Agamben Calls Research Articles

The cinema of Sun Yu: Ice cream for the eye…but with a homo sacer

ABSTRACTThis article rethinks where the films of Sun Yu (1900–1990) stand in a highly complex political, theoretical and industrial matrix. By combining a historical reading of the industrial conditions, and a hermeneutic reading of the theoretical discourse in the 1930s, this article argues that the ‘soft film’ is not ‘apolitical’; rather, it shares with the ‘hard film’ position a common belief that cinema is an educational tool for political ends. In this light, the article uses a close analysis of two films by Sun Yu, Tianming/Daybreak (1933) and Tiyu huanghou/Queen of Sports (1934), to demonstrate that Sun's films were intended as Nationalist propaganda. However, by focusing on perfecting the forms of these films as entertainment so knowingly, and by turning the female protagonist of each film as what Giorgio Agamben calls a homo sacer, the text becomes open to multiple and mutually conflicting readings.

<b>A Produção do Humanismo da Alta Idade Moderna em A Tempestade de Shakespeare</b><br>doi:10.5007/2175-7917.2010v15n2p164

This article reads Shakespeare's The Tempest as a key text for any genealogy and post-humanist deconstruction of Early Modern humanism and of the human/animal divide, having been written during the transition from the Renaissance to Early Modernity, but also because it dramatizes the very process of the production of humanism (and of the human as opposed to the animal). Thus, the illusionist "play" that Prospero sets up on the island to convince his countrymen of his legitimate claim for the throne may be read as the enactment which is necessary for the production of he human according to the new Early Modern values of art as a tool to power and knowledge. The article also focuses on the importance of the inauguration of the ontological human/animal divide for Prospero's play, by the means of which he can activate the anthropological machine (as Agamben calls it) that will fabricate the Early Modern civil human.

“WE ARE THE WORLD”: THE FLIGHT FROM IMPOTENCE IN THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE

Punctuating a recent music video we see, in his white glove and gold jacket, before his infamous face-whitening surgeries, the Michael Jackson of old. This video, for the song “We are the World 25,” is introduced, directly into camera, by a sincere Jamie Foxx, who implores viewers to give generously to help the recovery effort in Haiti. “Do more than just watch,”he says. “Take action.” Then, before the expected images of Haitians, and even before the singing celebrities themselves, we see a host of signatures unfolding on a black background.From the beginning, then, this video walks a very thin line: clearly banking on the reputations of singers who have made their careers as spectacles, as images, the video goes to some lengths to claim an authentic, and even superior, political position. “Give what you can,”Jamie Foxx says, “as I have.”The video’s repeated use of the image of Michael Jackson signifies this tenuous, if not contradictory, position. Who, after all, is more exemplary of the cultural logic of the societyof the spectacle than Michael Jackson? And who, in the pantheon of MTV singers, spent more time claiming authenticity and declaring our collective responsibility for a universal humanity? The video presents an excess of repetition and citation, in terms of its music and lyrics, the images Michael Jackson himself, as well as the chorus of Jackson-citing celebrity singers. But, despite the obvious point that these images and these performers are perhaps the most manufactured and least authentic imaginable, the video’s authenticity, as well as its anxiety over its own search for authenticity, is almost hyperbolically announced. My goal in this short essay is to read this video in relation to Agamben’s claims about the spectacle in his book The Coming Community. I will argue that it is precisely this citationality, this identity without essence—what is clearly a profoundly inauthentic announcement of authenticity—that Agamben sees as, potentially, the road out of the spectacle society. This video promiseswhat Agamben calls “whatever” politics (1), so–called politics, or, in Derrida’s terminology, a politics “under erasure” ( OG 23). At the same time, this video reveals the parallel logic,suggested in juridical terms in Agamben’s Homo Sacer, in which the anxiety of nonbelonging and inauthenticity leads to a more extreme and potentially violent search for essential group belonging and authentic political identity.

