Abstract:In this essay I contemplate cinema studies’ undertaking of a disciplinary turn from ideological to ethical analysis. In reaction to empiricist opposition towards ideological critique, David Rodowick has proposed that film theory move beyond the limits of ideological analysis by reviving theory’s ancient philosophical connection to ethics. In this new disciplinary paradigm, film theory (as philosophy) would balance knowledge (empiricism) and ethics (reflective self-examination). While several scholars have heeded this call by summoning the ethical “dimension” of cinema, how this conception of ethics extends and exceeds ideology remains unclear. If the theoretical humanities desire a post-ideological ethics, I propose, they will need to assess two features of their earlier turn toward ideology. The first, evoked through a reading of Louis Althusser, is that ideology subordinated rather than overlooked ethics, rendering it unintelligible for theory. The second is that ideology could draw its critique of ethics from philosophy only because, like theory, “ethics” is also a discursive formation; it too has a history with its own “turns” and moments of crisis. Yet the turn within ethics to which that ideological critique is indebted produced a fundamental revisioning of value as constitutive for differentiated knowledge, contradicting the premise of ethics as a “dimension” separate from our basic epistemic grasping of the world. Although Rodowick cites the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell as examples of the inseparability of epistemology and ethics, leading away from ideological theory, I show how both maintain the subordination of the ethical to the epistemological. Adopting Roland Barthes’s notion of ideology as an “image-repertoire of history,” I argue that such inseparability is better accomplished by thinking ethics as itself historically cinematic rather than as a dimension of thought applied to cinematic or other texts.
{"title":"The Ethical Turn in Cinema","authors":"J. R. Miller","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this essay I contemplate cinema studies’ undertaking of a disciplinary turn from ideological to ethical analysis. In reaction to empiricist opposition towards ideological critique, David Rodowick has proposed that film theory move beyond the limits of ideological analysis by reviving theory’s ancient philosophical connection to ethics. In this new disciplinary paradigm, film theory (as philosophy) would balance knowledge (empiricism) and ethics (reflective self-examination). While several scholars have heeded this call by summoning the ethical “dimension” of cinema, how this conception of ethics extends and exceeds ideology remains unclear. If the theoretical humanities desire a post-ideological ethics, I propose, they will need to assess two features of their earlier turn toward ideology. The first, evoked through a reading of Louis Althusser, is that ideology subordinated rather than overlooked ethics, rendering it unintelligible for theory. The second is that ideology could draw its critique of ethics from philosophy only because, like theory, “ethics” is also a discursive formation; it too has a history with its own “turns” and moments of crisis. Yet the turn within ethics to which that ideological critique is indebted produced a fundamental revisioning of value as constitutive for differentiated knowledge, contradicting the premise of ethics as a “dimension” separate from our basic epistemic grasping of the world. Although Rodowick cites the work of Gilles Deleuze and Stanley Cavell as examples of the inseparability of epistemology and ethics, leading away from ideological theory, I show how both maintain the subordination of the ethical to the epistemological. Adopting Roland Barthes’s notion of ideology as an “image-repertoire of history,” I argue that such inseparability is better accomplished by thinking ethics as itself historically cinematic rather than as a dimension of thought applied to cinematic or other texts.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41685228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Focusing principally on the once-feted philosophical movement of object-oriented ontology (OOO), this article examines how this movement fits into a broader “speculative turn,” which seeks to reverse the purportedly wrongheaded emphasis of post-Kantian critical philosophy on the finitude of the subject, and once again unleash the fecund potentialities of speculative thought. Identifying several incongruities and tensions that traverse this project, it is argued that OOO exemplifies the difficulties faced when attempting to articulate a decidedly pre-critical metaphysics without accounting for the question of subjectivity.
