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Administering Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law

Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld (eds)

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, ... More

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, both reception and resistance, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. Contemporary critique is brought to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake.Less

Citizen Subject: Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology

Étienne Balibar

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and ... More

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this book, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as “we” (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucault, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, the book proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a “right to have rights” (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He—or she, because the text is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference—figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding “anthropological differences” that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community. The violence of “civil” bourgeois universality, the text argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness.Less

The Disavowed Community

Jean-Luc Nancy

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy ... More

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)—a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “the inoperative community”—Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community (2014). Unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot’s text, Nancy’s essay addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot’s thinking. These themes and motifs include: their respective readings of Georges Bataille, notably his political writings as well as his appeal to the “community of lovers”; pre- and post-war responses in France to fascism and communism; the relation between community, communitarianism, and being-in-common; the relation between the disenchantment with democracy and “aristocratic anarchism”; readings of Marguerite Duras’s récit, The Malady of Death; references to the Eucharist and Christianity; and a rethinking of politics and the political. In short, the exchange between Blanchot and Nancy opens up a rethinking of community that raises at once questions of affirmation and critique, of avowal and disavowal.Less

Europe and Empire

Massimo Cacciari

Alessandro Carrera (ed.)

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has ever known in the last thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis and “unshakably undecided,” ... More

The European Union and the single currency have given Europe more stability than it has ever known in the last thousand years, yet Europe seems to be in perpetual crisis and “unshakably undecided,” so to speak, when it comes to defining its stand in the world arena. To the Asians, Europe was once the Land of Sunset, the place where exiles took refuge. Many empires had their day in Europe. In the end, however, they all bowed down to the multiplicity of ethnicities, traditions, and civilizations that have shaped the continent. Europe will never be One, but to survive as a union, it will have to become a federation of “islands,” both distinct and connected. Written between 1994 and 2012, the essays included in Europe and Empire hark back to the dawn of Europe in the light of today’s sunset. Drawing freely from Ramon Llull, Nicolaus of Cusa, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Kojève, Hannah Arendt, and María Zambrano, Cacciari questions the juridical structure of the Roman Empire, the destiny of Christianity, and the inevitability of secularization. Cacciari’s assessment of Europe comes down to the advice: Do not resist the sunset, embrace it. Europe will have to “let go” of itself and open up to the very possibility that in a few generations new exiles and an unpredictable cultural hybridism will change (again!) all we know about European legacy. This is hardly happening today, yet the political unity of Europe is still a necessity, no matter how impossible it seems to achieve.Less

The Mandate of Dignity

Drucilla Cornell and Nick Friedman

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of ... More

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin’s discomfort with that document’s enshrinement of “socioeconomic rights,” his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy.Less

Mutant Neoliberalism: Market Rule and Political Rupture

William Callison and Zachary Manfredi (eds)

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Seemingly repudiated by historical events and yet staggering on like an undead cadaver, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie” ideology ... More

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Seemingly repudiated by historical events and yet staggering on like an undead cadaver, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie” ideology following the 2008 financial crisis. After the major political shocks of 2016, the global rise of the far right, and the rebirth of democratic socialist politics, commentators declared “the end of neoliberalism” once again. Yet even as new political forces emerge from decades of neoliberal hegemony, it remains far from certain whether they will sound neoliberalism’s death knell or rather propel new movements within its dynamic development. Mutant Neoliberalism brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism from an array of disciplines—political theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists—to reappraise ongoing transformations within our historical moment. Rethinking the shifting relationship between market rule and political rupture, the authors interrogate the decades of neoliberal governance, policy, and depoliticization that created conditions for thriving reactionary forces, while also investigating how recent trends may challenge, reconfigure, or extend neoliberalism’s reach. Facing the challenges of our dystopic present not only requires moving beyond expectations of neoliberalism’s inevitable death, but also grasping its ongoing mutations across spheres of political, economic, and social life. Mutant Neoliberalism recasts the stakes of contemporary debate, asking us to rethink what we know about neoliberalism in order to reorient critique and resistance within a rapidly changing landscape.Less

On Universals: Constructing and Deconstructing Community

Etienne Balibar

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting ... More

Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.Less

The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil?

Roberto Esposito

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and ... More

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.Less

The Postcolonial Contemporary: Political Imaginaries for the Global Present

Jini Kim Watson and Gary Wilder (eds)

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether ... More

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.Less

Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair

Bonnie Honig

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and ... More

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. This book asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? This book suggests that democracy postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of this book is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. The book attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. The book underlines the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.Less

Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism

Andrew Dilts

Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, gives a theoretical and historical account of the pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on ... More

Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism, gives a theoretical and historical account of the pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and post-colonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into 19th and 20th state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in post-slavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern “American” penal system, shows the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate: punishment and citizenship. It reveals the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system, and at the same time, the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise. Felon disenfranchisement is shown to be a symptomatic marker of the deep tension and interdependence that persists in democratic politics between who is considered a member of the polity and how that polity punishes persons who violate its laws. While these connections are seldom deployed openly in current debates about suffrage or criminal justice, the book shows how white supremacy, a perniciously quiet yet deeply violent political system, continues to operate through contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.Less

Redeemer Nation In the Interregnum: An Untimely Meditation on the American Vocation

William V. Spanos

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum interrogates the polyvalent role that American exceptionalism continues to play after 9/11. Whereas American exceptionalism is often construed as a discredited Cold ... More

Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum interrogates the polyvalent role that American exceptionalism continues to play after 9/11. Whereas American exceptionalism is often construed as a discredited Cold War–era belief structure, Spanos persuasively demonstrates how it operationalizes an apparatus of biopolitical capture that saturates the American body politic down to its capillaries. The exceptionalism that Redeemer Nation in the Interregnum renders starkly visible is not a corrigible ideological screen. It is a deeply structured ethos that functions simultaneously on ontological, moral, economic, racial, gendered, and political registers as the American Calling. Precisely by refusing to answer the American Calling, by rendering inoperative (in Agamben’s sense) its covenantal summons, Spanos enables us to imagine an alternative America. At once timely and personal, Spanos’s meditation acknowledges the priority of being. He emphasizes the dignity not simply of humanity but of all phenomena on the continuum of being, “the groundless ground of any political formation that would claim the name of democracy.”Less

Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition

J. Paul Narkunas

Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and ... More

Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an ‘ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of “market humans,” the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human. Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.Less

Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy

Dimitris Vardoulakis

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the ... More

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.Less

Thinking with Balibar: A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice

Ann Laura Stoler, Stathis Gourgouris, and Jacques Lezra (eds)

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, ... More

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.Less

Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought

Roberto Esposito

This book is about the relationship between theology and politics. In the late stages of a debate that has spanned the entire twentieth century, the ultimate significance of the notion of “political ... More

This book is about the relationship between theology and politics. In the late stages of a debate that has spanned the entire twentieth century, the ultimate significance of the notion of “political theology” continues to elude us. Despite our efforts to move beyond it, we still remain confined within its horizons. The reason lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event, but the hub around which the machinery of Western civilization has been turning for more than two thousand years. At its center is the articulation where universalism and exclusion, unity and separation, meet. All the philosophical and political categories that we employ, beginning with the dispositif of the person, Roman and Christian in origin, still mirror this exclusionary device. The text analyzes the conceptions of philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, Kant, and Hegel through this lens. The possibility of moving past political theology—which is the core task of contemporary philosophy—demands a radical conversion of our conceptual lexicon. Only once we have restored thought to its proper “place”—relative not to the single individual, but the human species—will we be able to escape the machine that has imprisoned our lives for far too long.Less