, be prudent to continue to wait before endeavouring to integrate The Sacrament of Language within Homo Sacer in general, and to acknowledge that, whatever we might say about it now, its full significance will not be known for a while yet. This review, then, will seek merely to summarize the basic claims of The Sacrament of Language, and leave the problem of context for another time. The Sacrament of Language is, as the subtitle suggests, a study of the oath, or the act of swearing to god. It is organized in opposition to a long scholarly tradition - central to anthropology, linguistics, philology, as well as legal and religious history - that treats the oath as a remedy for the fact that language is ambiguous, or that humans have the capacity to lie, and that locates its origins in a 'magico-religious' stage in human history, or a time when humans genuinely feared divine retribution. According to Agamben, this tradition relies on the 'scientific mythologeme' of 'the primordiality of the sacred' (13), or the myth that human history proceeds from a primitive belief in the reality of the sacred realm to an increasingly rational juridical and scientific codification of that belief. In fact, Agamben insists, religion, law, and science have always comingled in human history. Thus it is of no use to try to understand the oath as a remnant of a primitive age, or to assume that the gods it invokes originally functioned as omniscient witnesses who would punish anyone who deigned to speak falsely. To swear to god is not to fear god's power or reprisal. Rather, Agamben proposes, it is to invoke, or even to partake of, the, as it were, godlike power of language itself, or the power that language has to name the world. The oath, in other words, is not a 'sacrament of power'. It is, instead, a 'sacrament of language' (71). The simplest way of explaining what Agamben means here is to say that, for him, the oath is a speech act, or a performative rather than a constative statement. In other words, irrespective of the truth or falsehood of what I say while under oath, the oath itself, or the act of swearing, refers to nothing other than itself, or that very act. Thus, Agamben claims, it 'cannot be contested or verified in any way'. Rather, it 'coincides with the call and is accomplished and extinguished together with it' (33). Or, to put the same point in slightly different terms, in the oath as in the speech act, the expression and its referent are consubstantial. There is an immediate connection between the world of language on the one hand and that of actions or things on the other. Thus, and once again in opposition to the traditional understanding, the oath...

<i>Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human</i> by Maren Tova Linett

This paper considers the relevance of Franciscan monastic practice to contemporary postcapitalist politics in the time of the Anthropocene. Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on the monastic revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries explores the different relationships between the rules governing monastic life and materiality, wherein the renunciation of property and the practice of highest poverty give the greatest expression of a collective, monastic form of life. The embodied connection between having a rule and living it contrasts starkly with emergent Church doctrine that introduced a cynical split between the sacred and the material: good or bad, the priest only need say the words. Centuries later, a version of this cynical split seems operative in contemporary “green consumerist” responses to the Anthropocene, amounting to a palliative gesture when what is required is revolutionary transformation. In contrast, this essay considers how contemporary postcapitalist politics, like monasticism, rests upon embodied forms of collective life.

