Constitutive Exclusion Research Articles

Queer theory, sex work and the European Union: on the constitutive exclusion of sex work from the European Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual policies

Queer theory, sex work and the European Union: on the constitutive exclusion of sex work from the European Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersexual policies

To do justice to Foucault: Foucault and Derrida in couples therapy with Freud

This paper elaborates key factors in Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida’s long polemical argument over the question of madness. The paper focuses on Foucault’s consideration of a constitutive exclusion underlying the discourse of reason and unreason, as well as his insistence on that exclusion’s singular relationship with madness. This exclusion is then developed in psychoanalytic terms augmenting the constitutive gesture that Sigmund Freud attributed to the plurality of subjective structures elaborated in his metapsychology. The psychoanalytic determination of constitutive exclusion is posed as being situated at a privileged position that enables it to consolidate the polemic debate between Foucault and Derrida about madness. By doing so, the intersection of Foucault's theory of madness with Freud’s psychoanalysis is shown to be fruitful territory, epitomizing a hospitality to madness—thus, doing justice to Foucault in light of Derrida’s critique.

Problematizando as alteridades para uma compreensão feminista e decolonial da Saúde Única em Periferias

Abstract In this work, we reflect on how different figures of alterity are targets of marginalization and what this implies in terms of recognition in political grammars that establish who can become a subject of health. Based on feminist and decolonial contributions, we discuss some ontological assumptions about the relationship between humans, non-humans, and nature to broaden the understanding of the One Health of Peripheries. We also incorporate some narratives of adolescents who live in the Jardim São Remo favela (São Paulo, SP) and act as One Health of Peripheries Young Agents. In dialogue with them, we explore the process of constitutive exclusion of favelas, based on rhetorics that do not recognize the plurality of collective configurations and reinforce the figure of favelas as a threat to public security. In contrast to this project, we bring the principles of reforestation and confluence of significant alterities to reinforce the multispecies justice promoted by the praxis of One Health of Peripheries.

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

Along the Wayside, Fall 2022

The constitution of political contention: The case of protests and riots at the turn of the 19th century

How is political contention constituted as an intelligible political practice, distinct from mere social disorders? This article gets at the question by analysing the relation between protests and riots at the turn of the 19th century in England. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s discussion of visibilities and post-foundational political theory, it contrasts the 1760s Wilkes and Liberty agitations with that of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s. It articulates two ways of configuring the relation and constituting political contention in the self-governing practices of contentious actors. In the first case, political contention is an exercise of public spirit that may include riots and is opposed to passivity or factional interest. In the second, it is a process of public inquiry premised on a constitutive exclusion of riots. The comparison reveals how the emergence of protest politics also resulted in a new way of delineating and constituting political contention. In this way, it offers a new perspective on the contemporary constitution of political contention.

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

The Need for a Black Feminist Climate Justice

The Performative Power of Queer Assembly

This paper addresses some relations between the spatial politics of queer assemblies in spaces of protest and the constitution of collective political subjects. It does so by exploring the spatial politics of queer activism within the global Occupy movements, in the light of Judith Butler’s work on the performative power of assembly and the ambivalences of the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia. Specific challenges faced by queer activists in various encampments will be addressed in order to expose some tensions between the constitutive exclusions inherent to the constitution of spaces of protest and the processes of coalition building needed to effectively overcome those very constitutive exclusions.

Colonizing cuts of labyrinth mythology, a tangling parable of white sensibilities

This article demonstrates the way wounds, and affects generally, are figured by the writing of history. It traces patterns of thinking about the labyrinth primarily in histories, theories, and myths of the past 150 years to demonstrate how the labyrinth has been cut by colonization. From the Mycenaean colonization of Indigenous Cretans (inaccurately named “Minoans”) to the emergence of white feminism and its present day practice, figures of the labyrinth iteratively cut history to perpetuate the un/common loss of colonized communities and to enact white racist sensibilities of exclusion. Entangling Karen Barad’s cutting together-apart and Kent Ono’s colonial amnesia, colonizing cuts are constitutive exclusions that wound and exclude colonized communities from history and world making.

Unity

Previous articleNext article FreeEditors’ NoteUnityRoger Karapin and Leonard FeldmanRoger KarapinEditor-in-Chief Search for more articles by this author and Leonard FeldmanAssociate Editor for Political Theory Search for more articles by this author Editor-in-ChiefAssociate Editor for Political TheoryPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreUnity as a political ideal is related to the strength of the group in confronting outsiders, whether in domestic conflicts involving political parties, interest groups, or social movements, or in international conflicts involving states and nations. Unity may also be valued intrinsically as an expression of the essence of a human group defined by similar characteristics that lead it to naturally act as one. Indeed, it is difficult to even think the concept of community without recourse to an account of some substance that unites its members.Unity could be achieved through bargaining and compromise, but also through domination and imposition. Because the collective essence or common identity that is frequently the basis of unity is created, not discovered, its generalization may require violent exclusion, the marginalization of dissent, and the assimilation of difference. Furthermore, what constitutes the unity of a collectivity may turn out to be a negation, a constitutive exclusion of an other against which the community is defined. Hence the ideal of unity, especially when applied to an entire polity, is deeply at odds with liberal democracy. It can readily be used to repress or exclude those who do not agree with current leaders or who lack supposedly essential characteristics used to define the nation. Unity can be used as a pretext for untrammeled rule by one person or one party, claiming to solely represent the popular will while ignoring or eliminating constitutional constraints and pluralistic institutions. Still, effective collective action without any unity is difficult to imagine, since political movements and parties require at least provisional stabilization around a common sign or demand.John Grant, in “Justifying Constituent Power in an Age of Populism,” examines the ontological assumptions of theories of constituent power and populism. He finds that the former is a better basis for contentious politics in a democracy, while what the latter offers—“pure unity, the defeat of the enemy, a glorious future—is ontologically suspect and politically impossible.”1 Hobbes’s political order, according to Sarita Zaffini in “Real Unity and Representation in Hobbes, Schmitt, and Barth,” requires something more than rational agreement. That something more is “real unity,” which, Zaffini argues in drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt and the theologian Carl Barth, happens through a transformative theological event—the political equivalent of the representation relationship between Jesus Christ and his church members.2 Janosch Prinz, in “Realism in Political Theory, Ethnographic Sensibility, and the Moral Agency of Bureaucrats,” argues that an ethnographic orientation can be helpful to the realist project of providing grounded, contextually sensitive political analysis and critique. Examining Bernardo Zacka’s account of the moral dispositions of street-level bureaucrats in When the State Meets the Street, Prinz shows how the turn to ethnography can also correct the tendency in realist political theory to separate morality and politics.3In “The Effective Altruist’s Political Problem,” Theodore M. Lechterman criticizes both the idea of effective altruism defined in cost-benefit terms and recent proposals to promote and measure the effects of advocacy; both focus on what is measurable, neglect the importance of institutional change, and risk perpetuating political inequality.4 Finally, in “A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration,” Yongwoo Jeung analyzes a failed attempt to create consensus between labor and management in dealing with problems of international competitiveness and automation, a failure that helped lead to the adversarial era of industrial pluralism and reactionary Keynesianism.5 Notes 1. John Grant, “Frames of Contention: Justifying Constituent Power in an Age of Populism,” Polity 52 (2020): 3–34, at 33.2. Sarita Zaffini, “Real Unity and Representation in Hobbes, Schmitt, and Barth,” Polity 52 (2020): 35–63.3. Janosch Prinz, “Realism in Political Theory, Ethnographic Sensibility, and the Moral Agency of Bureaucrats,” Polity 52 (2020): 64–87.4. Theodore M. Lechterman, “The Effective Altruist’s Political Problem,” Polity 52 (2020): 88–115.5. Yongwoo Jeung, “A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration,” Polity 52 (2020): 116–55. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Volume 52, Number 1January 2020Unity The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/707027HistoryPublished online November 18, 2019 © 2019 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Indigenous modernism: dehabituating reading practices

This paper experiments with formal style as a way of working through the literary discipline’s lacunae regarding aesthetic value, race, and coloniality. Using a “counter taxonomy” as an example of academic dissent, this paper considers the limits of this form of dissenting speech within “public discourse” (Fraser; Habermas) by demonstrating a persistent occlusion in the literary discipline related to this mode of speech, which concerns the “primitive” subject. I define a term to unsettle a series of categorical terms long-held as guiding frameworks in our discipline: modernism, Native and Harlem renaissances, etc. This term is “Indigenous modernism,” a category that is a contradiction in terms because it announces its inclusion of the original term’s constitutive exclusion, ie. the primitive within the modern, through the language producing its erasure. Through this experiment, I argue for the necessity of a different kind of dissent, specifically a more capacious form of literary critique that interrogates the problems of holding a discourse in common and the specific needs of anti-colonial work. As a pedagogical exercise that models the benefits of failure, I suggest that this intervention requires us to think about how we represent truth through critique.

The other within: Agency and resistance under conditions of exclusion

This essay puts in conversation some of Seyla Benhabib’s insights about exiled, stateless and migrant populations with ongoing discussions in critical race theory about the racial exclusions of indigenous populations and populations of colour not only in the foundations of Western modern states but also in their contemporary functioning today. The essay locates these exclusions not only in the failures of states but also in their proper functioning, that is, in their very design and constitutive structures, focusing for this purpose on what is described as constitutive exclusions. The essay argues that the relationship between legal agency and social and political agency needs further articulation within Benhabib’s jurisgenerative politics in order to properly address constitutive exclusions.

Tracing the radical, the migrant, and the secular in the history of Australian schooling

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to introduce a broad theoretical orientation for the themed section of History of Education Review, “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Through the conceptual frame of “contrapuntal historiography”, it commends the practice of re-looking at taken-for-granted concepts and re-readings of the cultural archive of Australian schooling, with especial attention to silences, discontinuities and the movements of concepts. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on Edward Said’s approach of “contrapuntal reading”, this paper refers to the recent work of Bruce Pascoe as an exemplar of this practice in the field of Australian history. It then relates this approach to the study of the history of Australian schooling as demonstrated in the three papers that make up the themed section “Unstable concepts in the history of Australian schooling: radicalism, religion, migration”. Findings Following in the style of Said’s contrapuntal reading and the example of Pascoe’s work, this paper argues that there are inerasable traces of historical politics – that is, the records of constitutive exclusions and silences – which “haunt” taken-for-granted concepts like the migrant, the secular and the radical in the history of Australian schooling. Originality/value Taken alongside the three papers in the themed section, this paper urges the proliferation of different theoretical and disciplinary approaches in order to think anew about silences, discontinuities and movements of concepts as a counterpoint to dominant narrative lines in the history of Australian education.

Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors by Sina Kramer

Reviewed by: Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors by Sina Kramer Rick Elmore (bio) Sina Kramer, Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 256 pp. isbn: 978-0-1906-2598-6 Excluded Within is an inspired work of political philosophy that tackles the question of political agency and political exclusion. At the heart of Kramer's book is a desire to understand how certain agents fail to appear as politically intelligible, their actions variously seen as bewildering, wild, or simply apolitical. Antigone, Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin, and the 1992 Los Angeles riots/rebellion are, for Kramer, exemplars of this kind of ambiguous political agency, figures simultaneously included in and excluded from the space of politics. This status of being politically "excluded within" is illustrated in the debate over the very naming of the 1992 Los Angeles riots/rebellion as "riots," implying wild, unorganized, and destructive behaviors with no articulated political platform, while "rebellion" suggests organized, if still destructive, political action. What interests Kramer about these forms of political agency is the way in which they "paradoxically both ground … and troubl[e] the distinctions that structure political bodies and the terms of political agency," the exclusion of the lawless destruction of property implied in the notion of riots, for example, making possible the stability of the regimes of law and property ownership (Kramer 2017, 5). Hence, Excluded Within is an account of "constitutive exclusion," an analysis of the ways in which a logic of exclusion grounds the existence of political bodies and political agency particularly under existing regimes of [End Page 151] white supremacy, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ableism. However, more than just a critical diagnosis, Kramer's book is a powerful and compelling work of political, and I am tempted to say revolutionary, hope; Excluded Within is guided by the belief that this world, with all of its violence and injustice, can and ought to be otherwise, and that critical, philosophical analysis has a role to play in transforming us and the world. Hence, Excluded Within will be of interest to anyone working on questions of political subjectivity and liberation. It is Kramer's emphasis on the possibility of overcoming constitutive exclusion and the unintelligibility of marginalized political agents that marks, for me, the essential advance of her work over the array of thinkers who take exclusion to be fundamental to politics. Although Kramer deploys the concept of "constitutive exclusion" in a distinctly original way, her analysis draws on a long tradition in deconstruction, intersectional feminist theory, queer theory, and critical race theory of understanding exclusion as constitutive of politics. For example, in the deconstructively inspired political theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, exclusion is characterized as an essential, ontological feature of all political systems, the marking of a "constitutive outside" required in order for there to be a political "inside" (Kramer 2017, 7–8). Similarly, feminist theory has long argued that the exclusion of women from politics is more than just a contingent failure of liberal democracies to live up to their own ideals, the very norms and activities of these institutions themselves gendered in ways that position the categories of politics and political agency as always already masculine (9). Expanding on these insights, and following the work of Judith Butler and French feminist philosophy, some theorists argue that the exclusion of the feminine (as well as other marginalized identities and positions) is built into the very "dialectic between universal and particular, and between inclusion and exclusion" (10). On these readings, the exclusion, occlusion, or forgetting of otherness would be a constitutive problem not only of politics but of thought itself, exclusion built into the epistemological and ontological structures of Western conceptuality. This notion, that marginalized identities might be structurally and, therefore, necessarily excluded from the sphere of politics, has led some theorists, particularly in queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies, to argue that exclusion marks a common lack around which political solidarity and entirely new political conjuctures might be built (10–11). Yet while extensive, Kramer rightly identifies that this large body of work leaves a number of key issues concerning exclusion unsettled, most...

From Locke to Slots: Money and the Politics of Indigeneity

AbstractWith ongoing consequences for American Indians, the New World Indian has been a pervasive figure of constitutive exclusion in modern theories of money, property, and government. This paradoxical exclusion of indigenous peoples from the money/property/government complex is intrinsic to, and constitutive of, modern theories of money. What is more, it haunts the cultural politics of indigenous peoples’ economic actions. In Part I, I establish that, and how, indigeneity has been constitutively present at the foundation of modern theories of money, as Europeans and settlers defined indigenous peoples in part by the absence of money and property (of which money is a special form). In turn, and more to the point here, they defined money and property in part as that which modern non-indigenous people have and use. These are not solely economic matters: the conceptual exclusions from money/property were coproduced with juridical ones insofar as liberal political theory grounded the authority of modern government in private property (and, in turn, in money). To show how this formation of money and indigeneity has mattered both for disciplinary anthropology and for American public culture at several historical moments, Part II traces how the dilemmas expressed by these texts haunt subsequent debates about the function of wampum, the logic of potlatch, and the impact of tribal gaming. Such debates inform scholarship beyond the boundaries of anthropology and, as each case shows in brief, they create harms and benefits for peoples in ways that perpetuate the (il)logics and everyday practices of settler colonialism.

Decolonizing Civil War

This essay argues that there is a need to decolonize the genealogy of civil war. David Armitage’s new book brilliantly reveals civil war’s generative power in shaping European and North American conceptions of politics, revolution, and the laws of war. But to make sense of the discourse of civil war we also need to account for the constitutive exclusions of those whose struggles elite Europeans refused to recognize as “civil,” those not recognized as part of a common brotherhood or as co-belligerents. The absence/ presence of women, slaves, and barbarous armies is vital to the historical conception of civil war.

