Agamben's Concept Research Articles

Opening a Virtual Space before the Door of the Law: The Transnational Togani Effect from Silenced to Angels Wear White

Through an examination of what the author calls the transnational Togani effect, which challenges legislative failures across both screens and borders, the author hopes to show how social justice films are deployed as a mode of critique that directly impacts the criminal justice system. The author's analysis of the transnational Togani effect therefore encompasses and connects the dimensions of virtuality and actuality in their interactive relation in the contemporary media environment. The author situates this interactive relationship between the virtual and the actual within a transnational framework because awareness of sexual assault is raised in cross-border contexts that are intertextual and interconnected. Drawing on the Deleuzian notion of the virtual and the actual and Giorgio Agamben's concept of inclusive exclusion, the author suggests that screen intervention is a virtual layer added to heterotopic space that serves as a possible resistance against the entrapment of human subjects by neoliberal governance, in which the law is “in force without significance.” As Deleuze shows, the virtual and the actual are fully real, and the relationship between them takes the form of a circuit. By exploring how the interlocking of virtuality and actuality comes to bear on the legal sphere, this article poses fundamental questions for cinema, or for audiovisual media in general, such as to what extent cinematic critique is capable of opening an alternative space for social justice.

Theorizing emotional geographies of later-life care: Agamben, Marx, and Massey in the home

This paper proposes two concepts, emotional alienation and spatialized emotion, to theorize the emotional geographies of later-life care. The concepts build on spatiality in Marx's alienation theory, Agamben's concept of bare life and Massey's politics of space. These new concepts are created and adopted in four steps: (1) a literature review on care, emotion, affect, eldercare, and Parkinson's disease patients' mental health in diverse disciplines; (2) theoretical analysis on the political economic status of ailing elderly and care workers; (3) spatial analysis interviews with a Parkinson's disease patient and caregiver as an application of the proposed theories; and (4) a discussion of the expanded theoretical frame centered on the micro-spatial scales of the interior spaces of home. Alienation theory and the concept of bare life have limitations in explaining daily lived experiences in micro-scaled places. Because lived experience, and its emotional dimensions, has a specific geography, this paper argues that a spatialized approach is needed to identify and effectively intervene in the problems of contemporary eldercare. This paper is part of a larger human geography study examining the daily emotions of people living with Parkinson's Disease and care workers in the home that aims to identify where interventions are needed to build a later-life care environment that offers sustainable and dignified later-life care.

A geography of repression: The first years of the fascist Special Tribunal in Italy, 1926–1928

This article analyzes the spatial and temporal patterning of political arrests during the initial years of the fascist regime in Italy, specifically from 1926 to 1928. During these crucial years, Italy's fascists acted rapidly to consolidate their power and to suppress their opponents. A key element of this takeover was the creation of a political court, the Special Tribunal. I examine the work of the Special Tribunal in two ways. First, I analyze the spatial patterning of political arrests on different scales, ranging from local to national. Second, using Agamben's concept of ‘states of exception’, I investigate how the fascists used political crises to further their activities of political suppression. I argue that while the Special Tribunal did target political enemies, it was also used as a sophisticated system of control of territory and population. Drawing on the techniques of the emerging field of historical geographic information systems (GIS), I use the Knox Index and hotspot analysis to focus on the role played by space and place in the fascist system of political oppression. This article contributes to a growing body of historical research focusing on the spatial dynamics of authoritarian regimes in interwar and wartime Europe and the geographies of their carceral practices.

The Potentiality of Paralysis in Joyce’s “Counterparts”

The scrivener presents a curious case—writing the law and bringing it into existence via the material reproduction of legal instruments. Our most famous literary example is Melville's Bartleby, forever immortalized by his listless refusal: "I'd prefer not to." Yet near on fifty years after Melville, Joyce conceived another scrivener, neglected by comparison: Farrington from the Dubliners story, "Counterparts." Though critics have noted how Farrington is shot through with the "hemiplegia or paralysis" Joyce claimed lay in the soul of Dublin, few have considered paralysis as a concept containing the opposite—a catatonic moment of potential, rendered aesthetic by Joyce's story. Drawing on Agamben's conception of potentiality, this paper takes Joyce's scrivener beyond the realist critique of the ennui of the imperial subject to explore how Farrington reveals a double potential: the potential of the paralyzed colonial subject; and the potential of thinking with contemporary critical theory to see paralysis not as an end, foreclosure, or stasis, but an aesthetic rendering of contingency.

Agamben’in İstisna Hali Olarak Pandemi Döneminde Dışsal Siyasal Etkililik: Sosyal Etki Teori Çerçevesinde Bir İnceleme

Bu çalışmada Agamben’in “İstisna Hali” kavramından yola çıkılarak pandemi döneminde alınan ve uygulamaya konan önleyici ve ihtiyati tedbirlerin Sosyal Etki Teorisi çerçevesinde üniversite öğrencilerinin Dışsal Siyasal Etkililik duygularında nasıl bir değişiklik yarattığı sorusunun cevabını bulmaya yönelik olarak hazırlanmıştır. Bu çerçevede bir üniversite öğrencileri üzerinde alan araştırması yapılmış ve elde edilen veriler SPSS 23 yazılımı yardımıyla uyum analizi kullanılmak suretiyle değerlendirilmiştir. Bu değerlendirmeler sonucunda siyasal iktidara ve dolayısıyla kazanan partilere yakın duran bireylerin dışsal siyasal etkililikleri yüksek iken muhalif siyasal partilere destek verenlerin düşük olduğu gözlemlenmiştir. Ancak açık uçlu olarak sorduğumuz sorulardan anlaşıldığı kadarıyla da öğrencilerin bu süreci genel olarak siyasetin dışında, olduğundan çok daha kapsamlı bir “istisna hali” olarak algıladıkları anlaşılmıştır.

On the Political Biology of Eating and Performing (with) Food

Performance research involving food frequently focuses the ‘political economy of food sovereignty' where political action involves providing visibility to power differentials in righting injustices and/or celebrating differences. Alimentary and gustatory processes of eating are often assumed as ‘naturally' given and rarely put under a critical biopolitical lens. This essay, which zigzags between three food performances and three interdisciplinary concepts, attempts to reconfigure normative conceptions of the biopolitical; by interrogating instead the politics of biology away from transcendental conditions and anthropogenic definitions that lead to a radical insufficiency of justice to cater for difference. Firstly, Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life in his biopolitics is argued to be itself ontologically political, through performances of eating that decentre the human in definitions of biological life. This reveals and complicates biology's implicit technicity as that which demarcates what is human life from what is not. Secondly, food performances conjure the ‘enteric imagination' that bring into focus the entanglements of instinctual and ethical life. These performances, with concrete coordinative connections between eating and hearing make porous the epistemological domains between individuality and communality, organic and inorganic, life and death, towards a richer idea of biopolitics as ‘lived-intuition.' Lastly, the essay outlines Gilles Deleuze's ‘becoming-minor’ as a creative and affirmative politics, arriving not as the result of majoritarian agreement nor counter-hegemonic movements, but rather the aggregation of a myriad of molecular, minor events where inventions and conjugations of specific, unforeseen and autonomous modes of becoming exist. Focusing on the politics of biology in this way provides alternatives to idealistic definitions of life whose exigencies can be seen not only in relation in their binary opposition to death, but moves towards a positive one, immanent to multiple modalities of being. The biopolitics of eating does not oppose but stays with the inarticulable but nevertheless real sensoria, providing a surface for experimentation that produces abstractions, concepts, disciplines, gestures and alimentary processes, towards a biopolitics of food that acknowledges that the biological is in itself already political.

‘Est-ce vivre?’ The Politics of Living in La Boétie and Montaigne

This article explores Étienne La Boétie's discussion of the unfree life, with and against Montaigne's accounts of life in the Essais. In De la servitude volontaire, La Boétie responds to writing on life in his source texts, such as Seneca's ‘On the Brevity of Life’: the life of servitude is almost antithetical to any ‘good life’, and indeed is scarcely life at all. Giorgio Agamben's concept of ‘bare life’ and Orlando Patterson's characterisation of slavery as ‘social death’ elucidate La Boétie's characterisations of the deprived life in servitude. Montaigne's differently weighted reflections on painful, reduced, or tyrannised lives at the end of Book II allow that lives that are ‘less than good’ (not least his own, while suffering ‘subjection’ to kidney stones) may nonetheless be worth living. These approaches are part of the broader interest in early modern political thought in minimal definitions of the good life, and/or negative accounts of life.

Resistance and Counter-Zones of Indistinction

Agamben's concept, zone of indistinction, defines politically constructed, ambiguous time-space settings that are built by the sovereign, declaring the state of emergency, transforming the subjects into homo sacer. In this sense, a zone of indistinction is the space reproducing dominance and hierarchy. However, Agamben's analysis developed around this concept skips the reality of resistance zones which can be constructed by micro agents suspending the quasi-objective time-and-space settings organized in everyday-life practices. From this point of critical view, the article proposes a new concept, counter-zones of indistinction, which follows Agamben's analytical agenda from the side of non-dominant power relations. Thus, the article explains counter-zones of indistinction while it also analyzes the differences among counter-public spaces, heterotopias to make clear the conceptual boundaries. Hence, the article aims to contribute to Agamben's well-known study on the zone of indistinction.

From the Editor

From the Editor Siyuan Liu After the ramlila special issue in Spring, we return to regular content with a full range of memorial essay, translation, articles, reports, emerging scholar essays, and performance and book reviews. We start with an essay by Boreth Ly and Suppya Hélène Nut in memory of the recently deceased Princess Norodom Buppha Devi (1943–2019) of Cambodia, celebrating her life and contribution to the preservation of Khmer court dance, especially its revival in the aftermath of destruction by the Khmer Rouge. By chance, there is a small cluster on the Chinese theatre, starting with Janne Risum's significant translation of the complete April 1935 minutes of the forum between Mei Lanfang and Soviet experts, at the end of Mei's Moscow tour, on Chinese theatre and its impact on Russian theatre, film, and dance. I highly recommend Risum's extensive and methodical introduction. She not only delineates and contextualizes the debate between Meyerhold and his supporters (including Eisenstein) on the one side and those with more official views on the other, but also Soviet censorship of the original transcript that resulted in various incomplete, even imagined versions in the following decades that have affected the narratives around this historic episode of intercultural exchange in the early twentieth century. We next move to two articles on a couple of prominent contemporary Chinese directors, Meng Jinghui as the standard-bearer of the avant-garde and Wang Chong as a representative of the "post-Meng" generation. In her perceptive reading, Hongjian Wang deems Meng a "cynical idealist," which complements the current "pop avant-garde" frame of Meng scholarship, while Yizhou Huang critically assesses Wang Chong's multimedia production Ibsen in One Take against his self-claimed "new wave theatre." The two other articles offer welcoming additions of less discussed areas to Asian theatre scholarship, namely popularizing [End Page v] efforts in modern Korean theatre singeuk (new drama) and the role of Armenians in establishing Western theatre in the Ottoman empire. In the former case, Jaesuk Kim utilizes contemporary publications to focus on the leading singeuk dramatist Yoo Chijin's effort to break the monopoly of realist spoken drama in the mid 1930s, with song and dance in the traditional The Story of Chunhyang and in Dorothy and DuBose Heyward's Porgy. In the latter case, Elif Baş examines both the contribution of non-Muslim minorities, especially the Armenians, who staged Western plays in Armenian and Ottoman Turkish, and the nationalist sensitivity of early Republican-era theatre critics in evaluating their contributions. Following the translation and articles are three reports on currents practices of butoh and traditional forms from Bali and India. In "We Are Not Solid Beings: Presence in Butoh, Buddhism, and Phenomenology," Sondra Fraleigh channels her decades of experience, as a butoh student, performer, and scholar, to invite readers to an eco-somatic approach to butoh that emanates from Zen Buddhism and phenomenology. I Nyoman Cerita reports on the 2018 U.S. tour of Bhumi: Mother Earth, a production by the Bali-based Sanggar Çudamani (Çudamani Studio) with a focus on present environmental issues. Finally, Deepsikha Chatterjee offers a detailed and technical examination of the making of masks and costumes in Ankiya Bhaona, a form of ritual masked performance from the Assam region of India. This year's three emerging scholar essays all focus on East Asia. Echoing Risum's discussion of Mei Lanfang's 1935 Soviet tour, Chao Guo examines Mei's earlier tours to Japan and the United States in 1919 and 1930 as reflections of the cultural anxiety by anti-traditional new culture intellectuals as well as traditional theatre artists and their intellectual allies. Sebastian Samur similarly echoes Fraleigh's focus on butoh, with a study of the choreographies of Muramatsu Takuya from Dairakudakan, the world's largest butoh troupe, although Samur relies on Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis as a theoretical framework. In the final emerging scholar essay, Y.J Hwang utilizes Giorgio Agamben's concept of Homo Sacer—that state violence erases individual victims' most basic information concerning their deaths—to analyze the performance of cultural memory of the April 3 Incident (1948) in the Jeju Peace Memorial Park of Korea's...

SWINGING OF THE BREATH: UNDECIDABILITY AND ZONES OF INDISTINCTION IN HERTA MÜLLER'S ATEMSCHAUKEL

AbstractIn this essay I use Giorgio Agamben's concept of ‘zones of indistinction’ in an investigation of how undecidability functions in the generation of meaning in Herta Müller's Atemschaukel. I argue that, by evoking a number of oppositional pairs, Atemschaukel demarcates an area as a zone of indistinction. Within this zone the thinking and experience of the first‐person narrator, and, by extension, of the reader, oscillate between different modes, and tension is produced and sustained. Through this zone some of the most significant meanings of the narrative regarding the nature of representation, historic truth, and the truth of a specific witness are conveyed. While undecidability on the level of genre and the representation of reality is arguably the most obvious form in Atemschaukel, it is not the main focus of my analysis. Rather, my purpose is to shed light on the interrelation of oppositional pairs and their effect of meaning‐production without subsuming the various forms of undecidability under the obvious one of genre, as a categorisation of the work as ‘autofiction’ would probably do. Thus I challenge the generic categorisation of complex works of undecidability such as Atemschaukel and argue that in order to recognise certain meanings of the work, the reader must accept the unresolved nature of its undecidabilities.

Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...

O Enlace entre Psicanálise, Educação, Cinema e a Experiência Adolescente

Resumo: Neste artigo, refletimos sobre alguns efeitos metodológicos para a pesquisa-intervenção com adolescentes que advêm do encontro entre Psicanálise, Educação e Cinema. Para isso, partimos da experiência que tivemos com o Cine na Escola, dispositivo através do qual ofertamos sessões de cinema em conjugação com a abertura de um espaço de circulação da palavra aos adolescentes de uma escola pública de nossa cidade situada em uma região com altos índices de violência e vulnerabilidade. Articulando a discussão ao conceito de profanação de Giorgio Agamben, propomos profanar o uso utilitário do cinema, evocando a dimensão do novo na passagem adolescente.

Critique, Use and World in Giorgio Agamben's Genealogy of Government

This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was also for Nietzsche. But what does this mean for critique? Does critique belong to the nihilistic tradition of the West; occupying the still-warm seat of God inasmuch as it finds the world wanting as if from the outside? Does this mean we are left only with affirmation—passively acceding to the world as we find it? Or is this alternative of world-rejection/world-affirmation a false one? Agamben's concept of use seeks a way out of it.

Assinaturas que emergem da Comédia dantesca

Giorgio Agamben, ao elaborar o livro Signatura Rerum (2008), afirma ser possível investigar o passado, para chegar ao paradigma, definido como um conhecimento analógico. Agamben disserta também sobre a assinatura, a linguagem do mundo, da qual se percebe o espírito interior das coisas em sua exterioridade, além de definir a arqueologia filosófica, momento em que os saberes e os discursos são constituídos. Na esteira de Michel Foucault, o filósofo italiano argumenta que a “arqueologia é a ciência das ruínas, prática, que indaga a história não pela origem, mas como a emergência do fenômeno”. (AGAMBEM, 2008, p. 121). Neste caso, da obra literária emergem fenômenos e indícios, a exemplo da Divina Comédia, de cujo poema surgem personagens da mitologia grega, filósofos e poetas, dentre os quais, o mantuano Virgílio, e outras personagens. Essas singularidades, identificadas na Comédia, são objeto para um possível entrecruzamento com o conceito de assinatura, de Agamben.

