Zone Of Indistinction Research Articles

Characterization of New Tropicoporus Species (Basidiomycota, Hymenochaetales, Hymenochaetaceae) Discovered in Tamil Nadu, India.

This study aimed to investigate the morphological characteristics and phylogenetic relationships of three new species of Tropicoporus from the southern parts of India. The analyses of the ITS and nLSU regions revealed the novelty of these species, which have been named T. pannaensis, T. subindicus, and T. xerophyticus. All three species possess pileate basidiomes, a monomitic hyphal system in the context, and the presence of cystidioles and setae. However, they differ significantly in their phylogenetic placements and other morpho-taxonomic features. Tropicoporus pannaensis is characterized by a meagrely ungulate basidiome, indistinct zones, and an obtuse margin. Tropicoporus subindicus has a triquetrous basidiome and a radially cracked, crusted pileal surface with an acute margin, while T. xerophyticus is distinguished by an imbricate, perennial basidiome with an abundantly warted pileal surface. A phylogenetic tree is provided to show the placement of the three new species, along with detailed descriptions and illustrations. Additionally, a key for the identification of the Asian species of Tropicoporus is presented.

“The Trees Got Their Own Ways to Hurt Us”: Entangled Bodies and Fragile Flesh in M.R. Carey’s "The Book of Koli" (2020)

There is a post-apocalyptic England teeming with violent plants, where one break in the clouds could wake the trees around you, condemning you to become sustenance for thirsty roots. This is the speculative future of M.R. Carey’s speculative young adult novel, The Book of Koli, where humans struggle to adapt to their new role in this speculative future and plants pose an ever-growing threat. In this article, I analyse how The Book of Koli engages with, what I term, “plant flesh,” through the analogous transformations of humans and plants. Plant flesh is a development of Michael Marder’s “grafts,” where he suggests that grafts are an expression of proliferation for both plants and flesh. With grafts, Marder illustrates the vegetality of flesh; with plant flesh, I illustrate both the vegetality of flesh and the fleshiness of the vegetal. Plant flesh, then, becomes a term of indistinction (as per Matthew Calarco), where, through plant flesh, we can begin to trace the ways that humans and animals are like plants. In The Book of Koli’s young adult context, plant flesh’s indistinction captures the shared and necessary – but oftentimes violent – transformation of flesh, as teen protagonist, Koli, transitions into adolescence alongside genetically modified plants and their evolution into speculative monstrosities. Through theoretical discussions and close readings, I argue that explorations of plant flesh in The Book of Koli serve to demonstrate both the shared, violent transformations of plant and human flesh and the indistinction that such transformations encourage between the adolescent Koli and the ever-evolving plants. The Book of Koli’s speculative young adult journey, then, with its botanical threats and adolescent transformations, makes apparent the indistinct zones that can emerge, when we tend to the entangled bodies and fragile flesh of both plants and humans.

Globalization and Worlding: Interconnected Alternatives

At the outset, a distinction is drawn between globalization, that takes the shape of a consensus imposed from above, and worlding, that takes the shape of a dissensus developed from below. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, globalization “polices” a political space, suppresses conflicts among its constituents, appropriates and translates everything into its own identity parameters. By pointing out the “political” gap between what is claimed and what is within the given space, worlding, in contrast. insists on disagreement. However, these two reconfigurations and recalibrations of human being-in-common are never diametrically opposed, but are interrelated and intertwined. Worlding can start as a liberating “politics” but, as soon as it institutes its platform of commonality, may slip into an imposed “police”. Since political disagreement necessarily aims to legitimize its unrecognized identities, a surreptitious perversion of dissensual politics into a consensual police is its inescapable ultimate consequence. Disagreement invents names and utterances, setting up new collectivities that solidify their identities by “policing” their spaces. Accordingly, one can conclude that worlding starts as an emancipating project that gradually turns into discriminating globalization. The continuous slide of one into the other impeded and disconcerted the political space of European modernity from its very beginnings, accompanying it like an uncanny shadow. This space repeatedly proliferated both its internal (intra-European) and external (extra-European) “zones of indistinction”, whose residents forged transborder alliances with the aim of its recalibration and reconfiguration.

