Agamben on paradigms

“I am not a historian. I work with paradigms. A paradigm is something like an example, an exemplar, a historically singular phenomenon. As it was with the panopticon for Foucault, so is the Homo Sacer or the Muselmann or the state of exception for me. And then I use this paradigm to construct a large group of phenomena and in order to understand an historical structure, again analogous with Foucault, who developed his ‘panopticism’ from the panopticon. But this kind of analysis should not be confused with a sociological investigation.”

Interview with Ulrich Raulff, German Law Journal 5(5): 609-614.

biopolitics vs. dialectics?

“When life becomes the principle object for political struggles, one no longer ties political strategies or analysis to conventional limit conditions. Conditioning the possible, modes of active production instead define the biopolitical field of operations. This is not of course to suggest that wretched conditions cannot be defined as unjust or intolerable, but neither is it to play by the pre-set rules of political engagement. This exposes the fundamental difference between biopolitics and dialectics. Where a dialectical logic presupposes contradictory elements within a realm that it ultimately unifies, biopolitical logics presuppose connectable elements within a field in which everything is recombinant. With complex forms of self organization therefore replacing linearity, limit conditions are efficiently seconded by a general economy of political production. that is to say, once the strategic assumption that the universe is heterogeneous firmly displaces the dialectical assumption that the universe is homogenized, power struggles become a matter of pure strategy.”

Brad Evans, “Life Resistance: Towards a Different Concept of the Political,” Deleuze Studies 4(supplement): 149.

conservative thought: reaction and ideology

“After decades of “compassionate conservatism,” “a thousand points of light,” and “Morning in America,” dark talk of class warfare on the right can seem like a strange throwback. So accustomed are we to the sunny Reagan and the populist Tea Party that we’ve forgotten a basic truth about conservatism: It is a reaction to democratic movements from below, movements like Occupy Wall Street that threaten to reorder society from the bottom up, redistributing power and resources from those who have much to those who have not so much.”

…

“Playing the part of the dull-witted country squire, conservatives have embraced the position of the historian F.J.C. Hearnshaw that “it is commonly sufficient for practical purposes if conservatives, without saying anything, just sit and think, or even if they merely sit.” While the aristocratic overtones of that discourse no longer resonate, the conservative still holds on to the label of the untutored and the unlettered; it’s part of his populist charm and demotic appeal. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Conservatism is an idea-driven praxis, and no amount of preening from the right or polemic from the left can reduce or efface the catalog of mind one finds there.

Others will be put off by this argument for a different reason: It threatens the purity and profundity of conservative ideas. For many, the word “reaction” connotes an unthinking, lowly grab for power. But reaction is not reflex. It begins from a position of principle—that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others—and then recalibrates that principle in light of a challenge from below. This recalibration is no easy task, for such challenges tend by their very nature to disprove the principle. After all, if a ruling class is truly fit to rule, why and how has it allowed a challenge to its power to emerge? What does the emergence of the one say about the fitness of the other?”

…

“There is another reason to be wary of the effort to dismiss the reactionary thrust of conservatism, and that is the testimony of the tradition itself. From Burke’s claim that he and his ilk had been “alarmed into reflexion” by the French Revolution to Russell Kirk’s admission that conservatism is a “system of ideas” that “has sustained men … in their resistance against radical theories and social transformation,” the conservative has consistently affirmed that his is a knowledge produced in response to the left.”

“The Conservative Reaction,” by Corey Robin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

cesaire on colonialism and fascism

“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to bruatlize him in the truest sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is raped and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been ‘interrogated,’ all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack.”

Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 35-36

form-of-life as post-identitarian politics

“Sometimes getting something exactly wrong is getting it almost right. For example, in identity politics we try to treat a fact of our life as our form of life, while in form of life politics we do the exact opposite: we approach our way of
life as a fact (or, much better, as what the young Heidegger called ‘factical life’ or ‘facticity’). The crucial issue here is not really what is one’s form of life (enter the farcical parade of identities) but that one’s singular life has (or partakes in) a form, and that this form, which has no need to be further defined, is always already a source of power. It can therefore be demonstrated that struggles have integrated, even unknowingly, the logic of form of life have more lasting success than battles dominated by the logic of sovereignty, rights, blood, or land.”

David Kishik, The Power of Life, 113.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 11,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.