This article focuses on Foucault’s and Agamben’s readings of Augustine’s account of human nature and original sin. Foucault’s analysis of Augustine’s account of sexual acts in paradise, subordinated ...to will and devoid of lust, highlights the way it constitutes the model for the married couple, whose sexual acts are only acceptable if diverted by the will away from desire and towards the tasks of procreation. While Agamben rejects Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and reclaims paradise as the original homeland of humanity, his reappropriation of paradise remains conditioned by our turn towards our true nature, from which we have been estranged by sin. Agamben’s politics of reclaiming paradise necessarily involves the demand for obedience to this originary model of human nature. It therefore follows to the letter Augustine’s description of paradisiacal sex, in which the will prevails over desire by applying itself to and curtailing itself.
Tracing how the logic of inoperativity works in the domains of language, law, history and humanity, Agamben and Politics systematically introduces the fundamental concepts of Agamben's political ...thought and a critically interprets his insights in the wider context of contemporary philosophy.
The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series ...presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno’s own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power.
Sergei Prozorov contends that the post-truth ideology leads to the degradation of the public sphere that is essential to democratic governance. He argues instead for a positive role of truth-telling ...in the democratisation of biopolitical governance.
Sergei Prozorov challenges the assumption that the biopolitical governance means the end of democracy, arguing for a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy. He develops a vision of ...democratic biopolitics where diverse forms of life can coexist on the basis of their reciprocal recognition as free, equal and in common.
The article critically engages with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Rousseau in order to explore the affinities between the two authors’ subtractive approach to political subjectivation. In
The Kingdom ...and the Glory.
Agamben argues that Rousseau’s
Social Contract
reproduces, in a secularized manner, the providential paradigm of government, whose origins Agamben finds in early Christianity. This paradigm establishes a fictitious articulation between transcendent sovereignty and immanent government, presenting particular acts of government as emanating from general divine laws. We shall demonstrate that Rousseau was neither unaware of the problematic character of this paradigm nor did he venture to conceal its problems, but, on the contrary, he highlighted them throughout the
Social Contract
, whose key motif was the danger of the contamination of general will by particular acts, identities or interests. The same wariness of particularism characterizes Rousseau’s
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
, often read as entirely heterogeneous to the political project of the
Social Contract
. By reading these two works together as the affirmation of generic existence against all forms of particularism, we bring Rousseau’s analysis closer to Agamben’s own attempts to rethink politics as subtracted from all identity predicates and contained in the affirmation of ‘whatever being’. The elucidation of affinities between Rousseau and Agamben will permit us to identify the limits of this subtractive approach to politics and outline an alternative to it.
I recommend that the article should be revised and resubmitted. This is a very well-written and clearly argued piece that offers a systematic and analytical treatment of the concept of liminality ...that the authors suggest as an alternative to the binary inside/outside thinking that characterizes both the traditional international relations (IR) theory and its post-structuralist critique that remains fixated on the dividing line between the inside and the outside, even as it affirms its contingency, fluidity, haziness, and so on. While the authors’ argument, particularly their typology of liminal practices, is very interesting and suggestive, I am not certain that it succeeds in solving the problems the authors claim it does, at least on the level they claim it does. Below I address three problems with the argument.
This article addresses the relationship between ontology and politics in Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of democracy by probing the implications of his latest ontological innovation, the concept of ...struction. We argue that Nancy’s democracy is a mode of politics that makes the radical pluralism of struction legitimate, opening and guarding a political space for the coexistence of the incommensurable. From this perspective, and despite Nancy’s own skepticism about the concept of biopolitics, the notion of struction opens a pathway for theorizing democracy in a biopolitical key as the regime of coexistence of radically incommensurable forms of life in the absence of any coordinating principle. We nonetheless take issue with Nancy’s prescription for democracy to remain devoid of any political affirmation of its own. Instead, we suggest that the prescriptive content of democracy consists in the affirmation of the contingency of all the forms of life that coexist in it, which implies their freedom, equality, and community. In this manner, democracy makes the incommensurability of struction both legitimate and enjoyable.
The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. ...This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor’s judgement in observing the event of truth in the course of the disease, psychiatric crisis is explicitly forced by the doctor in order to elicit the desired symptoms in the patient and convert their power of disciplinary confinement into medical diagnosis. The article argues that this notion of crisis resonates with the tendencies observed in contemporary crisis governance in Western societies. While these tendencies are often addressed in terms of ‘psychopolitics’ that presumably succeeds Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, we suggest that Foucault’s own work on psychiatric power offers a valuable genealogical perspective on the contemporary governance of crises.
El artículo emprende una crítica de la lógica de la “otredad temporal” en la teoría contemporánea de las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII). Originalmente articulada en el ámbito de la integración ...europea, esta lógica presupone la posibilidad de una comunidad política de constituir su identidad sin alguna delimitación espacial, mediante la designación del Otro como su propio pasado, buscando evitar su repetición en el futuro. Mientras que la imagen de la Europa contemporánea, alterizando su propio pasado, ha sido sometida a la crítica empírica, este artículo propone un argumento conceptual para la indisociabilidad de los aspectos temporales y espaciales en cualquier acto de otredad. Basándome en la interpretación de Hegel de Alexandre Kojève, sostengo que cualquier acción histórica es necesariamente espacio-temporal, combinando la abstracción de la negación temporal con la actualidad concreta de un ser espacial negado. Las alternativas a la lógica de la territorialidad soberana, por lo tanto, no deben ser buscadas en el aspecto temporal de la otredad, sino en la búsqueda de la posibilidad de auto-constitución en la ausencia de cualquier acción negativa. El artículo concluye con un esbozo de dicho ethos alternativo, desarrollado sobre la base de la reconstrucción que hizo Giorgio Agamben de la problemática hegeliana-kojeviana del fin de la historia y su teoría del sujeto.
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