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This book examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a “natural” catastrophe when all of our technologies nuclear energy, power supply, water supply are necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? The book examines these questions and more. Included in this edition are two interviews.

Mass incarceration is one of the most pressing ethical and political issues of our time. In this volume, philosophers join activists and those incarcerated on death row to grapple with contemporary U.S. punishment practices and draw out critiques around questions of power, identity, justice, and ethical responsibility. The United States incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other country in the world. A disproportionate number of these prisoners are people of color, and, today, a black man has a greater chance of going to prison than to college. The United States is the only Western democracy to retain the death penalty, even after decades of scholarship, statistics, and even legal decisions have depicted a deeply flawed system structured by racism and class oppression. Motivated by a conviction that mass incarceration and state execution are among the most important ethical and political problems of our time, the chapters critique, and envision, alternatives to the injustices of the U.S. prison system, with recourse to deconstruction, phenomenology, critical race theory, feminism, queer theory, and disability studies. The resulting collection contributes to a growing intellectual and political resistance to the apparent inevitability of incarceration and state execution as responses to crime and to social inequalities. It addresses both philosophers and activists who seek intellectual resources to contest the injustices of punishment in the United States.

This volume represents the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to Jacques Derrida's Death Penalty Seminars, conducted from 1999 to 2001. The volume includes essays from a range of scholars working in philosophy, law, Francophone studies, and comparative literature, including established Derridians, activist scholars, and emerging scholars. These essays attempt to elucidate and expand upon Derrida's deconstruction of the theologico-political logic of the death penalty in order to construct a new form of abolitionism, one not rooted in the problematic logics of sovereign power. These essays provide remarkable insight into Derrida’s ethical and political projects; this volume will not only explore the implications of Derrida’s thought on capital punishment and mass incarceration, but will also help to further elucidate the philosophical groundwork for his later deconstructions of sovereign power and the human/animal divide. Because Derrida is deconstructing the logic of the death penalty, rather than the death penalty itself, his seminars will prove useful to scholars and activists opposing all forms of state sanctioned killing. In compiling this volume, our goals were twofold: first, to make a case for Derrida's continuing importance in debates on capital punishment, mass incarceration, and police brutality, and second, to construct a new, versatile abolitionism, one capable of confronting all forms the death penalty might take.

This book investigates the theme and tropes of betrayal and treason in Asian American and Chicano/Latino literary and cultural narratives. In considering betrayal from an ethical perspective, one grounded in the theories of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, the book argues that the minority subject is obligated in a primary, preontological, and irrecusable relation of responsibility to the Other. Episodes of betrayal and treason allegorize the position of this subject, beholden to the many others who embody the alterity of existence and whose demands upon the subject result in transgressions of intimacy and loyalty. In this first major comparative study of narratives by and about Asian Americans and Latinos, the book considers writings by Frank Chin, Gish Jen, Chang-rae Lee, Eric Liu, Américo Paredes, and Richard Rodriguez, as well as narratives about the persecution of Wen Ho Lee and the rescue and return of Elián González. By addressing the conflicts at the heart of filiality, the public dimensions of language in the constitution of minority “community,” and the mercenary mobilizations of “model minority” status, this book seriously engages the challenges of conducting ethnic and critical race studies based on the uncompromising and unromantic ideas of justice, reciprocity, and ethical society.

The central thesis of this book is that Michel Foucault’s account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a framework within which ethics becomes possible. Tracing the evolution of Foucault’s analysis of power from his early articulations of disciplinary power to his theorizations of biopower and governmentality, the book shows how Foucault’s ethical project emerged through two interwoven trajectories: analysis of classical practices of the care of the self, and engaged practice in and reflection upon the limits of sexuality and the development of friendship in gay communities. These strands of experience and inquiry allowed Foucault to develop contrasting yet interwoven aspects of his ethics; they also underscored how ethical practice emerges within and from contexts of power relations. The gay community’s response to AIDS and its parallels with the feminist ethics of care serve to illustrate the resources of a Foucauldian ethic—a fundamentally critical attitude, with substantive (but revisable) values and norms grounded in a practice of freedom.

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with “noble savages,” and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade and so used “slavery” and “freedom” callously. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a “fugitive” perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau’s political theory. Rather than tracing Rousseau’s arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in Rousseau’s Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Rousseauian political freedom cannot be understood without locating Rousseau’s figures of savages and slaves on the frontier of European expansion and colonization and in the Enlightenment reception of Stoic and Epicurean ideas on slavery and natural humanity. By placing empire front and center, Fugitive Rousseau thus shows how Rousseau’s work contributes to an international political theory and is thus not merely a theory of civic obligation and consent. Klausen critically examines Rousseau’s arguments on cosmopolitanism and nativism, developed in response to threats to freedom posed by European mobility and commerce, and pushes the cosmopolitan and nativist projects to their logical conclusions to reveal their limitations. Fugitive Rousseau then reconstructs an alternative Rousseauian conception, a fugitivefreedom, whereby a people constitutes itself, and affirms its freedom, in flight from domination.

