Louiza Odysseos

Human rights, liberal ontogenesis and freedom: producing a subject for neoliberalism?

Taking liberalism as a technology of government characterised by its signature impulse — what Michel Foucault called ‘the internal rule of maximum economy’ — the article interrogates the ways in which human rights produce a distinct subjectivity, homo juridicus, which is a subject amenable to self-government and, as such, acts as a partner, indeed a predicate, to neoliberal governmentality. Taking its impetus from Foucault’s discussion of homo oeconomicus , the article traces human rights’ relations of subjectification, that is, the ways in which human rights call homo juridicus into being as a distinct type of subjectivity that, in parallel to homo oeconomicus, makes possible the contraction of the state and its governmentalisation. The article calls such subjectification liberal ‘ontogenesis’ and argues that it takes four distinct but related forms: rhetorical, epistemic, performative and structural ontogenesis. It provides an illustration of how each of these forms of ontogenesis produce, and produce globally — through their discourses, knowledge production, law-making and restructuring of the ‘conditions of freedom’ — a necessary subject for neoliberalism. The article thereby shows that human rights assist in the evolution of government as the conduct of conduct, and irrevocably recast the very meaning of freedom and the possibilities for agonism.

Governing dissent in the Central Kalahari game reserve: ‘development’, governmentality, and subjectification amongst Botswana's bushmen

This article explores the theme of ‘disciplining dissent’ by examining how dissenting conduct is channelled into ‘acceptable’ and ‘productive’ practices. To this end, it uses Michel Foucaults framework of ‘government’ in order to highlight the operations of a diffuse and generalized form of ‘disciplining’, where this refers to the directing or ‘structur[ing of] the field of action of others’. Through this framework, the article illuminates that subjects do not cease to be governed when they undertake certain practices customarily categorized as ‘resistance’ or ‘dissent’. On the contrary, the article explores how dissenting practice itself ‘disciplines’ the conduct of subjects. The article analyzes the pivotal role played in this by processes of subjectification, highlighting how ‘governing’ (dissenting) behavior may well require the incitation of forms of subjectivity, and ways of being, that are open to such acceptable forms of dissenting and resisting. The article examines the case of Botswanas Bushmen and their attempts to resist and revoke their relocation by the Government of Botswana from the Central Kalahari Game Reserve since 2002 as an important contemporary site illustrative of the interplay of governing, dissent, and subjectification. Este artículo explora el tema de la ‘disidencia disciplinaria’, examinando cómo la conducta de disidencia se canaliza dentro de prácticas ‘aceptables’ y ‘productivas’. Con este fin, usa el marco de ‘gobierno’ de Michel Foucault, para resaltar las operaciones de una forma difusa y generalizada de ‘disciplinar’, en lo que se refiere a la dirección o ‘estructura[ción] del campo de acción de otros. A través de este marco, el artículo ilustra que los sujetos no dejan de ser gobernados cuando asumen ciertas prácticas, usualmente categorizadas como ‘resistencia’ o ‘disidencia’. Por lo contrario, el artículo explora cómo la propia práctica de disidencia ‘disciplina’ la conducta de los sujetos. El artículo analiza el papel fundamental que juega en este proceso de subjetivación, resaltando cómo la conducta de ‘gobernar’ (disentir) quizás requiera la incitación de formas de subjetividad, y maneras de ser, que están abiertas a tales formas aceptables de disidencia y resistencia. El artículo examina el caso de los bosquimanos de Botswana y sus intentos de resistir y anular su relocalización de la Reserva de Caza del Kalahari Central bajo el gobierno de Botswana desde el 2002, como un importante punto contemporáneo e ilustrativo de la interrelación entre gobierno, disidencia y subjetivación. 通过考察异议行为如何被导入为“可接受”和“富有成效的”实践活动，本文对“规训异议”这一主题进行了探索。为此，本文采用了米歇尔•福柯的“治理”框架，以强调“规训”在广泛和普遍表现形式上的运作，这里的所指，是“对他人行为领域的控制或安排。”通过这个框架，本文阐明了行为主体在进行通常被归为“抵抗”和“异议”这类实践活动时仍然受到统治。相反地，本文探讨了异议实践活动自身如何“规训”主体的行为。本文分析了主体化过程在其中扮演的极重要角色，强调了“治理”（异议）行为多么需要主体形式的激励，及其存在的方式，它们是向这种可接受的异议和抗议形式开放的。本文考察了博茨瓦纳丛林居民及其2002年以来抵制和抗议博茨瓦纳政府强制他们从中卡拉哈里禁猎区搬迁的努力，这是一个能够说明关于治理、异议和主体化彼此互动的重要的当代案例。

