Logic Of Exclusion Research Articles

DDP Controversy and the Dilemma of H-Sang Seung′s ″Landscript″

Zaha Hadid′s design of the DDP (2007-13) in Seoul has been criticized for its seeming disinterest in the site′s sense of place. The most consistent critic against the design is H-Sang Seung (b. 1952), one of the participants in the 2007 competition for the project. For Seung, careful consideration of ″the record and story of our lives…written on the land,″ which was to be theorized under the name ″landscript″ (2009), should have been the starting point of the present DDP. Though very cogent, however, his opinion cannot but encounter a dilemma in the fact that the futuristic DDP will also be established as one layer of the ″landscript″ on the site. In addition, his ″landscript″ theory, partly supported by Heidegger′s concept of place, could be criticized based on criticism of Heidegger. For example, Neil Leach (1998)—after Jean-François Lyotard (1987)—sensed ″a potential violence″ and ″the logic of exclusion″ in the Heideggerian place. In the contemporary context of ″the heterogeneous, open cosmopolis,″ Leach argues, we should pursue ″cosmopolitan architectures″ transcending ″the rigid constraints of the genius loci.″ On the basis of Leach′s argument, this paper aims for a critical re-reading of Seung′s ″landscript,″ revealing his dilemma in the DDP controversy.

Placing Angola: Racialisation, Anthropocentrism, and Settler Colonialism at the Louisiana State Penitentiary's Angola Rodeo

AbstractThe Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) is a site embedded with historical legacies of plantation slavery and settler colonialism; as the largest maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the prison also reflects the racial injustice of contemporary US mass incarceration. Situated on the site of an old plantation, the prison hosts the Angola Rodeo twice a year, an event that crystallises violent multispecies social relations in the merging of the US West and South as two distinct kinds of colonial projects. Whereas much scholarship and activism has worked against the wholesale dehumanisation inherent in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and mass incarceration, this paper works to interrogate and disrupt the human–animal binary through which processes of dehumanisation are sustained. Drawing together postcolonial studies and animal studies, the paper centres empirical research on the Angola Rodeo to highlight how racialisation and anthropocentrism are intertwined logics of subordination and exclusion that carry forward into the present. Ultimately, the paper suggests the need for a mode of analysis and action that does not maintain the subordination of the animal, and instead, takes a de‐anthropocentric and decolonial approach to injustice.

Anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the Crisis of the European Intergration

이 논문에서는 특히 독일을 예로 들어 유럽에서 기승을 부리는 반이민주의의 성격을 살펴보고 국가적 차원에서 이주민에 대한 혐오가 유럽적 차원으로 확대된 배경과 새롭게 나타난 ‘유럽적 인종주의’의 구조적 토대들을 살펴보고자 한다. 이주민은 유럽역사에서 오랫동안 이방인으로 여겨져왔다. 근대 국가의 형성과 더불어 이주민은 국민의 ‘타자’로 배제되었고 최근에 유럽 연합에서 나타나는 이주민에 대한 반감은 문화적으로 ‘진짜 유럽인’과 비유럽인을 구분하는 기제로 작동하고 있다. 문제는 이 유럽적 차원에서 나타나는 반이민주의가 아이러니하게도 유럽공동체가 유럽연합을 확대하는 과정에서 심화되었다는 것이다. 이를 위해 유럽연합의 확대와 더불어 마련된 ‘코펜하겐 기준’과 ‘유럽시민권’ 제도의 문제점이 검토될 것이다. 마지막으로 배제의 논리가 아니라 ‘이질성을 포용’하고 유럽의 거주민으로서 이주민들을 포함시킬 수 있는 대안적인 유럽적 정체성에 대한 예시를 소개하고자 한다.This paper examines the characteristics of anti-immigrants, especially in Germany, which is emerging particularly severely in Europe, and the background why the hostility to the immigrants has expanded to the anti-immigration throughout Europe. Ultimately, I would like to identify institutional foundations of the newly emerging European racism . Immigrants have been for a long time regarded as strangers in European history. With the formation of the modern Nation-state, migrants were excluded as ‘others’ of the people, and the recent antipathy towards immigrants in the European Union is functioning as a mechanism to distinguish between “real Europeans” and “non-Europeans” from the cultural point of view. The problem is that anti-immigrants on this European level are ironically deepening in the process of enlargement of the European Union. To prove this These, the problems of the ‘obligations of membership’ proposed in Copenhagen(1993) and ‘European citizenship’, which were established along with the enlargement of the European Union, will be examined. Finally, I would like to introduce an example of an alternative European identity that could embrace heterogeneity and include migrants as European inhabitants, rather than the logic of exclusion.

Leading in the Context of Immigration: Cultivating Collective Responsibility for Recently Arrived Immigrant Students

Although school based discourses often frame immigrant students as in need of intervention, leaders can challenge this exclusionary logic, encouraging educators to help students develop linguistic and academic skills while affirming students' rich transnational experiences. This article provides ethnographic images from schools that are effectively serving recently arrived immigrant youth to consider the dimensions of leadership that engender collective responsibility for immigrant youth. In doing so, it considers how school leaders influence how immigrant students are positioned within the sociocultural practices of schools, as well as structures and practices that empower teachers to develop rigorous and responsive curriculum and to support students varied needs.

“Awful Gladness”: The Dual Political Rhetorics of Du Bois’s “Of the Passing of the First-Born”

W.E.B. Du Bois’s elegy for his infant son, “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” in The Souls of Black Folk, has received relatively scant attention from political theorists. Yet it illuminates crucial developments in Du Bois’s political thought. It memorializes a tragedy central to his turn from scientific facts to rhetorical appeals to emotion. Its rhetoric also exemplifies a broader tension in his writings, between masculinist and elitist commitments and more insurrectionary impulses. In its normalizing rhetorical mode, which dominates, the elegy depicts an idealized patriarchal bourgeois household—potentially eliciting white readers’ sympathetic identification, but failing to displace the gendered and classed logic of racial exclusion. Its moments of transgressive rhetoric complicate or refuse such identification, celebrating Burghardt’s racial impurity and invoking a lineage of black maternal ambivalence. Though each is vexed and ephemeral, these moments of transgressive rhetoric reveal countervailing impulses that Du Bois would articulate in later writings.

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness

The Politics of Undeserved Happiness Zahi Zalloua (bio) In this essay, I want to critically engage with privilege theory and the now widespread liberal activist slogan "check your privilege" so prevalent on U.S. college campuses. Feminists were arguably the first to criticize unearned privilege, and in particular male privilege, as well as resistance on the part of the privileged to recognizing that privilege as exclusionary. American feminist Peggy McIntosh looks for example at the ways some men react negatively to the critique of male privilege, illustrating their reluctance to give up their power (McIntosh 2001, 95-105). Even when men acknowledge the historical discrimination of women, according to McIntosh, they often fail to see privilege as divisive: they fail to see, that is, how the notion of privilege is governed by a logic of exclusion. In discovering her own white privilege, McIntosh comments, "I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious" (94-95). To correct such shortcomings, privilege theory teaches that there is no privilege without the unprivileged. What comes out of the analysis of McIntosh and others, then, is the imperative to self-analyze, to check one's privilege. But what does it mean to check privilege? What is its critical force? Is it adequate to the task at hand? Simply stated, what is privilege theory questioning and what is it leaving intact? I counter here what could be described as privilege theory's liberal critique of unearned privilege on two fronts.1 On the first front, I draw on Herbert Marcuse's claim for "the need for 'undeserved' happiness" from his 1967 essay, "The End of Utopia." The "happiness" in "'undeserved' happiness" here should not be conflated with complacent satisfaction, with the attainment of a happy state—a view of happiness that psychoanalysis consistently questions—but should be understood instead as referring to modes of enjoyment, to unruly acts of libidinal gratification and [End Page 371] self-cultivation incongruous with the capitalist maxim, happiness as the deserved fruits of social productivity. Moreover, Marcuse's formulation throws a wrench in the logic of reward and punishment that often informs the contemporary discourse of privilege, a logic that unwittingly transforms the critique of structural inequalities into a matter of individual conscience: you should be verbally punished for assuming your unearned privilege (visible in the act of calling out someone's privilege in the accusatory charge, "your privilege is showing"), and rewarded for confessing your given privilege (whether or not that confession leads to a deeper engagement with the structural problems at work). On the second front, I scrutinize further privilege theory's under-theorized account of subjectivity. In this effort, I turn to Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian musings on the postmodern superego to demonstrate how the compulsory call "to check your privilege" at best provides a limited critical value and, at worst, is hegemonic and complicit with the very racist and sexist ideologies it seeks to undermine. Finally, I reread Marcuse's call for undeserved happiness along Žižekian lines as effecting a shift from privilege to fantasy: from the liberal imperative to "check your privilege" to the psychoanalytic injunction to "check our fantasy." The critique of privilege theory has emanated from two main camps: the Right condemns privilege theory for creating a victim industry and helping to legitimize a stifling atmosphere of political correctness (one in which marginalized groups—the unprivileged—are seen as exempt from criticism while white, Christian, heterosexual males are fair game), while the Left questions and complicates privilege theory's approach for its failure to truly get at oppression, seeing it as reformist rather than revolutionary. Both Marcuse and Žižek gesture toward a third line of critique. Their objections to privilege theory share much with the Left's verdict that this approach does not go far enough—and, at least in the case of Žižek, the Right's suspicion of political correctness, of tolerant liberal multiculturalism more generally—but, as we shall see, they converge here for significantly different reasons. Again, in its best forms, privilege theory...

After Over-Representation, Care

After Over-Representation, Care Ashon Crawley (bio) [C]are. It's all we have.1 To end with care, to end with a point of departure, is to not end at all. It is instead to call, to seek, to journey, to request, to manifest desire for relationality—for sociality—and thus to resist the imposition of modern Western thought that would have us severed one from another. To end with care, as Christina Sharpe does in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, is to open rather than close—to think directionally and, possibility, otherwise. To care about that which is considered impossible to care for, to offer care—as concern, as tending to, as love, as abiding with—is to disrupt the time and space of Western logics: its history, its present, its futures. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is infamous for having said that Africa does not belong to history. And though lots of philosophers have attempted to explain away such racism—though it was precisely anti-Black racism that allowed such an assertion—I want to attend to the complexity that emerges when one considers history as something that is not axiomatic, that is not self-evident, as [End Page 303] something that can be categorically refused to a people, as a mode of thinking relation that can function by exclusion. I want to consider those excluded from history philosophically because to belong to, to be captured by, to be engulfed in the history-philosophical is to be placed within the strictures and constraints of the normative world and, following the line and root of Sylvia Wynter's poetics, its overrepresentation.2 We might say that overrepresentation itself is a problem, if not the problem, of the mood and movement against the flourishing of Black life, against the flourishing of Black flesh. In other words, what if the perennial problem of our current political moment—its crisis of meaning, its ongoing reproductions of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism as dual nodal forces of its globality and violence—is rooted at least in part by desiring a history, at least in part by desiring a Being that belongs to history? What if the history Hegel marks, and thus then perhaps the history of Western thought, and thus also thought-Western itself—that big and wide and capacious category that seeks to claim everything within its reach, that attempts to leave nothing unfurled in its wake—is created through an aversion to difference, an aversion to the disruptive capacity of Black life and flesh and Black language, the desire to create smooth, linear, progressive, and forward-moving time? To produce history by averting Blackness is to produce through exclusion and violence, such that to want to belong to it, to desire it, would be something that must be refused. How to attend to the fact that what befalls Blackness, what befalls Black flesh, is what is produced by the exclusion of and aversion to Blackness, that which remains after overrepresentation of Man? Sharpe's In the Wake points us there, in that direction, to that restive questioning, that restive calling that is also a solicitation for response. She calls us to think about the necessity, the urgency, the practice of care. And if care—of braided hair before ecological crises that have the fingerprints of Man on them; of delicate and gentle and intentional placements in boats—is that which cannot be liquidated or quelled, then how does one practice care when a neoliberal logic of inclusion and exclusion, of monetization and financialization, can utilize the concept of care itself as a means to further exploit, exclude, and produce violence against Black flesh? That is, how can we practice care as reflex and gift and outpouring against the imposition of having to care, of being forced to care, of being made to care as a juridical practice of anti-Black violence? Can we practice care against the logics of violence and exclusion that mark care as all that we "have"? What is care to overrepresentation? To ask about care is to consider how to be together, how to forge a way otherwise, how to imagine life...