Bare Life and Biopolitics in El Rey de La Habana

In this essay, I propose a reading of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s novel El Rey de La Habana (1999) as a critique of the reduction of political life to what philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” The novel, written during the período especial highlights the state of emergency and economic crisis that overwhelmed Cuba following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. My analysis centers on Reynaldo, the novel’s protagonist, and the various ways he embodies the thresholds or zones of indistinction that constitute bare life. In Agamben’s terms, Reynaldo exhibits the traits of homo sacer, the sacred man whose exclusion from political life is constitutive of modern sovereign power. In this sense, my biopolitical reading contemplates the central role of excessive corporeality in the novel as an index of the violence of sovereign power during Cuba’s Special Period.

Drones as Machines of Sacrifice: Enframing the Zoological Components of On-Screen Warfare

This article examines how drone warfare transforms the targeted region into a zone of indistinction governed by anthropocentrism. Alwazir’s ‘Yemen Inside Out’, Behram’s ‘Not a Bugsplat’ portrait, and Chishty’s drone art undo the dehumanising rhetoric of ‘Bugsplat’, the US drone software, by redefining the distance between what is being targeted on the ground and drone pilots conducting on-screen assaults from above. Theorising the relegation of right-bearing humanness to the marginalised status of bare insecthood, I draw on Heidegger’s notion of distance, nearness, and the disappearance of nearness between the viewer and what is being viewed on a screen. I then invoke Agamben’s understanding of nearness, as I demonstrate how the artwork I examine enacts a distinctive subversion of Bugsplat’s political anthropocentrism and a challenge to the portrayal of the loss of life as something as easily erasable as the splat that the killing of an insect leaves on a surface.

Iron oxide chemistry supports a multistage hydrothermal genesis of BIF-hosted hematite ore in the Mt. Tom Price and Mt. Whaleback deposits

This study demonstrates the great value of iron oxide chemistry in low-temperature systems. Hematite records elemental signatures of structural control, partial inheritance of pre-existing alteration, and allows chemical fingerprinting of multistage BIF-hosted ore.Mt. Whaleback and Mt. Tom Price are Western Australia’s largest banded iron formation (BIF) hosted hematite ore deposits. The mechanisms and timing of iron enrichment from BIF (with ∼20–40 wt% Fe) to high-grade iron ore (with up to 69 wt% Fe) are still controversially debated. In-situ iron oxide chemistry support post-metamorphic, structurally controlled, hydrothermal hematite ore formation via multiple stages of hydrothermally altered BIF.Iron oxides in two hydrothermal alteration zones in BIF at Mt. Tom Price (distal alteration assemblages: magnetite-siderite-stilpnomelane ± pyrite and intermediate alteration assemblages: hematite-magnetite-ankerite-chlorite) show similar trace element patterns that are distinct from metamorphic magnetite in least-altered magnetite-quartz ± hematite ± Fe-carbonate ± Fe-silicates BIF. At Mt. Whaleback, the hydrothermal alteration is completely eradicated by subsequent microplaty-martite hematite ore formation, and solely recorded in hematite composition by the inheritance of various conservative element abundances.Petrographically indistinct zones within a given orebody are chemically distinct and demonstrate formation via contrasting structurally controlled hydrothermal fluid flow: At Mt. Whaleback, specifically in the vicinity of Central Fault and Whaleback Fault, systematic trace element group abundance trends are recorded: major controls are fO2, pH, and acquired country rock signatures, i.e., evolved (Al, Mn, Mo, Pb, U) at Central Fault, and primitive (Al, Cr, Ti, V, Cu, Ni, Co) at Whaleback fault. Complex zoned growth textures and element distribution in microplaty hematite support precipitation during protracted hydrothermal fluid/rock interaction. In combination, our results falsify the importance of alternative hematite crystallisation models, including goethite dehydration and coalescent nanoparticles.

The enlightened city

Postsecularity, or the nature of the reflexive questioning or destabilization of the secular, remains a highly contested and problematic notion across the social sciences and humanities. Most perspectives share profound disappointment in the institutions of liberal democracy, requiring us to rethink the grounds for ethical and political action in post-political, -democratic, and -truth times. I argue with reference to select illustrative cases that one possible value of postsecularity rests in the notion of the enlightened city that emanates from three broad lines of inquiry: (1) new geographies of religion and postsecularity with implications for decolonial urban theory and the commons; (2) Frankfurt School-inspired messianic critical theory, reflexive secularization, and decolonial urban postsecularity; and (3) reflexive humanization, perceived “impossibility” of wholeness, and critical discourse on the Anthropocene. Rather than repeat the all-too-familiar dangers of Enlightenment rationalism, this approach stresses an immanent transcendent overlapping of ethical and political imperatives beyond the classical separation of life and politics, “planetary urbanization” and zone of indistinction providing the canvas from which postsecular processes unfold, and new subject formation that reconciles radical differences towards a higher unity and confronts injustices in more inclusive and humane ways.

A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary

The article addresses Giorgio Agamben’s critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben’s comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben’s thought.

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.

Porous Bodies: Environmental Biopower and the Politics of Life in Ancient Rome

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity at the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘environmental biopower’.

O ESTADO DE EXCEÇÃO NAS FAVELAS: perspectivas biopoliticas a partir da pandemia do covid-19

A expansão do novo coronavírus - COVID-19, classificado como pandemia pela Organização Mundial da Saúde (OMS), vem causando insegurança e muita incerteza por todo o mundo. O crescimento exponencial fez com que o vírus atingisse também as comunidades mais pobres. Esses são espaços com alta densidade demográfica, habitações precárias com poucos cômodos e que possuem pouca ventilação. Também faltam equipamentos de saúde, não há rede de esgoto, saneamento básico e água potável. Todos esses elementos apontam para uma situação de abandono por parte do Estado em que moradores passam a ser incluídos no seio de uma exceção, uma zona de indistinção em que a vida se torna apenas biológica, uma existência destituída de qualquer valor, mera vida. Essa situação de abandono se agrava ainda mais no contexto de uma pandemia e evidencia a existência de uma biopolítica baseada na exclusão dessas populações. Desse modo, o presente artigo pretende partir das considerações sobre biopolítica, de Michel Foucault, e de conceitos apresentados por Giorgio Agamben, como vida nua, homo sacer e poder soberano para debater de que maneira um cenário pandêmico pode aprofundar ainda mais as desigualdades nas favelas. 

State of Exception: The Birthplace of Kafka’s Narrative Authority

Across the postimperial East Central Europe, whose geopolitical space was reconfigured on the model of West European nation-states, unprocessed human residues proliferated as the collateral effects of politically guided national homogenizations. These positional outsiders, who were prevented from becoming legible within the newly established political spaces, take center stage in Kafka’s narratives, not only in the form of their characters but also their narrators and ultimate authority. They passionately attach themselves to the zones of indistinction, which the modern societies’ “egalitarian discrimination” has doomed them to, thus trying to turn their enforced dispossession into a chosen self-dispossession. I argue that Kafka’s narratives owe their elusive ultimate authority precisely to this persistent translation of the political state of exception of his agencies into their literary state of exemption. They are at constant pains to transfigure the imposed state of exception through its peculiar fictional adoption, but Kafka’s ultimate narrative authority nevertheless takes care to keep an edge over their efforts. It is precisely this never-ending gradation of subversive mimicry in Kafka’s works that his postcolonial successor J. M. Coetzee most admired.

