12 results
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2. "Towards an Assemblage Theory of Scapegoat Sacrifices, Pharmacotic Violence, and Fascism".
- Author
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George, Larry
- Abstract
This paper explores how the apotropaic ancient Greek pharmakos scapegoat ritual, and a more general type of apotropaic scapegoating violence that I call 'pharmacotic violence' function respectively as the Deleuzian 'diagram' (or 'abstract machine') and the 'machinic assemblage' (or 'concrete machine') of fascism, and indeed of all forms of what I call 'pharmacotic' political assemblages. Interacting with one another over time, such pharmacotic political assemblages draw out or catalyze in each other the kinds of internal political dynamics and reinforce the sorts of political structures and institutions that encourage the perpetuation and intensification of apotropaic scapegoating sacrificial violence, eventually addicting those polities to pharmacotic violence. Over time, those polities may form a molecular population of political singularities or entities, each carrying the virtual capacity to stimulate reciprocal pharmacotic scapegoating responses in the others. Specific kinds of catalytic events can trigger the expression of these virtual capacities, producing violent inter-communal or interstate sacrificial scapegoating dynamics that frequently generate higher-scale assemblages or molar aggregates comprised of pharmacotic political assemblages whose relations become locked into mutually reinforcing patterns of displacement, condensation, projection, and demonization, often resulting in actual 'pharmacotic wars.' This paper is a preliminary draft of a section of a book manuscript on the genealogy of pharmacotic violence and pharmacotic war in the West, and more broadly in what I call "Helleno-Abrahamic" political cultures. Included among "Helleno-Abrahamic political cultures" are all those civilizational assemblages whose component elements are substantially influenced by the legacies of both Hellenic political philosophy and political institutions, on the one hand, and Hebraic political monotheism, on the other. Both of these political traditions are explicitly informed by sacrificial scapegoating pharmacotic violence. The pharmacotic influences within the Hellenic tradition can be readily seen in the myths of Iphigenia, the sacrifices at Patroclus' funeral, and the execution of Socrates, as well as in the Ionian Greek pharmakos ritual itself. Pharmacotic themes within Hebraic monotheism (and, by lines of descent, in Christianity and Islam) are clearly present in all of the tales comprising the central narratives of the books of Genesis-Bereshith (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph) and in the narrative of Moses and Aaron in Exodus, the tales of Jephthah, Job, and several of the prophets, among numerous others. The Akedah of Isaac - the Qur'anic Dhabih - and the Levitical Azazel (scapegoat) atonement rite are straightforwardly pharmacotic rituals, and the story of the pharmacotic sacrifice of Jesus (which it was likely informed by Paul's witnessing of - and possibly participation in? - a pharmakos ceremony in Ephesus or another Ionian Greek city) is of course the defining narrative of Christianity. The celebrations of Passover, Easter, and Eid al-Adha, among many other rites of the three Abrahamic monotheisms, commemorate pharmacotic sacrifices. My genealogy of pharmacotic violence and pharmacotic war is conceived as a contribution to what Michel Foucault called "writing the history of the present". I am interested in analyzing those Western cultural practices that have shaped modern individuals as both political objects and subjects - in the present case in such a way as to make them capable of engaging in what I call "pharmacotic wars": organized, large-scale international military conflicts that are structured in important ways like apotropaic pharmacotic scapegoating rituals - and how this potentiality makes both fascism and the microfascist dimensions of liberal democracy possible... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
3. (In)Different Politics: resistance as event and trafficking in women.
- Author
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Aradau, Claudia
- Subjects
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POWER (Social sciences) , *LIFE , *BIOPOLITICS (Sociobiology) , *SOCIOLOGY , *POLITICAL science - Abstract
Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopower and its new technologies centred on life and the living lack a clear definition of the concept of life. While Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of biopower has differentiated between two concepts of life, zoe and bios, bare life and politically qualified life, Agamben’s notion of zoe has often been equated with the Foucauldian understanding of life. This paper will show that the conflation of life and bare life, the zone of indistinction they enter erases the space for political action, for processes of re-subjectivation. To this end it draws on a Deleuzian understanding of life and confronts it with Foucault’s and Agamben’s. Deleuze introduces a different notion from both Agamben’s zoe and Foucault’s life, that of a life or ‘impersonal life’, life which cannot be attributed to a subject, which only exists in a matrix of desubjectivation. The challenge of abject life is that of its status as excluded, downcast life and therefore cannot be based on a biopolitics of impersonal life. In this understanding of life, biopolitics needs to be exposed as desubjectivating, as erasing political differences and short-circuiting political claims on the status of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