Mimesis, Contention, and Corporeality of Otherness: Reading the Haircuts of Undocumented Immigrants’ Daughters in Japan

Mimesis, Contention, and Corporeality of OthernessReading the Haircuts of Undocumented Immigrants’ Daughters in Japan Yurika Tamura (bio) In 2009 a daughter of Filipino undocumented immigrant parents in Saitama, Japan, drew national attention. In order to plead for annulment of her parents’ deportation, Noriko Calderon at the age of fifteen became a spokeswoman for the family. Once her parents’ verdict became final, Noriko cut her hair short and continued her plea in the media. In this paper I comparatively examine Noriko’s haircut and another immigrant’s daughter’s haircut in her appearance in a famous documentary and argue that the two girls’ haircuts, which are situated in the Japanese immigration discourse, are both political performance and feminine mimesis. Using Luce Irigaray’s notion of feminine mimesis, which posits mimesis as a profoundly ambivalent yet subtly contentious act, this essay traces how such haircuts can reveal masculine logic of exclusion. In the process, I focus on hair as both material and symbolic surface of the body, the location of subjectivity. locating hair as the corporeal surface Hair, made of once living and now dead cells, surfaces from inside and covers the body, and it can be understood as both inside and outside of the body.1 Rooted in the body, hair is considered to be an intrinsic part of body matter and bodily cycles. Yet hair can also be easily detached from the body. Can this liminal entity of our bodily surface act performatively? Can the hair of Othered bodies, senseless dead cells, give a sense of the corporeality of the Other?2 These questions surface at the two scenes in the media coverage of “undocumented” (a word which suggests both the existence and nonexistence of supposedly-not-existing bodies) immigrants and their phantoms in the [End Page 183] border control narratives in Japan. The phantoms are the cut hair of the two daughters of these immigrants: two women, two haircuts, one inside and the other out. These two cases of the public appearance of undocumented immigrants and their hair-cutting daughters occurred separately and are unrelated to each other. However, together they (and the daughters’ hair) locate the bodies outside the “belonging,” pointing to the very real and corporeal “cut” of bodies from a community of belonging. But there is more to these narratives: the daughters’ hair that is removed by the act of cutting exposes the stale logic of rootedness in a traditional discourse of nation and ethnicity. It subverts the notion of roots. The daughters’ haircut then becomes an act of performance that threatens the imperial politics of belonging within which citizenship is formed and dictated. Like strands of our hair sporadically appearing without a trace on our daily surfaces—sink, floor, and even on our shoulders—these phantoms of immigrants narratives, apparitions of excluded bodies, often haunt the imagined surface of a national community. Hair can also take on more meanings than bodily and social surface or roots. Starting with the story of Rapunzel and continuing to the contemporary hair-flipping performance of feminine sexiness in the US media, many cultures seem to confirm the idea that long feminine hair represents exuberant and enticing feminine sexuality. The analysis of female haircut performance that follows then extends to study the patriarchal nature of the national community that trims off and disciplines the raced and gendered bodies of the immigrants’ daughters (and their very corporeal body part) as well as finding the daughters’ act to constitute feminine performance, an intellectually calculated act (whether conscious or subconscious) that is highly sentient of the sexual politics of imperial heteropatriarchy. in lieu of words: noriko’s haircut Possibly one of the most hated figures in Japan in the year 2009, Noriko Calderon was only thirteen years old when she became a detested icon of the illegal alien. Her parents, Arlan and Sarah Calderon, had immigrated to Japan from the Philippines in 1997. Although undocumented, they were successful in building a life in Japan. Both parents worked in menial jobs and acquired good reputations for being diligent workers, and they eventually had a daughter, Noriko, who was growing up to be a regular Japanese teenager with a common Japanese female name...

The Other Battle of Algiers

The Other Battle of Algiers

The Logic of Deferral: Educational Aims and Intellectual Disability

The educational aims described by educational philosophers rarely embrace the full range of differences in intellectual ability, adaptive behavior, or communication that children exhibit. Because envisioned educational aims have significant consequences for how educational practices, pedagogy, and curricula are conceptualized, the failure to acknowledge and embrace differences in ability leaves open the question of the extent to which students with intellectual disabilities are subject to the same aims as their “typically-developing” peers. In articulating and defending valued aims of education, educational philosophers tacitly or expressly concede that particular aims will be ill suited to many children with intellectual disabilities, and that separate aims will therefore apply to them. This paper evaluates the philosophical reasoning behind this conclusion that some people, by necessity, must be governed by separate educational aims, to be decided separately and secondarily. The author calls this the “deferral stance.” First, the paper outlines concerns about a particular ability-biased social and epistemic context in which theorizing about educational aims takes place. The author then examines assumptions that underpin the logic of deferral, arguing that the logic proves flawed when subjected to conceptual and empirical scrutiny. The paper concludes by outlining an inclusive approach—the affirmative stance—to theorizing about educational aims that resists the logic of exclusion and deferral.

What Is the Opposite of Injustice?

Scholars have long assailed binary notions of justice by challenging dichotomies between, for example, superior and inferior classes, ethnicities, or sexualities. What has remained intact is the seemingly obvious assumption of mutual exclusion between the concepts of justice and injustice. That logical distinction is expressly articulated with the very birth of programmatic Western social theory in ancient Greece and it persists still. Within any classical programmatic model, injustice emerges as a sheer imperfection in the achievement of that model’s conception or conceptions of justice. We come to view that concept of injustice as logically obvious. But the programmatic tradition exemplifies that logic of mutual exclusion even within existing, positive legal systems. Contrary to that tradition, it is argued here that injustice must be construed not merely as the inadequate realisation of one or more given conceptions of justice, but more importantly as the product of those same conceptions.

Muslims as outsiders, enemies, and others: The 2016 presidential election and the politics of religious exclusion

Despite Americans’ commitment to religious freedom, religious minorities have been marginalized and excluded since the country’s founding. Focusing on the 2016 election, this chapter analyzes the latest chapter in this history, in which Republican candidates constructed symbolic boundaries that defined Muslims as non-American (outsiders), anti-American (enemies), and un-American (others). It then draws parallels between contemporary anti-Muslim rhetoric and the historic treatment of Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and atheists. In each case, these religious groups have troubled a vision of American belonging that is tightly linked to white Protestant identity, and more subtly, to individualist and voluntaristic notions of the good religious (and democratic) subject. This recurrent pattern complicates the notion that American nationhood is rooted in civic rather than ethnic membership, instead revealing a complex interplay between civic and ethnic logics of exclusion. While efforts to purify the “Christian nation” rest explicitly upon an ethno-religious vision of American peoplehood, a subtler civic logic is also at work in efforts to frame religious minorities as uncivil threats to American values and norms, including religious freedom itself.

Contested spaces of citizenship: camps, borders and urban encounters

As citizenship regulations have tightened across the world, protest and activist movements have also emerged to challenge the violence of border and migration control. Positioned at the intersection of citizenship studies and critical geography, this special issue explores how space is conceived, mobilised, used and, in turn, shaped by these political struggles. The authors argue that citizenship is inextricably and irreducibly spatial, and therefore entangled with the material and discursive dimensions of geographical places and scales. Drawing on a rich set of examples, the contributions of this issue trace how space is actively and strategically used within multiple processes of political subjectivation. Focusing on critical sites through which exclusionary logics materialise – such as camps, borders and the urban space, the papers investigate how marginal(ised) political subjects claim their rights in and through space in different and often ambiguous ways, including contestation and solidarity.