Rethinking government and its economy with Giorgio Agamben: The homo sacer in alternative entrepreneurship

Giorgio Agamben argues in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011) that a theological remnant has survived since the medieval period that today makes it impossible to think of government and economy, or ethico-political questions and the administration of a society’s resources, separately. This conflation can be recognized in today’s growing trend of alternative entrepreneurial ventures that aim to merge social and economic value creation in response to shrinking welfare states. ‘Alternative entrepreneurship’ merges organizational goals and values with those of their members with the aim to increase innovation and productivity, and to spur social change. Rather than asking if and how alternative entrepreneurship can solve social problems, the present article contributes to a sociological understanding of the special kind of humanism embedded in these ventures. Drawing on Agamben’s work, this article theorizes the process that enables the conflation of personal and organizational values, and of ‘government and its economy’. The contribution is based on an ethnographic study of an IT company, founded in Hungary around 2010, and its engagement in the Budapest Pride Parade, in a Roma settlement, and in a mission to help Syrian refugees. Following Agamben, we think through these interventions as ‘zones of indistinction’ where organizational boundaries are dissolved, where contradictory values are conflated, and where the participants are positioned as homines sacri whose humanity is at stake. This article shows how the encounters within these zones enable a merging of idealism and economic gain, turning the company itself into a zone of indistinction.

“Everywhere Felt and Nowhere Seen”: Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the “Sovereign Paradox"


 This paper argues that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart reflects what Giorgio Agamben refers to as the “sovereign paradox” on two levels: first—as reflected by the subject of the novel—on the juridico-political level, and second, on the level of the language and structure of the novel itself. The relationship between these two levels is made clear by Agamben, who uses language as the prime example of the “sovereign paradox” implicit to the juridical order. “Language,” he writes, “is the sovereign who, in a permanent state of exception, declares that there is nothing outside language and that language is always beyond itself” (21). Obeirika’s words in Things Fall Apart: “There is no story that is not true” (Achebe 14), illustrates this “sovereign paradox” by pointing on the one hand to the omniscient authority of the narrative text, while on the other directly undermining that authority. I argue that it is by doing away with the binary system of what can and should be considered true and untrue that the reflexive narrative – of which Achebe’s novel is a prime example – positions itself in a “permanent state of exception” (Agamben 21). Things Fall Apart establishes for itself “a zone of indistinction” (Agamben 47) characterized by the very impossibility of arriving at the “truth” as such, or “of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception” (37). A “zone of indistinction” is constructed on a textual as well as a political-historical level by the novel’s transgression of its own narrative borders.

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.

Breaking the Mirror of the Spectacle: Mass Murder/Suicide as the Ecstasy of Simulated Experience

This article develops a sociological understanding of the lone mass shooter and the ways in which his affectual constellation is produced within and mirrors the social space. It begins by outlining the contemporary political context of terrorism. The article then explores the affectual constellation of an isolated mass murderer, by asking the question ‘what is a loser?’. Following this, it links the emergence of the radical loser to modernity through an exploration of the genealogy of nihilism. Then, taking the mass murderer Elliot Rodger as a paradigmatic case, it explores the ways in which his affectual constellation can be understood as produced within the capitalist social formation. Finally, it argues that mass murder can be understood as the ecstasy of simulated experience, its violent countertransference, constituting a zone of indistinction between the spectacle and the real, killing and being killed.

The council of expediency: crisis and statecraft in Iran and beyond

Giorgio Agamben argues that in contemporary governance the use of ‘emergency’ is no longer provisional, but ‘constitutes a permanent technology of government’ and has produced the extrajudicial notion of crisis. The engendering of ‘zones of indistinction’ between the law and its practice is what Agamben defines as a ‘state of exception’. This article adopts the notion enunciated by Agamben and revisits it in the Islamic Republic of Iran. There, the category of crisis has been given, firstly, a juridical status through the institution of maslahat, ‘expediency’, interpreted in a secular encounter between Shica theological exegesis and modern statecraft. Secondly, crisis has not led to the production of a ‘state of exception’ as Agamben argues. Instead, since the late 1980s, a sui generis institution, the Expediency Council, has presided and decided over matters of crisis. Instead of leaving blind spots in the production of legislative power, the Expediency Council takes charge of those spheres of ambiguity where the ‘normal’ – and normative – means of the law would have otherwise failed to deliver. This is a first study of this peculiar institution, which invites further engagement with political phenomena through the deconstruction and theorization of crisis politics.

