Suchergebnisse

This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military's use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish's 'churn of mobilization and demobilization' beyond the military's instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military's war-making apparatus.

Abstract Walter Benjamin published his influential essay 'Critique of Violence'/'Zur Kritik der Gewalt' in 1921, and the work has troubled and provoked thinkers across disciplines for over a century now. This Forum gathers a group of scholars in philosophy, political science, international relations and legal studies to reflect on the actuality of Benjamin's essay for contemporary critical theory. In Part II of the Forum, Aggie Hirst, Tom Houseman, and Vinícius Armele draw on Benjamin to analyse what remains of European colonialism. Hirst and Houseman interrogate the extent to which Walter Benjamin's notion of divine violence may be useful in the service of decolonial struggle. Insofar as it is antithetical to the colonial order – which is inaugurated and reproduced by the law making and law preserving functions of mythic violence – divine violence appears to open a space for conceptualising a far-reaching challenge to the violence encrypted in that order that is 'lethal without spilling blood'. Because the exercise of such 'power over all life' is exercised 'for the sake of living,' Benjamin argues, its accompanying sacrifices are acceptable. Drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theory, Hirst and Houseman offer a critique of the 'God's-eye view' inherent to any claim to divine violence. Benjamin's text can generate powerful insights into the nature and limits of decolonial struggles, but it ultimately fails in providing an alternative to the mythic violence it criticises, by reproducing – at the heart of the emancipatory concept of divine violence – a problematic impersonation of a divine authorial voice that is already a trope of coloniality. Armele's reflection seeks to recover ancient tragedy's role of reluctance toward the previously unquestionable power of the violence of mythical destiny. Resume Benjamin's contributions on (1) melancholy and Romanticism, which represents the revolt of repressed, channelled and deformed subjectivity and affectivity, and (2) the criticism of the violence that is established in the manifestation of its ethical relations between law [Recht] and justice [Gerechtigkeit], Armele reveals the intertwining of the experience of historical time and the orientation of current political struggles. Inspired by Benjamin, he examines the action of the Black Lives Matters movement in Bristol, UK, which toppled a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, and threw it in the city's harbour, reopening a historical wound of colonialism and national memory.

Abstract Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference 'Whither Marxism?' hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida's analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. In this group of contributions, Aggie Hirst and Tom Houseman, Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, Jenny Edkins and Cristiano Mendes reflect on the legacies of Marx and Derrida: on whether Derrida emphasized the wrong Marxian heritage, on the promise and risks of hauntology, on the ghostly potential for justice amidst devastation, and on the paradox of deconstruction's legacy itself.