Baku formula 1 city circuit: exploring the temporary spaces of exception

Since 2016 Baku, Azerbaijan has become the newest addition to the Formula 1 Championship. Organized in the downtown Baku, the F1 European Grand Prix has brought transformations in physical and regulatory terms by imposing temporary rules and restrictions to host this motorsport event. The result was a disruption to the local population's daily practices in the areas directly impacted by the race, as access to such areas were only made available to F1-related visitors and staff, and beyond for weeks leading up to the event. Through on-site observations and in-depth interviews in Baku, this paper explores the role mega-events, such as the F1 race, play in transforming cities and examines it's temporary and longer-term legacies. Theoretically, these processes are analyzed through Giorgio Agamben's concept of the state of exception, which theorizes the abandonment of the rule of law and introduction of an exceptional legal regime in the name of public good. The paper argues that mega-events produce spaces of exception in its host cities by declaring temporary regulations that are tailored towards the needs of the events rights holders and their commercial partners, along with national elites, normalizing the exceptional procedures and compromising the daily activities of locals in the spaces appropriated for the event.

How Meat Changed Sex

The article explores the history and structure of American laws criminalizing sexual contact between humans and animals to demonstrate how the ecological conditions of late capitalism are remaking sexual taxonomies, practices, and identities. It notes that the majority of these statutes have been enacted within the past three decades and most contain language that explicitly exempts animal husbandry and veterinary medicine from prosecution. The article explores the legislative politics that produce these exemptions and exposes an underlying ambiguity: in the age of industrial reproduction, the “accepted practices” of animal husbandry can be distinguished from bestiality only through legal fiat. The structure of the laws exempts human sexual contact with animals when it reproduces biocapital and produces “perverse” bestialists and “normal” farmers as mirrored categories, distinguished not by their relations to animals but by their relations to capital. Finally, the article reads this insight against the biopolitical theorist Giorgio Agamben's concept of anthropogenesis and notes that such exemptions reveal a limitation in his theory. In place of the timeless ritualism of Agamben's “anthropological machine,” the article argues for an account of speciation that recognizes strategic gradations of pain and pleasure, the critical role of sexual violence and reproduction, and processes of trans-speciative procreation.

“Translating” Mein Kampf: Arnon Grunberg's Profanations

In this article, I borrow Giorgio Agamben's conception of profanation to analyze Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg's novel The Jewish Messiah (2004), whose grotesque plot includes a translation project of Mein Kampf into Yiddish. I read The Jewish Messiah as a profanation that seeks to counteract sacralizations of Adolf Hitler's book as the “Bible of Evil” in Western European secular societies such as the Netherlands and Germany, where the distribution and translation of Mein Kampf has been legally proscribed. But I also read Grunberg's novel as a profanation that seeks to undermine sacralizations of literature that place literature in a special zone governed by a supposed (Western, secular, liberal) social contract not to take offense. Steering away both from the secularist maxim that what can be offended must be offended and from the mandate to avoid giving offense in the name of liberal tolerance, Grunberg's work, I argue, provokes its readers to reflect on the question by what exactly we should feel offended.

Book Review: The Use of Bodies

The Use of Bodies. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. xxii + 291 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).With English publication of The Use of Bodies, we now have final volume of Giorgio Agamben s remarkable series of investigations into ontological foundations of Western politics. Beginning with eponymous volume in 1995, nine entries of Homo Sacer series attempt an elucidation of deepest philosophical and theological foundations of contemporary Western politics. As Agamben specifies his project, he is after the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had remained at same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in (p. 263).In book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben famously claimed that Western politics is based on aporiatic exception, where natural life (zoe) was distinguished from a political life (bios). We see this distinction most acutely in Roman legal figure of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is paradoxical because it is a life that can be killed (because it has been stripped of its political meaning), yet not sacrificed (also because it has been stripped of its political meaning). Precisely because of its (former) life in political order, figure of homo sacer has been stripped of its political being and exists merely as bare life (zoe). It is included in political order only, paradoxically, by exclusion.Through an intricate analysis of both ontological and theological themes, Agamben claims this divlsio is fundamentally constitutive of Western political order. Politics, then, is founded on a specific definition and attendant understanding of life. In so doing, West produces a politics that brings natural life, or very fact of living, into question. Moving beyond Foucault and Arendt, Agamben controversially names concentration camp as bio-political paradigm of Western modernity, place where sovereignty can both produce and have absolute power over bare life. The paradigma of camp is representative instance of bio-political control that sovereign power wants to achieve; not then as an aberration of modern West, but rather its truest expression.In The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to series' origin and takes up again topic of life, giving us perhaps most complete genealogy of philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of form-of-life, long awaited in his work. …

