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Giorgio Agamben's critical stance on biopolitics and sovereignty is primarily concerned with the problem of the "state of exception" as the paradigm of contemporary Western politics. According to Agamben, human life has been reduced to a "bare life" by a state of exception founded on the relation between the law and sovereignty. In response, Agamben's redemptive politics is a counterargument to the contemporary nihilistic-exceptional politics and capitalism of spectacle. This "coming politics" is founded on some basic ideas such as "playing with the law," "profanation," "gesture," "free use" and finally "form-of-life." This essay will first explain the role of these ideas in Agamben's coming politics, then, it will demonstrate that all these ideas (or political strategies) are based on a deep belief in the power of thought. Therefore, it seems fair to assert that Agamben's coming politics is a kind of theoretical or philosophical politics and its hero or subject could be called "philosophers." It will be argued that from a political standpoint, this philosophical politics not only cannot be redemptive but might also result in a form of political passivity and the maintenance of the current political order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, which is an analysis of Kacper Bartczak’s poetry collection Pokarm suweren [Food Sovereign], presents the characteristics of the title figures (food and sovereignty), their interdependence and their significance for the issues addressed by the poet. The interpretation is built against the background of the concept of sovereignty as understood by Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Readings of individual poems aim to demonstrate that Bartczak’s lyrical subjects, in the course of experience, attempt to approach a (neo)vitalism tailored to their world-feeling, and thus initiate the objective imperative of the power of biology, deriving this necessity from the idiomatically seen poetic language – a source of order located outside the system of technopolitics and arbitrary law, but deeply connected to life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary narration of The Rooster Bar novel is about the trapped life of the three characters in a scholarship program for poor people. In the story, the D.C. offered the United States of America scholarship program. The scholarship requires the characters to pay all the loans after they graduate. Thus, these characters could only have one specific scholarship program for poor people. This study analyzed the strategy of sovereignty in retaining the homo sacer subjects and the forms of resistance from three characters to escape from the retention as the homo sacer group. This research methodology is descriptive and qualitative by taking note of the essential data related to the formal objects and analyzing them. The novel showed that the minor and poor community, especially students, were allocated into one zone which in a high educational institution to fulfill the scholarship scheme as the realization of homo sacer retention. This situation reduces the poor student from the rights and protection in the legal order. The retention is based on a state of exception, sovereignty, and apparatus as the unity to keep the characters failed to flee from the homo sacer status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accurate illustration of the contemporary refugee subject has presented an unprecedented theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenge to all fields of academic research. Seeking for alternative philosophical modalities capable of liberating refugee representation from the suffocating threat–victim bipolarity, this article critically investigates Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler’s theoretical perspectives on refugee subjectivity. Section 1 systematises the dominant tropes of refugee representation either as dehumanised threats or depoliticised victims. Section 2 introduces the readers to Giorgio Agamben’s emblematic homo sacer as a potentially fertile reconceptualisation of refugee subjectivity. In this context, Judith Butler’s critique on the Agambenian bare life is presented in two core pillars. Following one Butlerian claim, we trace the Agambenian inadequacy to successfully overcome the contemporary threat–victim mode of refugee representation in the absence of an empowering theoretical account of the homo sacer’s agentic and resisting capacities. In Section 4, we explore Judith Butler’s main argument regarding the constitutively political character of vulnerable refugee existence. By designating the Butlerian constellation of vulnerability and agency as an invigorating alternative perspective on modern refugee representation, we finally argue that Butler’s epistemological framework provides a more agonistic and nuanced theorisation of refugee subjectivity than Agamben.

This article compares two theoretical tools popular among migration researchers: the concept of "bare life" offered by Giorgio Agamben, and the conceptualization of border practices and security in critical border and security studies. The paper presents how Agambenian theory seems to lack proper analysis of power, which can be provided by critical theory. Also, Agamben's insufficient substantiation of resistance to exclusion should be supported by the normative critique offered by critical theorists of security. This enables proper examination of the humanitarian crisis provoked by both the Belarusian and Polish states' bordering practices in 2021 and 2022. In result, an analysis of Polish and Belarusian bordering practices through this theoretical lens suggests how the critical approach to borders and security may be useful in depicting precisely the interplay of power within a sovereign state and in researching possibilities of resistance against practices of exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anonymously authored Mucedorus was the most popular printed play-text in Renaissance England. A critical consensus has condemned the play as a vulgar romance with conservative overtones. Through a close reading of the banished shepherd-prince and the cannibalistic outlaw-king, Bremo, I argue that the play instead stages a disturbing encounter between two figures of sovereign exclusion, whose differences collapse into imitation. This mirroring conflict participates within the play's provocative depiction of other dissolving antitheses: between order and chaos, civilisation and animality, reason and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Giorgio Agamben gives us two ways to conceive of sovereign power: according to the exception and according to the example. He famously follows the former in his Homo Sacer project, but I develop and follow the latter, which I find present in Plato's Laws. There, Plato gives us a view of sovereignty in its constitutional moment, showing us how constituting and constituted power emerge together from the relationship between law and the communal narrative upon which it rests. This form of sovereignty cannot be expressed according to the state of exception but requires an analysis from the state of example. The figure that emerges here, homo magus , provides the basis for an alternate archaeology of power, one in which sovereignty does not attempt to reduce political subjectivity to "bare life" but rather attempts to reduce political speech to "bare speech." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the 'messianic tone' (Bradley and Fletcher, 2010, p. 3) in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to render the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter's sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a 'European' tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer's anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political theorists continue to be provoked by Giorgio Agamben's disturbing diagnosis that 'bare life' – human life that is excluded from politics yet exposed to sovereign violence – is not a sign of the malfunction of modern politics but rather a revelation of how it actually functions. However, despite the enormous amount of attention this diagnosis has received, there has been relatively little discussion of Agamben's proposed 'cure' for the problem that he diagnoses. In this article, I analyze the three main concepts of Agamben's positive philosophical program – 'infancy,' 'potentiality,' and 'form-of-life' – in order to show how he attempts to subvert the sovereignty of law over life with his idea of a life of habit in which life is sovereign over law. In addition to analyzing these concepts, I engage in an immanent critique of Agamben's philosophy and contrast his vision of politics with those of other influential contemporary political theorists. I find that while Agamben's philosophical program is almost undone by internal difficulties, it still radically challenges current theories of subjectivity, humanity, and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary sovereignty is updated within the field of governmentality, and exercises its power in an extralegal and extrahuman form on certain populations considered dangerous for social security. These practices lead to unlivable lives not only because they are outside the law, but also, and for the same logical reasons, because they are outside the frameworks that define what is human. Guantanamo constitutes the exemplary paradigm of the denial of the legal and ontological status of prisoners whose lives are suspended indefinitely. Among the conclusions drawn from this reflection is that the excess of sovereign power threatens the human life of those sectors considered to be dangerous, as well as community life which becomes reduced to risk, enmity and rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to governmentality studies and state theory by discussing how to understand the centrality and importance of the state from a governmentality perspective. It uses Giorgio Agamben's critique of Michel Foucault's governmentality approach as a point of departure for re-investigating Foucault as a thinker of the state. It focuses on Foucault's notion of the state as a process of 'statification' which emphasizes the state as something constantly produced and reproduced by processes and practices of government, administration and acclamation. As a result of this, the state appears as a given entity which is necessary for the multiplicity of governmental technologies and practices in modern society to function. Only by reference to the state can governmental practices be effective and legitimized. Finally, the article conceptualizes the centrality of the state through Foucault's (preliminary) notions of the state as a 'practico-reflexive prism' and a 'principle of intelligibility'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses recent works by Giorgio Agamben and Eric Santner, who have interpreted Carl Schmitt's ideas in the context of left-wing political theology. The article traces how the fi gure of the undead Muslim recurs in the various philosophers and theologians referred to by these two authors. In this way, it shows how contemporary messianic thinkers unknowingly mourned their 'dead neighbours', traumatic irritants from which a messianic pearl was born. In order for this pearl to glow with a miraculous light (as Agamben and Santner would wish it to), modern thinking must engage in an act of neighbour-love, whereby it embraces the untimely, undead excarnations (disembodiments) of a history of typological damage. Otherwise, these traumatised and traumatising neighbours remain undead, driven by critical theories of sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this article offers a philosophical interpretation of Hong Kong's recent Umbrella Movement and the city's political identity since its 1997 handover to China. With the constitutional principle of 'one country, two systems' it has held since 1997, Hong Kong has existed as an 'inalienable alien' part of China not dissimilar to that of Agamben's political ontology of the homo sacer's 'inclusive exclusion' in the polis. In addition to highlighting how Agamben's politico-ontological notions such as 'exception' and 'inclusive exclusion' can illuminate the events of the Umbrella Movement, this article focuses particularly on the figure of the student, which many have seen as the symbolic face of the protest campaign. Considering how the student may also be regarded as a figure of 'exception', this article argues that the 'exceptional' role of the student highlights the unique sociopolitical as well as pedagogical aspects of the Umbrella Movement. Finally, comparing Hong Kong's 2014 protests to Agamben's philosophical account of the 1989 Tiananmen protests, this article concludes by suggesting that the Umbrella Movement is not simply a one-off event but fundamentally a manifestation of Hong Kong's continuing political existence since 1997. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay situates the execution of Calyphas in 2 Tamburlaine in the context of the gendered disciplinary regimes imposed by Tamburlaine in his quest for global empire. The execution bears a double significance: a father disciplines his son and, simultaneously, a sovereign military commander exercises martial law. In this doubling, the episode fuses a number of related issues in the history of sovereignty, especially key concepts addressed in Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and later taken up by Giorgio Agamben in works such as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. By putting these historical models into dialogue with a revised account of the play's source materials, this essay argues that Marlowe stages the violence embedded in both absolutist and republican models of governance when they are premised on the rigid enforcement of hierarchical disciplinary regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy Derrida in the seminar. In general, these relate to conceptualizing sovereignty and its relationship to the division between human and animal. The second section introduces the criticisms of Agamben, which are articulated initially in terms of the latter’s tendency to declare the origin of ideas and concepts. The third section outlines some central aspects of Agamben’s theory that are pertinent for evaluating Derrida’s criticisms. The fourth section turns to the conceptual and textual basis for the criticisms, which involve a way of thinking history and an interpretation of Aristotle. The final section of the paper extrapolates the implications of Derrida’s criticisms for thinking sovereignty and its future.

