Suchergebnisse

Unbearable: Foucault and the birth of nihilopolitics -- Ungood: Augustine's city of Cacus -- Untimely ripped: Macbeth's children -- Uncommon: Hobbes's martyrs -- Incorruptible: Robespierre and the already dead -- Unleashed: Schmitt and the Katechon -- Undead: Benjamin and the past to come.

In order to speak in the voice of "the pervert," psychoanalysis inevitably find itself performing the classic rhetorical act of prosopopoeia whereby an imagined, absent, or dead person is represented as speaking. To re-read Jacques-Alain Miller's classic essay "On Perversion" (1996), for example, we find that the pervert is adjudged to be "unspeakable"—in every sense of that word—and so they can only be ventriloquized by the figure of the analyst. If the analyst seeks to speak on behalf of the pervert, however, this essay argues that the perverse speech act is itself a form of prosopopoeia which can ventriloquize the subject position of the hysteric, the neurotic, the psychotic, and even the analyst themselves. In conclusion, the essay argues that Miller's account of the relationship between the analyst and the pervert, where each are seen to ventriloquize the other, bespeaks of a certain prosopopophilia—a love of prosopopoeia—that is the condition of being a speaking subject in the first place: I am always speaking for and as the other—even or especially when I am speaking as "myself."

In this article, I seek to offer a set of notes towards what Walter Benjamin calls a political theological "rideaulogie" --- quite literally a "curtainology," a study or science of the curtain. To be precise, I unpick four different readings or writings upon the political theological curtain: Hobbes's façade; Benjamin's curtainology; Deleuze's fold, and Derrida's tallith or prayer shawl. It is well documented by scholars as diverse as Blumenberg, Derrida and Hadot that the history of truth from Ancient Greece to modernity is itself a history of the veil. At the same time, the history of political theological truth-telling --- from Jewish, Christian and Islamic occultation and revelation to liberal iconoclasm and disenchantment --- is equally, if not more so, a dialectic of (un-)veiling. If Hobbes, Benjamin, Deleuze and Derrida are thoroughly enveloped in this political theological history of the curtain --- which is also an entire metaphysical history of the relation between interiority and exteriority, appearance and essence, surface and depth and so on --- I argue that they each seek to fold, pleat or re-double this history differently: what is unveiled in their work is a certain inexplicability (from the Latin inexplicabilis, literally "what cannot be unfolded or disentangled" --- AB). In Hobbes's curtain, for instance, we do not encounter an absolute divide or threshold between the outside and the inside --- between the state of nature, say, and society --- so much as the "becoming-inside" of this outside: the Hobbesian Commonwealth does not lie behind the curtain but, inexplicably, may be the curtain itself.

This article proposes a political prehistory of drone theory that traces its juridico-political evolution from the 17th century to the present day. To outline my argument, I construct a constellation between Hobbes's theory of sovereign punishment in Leviathan and Chamayou's critique of drone warfare in Drone Theory to illuminate the political origins of drone violence. First, I argue that Hobbes's social contract theory lays the conceptual groundwork for Chamayou's drone theory. Second, I contend that Hobbes's theory of the sovereign punishment of domestic citizens preempts Chamayou's critique of drone warfare against foreign enemies. Finally, I speculate that Hobbes's theory of punishment is founded upon a sacrificial paradigm that returns in the phenomenon of domestic drone strikes. In summary, I argue that Hobbes might be something close to the first drone theorist insofar as his political theory systematically produces the state of exception between citizen and enemy in which the drone operates today. What, then, are the theoretical origins of drone warfare? How does the punishment of citizens prefigure drone warfare against foreign enemies? To what extent might even citizens themselves be a species of drone who may be activated by the sovereign at any point?

AbstractThis essay seeks to explore the position of citizen sacrifice in Rousseau's political theology fromThe Social Contractto "The Levite of Ephraïm." To summarize, I contend that Rousseau's political theology starts out by seeking to prohibit religious sacrifice as something inimical to both natural and positive law, but ends up attempting to appropriate or internalize this sacrificial economy within his theory of citizenship. If Rousseau presents his theory of civil religion as a means of neutralizing the violence of sectarian religions, for example, I contend that this civil profession of faith is itself a species of sacrificial theology which is explicitly designed to create a citizen who is capable of sacrificing their life to the state. In "The Levite of Ephraïm"—a prose poem which begins and ends with the dismemberment of a woman—Rousseau's political theology of citizen sacrifice assumes its most graphic allegorical form.

Članek ponuja novo branje Lacanove materialistične definicije zavesti iz Seminarja II: Jaz v Freudovski teoriji in psihoanalitični tehniki 1954–1955, ki ga interpretira kot delo politične, celo vojaške, teorije. Če povzamemo argument, članek poskuša umestiti Lacanovo predavanje o miselnem eksperimentu v zgodovinski kontekst ne zgolj pojava povojne kibernetske teorije, temveč v daljšo zgodovino filozofije »stroja«, ki se razteza od Descartesa in Hobbesa vse do sodobnih filozofov kot so Koyré, Schuhl in Kojève. Če ima metafora stroja dolgo zgodovino znotraj filozofske antropologije, kjer je različno uporabljena za rešitev problemov svobodne volje, zavesti itd., pa avtor trdi, da je metafora stroja tudi dolgotrajen politični trop, ki je bil vse od začetka razvit za opis razmerja med suverenostjo in vlado, med pravilom in izjemo ter celo med vojno in mirom. Avtor v zaključku sklene, da Lacanov miselni eksperiment ne dramatizira zgolj fenomenološke nadomestitve suverenega jaza s »strojem« zavesti, temveč politično strmoglavljenje predmoderne suverene osebe s strani »stroja« modernega pravnega, političnega in celo vojaškega reda. ; This essay offers a new reading of Lacan's materialist definition of consciousness in Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-5 which interprets it as a work of political, or even military, theory. To summarize the argument, I seek to position Lacan's thought experiment seminar within the historical context not only of the emergence of post-war cybernetic theory but within the longer history of the philosophy of the "machine" that stretches from Descartes and Hobbes up to contemporary philosophers like Koyré, Schuhl and Kojève. If the machine metaphor has a long history within philosophical anthropology – where it is variously used to solve the problem of free will, consciousness and so on – I argue that it is also an enduring political trope which has, from the beginning, been deployed to describe the relationship between sovereignty and government, rule and exception and even war and peace. In conclusion, I argue that Lacan's thought experiment does not merely dramatize the phenomenological supersession of the sovereign ego by the "machine" of consciousness, but the political overthrow of the premodern sovereign person by the "machine" of the modern juridical, political – and even military – order.

This article offers the first comparative study of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke's readings of the Biblical figure of Jephthah the Gileadite and, in particular, the latter's notorious appeal to God that leads to the killing of his own daughter. To outline its argument, I focus on a critical moment in Hobbes and Locke's corpuses where they both appeal to Jephthah's vow to support their theories of sovereign right: Hobbes' account of the right to punish in Leviathan and Locke's account of the right to go to war in the "Second Treatise of Government." If Hobbes and Locke's readings of Jephthah differ considerably – the one focusing on Jephthah's daughter, the other on Jephthah himself; the one exploring domestic political theory, the other international relations theory; the one seeking to legitimize the right to punish, the other the right to go to war – I contend that both see Jephthah's story as an allegory for the origins of sovereign violence in self-sacrifice or even martyrdom. For Hobbes and Locke, Jephthah's fate becomes a kind of arcane theological paradigm for sovereign killing: what begins as the religious power to die ends up as the political power to kill. In the obscure story of Jephthah the Gileadite, then, I conclude that Hobbes and Locke set in motion what we might call a martyrological machine at the core of the modern liberal state. What if liberalism is constituted less by its professed love of "life" – private interest, private property, self-preservation, self-determination – than a willingness to sacrifice everything and die?