New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. New Drama: Tire Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Pp. x, 354. US$94.95. In New Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon reframes the study of theatre in Atlantic rather than national terms. New Drama aims to remedy the gap in the study of eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre by highlighting the emergence of early American theatre as an independent cultural form. Throughout, Dillon calls for a broader consideration of representation as she examines how the theatre serves as a space for reinforcing and contesting social belonging. In each chapter, Dillon draws on archival evidence to illustrate that Atlantic world theatres functioned as representational and inherently political spaces. New Drama begins by positioning the 1649 beheading of King Charles I and the 1849 Astor Place Riot as turning points in theatrical performance in the Atlantic world. Dillon introduces the commons as a collective that often challenged political, economic, and religious boundaries. She argues that this new performative commons emerged in the eighteenth and functioned as a means of individual and collective representation. Central to Dillon's analysis is the concept of the colonial relation, which she defines as the between the colony and the metropole in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century (31). She explores this connection in works such as The West Indian and Oroonoko. Expanding upon Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, or bare life, Dillion contends that slaves exist as figures of 'bare labor'--labor stripped of the resources of social life and the capacity for social reproduction (35). As Dillon suggests, the colonial relation was rendered visible through displays of belonging and non-belonging that reflected the racialized division inherent in colonial appropriation. Chapter Two returns to King Charles I's execution as a moment of emerging popular sovereignty. Dillon views the theatre as a mobilizing force and asserts that the staging of tortured bodies in Tears of the Indians enabled the English public to witness the genocidal acts of the Spanish. She suggests that the performance of Spanish cruelty generate[d] the identity of the Englishman as rightful occupant of the New World (81). By establishing the staging of tortured bodies as symbols of sovereign power, Dillon calls attention to the links between theatre, nationalism, and empire. The third chapter continues the text's discussion of tortured native bodies in works such as The Tempest and The Enchanted Island. Dillon distinguishes between the seventeenth-century figure of the tortured Indian and the eighteenth-century image of the royal slave. I found this chapter illuminating, in part because it touches on the disruptive function of women's bodies. Since Dillon's text surveys eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre, the subject of women performing as men is outside the book's scope. Nevertheless, the reference to cross-gendered casting is a compelling addition to a chapter that addresses the erasure of indigenous bodies. Dillon's fourth chapter investigates how slave bodies in Charleston were required to be both present (in terms of labor) and absent (in terms of political agency). …

Human Rights, Colonial Criminality, and the Death of Kwementyaye Briscoe in Custody: A Central Australian Case Study

The intersection of colonialism, legal systems, and human rights is revealed in the Alice Springs Watch House, a place for the temporary custody of, usually intoxicated, Aboriginal men. “Kwementyaye Briscoe” became the fourth death in custody since 1999; and this article draws on his coronial inquest. The post‐mortem humanity of the coroner is contrasted with the uncaring disregard of the police for Briscoe while he lived. These contradictory postures reveal the contingency of Aboriginal people's human rights in the neoliberal colonial state. Critical criminology has revealed that the Australian legal system has been complicit in establishing and reproducing the Aboriginal “criminal”. Relative to colonial relations of power, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the associated machinery of international law are relatively recent phenomena. This articles questions: What can a consideration of the discourse of human rights bring to an understanding of the treatment of an Aboriginal man in custody, and is this discourse complicit? Also, would sanctioning human rights in national law, via, for example, a bill of rights, legitimize human rights while simultaneously revealing their tacit assumptions? Agamben's concept of “bare life” sheds light on the paradoxes of human rights, as they are intensified in this custodial context.