- Title Pages
- Preface
- Political Theologies
- Introduction
- The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Church, State, Resistance
- Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta
- The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation
- On the Names of God
- The Permanence of the Theologico-political?
- Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt
- Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”
- From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of War
- Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture
- On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion
- Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic
- Bush's God Talk
- Pluralism and Faith
- Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians
- Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship
- Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and the Image of Reason
- Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason
- Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience
- Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God
- Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime?
- The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed
- How to Recognize a Muslim When You See One: Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion
- Laïcité, or the Politics of Republican Secularism
- Trying to Understand French Secularism
- Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands
- Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005 Multatuli Lecture
- Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis' Group
- Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics
- The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Automatic Theologies Surrealism and the Politics of Equality
- Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity
- Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to Be Post-Christians!
- The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Chapter:
- (p.602) The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Source:
- Political Theologies
- Author(s):
Jane Bennett
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
This chapter argues that one of the consequences of globalization has been the expansion of the categories with whose help we situate (human) agency. References to “earth”, “empire”, and “networks” are legion, but this chapter proposes the Deleuzian term “assemblage” as a better way of analyzing the present whole and its style of structuration. The advantage of introducing this ad hoc and living grouping, a decentralized web, of sorts, is that it allows us to conceptualize the ways in which, at present, there are increasing interactions between the human and the nonhuman, animal and vegetal life, material nature and technology. In other words, reference to the assemblage enables one to understand the theoretical and empirical inadequacy of human-centered notions of agency. To illustrate this concept, the chapter cites the electric power grid and the ways in which analysts described the power blackout that struck North America in 2003. It asks how recognition of the nonhuman and non-individuated dimensions of agency alters established notions of moral responsibility and political accountability.
Keywords: assemblage, power blackout, agency, moral responsibility, political accountability, material nature, technology, electric power grid, North America
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Political Theologies
- Introduction
- The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Church, State, Resistance
- Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta
- The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation
- On the Names of God
- The Permanence of the Theologico-political?
- Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt
- Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”
- From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of War
- Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture
- On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion
- Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic
- Bush's God Talk
- Pluralism and Faith
- Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians
- Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship
- Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and the Image of Reason
- Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason
- Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience
- Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God
- Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime?
- The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed
- How to Recognize a Muslim When You See One: Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion
- Laïcité, or the Politics of Republican Secularism
- Trying to Understand French Secularism
- Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands
- Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005 Multatuli Lecture
- Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis' Group
- Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics
- The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Automatic Theologies Surrealism and the Politics of Equality
- Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity
- Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to Be Post-Christians!
- The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments
