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The Future of the Human: An Introduction

Armstrong, N., Montag, W. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology

Balibar, E. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

The essay offers a series of reflections on the place of violence in politics and, at the same time, on the ways in which the relation between what might be understood as mutually exclusive categories (violence ceases where politics begins and vice versa) has been theorized, especially in the twentieth century. The condition of such an inquiry is not a set of abstract concepts, but a phenomenology of extreme violence that exceeds any rational political objective. Such violence is often theorized through such negative categories as evil or extermination and thus continues in some measure to resist efforts to comprehend it. To begin to acknowledge the historical and material forms of the existence of violence is to confront the "tragic" dimension of the practice of politics. Just as this practice can never abandon itself to violence, so it can never altogether abandon violence, especially in the forms of resistance and insurrection.

The Democratic Insect: Productive Swarms

Dubois, P. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

How does the insect swarm serve as a figure for humanity? In recent formulations by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the swarm buzzes for the anonymous multitude, achieving creative solutions to humankind's problems "through collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model." Such a vision constructs a benign and beneficent swarm that, although it lacks differentiation and specificity, accomplishes democracy without sovereignty. Achille Mbembe points out, nonetheless, that the swarm can have a more sinister and deadly aspect.

The ancient Greeks used the figure of the swarm to connote an anonymous and undifferentiated mass of human beings. Achilles' army of Myrmidons in the Iliad are at least antlike, perhaps even metamorphosed ants, ants become warriors. In the classical period, the comic poet Aristophanes uses the insect swarm of wasps to embody his crowd, his chorus of furious, cantankerous, militant, and class-conscious jurors. Such a swarm is depicted with affection even as Aristophanes seems to deplore their manipulation by demagogues. Their "becoming-animal" offers a riotous, exhilarating line of flight from the decorum of nouveau riche Athenian society, a form of politics as the demos, the people, demand their part. But the philosopher Plato removes the sting from the wasps and represents docile and obedient bees, model citizen-workers, and even cicadas, transformed from human beings who once loved the muses into tattletales for the gods; the swarm becomes an instrument of antidemocratic, philosophical espionage.

Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza

Montag, W. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Is Spinoza a theoretician of self-interest? Historians of philosophy have arrived at diametrically opposed answers to this question. His introduction of the term conatus, meaning endeavor or striving, in part 3 of the Ethics, together with his assertion that when human beings most seek that which is useful to them individually they are most useful to each other, might appear, as A. O. Hirschman argued, to render him both a follower of the Stoics and a predecessor of Mandeville and Smith. This essay takes the opposite view, arguing that Spinoza is above all the theoretician of the self-destruction and self-negation that societies of servitude require. The author calls these tendencies the inhumanization of politics, the forms in which the human is systematically subjected through affective imitation to what is incompatible with human existence.

Reinhabiting the Body Politic: Habit and the Roots of the Human

Heiner, B. T. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Among the principal demands of contemporary political theory and practice is to determine habitable alternatives to (1) the violent and falsely two-sided dynamic of sovereignty and (2) the modern equation of the unitary, self-governing entity with the human itself. This essay contributes to this effort by conducting a genealogy of the political anthropology at the root of sovereignty, focusing on the notion of habit. It argues that the anthropology of sovereignty is deeply entrenched in a form of Christian metaphysics, which crystallizes in St. Augustine's conception of habit. Under Augustine's self-examining gaze, habit comes to be construed as the symptom of man's metaphysical "fallenness" into a state of "entanglement in the multitude": an inhuman structure of ontological constriction at the heart of the human. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty back to the early Christian discourse of the human soul's struggle to master the "habits of this life," the author calls attention to an alternative conception of habitual bodily being that gives expression to the latter's fundamental ambi-valence. The habitual body of the multitude is read as an ontological structure of disposedness that both limits and opens, contracts and dilates. Habit, in this expansive sense, can be redirected not only to refashion the routines through which we inhabit our shared habitats but also to transform the rituals through which we inhabit truth. The essay argues that, as the variable amplitude of existence, habit is the common structure through which humanity must grasp its future.

Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt

Turner, H. S. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

This essay examines the problem of the corporation as an "artificial person" and as a form of political organization in the early modern period, using Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1598–1600) to explore models of collective, corporate narration and competing images of group formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It turns to the work of Freud in order to propose an analysis of the "corporate ego," joining Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) with the work of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour and the critic Roland Barthes in order to suggest ways of thinking and writing about impersonal institutional structures. The essay has been written in the voice of Freud, as a hypothetical lost lecture from the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis; its main goal is to model how we might replace key political concepts such as the "state," the "human," and the "person" with those of the "network," the "assemblage," and the process of "translation."

