archive : s0metim3s

Here’s the pre-print version of the oikopolitics piece, slated for Global South. Apparently I’m supposed to remove the link when it appears in print. I think this is the fragment I like the most:

If the modern financial system is premised on the historical emergence of national debt, the late twentieth witnessed the democratisation of its risks through the household. And yet, as it turns out, the dispersal of risk opened the door to the cascading effects of subprime instability and default. The idealised household had not taken hold in any generalised sense, much as it imposed itself as norm, and beyond any attempt to assume that all of those who defaulted could not pay rather than had decided not to or, more broadly put, did not budget and toil as they ought.

Here’s the abstract for the oikopolitics piece:

In his 2009 Inaugural speech, US President Obama spoke of America’s future by not only invoking We the People’s faith in founding ideals and documents, but he did so – by this time, as his signature rhetoricity – by evoking storms. Every “so often,” he remarked, “the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.” He also spoke of an immeasurable “sapping of confidence” in America’s futurity, alongside “indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics,” such as foreclosures, rising unemployment, and a costly health care. The essay that follows was written just prior to that speech, but it nevertheless attempts to understand how the measurable acquaints itself with the immeasurable (desire and the future) through a meshing of gender, race, sex, labour and desire in the accounting of the household – and the oikos, in all its etymological tightening. The question, in one sense, is how the coincidence of crises financial and climatic might unfold and recompose an oikopolitics. The concept of an oikopolitics is offered here as something far more explanatory of the genealogical and familial than understandings of sovereignty through a biopolitical lens have admitted, and something far less subjectively universal than many accounts of affect and intimacy aspire to. It does not simply point to a blurring of the classical distinction between the public realm of politics and the private domain of the household in the trammeling of arousal to labouring, and a socio-political horizon whose possible forms of relation are those of the national state conceived as home. It is also explanatory of the ways politics assumes the task of securing an intimately normative disposition, the raising of a properly political subject on the grounds of the at once familial and national. It is, in another sense then, a post-autonomist contribution to discussions that, thankfully, remain turbulent.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. - Marx, “Theses On Feuerbach”.

Thesis Eleven – what is ‘the point’? What is at stake? Eleventh - that moment beyond the neat ten, in excess of the theological commandments. Karl Marx’s eleventh comment on Feuerbach, while very far from being, as it is so often read to be, the purportedly a-theoretical pragmatic command which forestalls asking any significant or difficult questions about ‘how things are’ or, even less, amounting to a dialectics which seeks to project idealised versions of what exists into an infinite future, is nevertheless equivocal enough to have enabled interpretations of such varieties. Such are the contingencies of writing and reading, to be sure.

A couple of lengthy fragments from Catherine Mills’ “Playing with Law: Agamben and Derrida on Postjuridical Justice” (South Atlantic Quarterly, 107:1, 2008), following on from these meanderings around questions of norm and precariousness here and here:

Toward the end of his book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben writes:

One day humanity will play with law just a children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin’s posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.1

“They were jittery with the idea of staying,” he says, “and paralyzed with fear at the idea of leaving. You would get them prepared with their passports and all their visas in order, and a month later they would still be sitting in the Marseille cafés, waiting for the police to come and get them.”

From Michael Taussig’s Walter Benjamin’s Grave - a longer excerpt here.

A redux of Hamacher’s “Guilt History - Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as Religion” (and the graphic I used last time), apropos recent debates. (I won’t blockquote it though, because it’s long and easier to read without doing so.) Trans. Kirk Wetters, Diacritics 32:3-4 (2002).

Something to add to the readings of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Gewalt’: Alexander Karschnia’s “Down by Law - A Critique for the 21st Century”: