James D. Faubion

Rethinking the subject : an anthology of contemporary European social thought

* Foreword, Paul Rabinow Cultured Bodies * Structures, Habitus, Practices Pierre Bourdieu * Gender and Identity in the New Guinea Highlands Marilyn Strathern * Discipline Michael Foucault Matters and Ideas * Politics Unbound Alessandro Pizzorno * Progress Exposed as Fate? Hans Blumenberg * Modernity and the Planes of Historicity Reinhart Koselleck * The Totalitarian Disease Louis Dumont * Individualism and the Ideology of Romantic Love Alan Macfarlane * The Contemporary Codification of Intimacy Niklas Luhmann Acts and Reasons * Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason Jurgen Habermas * The Contemporary Pragmatics of Scientific Knowledge Jean-Franois Lyotard Economies and Societies * Post-Industrial Classes Alain Touraine * On Consumer Society Jean Baudrillard

Anthropologies of ethics: Where we’ve been, where we are, where we might go

Comment on LAIDLAW, James. 2014. The subject of virtue: An anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The subject that is not one: On the ethics of mysticism

Any anthropological approach to ethics that gives a central place to subjects and the positions they might occupy is obliged sooner or later to address an apparent paradox, instances of which are widespread. They occur in those many ethical systems that valorize a condition that can hardly be characterized without equivocation: the subject that is not one. We commonly think of such a (non-)subject as a mystic. A useful starting point in coming to terms with the mystic rests in the distinctive place in which he or she typically stands in relation to any given ethical domain – a place decidedly not at the center, at the axial conjunction that the ethical Everyperson occupies. Victor Turner’s treatment of liminality provides a useful analytical precedent, but it does not of itself adequately clarify either the specific ethical difference or the specific ethical function of mysticism as such. Crucial to both is the mystic’s generation in practice of what turns out to be a very real paradox of self-reference, the thinking and acting out of the proposition that ‘this ethics is not an ethics’. The upshot is that the mystic as (non-)subject confronts the ethical system in which or by which he or she resides with its logical and its social incompleteness. No wonder, then, that mystics are rarely beloved of ethical absolutists, whose absolutism – by their very being, and whether or not wittingly – they call into question. No wonder, on the other hand, that moral-ethical liberals so often find them beyond the pale. The ethical paradox of the mystic is insuperable – but all the more socioculturally significant in being so.

On the anthropology of the contemporary: Addressing concepts, designs, and practices

Between 2007 and 2014, on his own and in association with Gaymon Bennett and Anthony Stavrianakis, Paul Rabinow has been devoted to the development of an “anthropology of the contemporary.” The project is widely recognized as being original, stimulating, and provocative, within and outside of the disciplinary corridors of anthropology. Only spotty attention has been paid, however, to the overarching integrity of the complex spiral of figuration and refiguration through which it has unfolded. Even less attention has been paid to the overarching integrity of the works that Rabinow inaugurated and has continued to pursue throughout his career—from an original and frequently cited formulation of the relation between tradition and modernity through his more recent articulations of the anthropology appropriate to the relation between modernity and the contemporary. Severally and jointly, the contributors to this forum give attention to both. Anthony Stavrianakis joins Rabinow in a response that engages these contributors, taking the opportunity thus provided to address criticism and to elaborate and to refine an anthropology of the contemporary as they currently understand it to be.

On parabiopolitical reason

Our current ecumene is governmentalistically plural. The biopolitical technology of the regulation of one or another bounded population remains active among many other such technologies. The mode of veridiction proper to biopolitics is actuarial; it has a proper epistemology. In these two respects, it stands beside and apart from the mode of veridiction proper to a parabiopolitics, which is scenaristic and grounded in a sophiology. I extract the lineaments of parabiopolitical reason from two sources. One is an exercise undertaken in Greece between 2002 and 2004 under the mandate of the European program, FORESIGHT. The other is the work of Pierre Wack, whose methodology of scenario planning brings the difference that makes a difference between biopolitical epistemology and parabiopolitical sophiology most brightly to light.

Anthropology and History

Abstract Anthropology engages history not as one but instead as many things: (1) sociocultural change or diachrony; (2) a domain of events and objects that make manifest systems of signification, purpose, and value; (3) a domain of variable modalities of the experience and consciousness of being in time; and (4) a domain of practices, methods, and theories devoted to the recording and the analysis of temporal phenomena. It emerged, and continues to serve, as that branch of ‘natural history’ which investigates the psychophysical origins and diversification of the human race. As ‘ethnohistory,’ it investigates the documents of the pasts of native or ‘first’ peoples, paying special attention to the dynamics and consequences of colonization. Emile Durkheims Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1995/1912) opens the arena of an ‘anthropology of history’ with its argument for the social causation of the experience and conceptualization of time, but anthropologists remain divided over what the anthropology of history is or should be. Their disagreements are instructive because they recapitulate a much larger and more enduring controversy over whether anthropological knowledge is a mode of historical or instead a mode of scientific knowledge. The controversy is probably also irresolute, at least until either anthropology or history comes to an end.