The Spectacle of Sovereignty: The Abject Multitude in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris and Shakespeare’s

Surprisingly, mere religious difference is not the only source of fear in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris despite the play’s focus on the religious violence of the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre. Instead, like Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, representation of mimetic desire perpetuates the threat of internecine violence that haunts the play. Indeed, Marlowe’s Massacre and Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV both illuminate the way in which a gendered interpretation of the agentic, or self-determining subject, incites and reinforces an uncanny “zone of indistinction . . . at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge.” This troubled intersection is evident in Marlowe and Shakespeare’s representations of the sovereign and subjects’ struggle to establish and maintain power. In fact, the plays suggest how this gendered discourse shapes representations of the subject’s desire for power, or even recognition, and in the same instance the sovereign’s dependence on popular appeal. Most significantly, however, the plays trace the roles the discourse of gender and desire play in the changing political order from feudalism to an emergent merchant capitalism and the stirrings of liberal democracy.

Border as “Zone of Indistinction”: The State of Exception and the Spectacle of Terror Along Turkey’s Border With Syria

Turkey’s border with Syria today is a laboratory in which biopolitics and the spectacle coincide in new ways. As a consequence of the ongoing war between the state and Kurdish insurgents, and the state of emergency accompanying it, this border region has incrementally transformed into a “zone of indistinction” in which the spatial concepts of inside and outside interpenetrate. As exception is normalized, the logic of “the camp” (in Agamben’s sense) tends to become a dispositif. Exceptional routines are being exercised in this border region both to (re)construct the figure of the “Kurd” as a citizen and to generalize the domain of the camp, while also producing bare life in the context of counterterrorism. However, the “Kurd” as a subject cannot be ambiguously constructed, neither can the region be politically homogenized. Based on multisited fieldwork in the border city of Mardin, I claim that this zone of indistinction is simultaneously the place of revolt and resistance for the Kurdish case. Against this backdrop, the article argues the practical implications of counterterrorism policies in the region by focusing on how the state of exception is enforced on the Kurdish population as a biopolitical tool while being represented as a public spectacle to the rest of Turkey.

The refugee camp as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities

Analyses of refugee camps have criticised Agamben's conceptualisation of exception, understood as the juridical production of ‘bare life’ by the sovereign. They have emphasised the multiplicity of actors and exclusionary dynamics involved in the production of exception, as well as the politicisation of space. This scholarship has however stayed framed around an ‘exclusionary paradigm’. This article proposes a complementary way to move beyond Agamben's analysis of the camp by reconsidering the idea of a ‘zone of indistinction’ between exclusion and inclusion. It refers to Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, where many dwellers have a dual status of ‘refugee-citizen’. It analyses how the subject and citizenship are ambiguously constructed as simultaneously excluded and included – and not solely included through an exclusion. To explore these complex spatial dynamics of exclusion and inclusion, the analysis addresses the exercise of three forms of power – sovereignty, discipline and government – by focusing on the materiality of the camp and the practices of authorities managing space. These powers are ambiguously contributing to the inclusion of the camp and its dwellers in the territory of the Jordanian state, as well as in the neoliberal city of Amman, while maintaining the character of the camp as an excluded humanitarian and temporary space. Through this process, camp dwellers are recast not only as assisted subjects and beneficiaries, but also as autonomous and productive subjects, as well as entrepreneurs and consumers. This article therefore argues that the camp needs to be re-considered as a space of multiple ambiguities and subjectivities aimed at creating a differentiation in the city.