Special Dossier: Rethinking Sovereignty and Capitalism
Sovereign Anxieties and Neoliberal Transformations: An Introduction
William Callison
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
During the 2008 financial collapse, the concomitance of financial capital and state power belied the seemingly autonomous political “decision” on the bailout. Here sovereignty appeared entangled in politico-economic structures, in tight networks of state and non-state actors that emerged alongside the liberalization and financialization of the 1970s and that made this very crisis possible. Under these conditions, the sites and operations of sovereignty proved far more elusive and perplexing than traditional theories of sovereignty’s absolute and indivisible character would allow us to understand. On the one hand, the state was “forced” to become “the lender of last resort,” using public funds to support the fallen financial giants while letting others suffer from the initial volatility and the austere landscape that resulted from it. On the other hand, the ongoing politics of “crisis”—from the European Stability and Growth Pact to the more general phenomenon of sovereign debt—have engendered new modes of economic governance that reach beyond the explicit realm of the state.
Varieties of neoliberalism often spurn centralized state power in the name of market mechanisms and metrics, while the effects of globalization and the reach of international law also appear as signs of nation-state sovereignty’s reduced strength. Yet, as seen in the crisis, the problematic of sovereignty refuses to be buried, emerging in new forms and unforeseen entanglements. As governance becomes increasingly intertwined with market dynamics, state sovereignty presents us with challenging questions of both a theoretical and a practical nature.
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Sovereignty as Erasure: Rethinking Enforced Disappearances
Banu Bargu
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Every Saturday precisely at noon, a crowd of mothers gathers in front of the gates of Lycée de Galatasaray, a prominent francophone high school situated at the center of Istanbul’s bustling downtown district in close proximity to Taksim Square. These mothers, with pictures of their sons and daughters, stand in silence, with resolve but no resolution to their demand for justice. These are the mothers of the disappeared in Turkey, mothers of bodies that have vanished, or more accurately, bodies that have been made to vanish. These mothers do not know whether their sons and daughters are dead or live; their fates are uncertain. They remain unaccounted for, except on the rare occasion when their remains are found in some unmarked pit, anonymous or mass grave.
These mothers, accompanied by men and children who are the relatives of the disappeared, as well as a handful of activist lawyers and human-rights defenders, hold red carnations and often wear white headscarves that have become symbolic of their relentless search for their children. Some of them have been searching for over thirty years, since the 1980 military coup. Others joined the struggle in the mid-1990s, when the number of disappearances surged, especially in the southeast of Turkey, in the midst of the conflict between the Turkish armed forces and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
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Sovereignty, Norms, and Exception in Neoliberalism
Thomas Biebricher
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Neoliberalism is notorious not only because of the various effects attributed to its continued “ecological dominance” as a real-world phenomenon but also because of the difficulties in pinning it down conceptually. The meanings associated with the term vary between disciplines and subfields, supporters and critics, as well as political and scholarly contexts. As is well known, if the term neoliberalism is invoked at all in political debates, it is never used as a self-description but always refers to others, and as such it is usually intended to stigmatize them as egotistic market fundamentalists. That the term is easily instrumentalized for purely polemical purposes is in part due to the blurred, unfixed contours of the concept of neoliberalism.
For those who think of neoliberalism broadly along such market fundamentalist lines, the aim of this article, namely, to inquire into the notion of sovereignty as a particular aspect of neoliberalism’s political theory, may seem all but nonsensical. If neoliberalism can in effect be summed up as a creed of market fundamentalism and a commitment to “turbo-capitalism” that sweeps away everything that stands in the way of a further extension of the market zone to every last corner of erstwhile non-economic spheres of society, then what use could its intellectual dimension have for a political theory?
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Is Marx (Capital) Secular?
Wendy Brown
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Three contemporary predicaments have wreaked havoc with the modernist and especially twentieth- century Western expectation that secularism would be the future for ever more parts of the world and would remain a permanent feature of the West.
There is, first, the phenomenon of enormous planetary slums where, to paraphrase Mike Davis, the politics of proletarian revolution have been replaced by the politics of the holy ghost. Huge enclaves of poor people find sanctuary in religion today—evangelical Christianity in Latin America, North America, and southern Africa; populist Islam in Asia and North Africa; and a range of local [End Page 109] religions in regions around the globe. “If God died in the cities of the industrial revolution,” Davis writes, “he has risen again in the postindustrial cities of the developing world.”
In addition to the vitality of religion among the world’s most destitute, there is, second, a broad transnational renaissance for religion today, one accompanying if not generated by the intensification of capitalism’s global reach in recent decades. Rather than inciting secular revolutions and consciousness, globalization appears to have produced something of its opposite, in which the legitimacy and energy of states as well as national and transnational political movements (and conflicts) are often bound expressly to religion.
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The Sovereignty Effect: Markets and Power in the Economic Regime
Joseph Vogl
Translated by William Callison
The two parts of this essay revolve around a few dramas in the contemporary economy of finance. Part 1 will raise the question of the extent to which knowledge of the financial economy is a dangerous kind of knowledge, as it not only failed to predict the last crisis but, if anything, co-produced it. Part 2 will look more precisely at the organization of power in the financial-economic regime. At issue here will be the figure of an emergency politics that takes hold in the gray area between political structures and economic dynamics.
