archive : s0metim3s

Erik M. Vogt, in “Schmittian Traces in Žižek’s Political Theology (and Some Derridean Specters)” (diacritics 36.1), writes:

the (Christian) miracle of incarnation functions, for Žižek, as the elementary matrix for the act out of which a politics of true universality is to be generated. However, does the mutilated body of Christ really suffice as a bearer for a universalist position of defense against globalized cyberspace, against the mediatization of the miracle? As far as I can tell, Žižek never considers the possibility and actual ubiquity of a mediatized incarnation. Could it be because this would require the admission of “a certain artificiality and technicity, rendering the miracle as what de Vries calls “special effect” [“In Media Res” 25]? And if one grants the possibility of this interface between Christianity on the one hand, and the medium and mediatic on the other hand, would one not have to reposition Christianity — no longer along the lines of a politicizing logic of universality, but rather along the lines of a depoliticizing logic of globalization or “globalatinization,” that is, in terms of a “strange treaty between Christianity as experience of the death of god and the tele-techno-scientific capitalism”?

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

This has been sitting in my drafts folder for a week or so, but since Matt astutely picks up a thread from the Tocqueville post below, xposted to Long Sunday, I’ll post it now - as fragmentary and allusive as it is. I’d hoped to work it up as an elaboration of the second note on Schmitt, but also by way of eventually connecting this up with the question of the political and, as it pertains to the organisation of borders and law, habeas corpus. In any event, some fragments from Derrida and J-L Nancy for your perusal:

xposted to Long Sunday, and as part of the discussion on “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” taking place there.

1. "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value" is, perhaps, for those who arrive at it from literature, cultural studies, philosophy or similar, Spivak’s most ‘difficult’ or elusive of essays. It seems to be the one that, more than any other, makes readers blink, their eyes glaze over.

Blaise Pascal, born June 19, 1623. For Derrida, it was Pascal’s (or is it actually Montaigne’s?) notion of the mystical foundation of the law that was of interest, citing this at the beginning of “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’”: “And so laws keep up their good standing, not because they are just, but because they are laws: that is the mystical foundation of their Authority.” For Althusser, it was Pascal’s materialist understanding of ideology (or belief): “‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.” Both those readings of Pascal have appealed to me before, but I thought that they both missed this aspect: “Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth.”

{Sorry about that. Links now fixed}