Religious Studies' Mishandling of Origin and ChangeTime, Tradition, and Form of Life in Buddhism Ananda Abeysekara (bio) Most of religious life works quite well without "critique" because most of life does. — Talal Asad, interview in the Bulletin for the Study of Religion Every use is first of all use of self: to enter into a relation of use with something, I must be affected by it …; in the using of something, it is the very being of the one using that is first of all at stake. — Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies The modern (postcolonial-minded) narrative of religion is a critique of the problem of time, in that it "separates" (krinein) origin (arche) from change. Central to this narrative is the idea that religion or religious life, as something that belongs to history, changes. Change is assumed to be history's "force of movement." It is often difficult for a modern scholar to narrate the story of religion without the paradigmatic notion of change. But is this critical narrative of religion as self-evident as is often assumed? I think not. The idea of history-time that guides this narrative is based on a "decision." Decision in this narrative effects an "incision" (i.e., cutting into) or "excision" (i.e., cutting out) of the origin of religion's time from its change. Thus, a closer look at this narrative reveals an unquestioned relation between decision and critique.1 Decision simply becomes "critique." That is, decision-critique—from the Greek heritage of the word krino—seeks merely to "separate" the problem of origin from change, a problem that haunts our secular politics and temporality.2 This "decisive critique" turns out be a kind of "decisionism" that is caught up in the paradox of deciding that which [End Page 22] cannot be decided. In such decisionism, it becomes difficult to think the inseparability between life and its "form." This necessarily prevents us from thinking about tradition itself in other ways than the distinction between origin and change.3 In this essay, I try to think how this critique of time works in very different postcolonial-minded texts on religion, particularly those by scholars of Buddhism such as Anne Blackburn, Steven Collins, Donald Lopez, and Richard Gombrich.4 These texts, which are informed by different theoretical-political orientations, present contrasting conceptualizations of time and life in modern and premodern Buddhism. Nonetheless the texts produce a common problem of temporality by way of seeking to separate the point of origin from successive changes of religious life within history. The problem we find in this narrative is not restricted to the area of Buddhist studies or religion. The problem remains in how we understand history-time as a particular secular object of study and critique. Thus the examples of texts (in terms of essentialist and antiessentialist critics of history) discussed here help us understand the problem of the secular practice of critique and the assumptions that such practice takes for granted about history, tradition, religion, and life itself. To that extent, my interest is not in what critique is, but how critique works in the secular practice of time and life.5 This general problem can be found in the way the modern narrative of religious life, as something that exists and changes in history, is assumed to be governed by critique. For the antiessentialist critic, the division between origin and change is crucial to determining how religion or religious life changes in history. For the self-proclaimed essentialist, the nemesis of the antiessentialist, the same separation of origin from change is crucial to defending the very idea of "origin." My argument is that the antiessentialist critique of origin cannot undermine the essentialist's argument for origin, because both are informed by the same critical decision of time and life that takes the separation between origin and change to be empirically axiomatic.6 My aim here is only to ask questions about the aporetic difficulties that the modern critique runs into in deciding on the question of religious life and time in the above way. The aporia of the modern critical narrative of religion helps us ponder a not-often-posed question...

In this paper, I will try to address the question of how to conceptualise a form of life that is better than others, by putting Rahel Jaeggi’s pragmatism inspired critical theory and Giorgio Agamben’s genealogical perspective in conversation. I argue that for both authors the critique of forms of life is intertwined with “the critique of how”. Not restricting itself to ethical abstinence, and without imposing certain norms upon forms of life, “the critique of how” focuses on the reflexive capacity of forms of life, or their ability to question how they become what they are, which gives rise to an increased perception of the connections and continuities of activities in which they are engaged. In this sense, it may become possible to free the present in order to open it to contingency, and to see the glimpses of a better form of life.

The link that current and former service members have with the governments they serve is unique. Following Giorgio Agamben’s work on forms of life, this paper argues that those who choose to take part in military service exist as a unique, emergent form of life. This form of life often stands at the intersection of nationalistic mythmaking and the lived realities of service members prior to, during, and after their service. The author employs content relevant non-fiction vignettes. These sections follow Leon Anderson’s notion of “analytic autoethnography.” Topics explored include liminal experiences in military service and military operational realities. The paper also explores mechanical allegories of the soldier and veteran their implications on the life of the veteran. This research was conducted between August 2016 and May 2017. The author is a veteran and sole researcher for this work. Through the autoethnographic method, the work decodes and organizes the author’s personal military experience, highlighting service member and veteran voices that are often filtered through more traditional academic work on the topic as a means of demystifying military service and experience. The author concludes that by developing our understanding of service members and veterans as a form of life we can make the notions surrounding them more intimate and contextual, allowing us space to understand those individuals outside of the images and myth that often precede them.

