Bonnie Honig

Ruth, the Model Emigrée Mourning and the Symbolic Politics of Immigration

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israelites of our time. Herman Melville

Three Models of Emergency Politics

The last three decades have been spent perfecting the techniques of emergency rule and dismantling the apparatuses of universal entitlement. This must certainly be the mode of governance that some rulers have in mind for meeting a coming climate change dystopia: a world of mass movement of displaced peoples meeting harsher border restrictions, scarce resources distributed on the basis of privilege, armed control of privatized essential services. However, even though it may grate against some received critiques of law, we cannot afford to jettison “necessity” and “emergency” altogether. It

The Miracle of Metaphor: Rethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and Schmitt

The legal anthropologist carol greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment‘s Notice, with a story recorded by goethe, who, when traveling through italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar timekeeping practices. a man seated at a desk held in his hand a glass sand bottle, a timepiece. it was not immediately clear what his purpose was. But goethe soon noticed that as the prosecutor spoke the man kept the bottle lying on its side, its sands inert, and whenever the defense began to speak the man would turn the bottle upright and restart its sand flow. When the state spoke, time stopped. The defense, however, was subject to time. The story accords well with the views of state sovereignty propounded by carl Schmitt, who identifies sovereignty as such with the power to legally suspend law for a time by declaring a state of exception. for Schmitt, as for giorgio agamben, who works in his wake, the state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power. The ensuing condition is one in which we—or, rather, sovereign powers—are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both, since the state of exception is itself a legal condition of alegality. grounded in paradox—the legal suspension of law—and seeming well positioned to explain elements of the current political landscape that liberal and deliberative democratic theorists only criticize, Schmitt’s “state of exception,” i think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory. i seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt’s account is based and from which it draws sustenance. and i do so with the intent of highlighting the dependence of the so-called state of exception upon democratic energies and its vulnerability, therefore, to democratic action and resistance. i begin by devoting sustained attention to Schmitt’s metaphor for the state of exception—the miracle, noting that we may accept his metaphorization and yet be drawn by it to very different conclusions. alternative conceptions of miracle, as we shall see, point not to singular sovereign ruptural power but rather to receptivity, popular power, and the importance of orientation in everyday life to divinity or sovereignty. for this alternative, i turn to franz rosenzweig’s theology. another implication of the work begun here is to lay the groundwork for questioning contemporary identifications of action with event and politics with singularity. i ask whether the metaphor of miracle, normally taken to mark extraordinary, ruptural, or inaugurative politics (as, for example, by hannah arendt), might not license instead a turn to the ordinary, away from rupture to the everyday, from transcendence to immanence (though, as william connolly points out, the immanent can also be ruptural [Pluralism] and, as eric Santner points out, the rupture sought by rosenzweig’s new thinking is one that would return us to a different ordinary [On the

What Kind of Thing Is Land? Hannah Arendt’s Object Relations, or The Jewish Unconscious of Arendt’s Most “Greek” Text

Informed by D. W. Winnicott’s object relations theory, and focused on the role of Things in constituting the world that is the object of Arendtian care, this essay examines Hannah Arendt’s treatment in The Human Condition of two liminal examples, cultivated land and poetry, that hover on the borders of Labor, Work, and/or Action. Cultivated land could belong to Work because cultivation leaves a lasting mark on the land, but it is assigned to Labor because land, once it is left uncultivated, returns to nature, Arendt says. Poetry could belong to Action, which is the realm of meaning-making speech, but it is assigned to Work because, Arendt argues, poetry’s memorability ultimately depends on its writtenness and, once it is written, it becomes a Thing possessed of the object permanence characteristic of Work’s objects. But (un)cultivated land also has a textualized form; it, too, can be written down as, for example, in the form of mapping. Why does Arendt not consider this? What possibilities of political thought or action (beyond the mere reassignment of land cultivation from Labor to Work) might have been opened had she done so? Working through these questions with particular reference to colonial cartography (in which uncultivated land, deemed “fallow,” has a particularly political resonance), and reading Kafka’s The Castle (cited by Arendt elsewhere) alongside Brian Friel’s Translations, this essay explores practices of participatory mapping and land sabbatical that might make of land a “Thing” in Arendt’s sense. Noting the Biblical origins of land sabbatical and that Arendt’s move in the Work section from cultivated land to text/poem retraces George Steiner’s diasporic journey “From Homeland to Text,” I suggest that The Human Condition, commonly called Arendt’s most Greek text, may have a Jewish unconscious.