This article brings Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity, or sovereign decisionism, into conversation with the work of contemporary political theorist Giorgio Agamben, who argues that sovereign decisionism is the repressed theological foundation of authoritarian governments. As such, the article seeks to accomplish two goals. The first is to show that Sartre’s depiction of sovereign decisionism directly parallels how modern democratic governments conduct themselves during a state of emergency. The second is to show that Sartre’s notion of existential authenticity models, what Agamben calls, secularized theism. Through an ontotheological critique of Sartre’s professed atheism, the article concludes that an existential belief in sovereign decision represses, rather than profanes, the divine origins of authoritarian law. I frame the argument with a reading of Sartre’s 1943 play The Flies, which models the repressed theological underpinnings of Sartre’s theory.

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This article explores the biopolitical dimension of the trial of Jesus in John 18:28–19:16a from the Agambenian perspective of “bare life.” According to Giorgio Agamben, bare life, namely, life at risk of death through sovereign power, operates in the “state of exception.” The state of exception is a state wherein the threshold between the juridical order and anomie, or that between an insider and outsider of the juridical order becomes blurred as a result of a law that is suspended from its effectiveness yet is effective in its suspension. Jesus can be interpreted as a bare life in a zone of absolute undecidability in which both the Jewish and Roman laws simultaneously are operative and ineffectual. More specifically, Jesus is an insider in both the Jewish and Roman worlds on the grounds that he is subject to both the rules of Judaism and the Roman Empire. But at the same time, Jesus is an outsider from both the Jewish and Roman worlds explicitly because his kingship goes beyond both earthly rules (18:36; cf. 8:23; 17:14, 16). Paradoxically, Jesus is simultaneously an insider in and an outsider from each of the Jewish and Roman sovereignties. That is to say, Jesus lives in both of the sovereignties, while at the same time belonging to neither of them. It follows from this that Jesus resides in an in-between zone between insider and outsider. My contention, therefore, is that Jesus is such a liminal character—an unfixed and unfixable character in a zone of uncertainty—that he subverts the sovereign power and hierarchical dualism of the Jewish and Roman worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore the multifaceted relationship between violence, speech and power in the most graphic of Shakespeare's plays, Titus Andronicus. I take my cue from Hannah Arendt's reflections on violence as opposed to power, and as something "incapable of speech," but I read the play through the lens of Giorgio Agamben's notion of sovereignty as the suspension of the law. I consider the dichotomy speech/muteness as an example not only of the dichotomy power/violence (Arendt) but also of the opposition between bios and zoe, that is the difference between a life worth to be included in the political realm and a life understood as the mere condition of being alive, a condition common to human beings and beasts (according to classical philosophy). In Titus Andronicus, these distinctions are blurred, and zoe becomes fully exposed to the sovereign decision. While the image of a mutilated and mute body cannot match Arendt's idea of politics as the combination of speech and action bereft of violence, Agamben has developed the notion of a politics that renders life disposable, mute, bare, and can still be called politics or power, and precisely biopower. From this perspective, I argue, Lavinia and the other characters of Titus Andronicus are the embodiment of the concept of "bare life" as developed by Agamben, and Shakespeare's Rome is a State of exception and of exceptional violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hitherto critics have developed a very articulate sense of howThe Arcades Projectdraws on a psychoanalytic theory of sexuality to reframe a Marxist analysis of commodity culture, as Sigrid Weigel puts it. This essay argues that the issue of sovereign violence, implicit in patriarchy, is a crucial and neglected facet of howThe Arcades Projectframes the ‘erotic phenomena of modernity’, one that emerges most clearly through Benjamin's engagement with the figure of prostitution. If Benjamin, at moments, can imagine his own political awakening as a sexual flight from the bourgeois habitus into the labyrinth of the polis, with the prostitute at its centre, it is a flight that also falters precisely at the moment that it encounters the compromising entanglement of sexuality with those forms of life abandoned by the law. The tensions in Benjamin's work, between autobiography and critique, between prostitution as a figure for a broader sense of objectification and sexuality as a specific site of power that insists on the literal presence of the other's body, point to the anxieties attending his particular version of materialism as it encounters its own foundations in the exclusions fundamental to modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article articulates a concept ofsovereign timeand aims to demonstrate how the checkpoint generates this time. After briefly discussing how the checkpoint system in the West Bank radically alters the tempos of daily life, It then works through the understanding ofmessianic timedeveloped by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben in order to distinguish sovereign time as a unique concept. It argues that the temporalities of the checkpoint correspond to the spatial configurations of these sites, labeling these compound spatio-temporal relationships aschronotopes. The second half of the article examines how the checkpoint functions as a film set where a theological understanding of sovereignty is performed and filmed, and also explores how critical cinema exposes the checkpoint as a location that brings different kinds of chronotopes to crisis. It analyzes scenes at the checkpoint in Gillo Pontecorvo’sThe Battle of Algiers(1966), Tawfiq Saleh’sThe Dupes(1972), Elia Suleiman’sDivine Intervention(2002) and Yoav Shamir’sCheckpoint(2004) in order to show how these films interrupt the sovereign time of the checkpoint and make it audible and visible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an empirical engagement of Giorgio Agamben’s “spatial theory of power.” It explores, through the case-study of civil death in New York, the continuum of exclusion that is capped on one end by homo sacer and the sovereign on the other. I argue that civil death has had a long-running history in America, intimately connected to the expression of sovereign power and its deployment in the penal sphere. I show that despite the longue durée of this disability, and its efficacy as a tool of political and social marginalization, this practice has proved highly unstable for sovereignty and has generated significant resistance in the courts, civil society and prisons themselves. The contested status of civil death, I contend, underscores the dynamic character of resistance to sovereign power and its role in framing the conditions under which state authority can be articulated and maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is concerned with criticisms of Giorgio Agamben's biopolitical theory of sovereignty that are developed by Jacques Derrida in his final seminar titled The Beast and the Sovereign (2009). The implicit interlocutor for much of the seminar is theories of biopolitics. However, when these theories are addressed explicitly, it is through the work of Agamben. The article proceeds first with a brief account of the main issues that preoccupy Derrida in the seminar. In general, these relate to conceptualizing sovereignty and its relationship to the division between human and animal. The second section introduces the criticisms of Agamben, which are articulated initially in terms of the latter's tendency to declare the origin of ideas and concepts. The third section outlines some central aspects of Agamben's theory that are pertinent for evaluating Derrida's criticisms. The fourth section turns to the conceptual and textual basis for the criticisms, which involve a way of thinking history and an interpretation of Aristotle. The final section of the paper extrapolates the implications of Derrida's criticisms for thinking sovereignty and its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the 'messianic turn' in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing on the concept of the katechon as the restraining force that delays the advent of the Antichrist in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians. While Carl Schmitt held the passage on the katechon to ground the Christian doctrine of state power, Giorgio Agamben's reading of Pauline messianism rather posits the 'removal' of the katechon as the pathway for messianic redemption. In our argument, the significance of this text goes beyond the persistence of a vestige of the theological in modern politics. On the contrary, the logic of the katechon only comes into its own under modern nihilism as the resolution of the problem of social order in the absence of the eschatological dimension. The article focuses on the lethal paradox of the logic of the katechon, whereby the function of protection and restraint is converted into violence and anomie, and global political order becomes indistinguishable from global civil war. We conclude by outlining the conditions for suspending the katechonic function in a critical engagement with Agamben's messianic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper asks what makes the periphery or the frontier a prime locus of the “inclusionary exclusion” that is, according to Giorgio Agamben, so constitutive of the state of exception. By applying Agamben’s analytics to the Ogaden – a frontier province of the Ethiopian state – we propose an interpretation of the political history of the Ethiopian Ogaden as a recurrent government by exception that spans the Imperial rule (c. 1890–1974), the socialist dictatorship of the Derg (1974–1991), and the current revolutionary democratic regime led by the Ethiopian Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) (1991–today). Drawing attention to the historical continuities in the exercise of (Ethiopian) state sovereignty in its (Somali) frontier, we offer a genealogy of the violent incorporation of the Ogaden into the Ethiopian body politic. We identify recurring practices of sovereign power by successive Ethiopian regimes that are constitutive of the state of exception, namely a conflation between law and lawlessness, the politics of bare life and an encampment strategy. By doing so, this paper insists on the constitutive importance of land appropriation – Carl Schmitt’s Landnahme – in performances of sovereignty and territorialization at the margins of the postcolonial state. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Although the social sciences have experienced a spatial turn, the philosophy of space pertinent in the work of Carl Schmitt has largely been absent in this agenda. Through critically reviewing Schmitt's theory of space and its subsequent elaboration in the work of Giorgio Agamben, we investigate contested spaces as empirical sites where "spaces of exception" manifest themselves in specific forms of (de-)territorialisation. Looking specifically at the example of state-supported land appropriation in the Somali frontier in Ethiopia and spatial imaginations of ungoverned territories in Afghanistan pertinent in US think tanks, we come to argue that both empirical sites are characterized by a geographical imagination of space, or what Carl Schmitt termed "herrenloses Land" (space without a ruler). "Frontier" and "ungoverned territories" as spatial imaginations and spatial practices (of states, of occupying forces) nevertheless trigger diverging formations of territorialization. While spatial practices are still territorial ("Landnahme") in the case of the (Somali) frontier, spatial imaginations of ungoverned territories legitimate localized, network-based and temporary impositions of control. Theoretically, these different formations of territorialization are reflected in the different conceptualizations of the "state of exception" that Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben propose; thus, while for Schmitt, the state of exception is topographic (containerized in time and space), for Agamben it is topological, and, therefore, it escapes such defined boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article takes Giorgio Agamben’s declaration of his optimism with regard to the possibilities of global political transformation as a point of departure for the inquiry into the affirmative aspects of Agamben’s political thought, frequently overshadowed by his more famous critical claims. We reconstitute three principles grounding Agamben’s optimism that pertain respectively to the total crisis of the contemporary biopolitical apparatuses, the possibility of a radically different form-of-life on the basis of their residue and the minimalist character of this transformation that consists entirely in the subtraction of existence from these apparatuses. While the first two principles are unproblematic in the wider context of Agamben’s work, the third principle introduces the problematic of will that remains highly ambiguous in his philosophy. In the remainder of the article we address this ambiguity in an analysis of Agamben’s reading of Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and conclude that Agamben’s optimism ultimately consists in the affirmation of absolute contingency, beyond both will and necessity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay traces the contradictory nature of sovereignty from its initial statement in Pindar's controversial ode in fr. 169 (Nomos basileus) to its medieval manifestation in the Greek novels surviving from medieval Byzantium, namely, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Drosilla and Charikles, Aristandros and Kallithea, and Hysmine and Hsyminias. To unravel the paradoxical nature of Byzantine kingship in the novels, the author draws on two influential paradigms of sovereignty, Pindar's nomos basileus and Giorgio Agamben's bio-political paradox of homo sacer. The iconography of desire as it emerges in the medieval Greek narratives showcases the repression of a quasi-legitimate sovereign that mirrors Pindar's nomos basileus and Agamben's sovereign exception. Both posit Eros as a formidable ruler, revered and abhorred for his violent interventions, who stands simultaneously within and outside the law. This striking figuration of Eros as tyrannos and basileus is the byproduct of powerful patrons' propagandistic aspirations and the ingenuity of the authors of the novels themselves. In their narrative exploration of passion and sovereignty, Byzantine court writers in twelfth-century Constantinople reconcile the political interests of their patrons with the civic concerns of their times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that Giorgio Agamben employs two, contradictory theories of the state in his works. Earlier works, such as The Coming Community and Means without End, suggest that the state today functions as an aspect of the society of the spectacle where spectacle is the logical extension of the commodity form under late capitalism. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determined character to the state and a determining power to the economic forces of capitalism that conditions particular forms of the state. Later work, such as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and State of Exception, are preoccupied with the logic of juridical sovereignty and the increased frequency of states of emergency. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determining strength to the state under current conditions. Although his earlier work provides a more coherent narrative of how it is possible to move from contemporary society to ideal community, it does not provide the theory of political action necessary to overcome the power of the state he describes when he theorizes the state in Homo Sacer and State of Exception. None of the three possibilities of political action present in his later works provides passage beyond state sovereignty without violating his philosophical commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]