Dimitris Vardoulakis

The Ends of Stasis: Spinoza as a Reader of Agamben

Abstract Agamben contends that ‘There is … no such thing as a stasiology, a theory of stasis or civil war’ in the western understanding of sovereignty. His own vision of a politics beyond biopolitics explicitly culminates in the end of stasis. How can we understand Agamben’s political theology by investigating his use of stasis? Stasis is particularly suited to an inquiry into political theology. It is linked to politics, since its primary meaning is political change, revolution, or civil war, as well as to the theological, since it denotes immobility or immutability, which were attributes of God. Stasis, then, presents the simultaneous presence and absence that exemplifies the unassimilable relation of the sacred and the secular in political theology. The question is: Does Agamben remain true to this unassimilable relation? Or does he betray it the moment he calls for an end to biopolitics? Agamben’s reading of Spinoza will provide useful clues in answering these questions.

The critique of loneliness

A consideration of the political has to start with a distinction between politics and the political. This distinction, here, is drawn in relation to the place of the subject. Both politics and the political require a locus in which interaction between human beings occurs. Both terms require that the subject is not isolated, but that it is placed in an area where there is contact with other subjects. The subject’s isolation, as the locus that resists or counters sociality, is crucial in identifying the subject of both the political and of politics. Isolation puts the subject in a place devoid of other subjects. However, when subjectivity emerges as a crucial element of human interchange, then subjective identity also leads to a differentiation between the realms of politics and the political. The two questions – “who is the political subject?” and “who is the subject of politics?” – receive, then, divergent answers. For the subject of politics, the locus of human interchange is the sovereign state within which the subject exists as citizen. As such, what defines the subject of politics are the laws of the state. Isolation occurs when the subject is firmly outside the law – the law in the narrow legal sense, the law as statute. On the other hand, since the political subject is not confined to this or that sovereign state, its locus does not exist narrowly on a phenomenal plane. Thus, for the political, isolation is not conceivable as simple physical exclusion. Sociality is a regulative principle of the political only if it is not reduced to content. Nor can isolation, as the opposite of sociality, be equated with physical space. In relation to the political, it is better to view isolation as a topos. A topos is not merely in the service of oration (this would constrain it to politics). What is more, since Aristotle in the Topics links it to the general opinions of humans, topos brings along at least two interrelated aspects: a concern with argumentative strategy and the insistence of topicality. The former aspect is inseparable from language, while the latter ties it to historical actuality. The two aspects are interrelated since they presuppose an effective community. In this sense, the topos has a genuine significance for the political. Isolation will be crucial in identifying the place of the political subject in as much as isolation – as a topos – affirms sociality even though it seeks to disavow it. (Perhaps it is more accurate to say that isolation affirms sociality by seeking to disavow it. Thus it is made clear that what isolation introduces is a distancing from an

The Politics of Nothing: Sovereignty and Modernity

The title of this special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique is inspired by Georges Bataille’s famous formulation: ‘Sovereignty is NOTHING’ (1980: 300). Bataille’s statement may appear too obscure or ‘metaphysical’ in a world that became obsessed with questions about sovereignty after the events on September 11, 2001. The present collection of articles seeks to highlight how indispensable the nothing is in thinking questions about sovereignty in modernity. This will become apparent after a brief consideration of the way sovereignty is mobilized to explain contemporary social phenomena, as well as of the current status of the theoretical debate about sovereignty. Olivier Roy has argued that the actions of Islamic fundamentalists should be understood as emanating from the desire to attain to pure religion. This manifests itself as a war on culture. The fantasy of the creation of a panIslamic community encompassing the globe is based on a desire for deculturation, that is, the desire to institute particular norms or values (such as dress codes or eating proscriptions) as if those would be enough to lead to each individual’s salvation. Ultimately such a fantasy can never hope to achieve anything. Like the idealistic urban terrorist from the 1970s in the West – e.g. the Red Brigades in Italy and Germany – Islamic fundamentalism is a rebellion without a cause because it fails to aspire to creating sovereign entities.1 Now, if this analysis is correct, then it seems paradoxical that the US and their allies responded to the terrorist threat through imperialist gestures such as the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Such imperialism is an attempt to bolster their own sovereignty, even though sovereignty does not seem to be the issue for the fundamentalists they are pursuing. The upshot of this paradox at the heart of global politics since 2001 is that sovereignty has suddenly erupted as an urgent issue in a variety of fields – philosophy, political science, legal theory, international relations and so on. However, as Jen Bartelson has recently showed, the debate in all these fields is marred in the trenchant opposition of those who argue that the forces of globalization have diminished the power of state sovereignty, and those who