Commodification of utopia: The lotus eaters revisited

This article responds to recent lamentations about the waning of utopia. Through an explanation of different concepts of utopia and an analysis of a recent shopping mall development project, the article shows how utopia has been appropriated by commercial actors. Drawing on the work of Herbert Marcuse and Giorgio Agamben and with the help of the Homeric allegory of the lotus eaters and contemporary popular culture, the article analyzes this state of affairs. It argues that an important part of the perceived decline of utopia is due to its commodification and that utopia, with the potential of being a ‘means without end’, is in need of what Agamben calls ‘profanation.’

War Is Culture: Global Counterinsurgency, Visuality, and the Petraeus Doctrine

In one of his signature reversals of accepted wisdom, Michel Foucault modulated Carl von Clausewitz's well-known aphorism on war and politics to read, “Politics is the continuation of war by other means” (48). That is to say, even in peace, the law is enacted by force. In conditions of state-determined necessity, that force appears as a direct actor in legitimizing what Giorgio Agamben calls “the state of exception.” In English law the term would be “martial law” (Agamben 7). By extension, if globalization has again become the “global civil war” (Arendt, qtd. in Agamben 1) that was the cold war or has created a new state of “permanent war” (Retort 78), then war is global politics. So what kind of war is the war in Iraq (Reid)? It is now being waged by the United States as a global counterinsurgency. In the field manual Counterinsurgency issued by the United States Army in December 2006 at the instigation of General David Petraeus (Bacevich), counterinsurgency is explicitly a cultural war, to be fought in the United States as much as it is in Iraq. Cultural war, with visuality playing a central role, takes “culture” to be the means, location, and object of warfare. In his classic novel 1984, George Orwell coined the slogan “war is peace” (199), anticipating the peacekeeping missions, surgical strikes, defense walls, and “coalitions of the willing” that demarcated much of the twentieth century. In the era of United States global policing, war is counterinsurgency, and the means of counterinsurgency are cultural. War is culture. Globalized capital uses war as its means of acculturating citizens to its regime, requiring both acquiescence to the excesses of power and a willingness to ignore what is palpably obvious. Counterinsurgency has become a digitally mediated version of imperialist techniques to produce legitimacy. Its success in the United States is unquestioned: who in public life is against counterinsurgency, even if they oppose the war in Iraq or invasions elsewhere? War is culture.

Cross-Channel Becomings-Animal: Primal Courtliness in Guillame de Palerne and William of Palerne

This essay argues that William of Palerne, a fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the twelfth-century Old French romance Guillaume de Palerne, outdoes its French predecessor in sustaining Western aristocratic hegemony. William's translation is motivated not by patriotism, but by a desire to disseminate elitist class values. Both versions feature what Bourdieu calls “rites of passage,” in which nobles cement their exceptional status through privileged crossings into the animal world. The romances' werewolf narratives reveal the predatory nature of aristocratic power, with a future prince's animal life figuring the sovereign's incorporation of violent nature. In donning animal skins, the fugitive lovers become what Agamben calls bare life, with the elite idioms of courtly love and venery marking their ritual passage into full aristocratic identity and imperial power. By magnifying Alexandrine's role, William highlights the ritual nature of the lovers' becoming-animal. By intensifying his source's feudal elitism, and by underscoring the link between violence against peasants and aristocratic exceptionalism, William registers his aristocratic patron's anxiety concerning increasing socio-economic diversity. Each of the romances participates in Western consolidation by excluding the Eastern other from the closing marriage alliances, revealing that class is the driving force of its animalized allegory.

Savage Materiality

Page 5 September–October 2009 Savage Materiality Christine Hume Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal, a Project for Future Children does not yield first impressions.As in most of Kapil’s work, immersion is both technique and kinetic effect. Immediately intimate, the book explores cultural identity formation through mirroring and alterizing several main characters—a wolfgirl, the author’s father, and the Kapil herself—in three narratives magnetized by the force of relation. In the foreground is the story of two human girls found living with wolves—as wolves—in the Bengal region of India in 1920. Based on the diary of Reverend Joseph Singh, the missionary who took them into his orphanage , Kapil’s account roughens up her source text in order to dramatize the book’s ultimate subject: the body. Meanwhile, a companion memoir—responsive to and contextualized within the wolfgirls’ story— fastens on Kapil’s father’s transformation from illiterate goatherd to the firstAsian headmaster in the UK. Readers confront his epistemological shift largely through uncanny physical descriptions.Triangulating with these “retellings,” Kapil also relates the story of her research of the wolfgirls and her travels with a French filmmaking company documenting humanwolf contact. In just sixty-five pages, we also find a ghost manifesto on aesthetics. Narrative internests with theoretical riffs and interbreeds with document, while never surrendering the brutal adumbrations of a shared captivity narrative. Though the hybrid ethos is fashionable in experimental writing—Nortonized and commodified unto near meaninglessness—Humanimal sets new stakes by permeating subject, form, and approach with an empathy that illuminates drastic human configurations and conversions. Though based on true stories, Kapil’s work functions more like myth, with its orchestration of infinitely corruptible parts. For instance, Kapil alters Singh’s representation of the wolfgirls’ lives significantly; this simultaneous reveling in and resistance to historic sources will raise a few eyebrows for those curious and industrious enough to track down the source of Kapil’s quotations. Yet the interval between fact and fiction, between research and intuition, percolates powerful mythologies. Kapil reconstitutes given stories by subjecting their facts to the same kind of intense conversions Kapil’s characters undergo. All of Kapil’s subject-strands form and de/reform in the service of deeply relational aesthetics , each translating the other to maximum advantage in a rapture of complementary passions. Humanimal questions liminal identities and territories of all kinds by indirection more often than by direct address. How is the story of the wolfgirls a female story? How is the story of the wolfgirls a human story? How does our umwelt—our subjective environment—physically shape us? How does it determine what we sense, digest, and understand? Does our umwelt determine our species? In what ways do the jungle and garden act on us, as haven, as machine, as projection? Does domestication inaugurate violence and oppression? How is the story of the wolfgirls an Indian story? How does the story of abandonment lend anyone feral, possessed , or outside another way to be found? What might it be like to occupy a caesura between human and animal? What unprecedented pulse—thought, sensation, politics—might come of it? Though these quandaries are impossible not to fathom while reading Humanimal, Kapil insists, “I don’t want to ask primal questions.” She instead provides an antidote to what Giorgio Agamben calls, in The Open: Man and Animal (2004), the “anthropological machine,” or thinking that creates an absolute divide between animal and “man.” In our efforts to define ourselves, we have deformed ourselves. This chilling capacity for adaptability has led our species, Agamben claims, to “the total management of biological life,” a global economy, and “humanitarian ideology ”—three concentric faces looking toward posthistorical humanity. Kapil’s work unites its hybrid faces against this troubled physiology. The book is not as much concerned with transmission of ideas as it is with the creation of an atmosphere where our automatic naturalization of sentience into sapience slows down or shuts off. She does so by refusing to betray—that is, control—the senses: “We are here to cull an atmosphere; to scrape color and sound and light into jars.” To really enjoy reading Humaninal, best to have a taste for amniotic atmospheres...

Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis

At the heart of the relationship between philosophy and poetry, and of the philosophical and the literary tout court, is the relationship between poetry and prose. In the increasingly influential work of Giorgio Agamben, whose impact continues to grow across a wide range of disciplines, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, receives renewed attention and significance. Situating Agamben's philosophical, poetic prose in relation to the legacy of the prose poem from Charles Baudelaire through Walter Benjamin and Rosmarie Waldrop, “Philosophy, Poetry, Parataxis” explores the implications of what Agamben calls “whatever being” or “whatever singularity” for our understanding of the potentialities inherent in the relationship between contemporary writing practices and what Agamben calls The Coming Community. In contributing to the development of innovative, alternative forms of textuality at once “philosophical” and “poetic,” contemporary writers such as Agamben and Waldrop share an understanding of the informing role of parataxis in inflecting philosophy and poetry, poetry and prose, toward what we might call an aesthetics and politics of apposition.

Undoing Legal Violence: Walter Benjamin's and Giorgio Agamben's Aesthetics of Pure Means

Giorgio Agamben calls for a ‘playful’ relation to law as a way to counteract its inherent violence. Such a relation would prevent law from functioning as a means to an end, instead treating it as a ‘pure means.’ This article evaluates the significance of Agamben's proposal and of the concept of pure means, arguing that both implicitly draw on a Kantian model of aesthetic experience.

Cinema and the Meaning of "Life"

Cinema and the Meaning of "Life" Louis-Georges Schwartz (bio) Introduction If one were to ask about the role that the cinema has played in contemporary thought, one would discover it entangled in the complex struggle over the concept of "life." Cinema and the motion-picture technologies associated with it were invented and cultivated in a society whose moral, legal, economic, and semantic values organized themselves around "life." In modern times, biological life, understood as both pure survival and the potential labor power it implies, has become a human right, while questions of the quality of life have become sites of intense contestation. Transvaluation of "life" has been crucial to the emergence of contemporary social forms, as recent scholarship on the concept's genealogies has begun to show.1 Like other reproductive technologies such as photography and gramophony, cinematography suggested to its first public the possibility of preserving a living image of the dead, appearing as an event in the history of the concepts of "life" and "death." In what follows I will look at early journalistic accounts of cinematograph screenings in Europe and passages about cinema by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze in order to sketch the extent to which cinema has been involved in the transvaluation of life. These texts invoke life and death in original ways as they attempt to respond to the experience of cinema in writing. My readings will only be indications of the mutations in the genealogy of life, occasioned by writing about the cinema, in order to establish a particular field of genealogical investigation. I will follow uses of words [End Page 7] associated with the concept "life," such as "living," "dead," and "ghost," attending to their differences from conventional usage "Meaning" appears under erasure in my title in order to focus on lexical variation, conceptual change, and contestation of values rather than static semantics. Recent work by Giorgio Agamben has helped us to understand modern philosophies as philosophies of life by situating Michel Foucault's work on biopolitique within a network of post-Heideggerian thought. Agamben's essay "Absolute Immanence" begins by pointing out that the last articles Foucault and Gilles Deleuze published before their deaths were both about the concept of "life."2 The correspondence between Deleuze's and Foucault's final texts exemplifies a turn in contemporary philosophy, which according to Agamben can only be a philosophy of life. Agamben calls for future philosophy to produce a genealogy of the concept "life" and to rethink it in ways other than those which enable contemporary forms of domination. Agamben's genealogy will be of the Nietzschean type as understood by Foucault, a genealogy that rearticulates values by showing them to be historical and by illuminating the ways in which values are the effects of an ongoing process of transvaluation. Foucault describes the development of concrete problems that call for a philosophy of life in his biopolitical studies. Starting with the observation that the modern state transforms the feudal sovereign's power to end life into a power to control life, Foucault shows how contemporary governance justifies itself and regulates society by invoking "life" in ways which are, at least in part, philosophical.3 The contemporary concept of "life" implicit in governing institutions responds to concrete problems faced by the state. To be able to decide legal cases concerning the termination of life support or abortion, for example, the state refers to definitions of life developed by biology, theology, and philosophy. Since Foucault's death, the philosophico-theological dimension of contemporary discursive formations has clarified itself by producing the noun-phrase "culture of life," as the President and the Pope both say when invoking moral authority.4 In biopolitical regimes, a vague, largely unthought concept of life, pricelessly outside of any economy, confers worth on all other values. Thus the task of philosophy in such societies is to make explicit the appropriation of the concept of life for social control while producing another one that would resist such appropriation. I hope that this paper contributes to this project without negating the differences between, for example, Derrida and Agamben, by sublating each into the unity of a single discourse. Instead, I hope [End...