This book traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work to the present, showing how consistently and closely Agamben takes up (critically, sympathetically, polemically – and very often implicitly) the work of Jacques Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor. At its most fundamental level, Agamben's thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book, however, complicates and expands that constellation by showing that any understanding of Agamben that does not take his relation to Derrida into account remains incomplete. Divided into two roughly chronological parts, the book begins with a section titled “First Principles” that examines the development of Agamben's key concepts – infancy, Voice, potentiality – from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and traces the way these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts in Derrida's work. The second part, titled “Strategy without Finality or Means without End,” examines the political turn in Agamben's and Derrida's thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their crucial investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

This volume focuses on the relation that Foucault established between the ideas of biopower and biopolitics and the studies of governmentality in his last Courses at the Collège de France and in his occasional writings of this period. The essays in this volume adopt and contribute to Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics as a guiding thread to understand why liberalism and neoliberalism is a “government of life.” The essays in this collection, read as a whole, suggest that the linkage between governmentality, understood as a “conduct of conduct,” and biopolitics, understood as power over biological life, is fruitfully illuminated by considering the idea of a “normative order”: a way to regiment and govern the lives of people that brings together the religious as well as the economic dimensions of social order. All the chapters address the relationship between governmentality and biopolitics, but they do so from a variety of perspectives: some emphasize the problem of security; others the problem of managing the life of populations; others focus on the normative order of neoliberalism; still others address the way in which Foucault returns to ancient Greek philosophy and Christian and Islamic religion to understand this relationship.

The Ideology of Hatred advances a new socio-psychoanalytical framework for understanding the politics of national hatred as a discourse which characterizes today's many national, ethnic and religious conflicts by interrogating the unconscious within national discourse. It opens new and timely venues for thinking about the paradoxes of love and hate, while raising questions of social attachment and otherness. The book offers a critique of hatred as an ideological apparatus of power that operates within discourse as a defence strategy. A key term in The Ideology of Hatred is the "political unconscious," a concept signifying the transformation of the unthinkable into a language that is not itself. Hence, the book suggests that at the heart of all national conflicts lies a riddle: the enigma of desire. What this suggests is that untying and recognizing relations of intimacy and dependency can, under certain circumstances, change the discourse of hatred into relations of peace and even friendship.

From easy money to greed, there is no shortage of explanations for the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Some even deny it is a crisis, arguing that the Great Recession is just one of the many busts that are inevitable in the boom and bust cycle that plagues capitalist economies. Yet the claim that the financial crisis is just part of capitalism is an evasion that refuses to make judgments about the individual and collective actions that helped make this particular crisis possible. This book brings together philosophers, businessmen, economists, political theorists, and historians to ask after the cultural and intellectual transformations that underlie this particular crisis. Grounded in the thinking of Hannah Arendt, the essays touch upon Max Weber, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, and Michel Foucault. Some essays trace the rise of economic thinking and the decline of political judgment. Others explore how Keynesian economics is either a cause or a cure of the financial crisis. And still others ask pointed questions about contemporary business practices and the culture of financial capitalism. As a whole, the volume raises fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the global financial crisis.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory—including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan—do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy. Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends that political progressives should embody Kantian courage—a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the spaceof testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West.

Killing Times starts from the deceptively simple observation— made by Jacques Derrida—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time, preempting our normal experience of not knowing when we will die. The book examines more broadly what constitutes mortal temporality and how the “machinery of death” exploits and perverts time. It first examines Eighth Amendment challenges to the death penalty in the U.S, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of execution by firing squad and the electric chair to current cases involving lethal injection. Although defining the instant of death emerges as an insoluble problem, all the machines of execution of the post-Enlightenment period presume to appropriate and control that instant, ostensibly in service of a humane death penalty. That comes into particular focus with the guillotine, introduced in France in 1791–92, at the same moment as the American Bill of Rights. Later chapters analyze how the instant of the death penalty works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time and how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated in various ways. The book’s emphasis on time then allows it to expand the sense of the death penalty into suicide bombing, where the terrorist seeks to bypass judicial process with a simultaneous crime and “punishment”; into targeted killing by drone, where the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and disappear into the black hole of secrecy; and into narrative and fictive spaces of crime, court proceedings, and punishment.

This book grapples with fundamental questions regarding what type of revolution took place in South Africa over a more than 50 year long struggle. Each chapter grapples with the questions related to the idea that the revolution in South Africa was a substantive revolution, because of its insistence on the establishment of a democratic and constitutional state that recognized the thoroughgoing wrongs of the colonial and apartheid past.