Thematic Digital History Archives and Their Wicked Problems: China, America and the Pacific

This essay reviews China, America and the Pacific (2016) as an exemplar of Adam Matthew’s ambitious new generation of curated, thematic, multi-archival, online digital collections. These new collections confront a predicament already familiar in the digital humanities: Where do inherently expansive projects begin and end, and what are appropriate criteria for judging quality and completeness? In commercially curated, thematic digital archives, what is the logic of inclusion and exclusion? How do users—undergraduates in particular—make sense of the remixed materials they encounter in these privatized virtual spaces? The reviewer frames these questions as “wicked problems,” using language originally formulated in the 1970s, and recently revised by organizations, communities, and project managers grappling with social complexity and fragmentation. Although “wicked problems” elude definition and resist trial-and-error approaches, they can be “tamed” through sustained, intentionally argumentative conversations. Adam Matthew’s reliance on academic consultants and its growing interest in public-private partnerships provide fertile ground for initiating this sort of conversation. Acknowledging that it has always been a struggle to take on historically invaluable, commercially unprofitable archival projects, the reviewer encourages professional historians to make better use of the new realities, beginning with a fuller conversation about the role and responsibilities of academic consultants to vendors like Adam Matthew.

Il miracolo del nuovo e l'enigma del diverso, ovvero come evitare il successo artistico ed essere felici: Boris Groys e John Cage

The logic of inclusion and exclusion in the art system of objects and images which have been produced in the sphere of everyday life, is the basis of the logic of the “new”. The entry of these objects into museums, as well as the entry of some operations into the concert halls, is not a loss, but the possibility that the “new” is realized in a difference beyond the difference, examples of which are both in the sublimation of the banal (Cage) and in the museumization of the common object (Duchamp).

"What’s Love Got To Do With It?"

At some point in our lives we have all felt like insects, pinned, labeled and displayed by someone and defined in ways that we don't embrace, and for purposes that are not our own. But, Allison Weir asks in her recent book, Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Power and Connection, are identities inevitably alien and constraining? Certainly, she points out, contemporary feminists have tended to conceive identities in this way, viewing them as oppressive subject positions sculpted by complex intersections of language, law, power, and hierarchical social interactions.1 The most famous example of this sort of reification is Althusser's policeman, who shouts, Stop thief! In an instant, frames someone as an intelligible-if not upstanding-member of a social world. From this perspective, identities are created not by individuals, but individuals by their identities. When further analyzed we discover that identities conceived along these lines are shaped not only by but as on a binary logic of exclusion and a policing of boundaries.2 To be a woman is not to be a man, to be gay is not to be straight, and so on. In such accounts, Weir concludes, is through disciplinary regimes of that name and classify, that enable individuation only as they imprison.3 This is why identity is equated with subjectification, subjectification with subjection, and subjection with alienation and exploitation.Judith Butler has claimed that despite inscription of normative identities via binary exclusions of power, subjects can resist power, though, she adds as a caveat, while we can possibly refuse to be what we are called, we cannot escape operation of law, one of power's most potent effects. She writes, Yet call is always call of law, and agency consist in that resists law.4 Resistance is thus always already shaped by law that it refuses, meaning that agency is the dual possibility of being both constituted by law and an of resistance to law5Weir, pressing Butler, claims that because she makes identities work of and exclusion, it is difficult to explain how critique and change are possible. Her appeal to legal misrecognition through which an oppositional politics might slink, seems, Weir claims, inadequate to explain struggles for recognition and seems to suggest that law, language, or some other discursive field, is identical with self's agency.It is because she collapses agency and misrecognition, Weir claims, that Butler fails to hit feminist mark. Not only are our identities not sedimentations of because they are not things, but, they are, in addition, not reducible solely to power. Despite their rejection of metaphysics of substance, when Butler and Foucault describe as an internalized of power, they make it a kind of thing viewed as site of power's activity via operations of language, law, or psyche. One can see this metaphysical creep, for example, when Foucault claims that understanding who we are requires recognizing that self we discover is necessarily sedimentation of normalizing and coercive regimes of power Butler tends to use a language that figures subjectivity as an of something else, but describing something as an effect comes, Weir suggests, uncomfortably close to describing something as a thing. Whether such effects are actually conceived to be substantial or not, Weir argues, at heart of such theories is, in any case, a paradoxical equation of a self's agency and its subjection.6 While Butler, like many other feminists, accepts this paradox and accepts claim that is founded in same moment as both subaltern and agent, as and origin, Weir does not.While, Weir writes, there is no doubt that women's identities have been historically constituted through systematic oppression, trying to understand them solely in terms of these exclusions and domination ignores complex intersections of multiple identities that constitute any one person. …