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Articles
Our Things: Thoreau on Objects, Relics, and Archives
Branka Arsić
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Thoreau is as much obsessed with things as he is with oak trees. Things play a central role everywhere in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Most obviously, the Thoreau brothers make a boat and then turn it into a central character of the narrative, so that the boat, which is supposed to transport them leisurely from the Concord’s stream of death into the Merrimack’s waters of life, is elevated into a sort of amphibious ontological phenomenon. Promoted as both capable of flying like a bird and drifting on water like a fish, it is a creature capable of drifting flights, which Thoreau imagines as an excellent mode of existence. But there are other objects also: arrowheads just under the surface of the earth, churches spoiling the beauty of a Sunday landscape, houses, monuments indiscernible among the stones, and cemeteries grown into moss. In A Week, material culture is always immersed within animated processes, history turning into forests, archaeology into geology, objects into creatures. Similarly in Walden: from Concord houses to pyramids and coffins; from Indian baskets to oversized English suitcases; from the pots and pans Thoreau uses for cooking to chairs, lamps, and pencils; from trains to the Kouroo artist’s equipment—objects are always either juxtaposed to or intertwined with natural things (landscapes, apple trees, leaves, flowers, birds, or flows of wet sand), and material culture is reproached when it distinguishes itself from corporeal life. Not all things are the same for Thoreau, and in fact, when he talks about things he excludes many things.
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Paradisical Pessimism: On the Crucifixion Darkness and the Cosmic Materiality of Sorrow
Nicola Masciandaro
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“The contours of cosmic pessimism,” writes Eugene Thacker, “are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view . . . shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought.” By intellectually elevating the worst to universal magnitudes, cosmic pessimism forces the question of the relation between what ultimately is and how one feels about things. More specifically, it necessarily entertains—with utmost due skepticism—the problem of whether human sorrow, our volitional and affective sensor for what is wrong, has any universal validity.
This essay finds in cosmic pessimism the conceptual starting point for a mystical reinterpretation of the most radical representation of cosmic sorrow in the Christian tradition: the crucifixion darkness. As an ultimate figural conjunction of the pessimal and the optimal, this event provides the grounds for a paradisical inversion of pessimism around the axis of sorrow. Far from being an impasse, pessimism’s constitutive shadow is now seen to be an index of sorrow’s meta-subjective universality and thus the best means of overcoming sorrow itself.
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Cartographies of Style: Asignifying, Intensive, Impersonal
Anne Sauvagnargues
Translated by Suzanne Verderber
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Style sweeps away, infiltrates, and overturns the signifying components of language, producing new percepts, surprising and splendid individuations, at five in the afternoon, an afternoon in the steppe. Taking this position, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari counter the tendency in art and literature to turn style into an operator of identity. No longer treating style as the marker of a unitary signification, of a personal origin, or of a defined genre, they redefine it as asignifying, impersonal, and intensive. Nevertheless, there is nothing uncertain or reactive about these subtractive formulations, whose critical impact ignites a creative explosion.
Indeed, of what does style consist? In literature or in art history, style usually exercises a personological, identifying, and signifying function, sorting exceptional works from unimpressive or minor ones. Style is the hallmark of a habit that refers to an average level of language use or of art production, and personifies the genius artist in possession of a unique, transcendental ego who, in the classic version, deploys the norm in an exceptional way, or, in the romantic version, creates the norm. Exemplarity or exception: the normative strategy of style reveals itself in this process of distinguishing major works from minor ones.
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The Aesthetic Possibility of the Work of Art
Christoph Menke
Translated by Seth Thorn
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
A familiar way of starting to think about art is to submit it to the standard form of philosophical investigation defined by the sequence of an existential statement followed by a question. The existential statement concerns a particular class of things. The question concerns what makes these things possible. Let us say preliminarily: the question concerns the potential whose actualization is to be understood as a thing of that particular kind.
The form of this investigation is well known, for it has defined philosophy since Socrates. What is essential to this form is that the being and mode-of-being of things are not simply taken for granted; rather, they are questioned or “problematized.” In the light of this questioning, things seem neither self-evidently given nor miraculous but, in Aristotelian terms, “problematic.” They become something, in other words, that we want to, and can, understand or explain. The form of this philosophical understanding is the explanation of the reality [Wirklichkeit] of these objects as the actualization [Verwirklichung] of a possibility.
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Review Essays
Meditations in Midair
Emina Mušanović
A review of Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
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Cruising Dystopia: The Messy Optimism of Digital Connection in Shaka McGlotten’s Virtual Intimacies Bonnie Ruberg
A review of McGlotten, Shaka, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013).
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Cover: Christina Barrera, Candidate Universes (blue and red). More info.
Volume 23.1 is available at Duke University Press, Project Muse, and JSTOR. Qui Parle is edited by an independent group of graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and published by Duke University Press.