Fiona Jenkins

Bare-life: asylum-seekers, Australian politics and Agamben's critique of violence

I argue here that we may gain insight into the political challenges posed by asylum seekers using terms supplied by Giorgio Agambens analysis of the ‘rotten ambiguity’ of modem rule of law. Appealing to the language of human rights to address the status and suffering of would-be refugees is inadequate to the extent that it fails to interrogate (1) the terms on which ‘belonging’ and ‘displacement’ are politicised in the nation state and (2) the nihilistic form of modem law. I explore these limitations by locating Agambens thought in relation to that of Schmitt, Benjamin and Arendt, and contrasting his account of the ‘state of exception’ in which we live with a perspective that would invite us to see human rights as redressing excesses of sovereign power. My discussion leads me to partially endorse Agambens view that humanitarian concern for refugee entrenches deeply problematic aspects of the sovereign power of the nation state. I also argue, however, that we might think beyond his criticism of the nation state, to consider how democracy would need to be reconceived in order to allow the political claims of refugees to begin to be heard in their full force.

Gestures Beyond Tolerance Generosity, Fatality and the Logic of the State

Recent actions undertaken by the Liberal government in Australia to block the entry of asylum seekers on their rickety, sinking boats into national waters, led – perhaps rather late in the day – to a wave of calls from various voices opposed to such actions, that the Australian people return to the “good old-fashioned virtue of tolerance” (see, for example, “Shameful Politics of Exclusion,” Australian Financial Review 3 Nov. 2001). I take it that what was meant by this call for tolerance followed from a diagnosis of the significance of the government’s action in terms of a racist motivation for blocking the entry of asylum seekers. It framed an objection to the Liberals’ way of taking on the One Nation Party’s far-right agenda of intolerance for all forms of “otherness” within Australia’s midst. As such, the call for tolerance was a call that Australians should accept the existence of those minorities already living amongst them and perhaps, by extension, that they should find it in their hearts to welcome at least some of the ominously portended waves of refugees, fleeing from various dire circumstances around the globe. And here another attitude, richer than tolerance, was simultaneously invoked. “We are a generous nation” intoned Kim Beazley, at that time leader of the Labour opposition in the runup to elections, and making a gesture that was indeed very late in the day to distance himself from the government’s hostile policy towards refugees. His idea of generosity allowed him to specify a figure of some 2,000 people for whom Australia might reasonably assume responsibility without threatening its own well-being. This consideration of numbers, moreover, was couched in the rhetoric of concern for the asylum seekers themselves, whose pitiful exploitation by greedy people-smugglers, Beazley declared himself to be primarily moved by. A generosity, then, within limits. Generosity tempered both by concern for maintaining our own well-being and a concern for those whom we must – and this also for their own good – disappoint, block, save from their exploitation by the greedy which would expand, infinitely, to negate whatever generosity we might afford. Generosity conceived as an attitude that can be sustained only in so far as it does not undermine the dominant position of the one who “gives,” the one who has something in excess to give, and only gives out of that excess, thus without risking damage to the reserves necessary to maintain ourselves just as we are; that is, in the position of the generous

Limits of the Human

Modernity defines its civilisation and epoch, its political desires and ethical norms through the value and meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humanity that universal laws are conceived as valid and true. Today, however, the very concept of the human appears to be in crisis as we acknowledge our collective agency in precipitating a slide towards a catastrophic future for our planet, or register the aporias of the international human rights regime in the face of the multitudinous sites of geopolitical conflict and violence that have succeeded the Cold War. As the fundamentals of ethics are challenged by the anticipation of a post-human future, whether of an intelligence explosion, an event horizon termed ‘‘singularity’’ by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or of a biologically re-engineered human subject enabled by advances in the human genome project and the technologies of mammal cloning, we face a pressing need to recalibrate for our times the conceptual weight that the category of the human has acquired over two centuries of critical reflection and representation. This special issue of Angelaki orients itself to a climate of contemporary critical thought that originates in the contemplation of such limit cases. At once sober, tremulous, wondrous, and inventive, such thought takes the measure of humanity’s presence on this planet. It weighs the human capacity for transcendence with its predilection for annihilation. It ponders the fate of our non-human others, not just animals and living organisms but inert matter; and contemplates the fields of techno-mediation of suffering lifeworlds that constitute new public realms of visibility. Startlingly, it scales up human historicity to mark our intervention in geological space-time, thus heralding a new Earth era, the Anthropocene, a term that gives ominous credence to the indelible imprint of the human on our biophysical systems. If in ecological perspective, the human has become an element so disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring many forms and species of life to the threshold of extinction, then it may seem that all that has inspired modernity’s self-conception as progressive, humane and historically necessary proves instead to have been an unmonitored and dangerous experiment with life’s very conditions of possibility. The same thought may apply to our encounter with the limits of the human in global media images of extreme violence. The differential impact of crisis and suffering, giving rise to EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Epistemic Credibility and Women in Philosophy

Abstract Women in philosophy are disproportionately under-represented at elite institutions, and publishing patterns can be analysed to show that the ‘top’ journals publish articles by women at rates significantly lower than even the levels of women who have made it into tenure at these elite universities. In such journals, the type of epistemology that Lorraine Code describes as ‘immune to feminist critique’ is dominant, assuming that neutrality is the benchmark for knowledge, and that knowers float free of the encumbrances of situation. It is right to worry, as Code does, that feminist and critical race theory hold an increasingly fragile place in disciplinary philosophy and that disciplinary philosophy itself is thereby the loser. The question of how to reinvigorate radical projects of contestation is both urgent and vexing. To align this issue with the under-representation of women in philosophy poses its own problems, as this article explores: for women need not be feminist philosophers, and feminist philosophy can be a project of assimilation into the mainstream as much as it can be a project of radical transformation of disciplinary norms. There may be something to learn, however, both about equity in the academy and the fate of critique by considering the relation between prevailing institutional conditions, disciplinary trajectories and the gendering of prestige in the academic sector.

A Sensate Critique: Vulnerability and the Image in Judith Butler's Frames of War

That man’s not more alive whom you confront And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud, Than any of these celluloid smiles are, Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead; No thought so vivid as their smoking blood: To regard such a photograph might well dement, Such contradictory permanent horrors here Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out One’s own body from its instant and heat. —Ted Hughes, from “Six Young Men”

Souls at the limits of the human: beyond cosmopolitan vision

How might we construe the demand that is posed by the circulation of photographic images in the contemporary world other than the sense that is given to these in contemporary cosmopolitanism, that is, as an extension of the realm of representation to a wider humanity? The ontological reading of the image and its way of marking life given here delineates an approach to the evidence that images present that de-centres the place of human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. Using the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on the image, and Judith Butler on the apprehension of grievable life, the essay seeks to phrase the nature of a demand arising from the image, as that which exceeds an immediate or given context. It is this demand, I suggest, that is given in the non-representational aspect of the image, its circulation out of context. To heed this demand, I argue, is to attend to what Nancy terms “being-singular-plural” and Butler “grievable life,” and to move beyond the cosmopolitan form of vision toward what Derrida terms “hospitality.”

Gendered Innovation in the Social Sciences

There have been significant levels of gendered innovation across the social sciences. This chapter argues that such new norms and new knowledge are important in understanding the gendered realities of the worlds that social sciences seek to explain. In addition, they provide the wide lens we need for assessing progress towards goals of gender equality. Examining the relationship between advances in knowledge and the diversity brought by women to the academy, as well as the specifically critical approaches of feminist work, the chapter also discusses the uneven adoption of gender scholarship into mainstream social science disciplines, identifying factors such as methodological approaches and hegemonic assumptions that affect the rate of uptake.

Work (still) in progress: Establishing the value of gendered innovations in the social sciences

The extensive significance of feminist and gender research clearly does not need demonstrating to the audience of this specific journal; yet such recognition of its importance is far from being universal. Feminist economics belongs to a class of approaches stigmatized by the mainstream neoclassical discipline as ‘heterodox’. Feminist philosophy, like feminist economics, is largely published outside the disciplines most prestigious journals, and is produced almost exclusively by women. Political science and international relations, likewise, are disciplines that in their mainstream incarnation, seem barely to have begun to engage with gender as a fundamental aspect of all political relations. Although in these disciplines, as across the social sciences, we see vibrant sub-fields, where feminist approaches and gendered analysis are the norm, the degree of gender segregation that often marks such scholarship in terms of practice, impact and citation, is cause for concern. In present institutional contexts, where perceptions of the ‘excellence’ of research shape funding decisions and career paths, and where many disciplinary fields continue to construct images of the social, economic and political world that are at best indifferent to questions of gender and at worst perpetuate ways of thinking intimately bound up with the preservation of gender inequality and subordination, it may be timely to reflect upon and construct accounts precisely of why gender matters in these fields. At a conference held at the Australian National University in 2016, we sought to elaborate instances of gendered innovations in the social sciences that would both serve as elucidations of the importance of feminist and gender research to those as yet unfamiliar with or unconvinced of this; and to reflect upon the extent to which recognition of the value of this work had been conceded by mainstreams that all too often remain heavily male dominated. The work forms part of ongoing investigations conducted under the auspices of an Australian Research Council grant into ‘Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences’ (GESS). The aim of our conference was at once to consider how feminist and gender research sharpens and reforms disciplinary approaches, showing how our understanding of fundamental social science questions is improved by using a gendered analysis; and to compile evidence of the extent to which that promise of progress in knowledge is being realized or not through the uptake represented by disciplinary engagement and transformation. The findings on this latter question vary widely across disciplines, as the paper by Rebecca Pearse, James N. Hitchcock and Helen Keane in this special issue discusses. If we ask how far the ground-breaking work of feminist and gender research has been mainstreamed or acknowledged in its importance by the academic disciplines that are tasked with understanding society, the story is a very mixed one. There appear to be large variations in the extent to which disciplines have become conscious of the importance of gender, with sociology a clear leader in this respect. In this special issue we thus place an overview of empirical research findings about the status and influence of feminist and gender research, based on analysis of citation patterns and other indicators, alongside three ‘case studies’ of gendered innovations in some of the most problematic disciplines: economics, philosophy and political science. Gendered innovations in social sciences have arisen from forms of inquiry that pay attention to multiple differences, modes of inequality, and potentials of human existence that were systemically overlooked or discounted by the androcentric paradigms that have dominated social inquiry. This has meant scholarship that is more adequate to understanding the lives and destinies of half the worlds population, as well as the creation of public spaces where women have been able to articulate their individual and collective voices as producers of knowledge since second-wave feminism swept women into the academy. Yet in many respects the task of transforming disciplines by insisting on genders broad significance is no less necessary today than it was when critical perspectives on androcentric social sciences were first being forged from the 1980s onwards by academic feminism. To be sure, data-driven social science research will now most typically include at least some