Alan Milchman

Marxism and Governmentality Studies: Toward a Critical Encounter

This essay is animated by the conviction that a critical encounter between antiessentialist Marxism and Foucauldian-inspired governmentality studies can provide us with a purchase on a history of the present—that it can facilitate a diagnosis of the contemporary world. A critical encounter, as we understand it, entails a confrontation and an exchange, strife, and dialogue. A critical encounter does not aim at the resolution of outstanding issues, or the agreement of one of the parties with the position of the other. Rather, it is a confrontation in which the aim is not the destruction of one’s opponent but the moment in which positions are interrogated, questions raised, and dialogue established. According to Michel Foucault:

Martin Heidegger and the University as a Site for the Transformation of Human Existence

Martin Heideggers rectorate (1933–1934) was characterized by an incontestable involvement with Nazism. However, neither the rectorate, nor Heideggers ambitious project for the transformation of the university within which it was embedded, was reducible to Nazism. Indeed, Heideggers project to transform the university dates from his earliest lecture courses at Freiburg University in 1919 and was a hallmark of his thinking long before the rise of Nazism. That project was itself linked to the long-standing dispute in German academia over the role of the university in the modern world, which involved such thinkers as Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Despite the entanglement with Nazism, which stamped his rectorate, Heideggers thinking about the university as a site for the transformation of human existence is especially pertinent today.

Hannah Arendt and the etiology of the desk killer: The holocaust as portent

The wilful, planned, systematic extermination-not subjugation-of whole populations is a Novum of the twentieth century. Late modernity has been characterised by frequent outbreaks of mass murder organised by the modern state. While the administrative murder of masses of people planned and executed by the apparatus of the modern state is certainly indicative of a proclivity to genocide, it is not yet genocide itself. The term genocide must be restricted to those situations in which the object of state policy is the extermination, the complete annihilation, of a determinate group of the population. It is the Holocaust that constitutes the primary example of genocide in our epoch, in that the destruction of the Jews as a people became endemic to the evolving socioeconomic, political and cultural matrix. With the Holocaust, mankind stepped into an incipient genocidal universe in which the systematic, bureaucratically administered destruction of millions of citizens or subject people was becoming an integral and normal part of the operation of the state apparatus. A genocidal universe is a social constellation in which genocide becomes constitutive of a culture, a central feature of a civilisation, which integrates, propels and shapes the socio-political network in which the administrative murder of whole peoples and strata of the population occurs. In such a genocidal universe, the potential for the extermination of whole groups of the population is integrally linked to the very social structure itself. In this sense, the Holocaust was the clearest portent of such a genocidal universe that humankind has experienced thus far. Given the epoch-making character of the Holocaust, given the significance of the eruption of the genocidal universe as a potential inherent in modernity, it is surprising that, with very few exceptions, philosophy and social theory have not really probed the importance of these transformational events. As a result, the Holocaust, with its train of horrors, remains to this day an ‘unmastered past’, in the compelling view of Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1977, p. 283). This is all the more disturbing in that one of the classic functions of philosophy and social theory is to grasp the meaning of historic events and transformations, and to define their impact for the present and future of society. Philosophy and social theory need to develop a conceptual framework that will integrate and synthesise the various and seemingly disparate aspects of the genocidal events of World War Two and incorporate them within the ambit of a theory of modernity. These events, horrible and unprecedented though they were, are not inexplicable aberrations, surds. As one of us has argued elsewhere:

Max Weber on capitalism, socialism and democracy

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