From prehistoric stone tools to machines to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of production, coming from diverse histories, enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware. Things are the repositories of ideas, emotions, and symbols whose meaning we often do not understand. The more we are able to recover objects in their wealth of meanings and to integrate them into our mental and emotional horizons, the broader and deeper our world becomes. Philosophy and art can show us the way. In an unexpected but coherent journey that includes the visions of classic philosophers from Aristotle to Husserl and from Hegel to Heidegger along with the analysis of works of art, this book addresses issues such as fetishism, the memory of things, the emergence of department stores, consumerism, nostalgia for the past, the self-portraits of Rembrandt, and the still lifes of the Netherlandish painters of the seventeenth century.

For Jacques Derrida, the notions and experiences of “community,” “living,” “together” never ceased to harbor radical interrogations. The often anguished question of how to “live together” moved Derrida throughout his oeuvre, animating his sustained reflection on hospitality, friendship, responsibility, justice, forgiving, mourning as well as his interventions as an outspoken critic of South Africa's Apartheid, the Israel/Palestine conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and the so-called war on terror. The paradoxes, impossibilities and singular chances that haunt the necessity of “living together” are evoked in Derrida's essay “Avowing - The Impossible: ‘Returns,’ Repentance and Reconciliation” around which this collection is gathered. Written by scholars in literary criticism, philosophy, legal studies, religious studies, middle-eastern studies and sociology working in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, the essays in this volume tackle issues such as the responsibilities and fragility of democracy, the pitfalls of decreed reconciliation, the re-legitimization of torture in the war on terror, the connections between Orientalism, Semitism and anti-Semitism, the de-localizing dynamics of globalization, crimes against humanity and nationalism, politics as the art not of the possible but of the impossible. In some of the essays, Derrida is read with regard to areas of intense political conflict (India, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, Turkey, the US). Others consider the role of the auto-biographical and of the affective dimension of avowal and mourning. All of them engage in intense conversations with Derrida's text, and in responses of responsibility.

This book offers a lyrical, philosophical meditation on the global state of endless war and the violence inflicted by the imperial need to claim victory. It discusses the rise of the police state as linked, for example, to U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to China's occupation of Tibet, examining legacies of earlier campaigns and the residual effects of the war on terror. The book also takes up the shifting dynamics of peoples' resistance to acts of militarism and surveillance as well as social media and its capacity to inform and mobilize citizens around the world. At once an engaging treatise and a creative gesture, the book probes the physical and psychic conditions of the world and shows us a society that is profoundly heartsick. Taking up with those who march both as and for the oppressed—who walk with the disappeared to help carry them forward—the text engages the spiritual and affective dimensions of a civilization organized around the rubrics of nonstop governmental subjugation, economic austerity, and highly technologized military conflict. In doing so, it clears a path for us to walk upon. Along with our every step, the world of the disappeared lives on.

This book explores the possibilities for a genuinely radical critique of globalized culture and politics—at a time when intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike struggle to understand the configuration of the contemporary world. This book seeks to unsettle a naturalized and commonsensical assumption: that democracy and the economic market must be viewed as either united or at odds. Against both neoliberalists and cultural pluralists, the book argues that the state is not yielding to the market, but that the universe now turns on a “duopoly” between statist and global forms, one that generates not only economic and cultural sites but also ways of knowing, a postdemocratic episteme. Touching upon current issues such as terrorism, human rights, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the notion of the “people”, delving into the idea of biopolitics, and investigating the essential relation between language and political praxis, the book engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others.

This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides a systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole. The book argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. The book provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, this book gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. This book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics.

This book traces to Karl Marx's earliest writings on the Epicurean tradition, a subterranean, Lucretian practice that this book calls “necrophilological translation.” “Translation” here is extensively used and covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods, but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what counts as translation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an “object” is; “matter;” “value;” “sovereignty;” “mediation;” and “number.” In this book, a materialism “of the encounter,” as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory; the development of so-called divisible sovereignty in post-Schmittian political philosophy; Meillassoux's critique of correlationism; the resurgence of humanism in object-oriented-ontologies; and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. The book addresses Marx through Lucretius; through Spinoza's marranismo; through his translators. Freud's account of the agency of the unconscious, through Schiller's Don Karlos; Adorno's exilic antihumanism, against Said's cosmopolitan humanism; the absolutization of what is not-one, in Badiou, Meillassoux, and Freud through Donne and Neruda.

Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends–these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. This book seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both everyday and academic—and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format “What is X?” and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage, intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly, attempts to re-open the question “What is political thinking?” Each is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the political as such may be understood as a property, a field of interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a kind of event. This book does not stand upon a decided concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to the question “What is the political?” by submitting the question to a field of plural contention.