Identities and Freedom

I want to begin by thanking Margaret McLaren and Johanna Meehan for their very thoughtful and generous responses to my book, Identities and Freedom. These papers were originally presented at our book panel at the SPEP conference in October 2015, where we engaged in some very spirited and challenging discussion. I am grateful to all of the participants in that session for their questions and contributions, to Amy Allen for facilitating, and to Peg Birmingham for asking us to contribute the panel papers to Philosophy Today. In my response, I will clarify some of the arguments in the book, addressing Johanna's and Margaret's criticisms as I go along.This book is an argument for the importance of identities-of particular kinds of identities-as sources of freedom, in a context where arguments for identities are unpopular. I'm addressing a long tradition in Western liberal thought that is carried through poststructuralism, and through contemporary feminist and queer theories: a profound ambivalence about identities, both individual and collective. Identities are understood to be both sources and ends of freedom, and identities are the shackles that imprison us. Identity politics are seen as misguided affirmations of the very identities that colonize us, not a politics of freedom but a politics of balkanization and closure based on constitutive exclusions and a policing of borders.I attempt to unravel the knot of identity to develop a more complex and relational understanding of identities in relation to freedom. I understand identities as effects of multiple contesting relations-of power, but not only of power. Contesting relations of power and resistance, I argue, interact with contesting relations of love, mutuality, and solidarity, to produce identities in diverse locations that change through time.I'm making a conceptual argument about what identities are. And I'm making an ethical-political argument about how we can engage with and through our complex identities in practices of freedom and resistance. I argue for a conception of identities not as sameness, but as relational, and I argue for an understanding of freedom as a relational practice.So, in response to Johanna, I'm not saying that we can escape the monolithic ascription of identity. I argue that we are not wholly determined by monolithic ascriptions of identity, because identities are not monolithic; they are multiply and complexly constituted. This is a conceptual argument about what identities are, and how they are constituted. I guess you could say that it's a metaphysics. But my point is that we are constituted by politics and history and agency, not just by abstract laws or norms.I'm also making an ethical-political argument about how we negotiate conflicts among our identities, and identity-narratives. I don't think I ever use the term choose but I do talk about interpretations. And I don't think we ever get definitive answers to the questions who am I? and who are we? we get are interpretations, and these vary according to contexts and change over time. I don't think the conflicts among identities and identity-narratives force us to choose, but I do, as Johanna notes, think that these conflicts open a space for negotiating our identities, and that is a space of freedom. I argue that this space is created not just through the existence of conflicting concepts of identity, but through contesting relations: we negotiate our identities through identifications and disidentifications with multiple given and potential defining communities.With this focus on complexity, I criticize binary conceptions of identity as paradox: as the paradox of subjection. In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler writes: As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. And that is because What 'one' is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent on . . . a power external to oneself. Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency. …

Global production networks and uneven development: Exploring geographies of devaluation, disinvestment, and exclusion

AbstractThis paper examines global production networks through the lens of uneven development. Although originally concerned with asymmetries in the global economy, in the 1990s, global production network studies shifted decidedly towards a focus upon realizing the mutual benefits of engagement between multinationals, their suppliers, and the regions where the latter were located. Recent trends in supply chain restructuring, thrown into sharp relief by the 2008 financial crisis, have spurred more attention to the downsides of participation in global production networks, framed as empirical outcomes. Here, I explore this literature through the lens of three inter‐related processes of uneven development: strategies to defer devaluation, regional disinvestment, and constitutive exclusion. Viewed from this perspective, the global production network can serve as a powerful heuristic device to grasp emerging forms of territorial and social unevenness in the global economy.

Nullifying Settler Democracy: William Apess and the Paradox of Settler Sovereignty

This essay examines the concept of “Indian nullification” in the political writings of William Apess by situating his defense of native self-determination in the context of debates about the legitimacy of nullification in U.S. constitutionalism. It illustrates how Indian nullification operates, not as a feature of constitutional design asserting minority rights over the tyranny of the majority, but rather as a rhetorical form of political contestation exposing the constitutive exclusions of American settler democracy. Apess illuminates how constitutional ideals of popular sovereignty cohere around regimes of settler colonialism and indigenous dispossession, highlighting the paradox of settler sovereignty that provides the basis for American democracy. Indian nullification is not a simple demand that the boundaries of liberal citizenship be expanded to include Indians. It is a way of narrating and rhetorically representing the forms of settler conquest that establish the material and conceptual foundation of popular self-rule for white settlers.

Affect and Cruelty in the Atlantic System: The Hauntological Argument of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod

Affect and Cruelty in the Atlantic System:The Hauntological Argument of Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod Katie Simon (bio) Most readers of Thoreau’s Cape Cod (1865) have noted the narrator’s peculiar affect as he describes the sea’s violence and the mangled humans it spits out so dispassionately. While some have read this text divergently as a happy, sunny book or as a macabre prose poem bordering on the surreal, most readers can’t help but notice the narrator’s own pronounced lack of affect.1 Speaking in more environmental terms, one early reviewer mentions the severe “bareness” of Thoreau’s prose, seeing this bareness as astoundingly desiccating—“like the air of California, where things the most loathsome may lie around us without making the air impure.”2 Perhaps this striking atmospheric dryness and tonal neutrality, even about “loathsome” topics, provides the reason why early commenters also predicted the importance this “peculiar” text would have for a newly forming American literature.3 Perhaps this detached text about emotionally charged, disgusting topics is a bit too peculiar for most critics; indeed, it remains among Thoreau’s most neglected texts.4 To understand this dearth of critical attention, one might consider, as Lawrence Buell does, the obvious challenge Cape Cod poses to readers who perceive Thoreau as a heroic environmentalist. A narrative portraying nature [End Page 245] as constantly wielding death and boasting an extremely stoic narrator who describes this violent scene necessarily tests a redemptive view of nature.5 If the posthumously published, loosely organized Cape Cod fails to deliver, or perhaps even thwarts, a more traditional environmental preservationist message, this failure may also enable a different message now, during a moment of global economic and environmental crisis. My essay identifies in Cape Cod a radical critique of broader economic systems underlying relations between nature and the human, an analysis more far-reaching than Walden offers. Far from proffering the human as a nature preserver, this text reveals a dark vision of how modernity remakes the human. Its ethical commitment depends on understanding the human, like the Cape the narrator witnesses, as a site of making and unmaking. Through his own mimetic performance of detachment, the narrator models the detachment of capitalist systems, thus disturbing our notion of a heroic pastoral retreat. Thoreau produces a text with an undertow, a haunting, doubled text that aims to disturb readers by eliciting in them the emotions his narrator seems to eschew. I call this assemblage of affect and aesthetic, ethics and politics, the hauntological sublime. Several strains of Thoreau scholarship help inform my account of the ethical intervention this text makes. One critical view sees Thoreau’s detachment as a choice grounded in aesthetics, as a mode of protorealism that promotes divestment in order to appreciate the more stringent demands that “the murderous sublime” occasions.6 In this vein others have connected Thoreau’s work in Cape Cod with nineteenth-century painters such as the Luminists and the Hudson River School artists.7 These views, however, frequently offer a depoliticized Thoreau who not only seems uninterested in contemporaneous core issues, but who in some readings appears extremely misanthropic.8 More recently, critics have viewed the author as deeply engaged with historical, ethical, and political issues, with [End Page 246] James Patrick Brown arguing most convincingly about how Cape Cod connects aesthetics, ethics, and social justice. Brown’s formulation of “the ethical sublime,” however, pits affect against realism, valorizing the detached observer position as better equipped for social justice because better able to eschew sentiment.9 Combining and modifying these various critical positions enables us to consider not only the book’s constitutive exclusion of affect, but the crucial role that affect must play in the critical project of reassessing Thoreau’s politics. This essay will thus elucidate the way that performance, persona, and affective encounters between narrator and reader structure the text’s ethico-political critique. Framing this critical discussion within wider interdisciplinary theoretical currents is crucial for illuminating the affective, aesthetic, ethical, and political assemblage I am terming the hauntological sublime. Theorists of the black Atlantic have shown how sublime aesthetics are deeply implicated with racial terror, and how...

Nano Dreams and Nanoworlds: Fantastic Voyage as a Fantastic Origin Story

Fantastic Voyage , a 1966 Hollywood science fiction film based on a screenplay written by Harry Kleiner, is often associated with contemporary nanotechnology imaginings. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research conducted within a new nanoengineering department and undergraduate major to show how this film is deployed to produce a particular disciplinary and professional identity for nanoengineering. By juxtaposing my analysis of how the film is framed in the department with a close reading of the film itself, I show how both inclusions and exclusions constitute the “nano dream,” a boundary-drawing practice that constructs the nanoengineer as an intrinsically ethical identity. I further assess how the constitutive exclusions of a cultural object taken up within an epistemic community can potentially serve as the starting points for intervention—in this case, a critical pedagogy that posits a “critical nanoengineering” practice.