Editorial introduction: The politics of place

THE POLITICS OF PLACE An intellectual and political concern acquires actuality in the continuity of its being addressed. What is addressed is repeated, recapitulated and reframed within that continuity. If there is a way of understanding an approach that is truly interdisciplinary, then it is not found in the positing of an intersection of differing discursive practices occurring within any one written text. Such a procedure undoes specificity and therefore precludes the possibility of a critical intervention by blurring, if not removing, the site of intervention itself. Interdisciplinarity emerges when different practices operating together – in the guise of different texts – address the “same” topic. The topic – now a topos – becomes the site of a complex layering and weaving of concerns. No longer is such a place to be conceptualized in terms of the sameness of identity. The “same” henceforth takes on the quality of a locus of divergent practices that, given a certain configuration, opens up possibilities by allowing for productive affinities. Rather than having a simple existence, any such topic takes on the complexity proper to it. What this conception of the interdisciplinary brings to the fore is the way it involves an understanding of a topos of investigation as a site marked by an original conception of complexity. Interdisciplinarity in this sense brings two interrelated considerations into play. Both stem from allowing original – and thus an inherently ineliminable – complexity that has a structuring as well as an organizing role. The first is that there cannot be from within a given discursive practice an exhaustive account of the operation of the given topos. And yet this should not be seen as a restriction. It means that a given disciplinary approach cannot master a complex topos. This is, of course, the second consideration. Rather than interdisciplinary approaches restricting and hindering the development of disciplines, once the complexity of the topos is conceded and the desire to master distanced, what then emerges is a disciplinary practice as a site of innovation and development. Disciplines in a constant state of connection – caught in a weave of concerns that are themselves dictated by the ineliminable complexity of a topos – become places where creation is both possible and effective. This particular formulation gains an insistent acuity once the topos in question is place. Place works with an assumption. While it is assumed that place figures – e.g., what is architecture without ground, the social without location, nations without territory? – the other part

Invincible Eros : democracy and the vicissitudes of participation in Antigone

Abstract Sophocles’ Antigone presents both Creon and Antigone as both democratic and antidemocratic. The articles examines this paradoxical relation between the protagonists by looking at how the stasimon on eros figures sovereignty.

Kafka’s Cages: An Introduction

Kafka’s literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. All his novels present states of confinement. In Amerika, Karl Rossmann arrives in New York like a prisoner and then he is soon trapped in different circumstances. In The Castle, the elusive castle on the top of the mountain and its officials exercise such an attraction to the land-surveyor that he is unable to leave the village. And in The Trial, Josef K. is found guilty without being told what crime he is accused of. This sense of imprisonment is also crucial in the novella The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa is confined to his room. It is also prevalent in the short stories; for instance, in Georg Bendemann’s senseless condemnation to death by his father in “The Judgement,” in the chilling description of the torture machine “In the Penal Colony,” and in the cages of “A Report to an Academy” and “A Hunger Artist,” to mention just a few.

The Quintessence of Dust: Sovereignty and Creaturely Life

What is quintessential about dust? Two radically different answers might be given to this question. The first comes from ancient Greece and it refers to the dust that Antigone sprinkled over Polynices’s dead body. This is dust as a symbol of defiance, dust that signifies resistance to Creon’s sovereign authority by evoking ancestral, sacred law – dust as a metonymy for revolutionary power. And there is also Sebald’s dust, the emblem of natural history, as Eric Santner puts it, that is, as emblem of the destruction, the detritus that discloses a history that is not premised on progress and which does not promise an ultimate redemption. In other words, Sebald’s dust has no defined revolutionary aim, but is rather an object linked to awakening and to messianic temporality that retains a revolutionary possibility, albeit one that – unlike Antigone – does not challenge the sovereign directly.

Critical Praxis: Or, Is Everything Political?

Today, it would seemhardly sensible – one could even say, hardly sane – to challenge the common sense belief in the humanities that everything is political. From the left to the right, the political import of cultural practices has become so self-evident that it is unassailable. To challenge it, one would run the risk of being labelled cultural elitist, an aesthete, a mere hangover from a by-gone century. And yet, this is precisely the task that we are setting ourselves here: namely, to assert that art, criticism and politics are distinct, even if related, categories.

Enmity and Culture: The Rhetoric of Political Theology and the Exception in Carl Schmitt

Abstract This article compares Carl Schmitt’s and Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the figure of Hamlet. This comparison evaluates Schmitt’s response in Hamlet or Hecuba to Benjamin’s discussion of the ‘exception’ in Origins of the German Tragic Drama. ‘Deciding upon the exception’ is a defining characteristic of sovereignty, so that the comparison between Schmitt and Benjamin is also an evaluation of their respective theories of sovereignty. It will appear that the notion of the aesthetic is crucial in understanding this constellation of ideas.

Beside(s): Elizabeth Presa with Jacques Derrida

This paper explores the way that Elizabeth Presas artworks respond to Jacques Derridas thought. By examining how the particularity (the beside) and its supplements (the besides) operate in Presas works, it is shown how this movement between beside and besides is also central to Derridas thought.