4. Difference and Repetition in the Politics of International Resistance.
- Author
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Henry, Nicholas
- Abstract
This paper develops a micro-political account of transnational social movements based on concepts of generative difference and synthetic repetition, drawn from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. This approach complements existing macro-political theories of transnational social movements, while opening up new approaches to qualitative empirical research. To illustrate the potential of micro-political analysis, the concepts of generative difference and synthetic repetition are applied to a case study drawn from the ethnographic work of David Graeber on the participation of New York City activists in the organising of protests against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec in 2001. The operation of difference and repetition is considered in three areas of movement activity: direct action, consensus decision-making and networking. The concepts of difference and repetition are used to show how the organisational forms and action repertoires of transnational activism emerge out of micro-political interactions at the grassroots of movements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
5. Visualising insurantial imaginaries: notes on the study of insurance, security and immanent life.
- Author
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Lobo-Guerrero, Luis
- Subjects
- *
INSURANCE , *LIFESTYLES , *SECURITY (Psychology) , *RISK assessment , *RISK management in business , *BIOPOLITICS (Sociobiology) - Abstract
Insurance is intrinsically linked to the security of lifestyles in advanced liberal economies. As a technology of security, insurance operates economies of protection that also instantiate moral economies reflected in the behaviour of individuals and collectivities. The analysis of such economies, through risk assessments and risk management, has been locked into 'valuations' of security: the 'better' the lifestyle, the 'higher' the need for protection. Insurance relations, however, can be explored to understand the deeper problematic of security and 'life'. It is suggested in this paper, following Deleuze, that insurance be approached as an empirical site from which to understand the insurantial imaginaries that produce liberal securit(ies). It is proposed that such imaginaries, as the sites where immanent life as pluripotential and heterogeneous is strategised into biopolitics, are accessible through a critical understanding of the performative visualities of insurance advertisements. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
6. Circulation of Desire: The Security Governance of the International "Mail-Order Brides" Industry.
- Author
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D'Aoust, Anne-Marie
- Subjects
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CITIZENSHIP , *MAIL order brides , *INTERNET & women , *INTERNATIONAL security , *EMIGRATION & immigration , *GLOBALIZATION - Abstract
As a North-South phenomenon that involves claims of citizenship and sustains significant economic networks through migration patterns, the "mail-order brides" industry counts more than 3,000 agencies worldwide. It can be defined as 1) being based on introducing men and women from different countries through agencies specialized in placing personal ads about potential wives in catalogues or on the Internet; 2) making profit out of such introduction services; and 3) aiming at creating an intercultural marriage, with the objective of enabling the woman to immigrate. In this exploratory paper, I argue that "mail-order brides" are part of a security governance of migration. Relying on Foucault's concept of governmentality and Deleuze and Guattari's politics of desire, I develop the idea that security anxieties about this largely unregulated lucrative industry stem not so much out of concern for the freedom of the women being involved, but from the fear that it signals a "privatization of citizenship," namely the uncontrolled sale of marriage for immigration and citizenship benefits. Rather than following a real transnational "free market of love," the mail-order brides industry plays on various desires directly intertwined with globalisation flows and imaginings about the nation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2009
7. Dr. Strangevalue, or: how we (un)learn to love capital.
- Author
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Mueller, Tadzio
- Subjects
- *
CAPITALISM , *POWER (Social sciences) , *NEOLIBERALISM , *HEGEMONY - Abstract
This paper starts out with a simple question: how do we fight capital?, thinking this question from within my own location in European and transnational anticapitalist networks.Contemporary capital, we are frequently reminded, operates without a place of power or visible centre. In this paper, however, I will argue that this absence of a place of power does not suggest that capital lacks a centre, operating simply as an immanent phenomenon distributed entirely in the social field. Rather, I will show that the awesome powers of capital to, first, conjugate vast networks of flows in and through new enclosures, and second, to generate our consent to this process of enclosure and subjugation of life, rest on its placeless centre that is the value form.My paper will seek to both develop new theoretical proposals concerning the possibilities of constructing a 'decentred counterhegemony' (a world into which fit many worlds), and to further these theoretical discussions through inclusion of materials from radical ethnographies and engaged research in movement practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
8. Forget Kant: Foucault on critique, actuality and the self.
- Author
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Repo, Jemima
- Abstract
Foucault is often accused for an alleged lack of an ethical framework. His defenders have often retorted with a referral to his texts on Kant written in the late 1970s and early 1980s, whereby he often becomes posited as a 'hidden humanist'. This paper first, steps back from this discussion and reassesses these texts through Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche to argue that Foucault was 'unlearning' Kant to make way for a discussion about critique, actuality and the self. Foucault's work on Kant can be seen as related to his project of the problematisation of the self carried out in volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality. What we end up with is Foucault's consideration of the self as possibly the only certain point of resistance to political power. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
9. Discourse, Deleuze, Action.
- Author
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Lenco, Peter
- Subjects
- *
METAPHYSICS , *SOCIAL sciences , *POWER (Social sciences) , *COMMUNICATION - Abstract
The two fundamental elements that make up Foucault's notion of a dispositif are action and discourse. With these two basic concepts he seeks to undermine centuries of ontological formulation characterized by a representational metaphysics. Of course, this move, with its erasure of fixity, totality, and subject-object distinction, has numerable and critical consequences for the social sciences and all investigations of human enterprise. The fallout of this tumultuous formulation is Foucault's concept of power; a concept which is also the target of his detractors, the argument being that raising power to virtually the ultimate stuff of human action and thought emasculates it to the point of saying nothing. If everything is power than power is nothing.Today as the social sciences in general and IR in particular struggle with the wide and very loose usages of the concept of discourse, I would like to inject the thought of Gilles Deleuze in order to shed some light on and perhaps salvage to a certain extent the basic tenor of Foucault's offering. By prioritising Deleuze's agencements (or 'assemblages', 'apparatus', or sometimes simply 'arrangements') over dispositifs, this paper will illustrate what discourse as a concept can do for our thinking of social formulation and human (and non-human) activity. In this view, discourse is not communication or mere expression, but forms, along with activity, part of an immanent field defined soley by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, and flows. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
10. Along-side Global Political Economy-a rhizome of informal finance.
- Author
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Vlcek, William
- Subjects
- *
INTERNATIONAL finance , *WAR on Terrorism, 2001-2009 , *TERRORISM financing , *INTERNATIONAL relations - Abstract
One contemporary issue confronting global finance is the nature and extent of its participation in and contribution to a 'global war on terror'. To date the activity on this issue involves a variety of methods to 'combat the financing of terrorism', both by increasing the surveillance of financial transactions, and by regulating heretofore unregulated methods of financial exchange. The conventional analysis on this latter aspect includes disparaging allusions to underground banking, the black economy and illegal currency exchanges. It is a limited theoretical perspective of informal value transfer networks that reproduces the legitimacy of Western finance, while ignoring/concealing the rich historical legacy and efficacy of the methods under attack. This paper offers a conceptualisation of hawala as a rhizome, using the term as described by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. It argues that the ability to reconstitute itself transforms them from being a 'network' into a rhizome, and consequently the conventional view of the informal value transfer network fails to appreciate the crucial difference this makes for attempts at control and regulation. Consequently, the activity the state is seeking to control will merely be displaced, to reform and reconstitute itself yet again. To ground this argument in the present condition of the global political economy the specific example considered is al Barakaat, a transnational firm that fell victim to the global war on terror in late 2001. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
11. Fascism, Art and Historical (Im)Possibility.
- Author
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Lowe, S.
- Abstract
Notes on fascism can be found in Deleuze's work on literature. There he proposes literary or more broadly artistic production as a bulwark. Here, art-making forecloses history or historical study (so necessary in detecting fascism). The im/possibility of history or historical study leads to a bind. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2010
12. Discerning the Unconscious of Capitalist Sovereignty.
- Author
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Gammon, Earl
- Subjects
- *
POLITICAL economic analysis , *PSYCHOANALYSIS , *CAPITALISM , *SOVEREIGNTY , *SOCIAL reproduction - Abstract
One of the most interesting developments of Deleuze and Guattari's collaboration was their programme of schizoanalysis. With this programme, they attempted to elucidate the libidinal economy underpinning modern capitalist political economy, pointing to the historically unique manifestation of oedipal neuroses and perversions that have arisen as a consequence of the specific configuration of desire under capitalist social relations.Schizoanalysis, while recognizing the short-comings of Freud's work, particularly the failure of psychoanalysis to historicise the Oedipus complex that Deleuze and Guattari claim was a product of the rise of the capitalist state, builds upon Freud's recognition of the social constitution of the unconscious. Their programme aims to reveal the workings of 'an unconscious libidinal investment of sociohistorical production, distinct from the conscious investments coexisting with it.' This essay, drawing on schizoanalysis, pursues an understanding of the reproduction of the unique configuration of capitalist sovereignty, based on the separation of public and private spheres in social production. Similar to Deleuze and Guattari, I conclude that only by understanding the historical particularity of the oedipalised subject, a subject that Freud mistakenly theorised to be a universal configuration of desire, can we understand the reproduction and expansion of capitalist sovereignty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2007
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