本文旨在探究在阿甘本的著作中，詩學藝術如何作為生命－形式（form-of-life）之典範（paradigm），指引生命的「恆餘」對抗主權「暴力」的可能。本文分成六部分：頭兩部分先說明阿甘本著作中，「生命」與「餘」之間的兩種不同關連，勾勒其所謂生命－形式、典範等概念，並解釋生命－形式如何也是某種「典範生命」（paradigmatic life），因此可以成為某種生命恆餘。再來，則回顧阿甘本對亞里斯多德（Aristotle）與但丁（Dante Alighieri）的閱讀，以釐清西方思想中能力（potentiality）與作為（activity）兩者與生命政治問題的關係，並藉此提出某種得以呈現、保存餘力的生命－形式運作。第四部分回到阿甘本對於現代性美學與語言能力的討論，說明詩學對於生命－形式實踐的重要性。接著，本文聚焦詩學經驗如何對生命產生質變，發展出某種詩學公共生命，抗衡主權的暴力機制。最後，本文將略談阿甘本論述中烏托邦傾向的問題，說明其政治構想其實是種「非－非烏托邦」（non-non-utopian）。

The Tie that Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism. By Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013. Pp. 276. Cloth, $29.95.)In popular accounts, John Brown and his sons are often lionized as men operating with violence outside of a feminized domestic sphere even as the men's bonds as father, sons, and sons-in-law are apparent. Historians have paid scant attention to John Brown's wife, daughters, or daughters-in-law. In The Tie that Bound Us Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz effectively writes the Brown women into history, establishing that all the Brown women offered logistical and material support for the Brown men in both Kansas and Virginia, including wrapping bandages for them in advance of their departure for Harpers Ferry. Fifteen-year-old Annie and her sister-in-law Martha accompanied John Brown and the other raiders to their farmhouse hideout to do the domestic work and to serve as decoys from prying neighbors. For the rest of her life, Annie Brown was proud of the role she played at Harpers Ferry as an outlaw girl and soldier in the fight against slavery. Laughlin-Schultz documents how Annie Brown chafed at the lack of public recognition of her role.Long before Harpers Ferry, the Brown family confronted devastating crises. In total, John Brown had twenty children, eleven of whom lived to adulthood. That number is reduced to only eight who survived into their thirties, if one factors in the sons who died due to their militant antislavery activism in Kansas and Virginia. John Brown and his first wife had seven children before she died after complications from childbirth in 1832. The widower soon married teenager Mary Ann Day, who bore another thirteen children, only four of whom survived into their thirties. Six of Mary and John's children did not reach their teenage years and four died of dysentery in September 1843 (15). Even for the early to mid-nineteenth century, the Browns lost far more children than the norm. Although Laughlin-Schultz declines to speculate about whether these tragic deaths contributed to either a willingness or a reluctance on Mary Brown's part to see her children and stepchildren participate in John Brown's antislavery activism, it appears to be a defining aspect of their family's history of radical militancy.These terrible losses were compounded by the family's constant dislocation, as John Brown tried to find permanent, profitable employment. In 1848, Brown moved his family to a remote Adirondack region in western New York, settling at North Elba, Gerrit Smith's land-grant colony for free blacks. There, they lived in social equality with their black neighbors. The family had already faced many trials, but the worst was yet to come: John Brown's antislavery missions in Kansas and Virginia directly imperiled the lives of his male family members and increased the work and emotional burdens of the poverty-stricken Brown women left back at the farm.After Harpers Ferry, John Brown engaged in a letter-writing campaign from prison to raise money for his family, casting the Brown women in the role of needy, worthy dependents. White abolitionist women were fascinated by the grieving family and eagerly offered assistance, even as they condescendingly caricatured them as simple, rustic, and impoverished. Focusing on their white supporters, Laughlin-Schultz misses an opportunity to introduce African Americans, such as the writer and abolitionist Frances Watkins (Harper), who reached out to Mary Brown with moral and financial support. …

This commentary argues that one path toward Natalie Oswin’s ‘An Other Geography’ is through abolishing the institution of ‘White men’. Like other oppressive institutions, ‘White men’ have produced epistemic violence that has shaped and structured the discipline of geography in uneven and unjust ways. This essay is an effort to show appreciation and gratitude, and to stand in solidarity, with Oswin’s prophetic vision of ‘an other geography’. I mobilize the linked biographies of Harriet Tubman and John Brown as an entry point given how little we have yet worked to understand abolitionist history for thinking through the many ways we can work to transform geography.