Dangerous ontologies: the ethos of survival and ethical theorising in international relations

The article responds to a recent call for a more systematic interrogation of the persistence of the dichotomous relation between ethics and International Relations. The addition of ethics into International Relations, it has recently been claimed, has left unquestioned the ethical assumptions encompassed in the ‘agenda’ of International Relations itself. Thus, the article examines the ethics implicit in the ‘agenda of IR’ and, in so doing, considers the condition of possibility for a movement beyond the dichotomy ‘ethics and IR’ and towards ‘an ethical International Relations’. To achieve this task the article calls for an understanding of ethics as ethos. It further illustrates how the ‘dangerous ontology’ of realist IR is discursively created through an exposition of Thomas Hobbess Leviathan and Carl Schmitts The Concept of the Political. In this anarchical ontology of danger an ‘ethos of survival’ has come to be the relational framework through which the other is conceptually encountered as an enemy. Subsequently, the article considers what repercussions this ethos has for the reception of ethics into IR.

On the Way to Global Ethics? Cosmopolitanism, ‘Ethical’ Selfhood and Otherness

In response to varied processes of globalization, the cosmopolitan perspective has rightly insisted that discussion of global ethics ought to be taken seriously. This article agrees with cosmopolitan theorists in calling for the implementation of a perspective that can address the other outside of narrow communal determinations. Yet it also advances a critique of their reliance on legalist instruments such as human rights, contending that the bestowal of human rights does not necessarily or directly lead to an ethics of inclusiveness. While the attribution of universal humanity to all may appear as an appropriate means of extending ethical regardedness to all others, this does not immediately follow from such a legalist gesture. Any attempts to articulate a truly global ethics must begin by questioning the distinct communal sensibilities which, by the very fact of their distinctiveness, always already contain within them a ‘xenophobic’ element that cannot be transcended solely by the bestowal of human rights or other such instruments. This article, therefore, discusses a different kind of ‘cosmopolitan’ disposition, one which is based on the recovery of an ethical selfhood that understands itself as an opening to otherness. For this task, it explores the phenomenological analyses of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and specifically his examination of how communication can be cultivated through hearing and silence.

Interrogating Michel Foucault's Counter-Conduct: Theorising the Subjects and Practices of Resistance in Global Politics

Resistance, and its study, is on the rise: visible and politically discernible practices of dissent against sovereignty and economic exploitation, such as protesting, agitating and occupying, have received increased analytical attention in the past decade. This special issue provides much needed systematic attention to less visible practices of resistance or those not manifested in expressly political registers. It focuses on attempts to inventively modify, resist or escape the ways in which we are governed by interrogating critically the politics and ethics of resistance to “power that conducts”, expressed through Foucaults notion of “counter-conduct”. The contributions first theoretically interrogate, develop and refine the concept of “counter-conduct(s)”, offering a major statement of its importance for both the study of resistance and also its place in Foucaults work. Second, they provide inter/multi-disciplinary empirical investigations of counter-conduct in numerous thematic areas and spaces of global politics. Third, they explicitly reflect on variable and contingent forms of counter-conduct, examining its close relationship with conducting power. Finally, the special issue concertedly considers issues of methodology and method emerging from the study of counter-conduct and how these also recalibrate the study of governing power itself.

Introducing the International Theory of Carl Schmitt: International Law, International Relations, and the Present Global Predicament(s)

In this piece we introduce and contextualize the contributions to the special focus on the international theory of Carl Schmitt, and argue that Carl Schmitts much neglected international thought can provide scholars of both international relations and international law with a new common multidisciplinary research platform pivotal in thinking about the present international predicaments of crisis in international order and legitimacy, of contested liberal hegemony, and of the issue of unipolarity and the emergence of new forms of warfare, such as terrorism and the ‘global war on terror’.