Sovereignty and the Form of Formlessness

Armstrong, N., Tennenhouse, L. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

This essay argues that sovereignty, both the form of government and the law it constitutes, can be understood in terms of what it keeps out and at bay—namely, historically specific forms of formlessness. Assuming that formlessness does indeed have a form, the authors see it emerging in Jacobean tragedy whenever something happens to the body of the legitimate monarch and poses a threat to culture itself, endangering kinship along with the metaphysics of kingship. In Hobbes's Leviathan, sovereignty is no longer immanent in nature and the order of the universe itself but is a purely cultural or, in Hobbes's phrase, "artificial" thing. Hobbes designs the figure of Leviathan to render unthinkable the possibility of a many-headed body politic. Rather than set Hobbes in opposition to Locke and Defoe, who together arguably inaugurate the Enlightenment, the authors contend that such modern notions of self-sovereignty are defensive formations, responding to the same pressure of the multitude that shapes Leviathan.

Monstrous Individuations: Deleuze, Simondon, and Relational Ontology

Del Lucchese, F. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

Starting with Gilbert Simondon's theory of the individual (singular and collective) and its genesis, developed in his book L'individuation psychique et collective, this article discusses the principle of individuation and the critique of finalism. Simondon distinguishes and yet strictly binds together the two individuations that he calls psychique and collective, which is necessary, he argues, to avoid the double failure of psychologism and sociologism, by which he means the doctrines that assign a fixed (ontological) identity to man and his mind, on the one hand, and to society, on the other. Both psychologism and sociologism, according to Simondon, fail to understand their only reality, which is first and foremost relational. Influenced by Simondon's ontology, Gilles Deleuze's concept of nomadism is taken up in order to develop the idea of a principle of individuation intended as a critique of teleology. The question of individuation is thus referred to its ontological roots in the conflict between Aristotelian metaphysics (priority of act over power [potentia] and of final cause over efficient and material causes) and Spinozist metaphysics (power [potentia] existing only in act, absolute immanence, radical criticism of every teleology). This essay shows what is at stake between the two authors and what Deleuze could not have derived from Simondon, which Del Lucchese calls a Spinozistic problematic.

The Human Recycled: Insecurity in the Transnational Moment

Chakravorty, M., Neti, L. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

This article reads Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) to consider the questions of subjectivation and commodification motivating postcolonial critiques of power. The authors suggest that in the film, the assertion of sovereignty is articulated through the politicization of death and a reckoning of the dying body, through what Achille Mbembe refers to as "necropolitics." Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others, the authors contend that the limit of the human posed by the articulation of colonial frames within transnational ones conjoins modes of cultural subjection to an absolute devaluation of life itself. This reading of the film foregrounds the arena of the mass commodification of material bodies, resituating the foundations of capitalism within the slave trade, in contexts ranging from the sale of human organs to prostitution to trafficking in migrant laborers. The article posits a model of salability, based on disposable life and recycled humanity, where entry into the market as either subject or object is the condition of survival in the modern security regime. Against a terrain of precariously asserted and suspended subjectivity within the realm of state sanctions, readers are invited to consider the possibility the film presents of realizing a collective politics that subverts and seizes the management of life on the verge of death.

"I Insist on the Christian Dimension": On Forgiveness... and the Outside of the Human

Chow, R. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

The question explored in this article pertains to the type of exchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. Hannah Arendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justification for its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell." Yet, precisely the imperative nature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums. To elaborate this point, the author begins with a reference to a striking key episode at the heart of the South Korean film Miryang [Secret Sunshine] (2007), which stages forgiveness in the context of Christian evangelism. The article goes on to argue, through a discussion of the writings of Derrida and Auerbach, among others, that the connotations of forgiveness extend considerably beyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bear on contemporary theoretical questions about translation and the secularization of representation.

"Terrorists Are Human Beings": Mapping the U.S. Army's "Human Terrain Systems" Program

Hill, M. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

This article puts an emerging war doctrine archive through the paces of its philosophical analogues. Establishing in the first part of the article the "weaponizing of culture" (a now-common U.S. military phrase), which is occurring autogenically, that is, within and without the remnants of the liberal representative state, the author argues that war is now a fully operational part of the organizational work that terms like community, culture, and humanity are now doing (and doing differently than before). War in the sense invoked here is activated at various levels of intensity and visibility (think Katrina, the Patriot Act, Wall Street) as a civil or civilian war within the United States that is everywhere present but is hardly recognizable as such. In addressing one essential area of governmentality—demographics—the author makes the case for a change in liberal governmental reason that is evident in the U.S. Census 2000, concluding that demography has taken a uniquely post–civil rights turn in the unprecedented context of a coming U.S. white minority. Categorical self-identification within the permeable race and ethnic categories that the state now endorses paradoxically releases it from whatever previous civil-rights obligations the state may have had. In unpacking how this process works—call it autogenic violence at the level precisely of "recognition"—this article revisits Habermas's reliance on a juridically grounded base for intersubjectivity. Habermas extends the appeal for liberal international law to an updated endorsement of Kant's quest for perpetual cosmopolitan peace. With the problem of history and the relationship between temporality and the "cultural" disciplines such as philosophy in mind, the author updates Habermas's updating of Kant in a context of perpetual war that neither figure is willing to imagine.