'The purest citizens' and 'IVF children'. Reproductive citizenship in contemporary Poland.

This article examines the public debate on reproductive technologies in contemporary Poland, focusing on the rhetorical strategies used by the main opponents of IVF: conservative politicians representing the leading parties in the Polish parliament and the representatives of the Catholic Church. The analysis highlights the exclusionary logic inscribed in the construction of the main categories of political subjects in this debate, revealing important limitations of reproductive citizenship in the Polish context. The study draws on a variety of texts published in print and electronic media between 2007 and 2015, including articles on infertility and reproductive technologies published in the main Polish daily and weekly print publications, online resources (web pages, forums and Facebook pages), documents issued by the representatives of the Church, politicians and experts, e.g. open letters, commentaries, information for the media and interviews.

Prime Zero of the Anthropocene

As philosophers from Jacques Derrida, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, to Alain Badiou have shown, the concept of border entails a logic of exclusion that sustains itself on an empty place. In the absence of this empty place, what does the contemporary experience of being ‘without boundaries’ imply mathematically? This paper suggests that if the Anthropocene confirms Deleuze and Guattari's insight that the older, ‘castrative’ logic of the border-cut is extinct, this does not require us to abandon the categories that traditionally inscribed us as subjects altogether. Rather, it helps us to understand how the Symbolic Law is being logically inscribed. One often talks loosely about the ‘perversity’ of the Law, but this analysis of three parables of climate change enables us to pinpoint more precisely the structure of how the Law presents today. It suggests that to try to ‘diagnose’ the contemporary experience of the Law, we should look not to perversion but to the ‘prime zero’ of a specifically ‘feminine’ psychosis.

The Need for Speed: Traffic Regulation and the Violent Fabric of Karachi

As a domain of political intervention, speed is a meeting ground for projects of domination and tactics of emancipation, for logics of exclusion coexisting with various forms of collisions, intersections and amalgamations. Instead of reducing the ‘need for speed’ to a linear and unequivocal process, this article makes the case for thinking about speed as an arena of conflict, subject to brutal accelerations but also to at least momentary decelerations. Taking the example of Karachi, where road accidents and larger controversies around transport played a prominent role in the violent postcolonial transformations of the city, it argues that from these collisions emerged a form of political power premised on the regulation of traffic flows. It concludes that moving-power always exceeds the initial intentions of those setting it in motion as it simultaneously builds on and disrupts the forces that give every city its vitality, that is, on the vitalism of speed.

Witnessing in the age of the database: Viral memorials, affective publics, and the assemblage of mourning

Many terms, such as spontaneous shrines, grassroots memorials and performative commemoratives, have been used to describe the collaborative on-site and online memorials created following the deaths of national and global figures, as well as those of unknown victims of mass-mediated disasters. I argue that the adjective “viral” better captures the temporality, spatiality, materiality, and mimeticism of these formations, as well as their frequent pathologization. Contemporary performative public mourning follows from mediated witnessing in the era of networked digital media, forming a witnessing/mourning assemblage. The corporeal testifying of the witness-turned-mourner contributes material derivatives to an affective network. Breaking from constative, narrative testimony and the exclusionary logic of the monument, these memorial aggregations emerge from processes of database (de)composition and network virality. Through the close analysis of a 2008 YouTube memorial video tribute for victims of a Greek bus accident, I consider shifts in public grieving and memorialization of catastrophic media events in relation to developments in web protocols and platforms.