Prolegomena to any future decolonial ethics: coloniality, poetics and ‘being human as praxis'

Decolonial thought has wrought a devastating critique on the Academy and wide-ranging fields within it. Decolonial critique entails undeniable and multiple ethico-political orientations arising from concrete struggles within the ‘unfinished project of decolonization’ (Maldonado-Torres), as well as recent articulations of decolonial ethics. This article argues that, as decolonial critique, and calls for decolonial ethics, begin to find their way into broader theoretical discussions in the social sciences and humanities, it may be more fruitful to insist on the question of decolonial ethics. It encourages retaining the disruptive potential of decolonial critique by resisting its immediate translations into available ethical registers and traditions that unwittingly reassert, and remain bound to, forms of ethical expression dependent on generalised narratives, which occlude their histories of violent and racialised exclusion and masterful figurations of ethical subjectivity. Outlining Sylvia Wynter’s excavation of prominent figurations of the human as ‘Man’, I argue that our conceptions of ethical subjects too rest on such figurations. The article, therefore, discusses three prolegomena to any future decolonial ethics: the decolonial critique and displacement of the figure of ‘Man’ as ethical subject within racialised coloniality; the development of a decolonising poetics, whose ethos of irreverence seeks forms of poetic revolt that draw on struggles to question systems of ethical thought and knowledge; finally, a discussion of the contours of a praxis of being hybridly human through the development of ‘education’ as an incessant and ‘unfinished’ project.

The question concerning human rights and human rightlessness: disposability and struggle in the Bhopal gas disaster

In the midst of concerns about diminishing political support for human rights, individuals and groups across the globe continue to invoke them in their diverse struggles against oppression and injustice. Yet both those concerned with the future of human rights and those who champion rights activism as essential to resistance, assume that human rights – as law, discourse and practices of rights claiming – can ameliorate rightlessness. In questioning this assumption, this article seeks also to reconceptualise rightlessness by engaging with contemporary discussions of disposability and social abandonment in an attempt to be attentive to forms of rightlessness co-emergent with the operations of global capital. Developing a heuristic analytics of rightlessness, it evaluates the relatively recent attempts to mobilise human rights as a frame for analysis and action in the campaigns for justice following the 3 December 1984 gas leak from Union Carbide Corporation’s (UCC) pesticide manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India. Informed by the complex effects of human rights in the amelioration of rightlessness, the article calls for reconstituting human rights as an optics of rightlessness.

Constituting community: Heidegger, mimesis and critical belonging

In his commentary on Martin Heidegger’s ‘politics’, Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe noted that there is a continuous but unanswerable question of identification in Heidegger’s thought. At the same time, Lacoue‐Labarthe asks: why would the problem of mimesis, of identification, indeed, of ‘community’, not be considered the essential question of the political as such? In this article, I propose a consideration of the question of community and mimesis. I suggest that Heidegger’s radically hermeneutic and heteronomous analysis of existence (Daseinanalytik) enables us to give a critical rereading of his cryptic, contentious and troubling statements on ‘community’ and ‘people’ in the infamous paragraph 74 of Being and time. My purpose is not solely exegetical with respect to Heidegger’s argument, however. This rereading is primarily a retrieval of a productive understanding of how community comes to be constituted through the practice of ‘critical mimesis’ from Heidegger’s thought, as developed by authors such as Peg Birmingham. Critical mimesis or identification, I argue, points to a type of relationship towards the community’s past (‘the tradition’) that renders communal constitution by its members into a type of ‘critical belonging’. Critical belonging involves critique, displacement and resistance towards the tradition and, as a questioning mode of identification, help us critically theorise community constitution beyond ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ dichotomies. It may also well aid us in examining empirical questions about the expansion of community, multiculturalism and social exclusion which are at the forefront of social and political concerns.

The power of human rights/the human rights of power: an introduction

The contributions to this volume eschew the long-held approach of either dismissing human rights as politically compromised or glorifying them as a priori progressive in enabling resistance. Drawing on plural social theoretic and philosophical literatures – and a multiplicity of empirical domains – they illuminate the multi-layered and intricate relationship of human rights and power. They highlight human rights’ incitement of new subjects and modes of political action, marked by an often unnoticed duality and indeterminacy. Epistemologically distancing themselves from purely deductive, theory-driven approaches, the contributors explore these linkages through historically specific rights struggles. This, in turn, substantiates the commitment to avoid reifying the ‘Third World’ as merely the terrain of ‘fieldwork’, proposing it, instead, as a legitimate and necessary site of theorising.