Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item Humans among the Other Animals: Planetarity, Responsibility, and Fiction in Disgrace and Wolf Totem(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Duncan McColl ChesneyThis paper stages readings of several fictional and non-fictional explorations of the relation of man and animal, of limits, obligations, and sympathy, as well as larger ecological questions around creatureliness and planetarity. I argue for a reassessment, via Agamben’s by now familiar gloss on Heidegger’s discussion of the animal, of an ineradicable creatureliness internal to the human, and then show what coming to terms with this means more broadly in ethical life. Finally, I insist on the role of fiction in the training of the imagination, a priming for the sort of ethical experience essential to good or right life.Item Zones: Beyond the Logic of Exception?(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Brett NeilsonOver the past five decades the proliferation of economic zones has been crucial to the emergence of Asian economic power. With historical precedents in ancient free ports, pirate enclaves, and colonial concessions, zones have become crucial spaces of labor and production. They are sites in which globalized forms of capital and logistics interact with populations and administrative bodies to augment the conditions for profit-making and accumulation. How are we to understand the political and legal constitution of zones? In an important sense they are spaces of exception since states create them by sectioning off locations in which foreign investors enjoy exemptions to law and other forms of normative regulation. These exceptions, however, are often established by normative means and are almost always partial. Exceptional forms of rule in zones tend to exist alongside domestic civil laws, opportunistic applications of international law, and diverse norms and standards promulgated by corporate actors. Zones can at once be spaces of exception and spaces saturated by competing norms and calculations. They are strategic sites in which to test the applicability of Agamben’s work on sovereignty, exception and governmentality to the contemporary Asian context. Mindful of the plurality of zones across Asia, the paper highlights mutations in these forms of power to explore how zones disarticulate jurisdiction from territory, produce new kinds of laboring subjects, and prompt processes of spatial and social reorganization.Item The Immunity Paradigm’s Contradictory / Complementary Facets(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Rada IvekovićImmunization, a protocol for hammering identities and national, sexual, racial or class differences, is also a “creative” border-multiplying game. It can, but need not, revert against oneself (as autoimmunity), while it was meant to protect from the other. It is ambiguous. Extreme immunization is suicidal (because murderous), yet immunity is also vital, in a balance or percentage impossible to theorize. It is a matter of cognitive choice as well as, for Agamben, some kind of epistemological and “testimonial” ethics. While forms of immunization against others multiply from within society or from within the “camp” (as the pattern of society in Agamben’s parlance), the citizenship/ representation pattern is depoliticized i.e., subjected to immunity. The present paper argues that such depoliticization has become particularly visible since the “end” of the Cold War. Is immunity equilibrium for the community possible? The paper tests some such models with regard to Asia since 1989, articulated in politics and spelt out by some western philosophers, including Agamben, regardless of whether they actually mention Asia or not: the “with regard to Asia” aspect is here the clue for reading them, that against which they are probed. How much of the other (in this case, Asia) do they miss out? How much is left to the “politics of the people”? How much does “governance’s” democratic empty formalism enforce from above?Item Form-of-Life between the Messianic As Not and the Hypothetical As If(英語學系, 2015-03-??) Chien-heng WuThis paper takes Agamben’s conceptualization of form-of-life as its point of departure and situates this idea within the larger context of Agamben’s philosophy. Agamben diagnoses our contemporary political crisis and searches for a mode of existence where life would remain inseparable from its form: in this way he offers both a compelling analysis of sovereign power and a redemptive hope. However, it is not clear to what extent his notion of messianic redemption corresponds to that of political emancipation, for the register of change in Agamben’s political philosophy is framed exclusively in ontological terms, leaving the coming politics in a suspended sphere of pure mediality which subordinates questions concerning political contestation and material transformation. My contention is that an ontological politics modeled on potentiality proves a necessary yet insufficient ground for thinking political emancipation. It therefore behooves us to explore ways in which we can build on Agamben’s insight, but take it in a different direction and place it on a different level of analysis. The argument of this paper is that, rather than seeing the condition of possibility of change as being equivalent to change itself, we need to think the ethical exigency (in the form of the messianic as not) and the political dissensus (in the form of the hypothetical as if) together as forming a dialectic—such that ethics and politics are made in service of each other, not in place of each other.Item Out of the Biopolitical Double Bind(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hung-chiung LiAgamben’s theorization of biopolitics highlights the immanent structure of modern political power. Politics no longer maintains an external position of transcendence over life; rather, what emerges is an immanent double bind in which life and politics interpenetrate each other. Following his account and enlisting Žižek and Badiou, this essay aims to clarify how Agamben’s ontopolitical “unworking”(désoeuvrement) can deactivate this biopolitical power. The first part of this essay delineates the structure of this double bind and emphatically depicts the subject’s identificatory participation in bringing biopolitics into existence. The second part elucidates the two sides of “universal singularity” and centers on Agamben’s elaboration of Benjamin’s concepts of “singular inversion” and “real state of exception.” In light of Žižek’s criticism of Agamben’s lack of a theory of the subjective act, the last part attempts to find the contour of such theory in him. Agamben’s concepts of the “non-non-Jew” and “unworking” are expounded and brought into connection with Žižek’s conceptualization of “parallax” and “subtraction.” Furthermore, this part seeks to show how unworking or “sabbatism”can induce a singular mode of subjectification, how the sabbatical praxis of no-exception can untie the double bind between life and power, and how life beyond this biopolitical aporia can be envisaged.Item Managing the Unmanageable: Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory and the Dance of Political Economy(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Anthony Curtis AdlerWhile The Kingdom and the Glory addresses the specifically economic dimension of modern biopolitical forms of governmentality, it goes even farther than earlier volumes of Homo Sacer in obscuring the specific dynamic of modern capitalism. Rather than simply challenging Giorgio Agamben’s conclusions from an external perspective, the following paper proposes an immanent, “deconstructive” critique, showing that Agamben’s neglect of the problem of “economic value,” and of its close filiation to the circular movement of glory, is intimately related to his attempt, through the signature, to effectively neutralize the Derridean play of the signifier. While Agamben introduces the signature alongside the example as a second, economic-theological rather than political-theological paradigm for understanding paradigmicity as such, he seeks to stabilize the relation between the two. Contesting such stabilization, this paper develops a logic of surplementarity, positing the impossibility of keeping the “play of the signature” from disrupting the ideality of semantic value. Special attention will be given to Agamben’s tendency, neglecting the relation between oikonomia and dance, to identify the “acclamatory” aspect of glory with song alone. Thus he seeks to understand the economy as ordering into unison, rather than as a more complex, differential relation of singularities. This goes hand in hand with the failure to address the graphic, chrematistic dimension of modern capitalism. But it is ultimately when, turning to Hölderlin, he stresses the “national” essence of poetry, that the full consequences of his suppression of dance emerge. Attending to the role of dance in Hölderlin will nevertheless suggest another way to think the glorious economy.Item Aestheticization of Post-1989 Neoliberal Capitalism: From the Forms of Life to the Political Uses of Bodies(英語學系, 2015-03-??) Joyce C. H. LiuThis paper addresses the question of bio-politics that regulates and shapes people into different forms of life in today’s societies, particularly in the post- 1989 neoliberal capitalist conditions that we can observe in China. I call it the aestheticization of neoliberal capitalism. My concern in this paper is with the aestheticization of the neoliberal capitalism that was manipulated and executed by the contemporary States. I shall discuss the double cycle of the use and consumption of bodies in the artistic labor through my reading of a contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing (徐冰 1955- ). The primary process of the uses of the bodies by the State, the polis, took us to the question of the forms of life under the dictate of the political economy as discussed by Giorgio Agamben, and the question as to how and why human life, through the uses of bodies, is shaped, measured, calculated, regulated and processed into various forms of life. In order to think the power of life or the potential of life that would not be always already administered and distributed according to the reason of the polis, I juxtapose François Jullien’s formulation of the concept of shi (potential, inclination, tendency) that he derived from classical Chinese philosophy with the Western concept of potentia/potestas as well as from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi; and I discuss the possibility of a new critical and political use of body through the politics of aesthetics as this possibility presents itself in Xu’s work.Item Accepting/Rejecting: China’s Discursive Reconfiguration of Zoe for a New Era in Organ Donation(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Melissa LefkowitzIn the Chinese state’s attempt to rectify its organ shortage, an openly acknowledged problem nationwide, it must harness the body as a source of life. Whose bodies, exactly, form the crux of this paper, and it is here that Giorgio Agamben’s work is useful for a discussion that expands beyond a biopolitics centered on disciplines and technologies of power. Drawing upon articles in the U.S. and Chinese media, this paper analyzes the disparate logics inherent in media coverage following the establishment of China’s voluntary organ donation system in 2010. Though conceived at a great distance, Agamben’s bios/zoe dialectic operates as a fitting tool in the examination of an emergent discourse that is evolving in China, one that harnesses a rhetoric centered on value(s), scientific rationalism and charity in order to re‐define zoe(s) and reinforce the legitimacy of the state.Item Out of the Biopolitical Double Bind(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hung-chiung LiAgamben’s theorization of biopolitics highlights the immanent structure of modern political power. Politics no longer maintains an external position of transcendence over life; rather, what emerges is an immanent double bind in which life and politics interpenetrate each other. Following his account and enlisting Žižek and Badiou, this essay aims to clarify how Agamben’s ontopolitical “unworking”(désoeuvrement) can deactivate this biopolitical power. The first part of this essay delineates the structure of this double bind and emphatically depicts the subject’s identificatory participation in bringing biopolitics into existence. The second part elucidates the two sides of “universal singularity” and centers on Agamben’s elaboration of Benjamin’s concepts of “singular inversion” and “real state of exception.” In light of Žižek’s criticism of Agamben’s lack of a theory of the subjective act, the last part attempts to find the contour of such theory in him. Agamben’s concepts of the “non-non-Jew” and “unworking” are expounded and brought into connection with Žižek’s conceptualization of “parallax” and “subtraction.” Furthermore, this part seeks to show how unworking or “sabbatism”can induce a singular mode of subjectification, how the sabbatical praxis of no-exception can untie the double bind between life and power, and how life beyond this biopolitical aporia can be envisaged.