{"title":"The Contortions and Convolutions of the “Speculative Turn”","authors":"Thomas Sutherland","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Focusing principally on the once-feted philosophical movement of object-oriented ontology (OOO), this article examines how this movement fits into a broader “speculative turn,” which seeks to reverse the purportedly wrongheaded emphasis of post-Kantian critical philosophy on the finitude of the subject, and once again unleash the fecund potentialities of speculative thought. Identifying several incongruities and tensions that traverse this project, it is argued that OOO exemplifies the difficulties faced when attempting to articulate a decidedly pre-critical metaphysics without accounting for the question of subjectivity.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49655125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Recent methodological innovations in the humanities call on us to turn our attention toward the surface. Instead of looking for meaning beyond the objects under analysis we are asked to work with their textual and visual surfaces, thus eschewing symptomatic readings or critical exegesis. But this turn to the surface is not new. It does not even constitute a case of methodology catching up to theoretical trends of the past several decades where one of the foci was—time and again—an attention to surfaces: from poststructuralist obsessions with marked and textured surfaces to swan songs to complexity and opacity in the age of digital superficiality. When Donna Haraway diagnosed the turn from depth to surface as one of the traits of a paradigm shift from old hierarchies toward new networks of information and domination in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” she showed how surface turns are synchronized with changes in mediascapes and material imaginaries. By the same token, how “surface” is defined, imagined, and conceptualized in each instantiation of these turns differs widely. And each plea for work with the surface, often tied to claims of demystification, comes with its own agenda. In the face of repeated injunctions to turn toward the surface, we have either never been superficial enough or we have never been deep to begin with. And as the power of surface turns remains implicitly beholden to dichotomies (such as surface and depth), they do not do justice to the surface themselves, as they reduce and police a multiplicity of surface imaginaries. This essay proposes a new type of surface reading, not a reading of a textual surface, but a reading of surface figures; not a plea for defining a surface turn (or surface turns), but a reflection on how surface figures and claims for theoretical innovation can be thought together. After scrutinizing several turns to surfaces in theory, the essay turns to instances in which figures of the surface and of circularity intersect as a way of rethinking the binary between surface and depth and as a conduit for analyzing the force of the figure of the turn.
{"title":"Surface Turns","authors":"Andrea Bachner","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Recent methodological innovations in the humanities call on us to turn our attention toward the surface. Instead of looking for meaning beyond the objects under analysis we are asked to work with their textual and visual surfaces, thus eschewing symptomatic readings or critical exegesis. But this turn to the surface is not new. It does not even constitute a case of methodology catching up to theoretical trends of the past several decades where one of the foci was—time and again—an attention to surfaces: from poststructuralist obsessions with marked and textured surfaces to swan songs to complexity and opacity in the age of digital superficiality. When Donna Haraway diagnosed the turn from depth to surface as one of the traits of a paradigm shift from old hierarchies toward new networks of information and domination in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” she showed how surface turns are synchronized with changes in mediascapes and material imaginaries. By the same token, how “surface” is defined, imagined, and conceptualized in each instantiation of these turns differs widely. And each plea for work with the surface, often tied to claims of demystification, comes with its own agenda. In the face of repeated injunctions to turn toward the surface, we have either never been superficial enough or we have never been deep to begin with. And as the power of surface turns remains implicitly beholden to dichotomies (such as surface and depth), they do not do justice to the surface themselves, as they reduce and police a multiplicity of surface imaginaries. This essay proposes a new type of surface reading, not a reading of a textual surface, but a reading of surface figures; not a plea for defining a surface turn (or surface turns), but a reflection on how surface figures and claims for theoretical innovation can be thought together. After scrutinizing several turns to surfaces in theory, the essay turns to instances in which figures of the surface and of circularity intersect as a way of rethinking the binary between surface and depth and as a conduit for analyzing the force of the figure of the turn.