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The “Bitter Necessity” of Debt:
(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Steven Shaviro
Gilles Deleuze outlines a movement from Foucault’s disciplinary society to what he calls the control society. Foucault himself traces this movement in his lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics. Faced with the incipience of neoliberalism, both Deleuze and Foucault shift their focus away from biopolitics, or the regulation of bodies and populations, and return to a kind of quasi-Marxist concern with political economy. Almost in spite of themselves, they both rediscover political economy at the heart of social processes that had previously seemed to be of an entirely different order.
Invoking the West: Giorgio Agamben’s “Romantic Ideology” and the Civilizational Transference
(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Jon Solomon
Inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the “Romantic Ideology” that consciously created a tautological equivalency between language and people, this essay is interested in drawing upon elements of the philosopher’s conceptual kit to explore the ways in which his attempt to trace ontological origins recuperates “Romantic ideology” with regard to civilizational difference. We will take as our point of departure the construction of that ambiguous yet ubiquitous civilizational entity, the “West.” In order to tease apart the status of the “West” in Agamben’s work, we will return to the conceptual distinction and historical narrative deployed in one of the philosopher’s earliest works, Language and Death, which plays a seminal role in the development of the author’s later philosophy. Having thus established the moment when the “Romantic Ideology” criticized by Agamben reappears in the form of civilizational transfer, we proceed by way of asking, once again both with and against Agamben, if the “West” might not be seen as a form of translational apparatus such as the concept is critically taken up in the philosopher’s 2006 essay, “What is an Apparatus?” The essay concludes with a reflection on the relation between translation and species difference in the context of the new biospheric colonization that characterizes contemporary capitalism.
The Crime of Indistinction?
(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.
“Trafficking in Seeds”: War Bride, Biopolitics, and Asian American Spectrality in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation
(英語學系, 2013-09-??) Hsiu-chuan Lee
Taking a cue from Pheng Cheah’s discussion of nationalism’s paradoxical relation to life and death and his invocation of the idea of spectral haunting (in light of the Deleuzian “nonorganic vitalism”) as the genuine source of life in postcolonial cultures, this article conceives a life-begetting Asian American ethno-politics via a reading of the ethno- and biopolitics represented in Ruth Ozeki’s novel All Over Creation. I argue that All Over Creation intervenes in the discussion of Asian American ethno-politics of life and death not simply because it engages with food politics and advocates agricultural biodiversity, but also because it creates narrative linkages between biodiversity and ethno-diversity. First, by telling the story of a Japanese war bride, All Over Creation brings to the fore Japanese war brides to emphasize their significance as the “ghostly figures”—or “random seedlings”—occupying the margins of both Asian American and white communities. Moreover, the novel introduces “seed-dissemination” as a(n) (agri)cultural logic that makes “Asian American” less a category of hereditary permanence than an avenue for one to generate and become others. All Over Creation spells out affirmative life forces that sprawl from the migratory trajectories of people and seeds (or “people as seeds”)—trajectories that bring disorganizing force to the inherited logic or vertical continuity of both agricultural and ethnic cultural productions with lateral networking and changeable relationships.
Out of the Biopolitical Double Bind
(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hung-chiung Li
Agamben’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.
Out of the Biopolitical Double Bind
(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Hung-chiung Li
Agamben’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.
Risk, Fear and Immunity:Reinventing the Political in the Age of Biopolitics*
(英語學系, 2011-03-??) Han-yu Huang
As an update of his continual concern for contemporary risk society since 1980s, Ulrich Beck’s latest work World at Risk (2009) alerts us to the deterritorializing effects of global risk on national, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. On an increasingly global scale, risk mixes up natives and foreigners, while risk calculus connects natural, technical and social sciences, and incorporates almost all aspects of everyday life. Fear,accordingly, spreads out as a kind of carrier that binds so-called global,multicultural civil society; it even prospers as a lucrative risky business. Such an era has witnessed a structural transformation of the roles of the state andvarious biopolitical institutions, of life itself, of subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Žižek’s theory of ideology critique and radical ethics and politics, this paper firstly presents a critical survey of contemporary biopolitics, focusing on how health needs contagion as its uncanny double to define and of life flourish with uncertainty and administer our body and life. All of these will be discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of the contemporary risk society and culture of fear to critically look at how risk and fear function as depoliticizing biopolitical instruments for disavowing social antagonism. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito caution us against the (auto)immunitary biopolitical logic and call for vulnerability, precariousness and finitude to be adopted as the ethical principles for a “positive” biopolitics, while this paper will query whether human subjects are victimized and depoliticized in their discourses. The final part of this paper will turn to Žižek’s recent formulation of radical ethics and politics to address the possibility of reinventing the political in contemporary biopolitics.
Accepting/Rejecting: China’s Discursive Reconfiguration of Zoe for a New Era in Organ Donation
(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Melissa Lefkowitz
In 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.
The Crime of Indistinction?
(英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.

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