Thresholds: Sovereignty and the Sacred

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 199 pages. $45.00 cloth; $16.95 paper. For the first time history, the possibilities of the social sciences are made known, and at once it becomes possible both to protect and to authorize a holocaust. -Michel Foucault qtd. Agamben (1998:3) Sacredness is a line of flight still present contemporary politics, a line that is such moving into zones increasingly vast and dark, to the point of ultimately coinciding with the biological itself of citizens. If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sac7i. -Giorgio Agamben (1998:114-15) Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is one of those books that comes along all too infrequently, unsettling conventional answers and inspiring new questions a range of academic disciplines. We understand that this is a large claim with which to begin, but it is our hope this essay to show the immense range and depth of Agamben's insights and the implications of these insights for anthropologists, historians, legal theorists, sociologists, and others. Indeed, if the rapid commission of translations of Agamben's works are any indication, our prediction of his increasing theoretical influence would seem already the process of being fulfilled.1 Our claims for this text are, fact, matched by Agamben's own ambitious-and apocalyptic-declarations. Homo Sacer began, we are told a cryptic aside, as a response to the bloody mystification of a new planetary order; but soon, in the urgency of catastrophe, Agamben felt the need to confront and revise without reserve a range of terms that are central and seemingly self-evident the social sciences (p. 12). Amongst the points of critique, the sacredness of human and the paradox of sovereign power are at the forefront. Between them, Agamben hopes to do nothing less than reveal the originary and true nature of the modern political realm. His argument, succinctly summarized the concluding chapter of the text, is organized around three main points: 1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion). 2. The activity of sovereign power is the production of originary political element and threshold of articulation between nature and culture, xoe and bios. 3. Today it is not the city but rather the [concentration] camp that is the biopolitical paradigm of the (p. 181) The precise meaning of these statements will become clearer the course of our exposition. For now we wish to stress that bare life should not be confused with natural life, is what, Agamben's view, is produced the originary (both original and originating) act of sovereignty.2 The production of this thus establishes a relation that defines the political realm and which Agamben calls, following Jean-Luc Nancy (1993), the relation of ban, or abandonment. Bare is produced and through this act of sovereignty the sense of being included the political realm precisely by virtue of being excluded. And it is this same life, once abandoned by the law at the outskirts of the polis, that has today, according to Agamben, fully entered the polls to the point of rendering outside and inside, and law, truly indistinguishable from one another. It is this way that the concentration camp, for Agamben, has become the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. Our primary purpose this essay is to trace the intellectual genealogies of each of the three claims outlined by Agamben his conclusion. Before we turn to this task, however, some initial remarks further clarifying these claims and their relation to one another will be helpful. …

Medicalización de la vida


 
 
 La medicalización de la vida tiene que ver con la creencia fundamental de que la medicina puede afectar, decisivamente, todos los acontecimientos de la vida humana. Esta creencia se sustenta en el supuesto de que la vida es básicamente una cuestión médica, en cuanto ha quedado reducida a su concepto biológico, y es la medicina, con su saber científico y poder técnico, la que la sostiene. En el texto se analizan las ideas que mantienen operativa esta creencia. Para ello, considera la resignificación, a la luz de la ciencia, de los conceptos de cuerpo, enfermedad y salud, convirtiéndolos en lo que Agamben denomina sagrados inmanentes, y el papel que cumplen la medicina basada en la evidencia, la prevención y el medicamento en esa resignificación. Finalmente, asocia la medicalización con la biopolítica con- siderando el uso que hace esta última de la medicina a la hora de establecer juicios morales y legales.