After the previous chapter’s consideration of the relationship between phenomenological analysis and “spiritual” ideal of the unity of life and thought, this chapter draws on Hannah Arendt’s and Giorgio Agamben’s works to assess how different practices of thinking shape one’s form of life. Arendt and Agamben are juxtaposed together in this chapter not simply because they are two of Heidegger’s most influential former students, but because their respective works advance two opposing accounts of human life: namely, the vita activa (Arendt) and the vita contemplativa (Agamben). The chapter suggests that despite their opposing views, Arendt and Agamben both envision the unity of life and thought as a formal and indeed spiritual ideal.

Giorgio Agamben and Ludwig Wittgenstein seem to have very little in common: the former is concerned with traditional ontological issues while the latter was interested in logics and ordinary language, avoiding metaphysical issues as something we cannot speak about. However, both share a crucial notion for their philosophical projects: form of life. In this paper, I try to show that, despite their different approaches and goals, form of life is for both a crucial notion for thinking ethics and life in-common. Addressing human existence in its constitutive relation to language, this notion deconstructs traditional dichotomies like bios and zoé, the cultural and the biological, enabling both authors to think of a life which cannot be separated from its forms, recognizing the commonality of logos as the specific trait of human existence. Through an analogical reading between both theoretical frameworks, I suggest that the notion of form-of-life, elaborated by Wittgenstein to address human production of meaning, becomes the key notion in Agamben's affirmative thinking since it enables us to consider the common ontologically in its relation to Human potentialities and to foresee a new, common use of the world and ourselves.

This paper addresses the question of bio-politics that regulates and shapes people into different forms of life in today's societies, particularly in the post- 1989 neoliberal capitalist conditions that we can observe in China. I call it the aestheticization of neoliberal capitalism. My concern in this paper is with the aestheticization of the neoliberal capitalism that was manipulated and executed by the contemporary States. I shall discuss the double cycle of the use and consumption of bodies in the artistic labor through my reading of a contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰 1955-). The primary process of the uses of the bodies by the State, the polis, took us to the question of the forms of life under the dictate of the political economy as discussed by Giorgio Agamben, and the question as to how and why human life, through the uses of bodies, is shaped, measured, calculated, regulated and processed into various forms of life. In order to think the power of life or the potential of life that would not be always already administered and distributed according to the reason of the ＂polis＂, I juxtapose Francois Jullien's formulation of the concept of ＂shi＂ (potential, inclination, tendency) that he derived from classical Chinese philosophy with the Western concept of ＂potential＂/＂potestas＂ as well as from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi; and I discuss the possibility of a new critical and political use of body through the politics of aesthetics as this possibility presents itself in Xu's work.

The article analyzes Giorgio Agamben’s (b. 1942) research interests in terms of original interpretations of such categories as form of life, habitat, exclusion status and camps, biopolitics. Giorgio Agamben’s “Architectural Theory” is the result of a wide variety his readings of individual but very important reflections on biopolitical power and spaces for life. The purpose of the article is to outline for future researchers G. Agamben’s judgments about architecture, biopolitics and space, which, by chance or not, can lead the past and us to new horizons of philosophical understanding of the present. In some works, the philosopher himself accompanies his conclusions with an analysis of the spatial and architectural correspondences of power and biopolitics. In the reflections of G. Agamben emphasizes the linguistic and cultural distinction between domicile architecture (domus) and building structure (aedes), which is directly related to the “archaeological” research in the spirit of M. Foucault, as well as to the philosophy of architecture by M. Heidegger. It is noted that G. Agamben outlined a number of important theses, apparently continuing the correspondence debate with the famous architectural theorist Vittorio Gregotti, which began on the pages of magazines back in the 1990s. Camillo Boano, another researcher, revisits the theoretical connections between space and politics, arguing for the importance of Giorgio Agamben’s work for the theory and practice of architecture as a discipline. The article is intended for researchers of biopolitical power, anthropologists, architects and cultural theorists.