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-04-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45180995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The reality I investigate is one that is mediated through screens and layers of technological interference. I describe something that is recognizable, but my primary concern is to understand how the abstractions inherent in the process determine the structure of an image. The indexical version of photographic reality is transformed as the painting uncovers unexpected narratives that exist within an image. Cinema is an illusion that we accept as an alternative reality. It is a device that can transform the spectator, shape our vision and identity, and is part of a shared culture. By pausing the narrative and isolating moments, I attempt to understand what we are seeing: straight lines do not exist, form wavers and blurs, but still, something is seen that we denote as being ”real.” Working with the pause button and a camera, I look for a precise instant that embodies an action, an emotion, and a psychological tension. Godard said that ”the cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”1 I am interested in what happens when the temporality of cinema/reality is interrupted and explored with marks of paint. I photograph paused images of staged realities as they appear in a cinematic narrative on a monitor. I then make paintings of the resulting perceptual phenomena. I am not interested in the linear narrative that exists in the film, nor the linear perspective. I am concerned with the narrative that develops within the frame of the painting. Email: juditheisler@gmail.com Website: https://www.juditheisler.com/
{"title":"Images","authors":"J. Eisler","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0026","url":null,"abstract":"The reality I investigate is one that is mediated through screens and layers of technological interference. I describe something that is recognizable, but my primary concern is to understand how the abstractions inherent in the process determine the structure of an image. The indexical version of photographic reality is transformed as the painting uncovers unexpected narratives that exist within an image. Cinema is an illusion that we accept as an alternative reality. It is a device that can transform the spectator, shape our vision and identity, and is part of a shared culture. By pausing the narrative and isolating moments, I attempt to understand what we are seeing: straight lines do not exist, form wavers and blurs, but still, something is seen that we denote as being ”real.” Working with the pause button and a camera, I look for a precise instant that embodies an action, an emotion, and a psychological tension. Godard said that ”the cinema is truth at 24 frames per second.”1 I am interested in what happens when the temporality of cinema/reality is interrupted and explored with marks of paint. I photograph paused images of staged realities as they appear in a cinematic narrative on a monitor. I then make paintings of the resulting perceptual phenomena. I am not interested in the linear narrative that exists in the film, nor the linear perspective. I am concerned with the narrative that develops within the frame of the painting. Email: juditheisler@gmail.com Website: https://www.juditheisler.com/","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48378238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The effacement or denial of face, which Zygmunt Bauman linked, in 1999, to an absence of identity, should be reevaluated amidst today's biometric apparatus and its optical correction. Responding to David Gauthier and Erin La Cour's observations of the "problematic event" and its potential to undermine the archive with the mark of illegibility, I analyze artworks that have addressed error, failure, and glitch to limn connections between contemporary creative strategies and a history of maneuvers by migrants with the goal of becoming imperceptible. In framing my theory of the accidental and authorial breakdown through an examination of tactical countermeasures of evasion, this essay is also a response to the exploitation of information and optic systems within our current migratory drift, wherein biometric practices are enforced at border control checkpoints and during asylum application interviews, admittance to refugee shelters, residence and naturalization processes, and evaluations of eligibility for basic human rights. Informed by critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonialist studies, "The Glitch of Biometrics" converges media studies with studies of migration to call for a closer look at how technology legitimizes claims to security, mobility, and community.
摘要：Zygmunt Bauman在1999年将人脸的抹去或否认与身份的缺失联系在一起，在当今的生物识别仪器及其光学校正中，应该重新评估。针对David Gauthier和Erin La Cour对这一“有问题的事件”及其可能以难以辨认的标记破坏档案的观察，我分析了一些涉及错误、失败和故障的艺术品，以限制当代创作策略与移民操纵历史之间的联系，目的是变得难以察觉。在通过对规避策略对策的研究来构建我关于意外和作者崩溃的理论时，这篇文章也是对我们当前移民流动中信息和光学系统被利用的回应，在边境管制检查站和庇护申请面谈、进入难民收容所、，居住和入籍程序，以及基本人权资格评估。根据批判性种族研究、性别和性研究以及后殖民主义研究，《生物识别的闪光》将媒体研究与移民研究相结合，呼吁更深入地研究技术如何使安全、流动和社区的主张合法化。
{"title":"The Glitch of Biometrics and the Error as Evasion: The Subversive Potential of Self-Effacement","authors":"C. Campanioni","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The effacement or denial of face, which Zygmunt Bauman linked, in 1999, to an absence of identity, should be reevaluated amidst today's biometric apparatus and its optical correction. Responding to David Gauthier and Erin La Cour's observations of the \"problematic event\" and its potential to undermine the archive with the mark of illegibility, I analyze artworks that have addressed error, failure, and glitch to limn connections between contemporary creative strategies and a history of maneuvers by migrants with the goal of becoming imperceptible. In framing my theory of the accidental and authorial breakdown through an examination of tactical countermeasures of evasion, this essay is also a response to the exploitation of information and optic systems within our current migratory drift, wherein biometric practices are enforced at border control checkpoints and during asylum application interviews, admittance to refugee shelters, residence and naturalization processes, and evaluations of eligibility for basic human rights. Informed by critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonialist studies, \"The Glitch of Biometrics\" converges media studies with studies of migration to call for a closer look at how technology legitimizes claims to security, mobility, and community.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49564117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay revisits the genealogy of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité and calls for a reassessment of its later volumes as politically engaged expériences in historiography. Recontextualizing their work within the Essentialist–Social Constructionist debate that took place among historians and theorists of sexuality in the 1980s, I show that the relations between John Boswell, the most prominent "essentialist," and Michel Foucault, the most prominent "constructionist," were much more amicable and complex than commentators have previously claimed. Boswell served as a "guide" for the last three volumes of Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité. By uncovering the considerable influence oswell's supposedly "essentializing" concept of "gay" had on Foucault's later writings and politics, I demonstrate that Foucault was not committed to the historicization of sexual concepts, but rather to the transformation, through historiography, of present-day relations. This process, at once historiographical, intellectual, subjective, and political, is what Foucault calls expérience.
{"title":"Queer Strategies of Gay History: Boswell's \"Weapons\", Foucault's Expérience","authors":"François·e Charmaille","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0025","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay revisits the genealogy of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité and calls for a reassessment of its later volumes as politically engaged expériences in historiography. Recontextualizing their work within the Essentialist–Social Constructionist debate that took place among historians and theorists of sexuality in the 1980s, I show that the relations between John Boswell, the most prominent \"essentialist,\" and Michel Foucault, the most prominent \"constructionist,\" were much more amicable and complex than commentators have previously claimed. Boswell served as a \"guide\" for the last three volumes of Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité. By uncovering the considerable influence oswell's supposedly \"essentializing\" concept of \"gay\" had on Foucault's later writings and politics, I demonstrate that Foucault was not committed to the historicization of sexual concepts, but rather to the transformation, through historiography, of present-day relations. This process, at once historiographical, intellectual, subjective, and political, is what Foucault calls expérience.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45530686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay evaluates visualization practices in data science and the digital humanities by drawing on the resources of the environmental humanities. I show how certain conceptions of ecology and natural systems have provided constitutive metaphors in the design and theorization of data visualization practices. This genealogy of the visual culture of data science began with the professionalization of graph theory in the nineteenth century. Ecological analogies were also a prominent feature in twentieth-century computer and network design, and they have continued to inform many of the layout algorithms that generate present-day data visualizations. This history of ideas and practices shows how ecological metaphors have naturalized information systems in ways that obscure the material and social realities of those systems.
{"title":"The Ecologies of Data Visualization","authors":"Benjamin Mangrum","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay evaluates visualization practices in data science and the digital humanities by drawing on the resources of the environmental humanities. I show how certain conceptions of ecology and natural systems have provided constitutive metaphors in the design and theorization of data visualization practices. This genealogy of the visual culture of data science began with the professionalization of graph theory in the nineteenth century. Ecological analogies were also a prominent feature in twentieth-century computer and network design, and they have continued to inform many of the layout algorithms that generate present-day data visualizations. This history of ideas and practices shows how ecological metaphors have naturalized information systems in ways that obscure the material and social realities of those systems.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49152016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The term "reflexivity" continues to maintain an interpretive hegemony in discussions on modernity and the Self. As a form of praxis, applications of reflexivity frequently rely upon an acknowledged awareness of one's self-conscious attitudes, dispositions, behaviors, and motives. This essay takes aim at such contentions, exploring the extent to which examples of racism rely upon a level of reflexivity, best encapsulated in Žižek's "reflexive racism." Specifically, examples of non-racism/anti-racism assert the formal promotion of a monadic subject which is solely adept at "uncovering" and "relinquishing" its racism (disavowal), and depoliticizes racism by relocating and relativizing it to a particular sociohistorical context (deferment). In outlining this response, specific attention is given to Lacan's subject of enunciation and subject of the enunciated to show that it is in the obfuscation of one's "position of enunciation" that examples of reflexive racism reside.
{"title":"On Reflexive Racism: Disavowal, Deferment, and the Lacanian Subject","authors":"J. Black","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The term \"reflexivity\" continues to maintain an interpretive hegemony in discussions on modernity and the Self. As a form of praxis, applications of reflexivity frequently rely upon an acknowledged awareness of one's self-conscious attitudes, dispositions, behaviors, and motives. This essay takes aim at such contentions, exploring the extent to which examples of racism rely upon a level of reflexivity, best encapsulated in Žižek's \"reflexive racism.\" Specifically, examples of non-racism/anti-racism assert the formal promotion of a monadic subject which is solely adept at \"uncovering\" and \"relinquishing\" its racism (disavowal), and depoliticizes racism by relocating and relativizing it to a particular sociohistorical context (deferment). In outlining this response, specific attention is given to Lacan's subject of enunciation and subject of the enunciated to show that it is in the obfuscation of one's \"position of enunciation\" that examples of reflexive racism reside.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46182178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:As Giorgio Agamben brings his Homo Sacer project to a close in L'Uso dei corpi (The Use of Bodies), he pitches the slave as paradigm of the human, his archaeology of slavery hinging on select turns of phrase in Aristotle and Paul the Apostle. An assessment of Agamben's argument thus requires close attention to his signature philological moves, an exegesis of his exegeses. Professing to find the archaic nucleus of slavery, the truth of use, in a zone of indifference, Agamben conjures a slave without slavery, an exemplar of inoperativity and a common use of bodies. I offer critiques both of his method of philosophical archaeology and of his anthropology, raising questions about the tension between domination and mutual use, about the limits power imposes on potentiality, and about the paradoxical privilege implied by indifference to freedom. Intent on what he characterizes as the messianic vocation of the slave, Agamben is unable to see that the slave is always more than a slave, or, as one might say in Greek, hyper doulon.
{"title":"On Agamben's Slave without Slavery","authors":"J. Glancy","doi":"10.1353/dia.2020.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2020.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:As Giorgio Agamben brings his Homo Sacer project to a close in L'Uso dei corpi (The Use of Bodies), he pitches the slave as paradigm of the human, his archaeology of slavery hinging on select turns of phrase in Aristotle and Paul the Apostle. An assessment of Agamben's argument thus requires close attention to his signature philological moves, an exegesis of his exegeses. Professing to find the archaic nucleus of slavery, the truth of use, in a zone of indifference, Agamben conjures a slave without slavery, an exemplar of inoperativity and a common use of bodies. I offer critiques both of his method of philosophical archaeology and of his anthropology, raising questions about the tension between domination and mutual use, about the limits power imposes on potentiality, and about the paradoxical privilege implied by indifference to freedom. Intent on what he characterizes as the messianic vocation of the slave, Agamben is unable to see that the slave is always more than a slave, or, as one might say in Greek, hyper doulon.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46022012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Colonial Metaphor, Colonial Metaphysics: On the Poetic Pairing of Blackness and Indianness","authors":"C. Infante","doi":"10.1353/dia.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"67062529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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