Rosalyn Diprose

Biopolitical technologies of prevention

Abstract This paper examines the way some public health campaigns in Australia have been caught within a paradigm shift in the management of ‘risk society’. It details this paradigm shift in terms of an intensification of political technologies of ‘pre-emption’ in response to incalculable threats to physical security. The challenge this presents to public health programs, particularly those dealing with ‘life style’ health problems such as obesity, depression, and drugs (illegal and legal), is that, in pursuing admirable aims of the prevention of ill-health in the population, such campaigns need to avoid reproducing (and indeed should counter) the harmful effects of the pre-emptive approach to security. Using the example of ‘quit smoking’ campaigns of 2006-7, key features of the preemption paradigm are outlined, particularly the conservative comportment toward the future that it fosters. With reference to Foucault’s concept of ‘political technologies of bodies’ and Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies, the paper also explores deleterious effects of this approach to risk and health on human agency, well-being, and social relations in general. The negative impact of the pre-emption approach is outlined in terms of the way it tends to dampen the openness (or ‘potentiality’) of bodies toward the future, the world, and other people. However, the temporality and intercorporeality of bodies also explains the operation of resistance by human agents to both the paradigm of pre-emption and the health prevention strategies that employ its way of thinking. This provides the basis for a gesture toward a more ‘democratic’, respectful, and effective approach to the promotion of health and well-being.

Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts

Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty’s work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty’s thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existentialism, phenomenology, the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history and society. The second section outlines his major contributions and conceptual innovations. The final section focuses upon how his work has been taken up in other fields besides philosophy, notably in sociology, cognitive science, health studies and feminism.

Derrida and the Extraordinary Responsibility of Inheriting the Future-to-come

This paper examines Jacques Derridas account of the paradoxical structure of responsibility from two perspectives. First, in terms of the temporal dimension of responsibility as a responsiveness that affirms but also disrupts and critiques ones cultural heritage, and thereby constitutes the self as futural. Second, responsibility is examined in terms of its political dimension as a deconstruction of the opposition between determinism and absolute freedom. Against assumptions that deconstruction implies political quietism, the paper argues that it is necessary to assume what Derrida understands by “responsibility worthy of the name” in order to counter the closure of futurity that accompanies both terrorism and political conservatism.

BEARING WITNESS TO CULTURAL DIFFERENCE, WITH APOLOGY TO LEVINAS

apology to indigenous Australians. This apology is a gift offered in the spirit of decolonisation and in the words of Emmanuel Levinas. LevinasÕs words lend themselves to a philosophy of the gift insofar as they base a sociality that does not absorb the difference on giving to the other without expectation of return. For Levinas, subjectivity is the passivity of exposure to another, a giving of oneself without choice, a movement toward another arising from a disturbance of the self provoked by alterity. This being given to another is sensibility, being affected, non-indifference to difference, and this corporeality offered to another is inspired by the alterity of the other. This carnal generosity is also a beingput-into-question that makes me responsible for the other that moves me. However, LevinasÕs understanding of the gift also points to its aporetic structure, described so well by Jacques Derrida in Given Time. For Levinas, the generosity of exposure is a having been given to the other, Ònot the generosity of offering oneself, which would be an actÓ (Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence 75). As the apology I offer to indigenous Australians is a political act memorialised in a said, it betrays, in ways to be discussed, the apologetic position by which I might welcome cultural difference in the spirit of decolonisation. As a volitional act, this apology betrays what Levinas has said about the passivity of saying that welcomes cultural difference, and it betrays what he says about apology as responsibility, as ethical openness to the other. So, the apology to indigenous Australians that I offer and that I am also comes with apology to Levinas. If this apology to Levinas is necessary, if saying ÒyesÓ to cultural difference in the words of Levinas betrays the saying of Levinas, why resort to what he says at all? Precisely because it is LevinasÕs work that points so well, both to the necessity of the gift that bears witness to and welcomes cultural difference and to its betrayal in a political speech act. The impossibility of the gift of cultural difference is, however, not a licence for inaction. On the contrary, the betrayal of the apology is a risk that must be taken if I am to say anything at all to those indigenous Australians whom the culture that I am has colonised. The aporetic structure of the gift does not exclude a politics of giving. The purpose of this essay, then, is threefold: to bear witness to cultural difference with apology to indigenous Australians; to trace connections between what Levinas says about cultural difference and apology as responsibility that would lend weight to a politics of giving; and to mark the betrayals that this politics might involve. This betrayal of apology marks the aporetic structure of the gift; it marks the problem of the relation between the saying and the said, between ethics and politics, between the apology whereby I am given to the

Building and Belonging Amid the Plight of Dwelling

This paper re-examines the limits of the human in the wake of the cataclysmic destruction of built and living environments, along with their human and non-human inhabitants, by recent bushfires, floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis. The analysis involves reconceiving the human beyond notions of human agency assumed in disaster and risk theory. By examining the role of the built environment, things, the body, and community in what Heidegger calls the “plight of dwelling,” the analysis aims for a notion of the human that is suitably humble but responsible in the face of the plight of dwelling, not simply in the sense of accountable, but responsible for preserving for others, of dwelling as potentiality. And it aims for an ethics of rebuilding and recovery that can deal equally well with ruin by political forces and ruin by so-called natural forces. Building on Heideggers idea of the “plight of dwelling,” the paper adapts Rancières idea of the “distribution of the sensible” and Arendts political ontology to reveal the political dimensions of dwelling and what is required to minimise its ruin. Then, with the help of Merleau-Ponty, the paper considers the ethical dimension of rebuilding after ruin either by totalising politics or by environmental hazards. The analysis demonstrates how the preservation of dwelling is not about controlling the unpredictable but is a collective endeavour of existing with built and living environments that leaves space for the “event” of dwelling, that is the unique and the arbitrary. Anne Michaels’ novel The Winter Vault (2009) peppers the analysis because her story exposes the political, intimate, and ethical elements of the plight of dwelling that the philosophers often understate.

Community of Bodies: From Modification to Violence

What is the difference between the lip-stitched bodies of the asylum seeker in detention, the performance artist Mike Parr, and the male model John Spencer? All are bodies that have been modified in a similar way; with all three, lips were pierced, blood was spilt, bodily openings were closed. The difference between them, I will argue, lies in the way violence, perpetrated by others, marks their modification. This violence, though, will not be found at the point at which the needle or wire was inserted. The violence that marks the bodies of the asylum seeker and Mike Parr happened before any lip was pierced and before any decision to pierce it was made. The violence that marks these bodies was political and symbolic, but also physical and real. The issue this paper attempts to explore is the connection between the two: at what point does the political and symbolic converge with bodies to render their modification violent and a violation of being? The impact of the Australian government’s policy of excluding asylum seekers from landing on our shores provides a particularly graphic example of why such an analysis might be necessary. The question that the impact of this policy raises is not just about its effect on the bodies of those excluded but also why this policy has had such a divisive effect on the fabric of Australian community, given that few of us are the targets of it. That the policy has had such an impact puts in question some of the current theory about symbolic violence and body modification. On the one hand there has been some compelling work done by theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Drucilla Cornell on symbolic violence that suggests that politics, law, and conceptualization of bodies is violent in so far as such thematization generalizes and therefore excludes from consideration anything unique about particular people or

Women's Bodies Between National Hospitality and Domestic Biopolitics

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendts claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’ (innovation or the birth of the new), is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Womens bodies are thus caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendts political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios.

Arendt and Nietzsche on responsibility and futurity

This article compares Nietzsches and Arendts critiques of the juridical concept of responsibility (that emphasizes duty and blame) with the aim of deriving an account of responsibility appropriate for our time. It examines shared ground in their radical approaches to responsibility: by basing personal responsibility in conscience that expresses a self open to an undetermined future, rather than conscience determined by prevailing moral norms, they make a connection between a failure of personal responsibility and the way a totalizing politics jeopardizes human plurality. Two differences between Arendt and Nietzsche are also explored: Nietzsches account of the corporeal and affective dimensions of conscience explains how politics can foreclose the futural, undetermined dimension of conscience; Arendts account of political community exposes the mutual dependence of personal and political responsibility. By drawing together these aspects of Arendts and Nietzsches thought, the article aims to show how a failure of political responsibility can precipitate a failure of personal responsibility by undermining the basis of normativity that both liberal democratic politics and individual moral conscience would ordinarily share.

Recasting Participation in Drug Policy

Calls for “evidence-based policy” and greater community “participation” are often heard in the drug policy field. Both movements are in different ways concerned with the same questions about how “drug problems” ought to be governed and the place of “expertise” and “engagement” in democratic societies. However, these calls rely on the assumption that knowledges, publics, expertise, and issues of concern are fixed and stable, waiting to be addressed or called to action, thus obscuring ontological questions about what “participation” (be that lay or expert) may do or produce. There has been limited research in the drugs field that has taken “participation” as an object of study in itself and through critical examination attempted to open up new possibilities for its remaking. In this article, we draw on science and technology studies scholarship that has sought to illuminate the relations between public deliberation and government decision-making in public affairs involving technical claims and the generative capacity of such engagement (including for democracy itself). We describe various rationales for participation and examples of experiments that have sought to remake participatory processes in other policy domains. This literature provides fruitful ground for a reengagement with (and possibly a reconfiguration of) “evidence-based policy” or community “participation” in drug policy. Through this exploration, we hope to recast and more sensitively articulate the concept of “participation” in deliberations about public affairs involving technical claims in drug policy, thus opening up possibilities for experiments and practices that redistribute expertise, “slow down” reasoning, attend to emergent publics, and disrupt consensual claims as to “what counts” and what does not.