Public Things Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the Democratic Need

What if democracy postulates not just a demos and the other things on which democratic theory these days focuses (constitutions, clear territorial boundaries, proper procedures, commitment to formal or substantive equality) but also public things, shared common things, over which to argue, around which to gather? Such things require communal attention, public commitment, and collective maintenance. And they return the favor by lending to us some of their objectivity: that is to say, interacting with public things grants to democratic subjects some of those things’ durability and resilience. This insight is drawn from D. W. Winnicott’s object-relations theory in which the idea of a “holding environment” is key. This essay, develops new readings of Lear’s Radical Hope and von Trier’s Melancholia from a “public things” perspective and argues that new narrations of democratic maturation are needed to counter recent efforts to infantilize the democratic need for public things. Tocqueville and Hannah Arendt are drawn upon as well in this analysis of the complex politics of collaboration and privatization in the context of the theft of native lands and the catastrophe of climate change.

Review Essay: What Foucault Saw at the Revolution: On the Use and Abuse of Theology for Politics

I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at foreseeing the past. However, I would like to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice are still being rolled. It is perhaps this that is the work of a journalist, but it is true that I am nothing but a neophyte.—Michel Foucault, (“The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt,” in Afary and Anderson, p. 220)

Review article: The politics of ethos: Stephen White The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009

Stephen White’s latest contribution to his weak ontology project is this engaging book in which he analyzes the impact on politics and ethics of a form of subjectivity he calls sovereign and ‘capacious’. Capacious subjects are mortal and vulnerable but they do not identify with those traits. Instead, they see these traits as weaknesses and seek to insulate themselves from exposure to felt finitude. They fortress themselves within structures of rationality and agency that enhance their sense of power and control. They tend to experience power in their ethical and political lives and rarely do they feel powerless. When they do feel powerless they act in ways, often damaging to others, meant to shore up their own sense of control. In general, they have confidence in their capacities to extend their agency over large swaths of space and time, to control their environments, and manage conflicts rationally, intellectually, or through effective force. Situating his arguments in the context of specific challenges of late modernity, White proposes we interrupt and slacken ‘the momentum of the self that would be sovereign’ ( p. 69) and that we redefine capaciousness. Its rational controlling variant reduces human dignity ‘to the potential for a kind of mastery or reflective planning project’. The proposed alternative redefines capaciousness as ‘something such as ‘‘the meaning-making of a meaning-seeking creature’’’. The focus on meaning highlights both our capacity as humans to ‘master much in the world’ while also keeping such projections always ‘arrayed before a background of inarticulacy’ ( p. 51). Combining a focus on capacity and finitude, White argues, we come closer to Burke’s authentic rather than false sublime. The false sublime thrills with the ‘imagined infinitude of human capacity’. The authentic, by contrast, is experienced in the ‘uncanny juxtaposition of the exhilaration of something that is simultaneously grand but sobered by an association with death’ ( p. 52). Finitude is also an attractive conceptual resource because it is a weak ontological trait that defines humans in their commonality, rather than dividing us, as more theistic ontologies do. Mortality is uniquely able to offer the ‘most slender bond of commonality across large geographical distances’ ( p. 72). If we vivify our finitude and confront rather than avoid our shared mortality, we will be opened to more

Out Like a Lion: Melancholia with Euripides and Winnicott

This essay treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange visions of two suns. One focus here, with Winnicott, is on the youth, Leo, in von Trier’s film, and the young king Pentheus, in Euripides’ play. Both navigate their way through the doldrums of adolescence, a process that may involve violence, aggression and murder (of self, of other). Noting the often-neglected politics of regicide in Euripides’ play returns us to consider anew the politics of von Trier’s film.