Critiquing Sovereign Violence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
The Other ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Late Work ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Set Up

Sovereign violence is a dominant issue in contemporary political theory and has attracted much attention from proponents of critical theory, biopolitics, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. While heterogeneous, these commentators are united in rejecting the classic-juridical conception that holds sovereignty to be indivisible and orientated towards the establishment and maintenance of juridical order. This book argues that this rejection has been based on three distinct logics, termed the radical-juridical perspective, the biopolitical one, and the bio-juridical. The first, outlined through chapters on Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, and Deleuze and Guattari, offers a number of increasingly radical critiques of the classic-juridical conception of sovereignty, but continues to focus the inquiry around the creation/preservation/disruption of the juridical order. The second biopolitical logic, outlined through chapters on Foucault and Agamben, goes further by undermining the primacy that the classic and radical-juridical models give to law. Instead, sovereign violence is held to be concerned with the regulation of life, with this occurring through exclusion from law. The first two critical logics do, however, set up a binary opposition between law and life: the former affirming the sovereign’s connection to the former, the latter reversing this to claim that it primarily refers to the latter. The third model—called the bio-juridical and developed from Jacques Derrida’s late work on the death penalty—is held to overcome this by developing a compatibilist understanding in which sovereign violence is placed between law and life, simultaneously creating and regulating each through the other.

Life and Law: Derrida on the Bio-Juridicalism of Sovereign Violence

2019 ◽  
pp. 173-199
Author(s):  
Gavin Rae
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter moves from the second to third part of the book and from the biopolitical model to the bio-juridical one. The fundamental problem with the two paradigms outlined up to this point is that they set up a binary opposition between those thinkers that affirm the relationship between sovereign violence and the juridical order and those that affirm its relationship to life. The chapter focuses on Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the sovereign violence inherent in the death penalty to show that he claims that sovereign violence is not simply orientated to juridical legal order or the regulation of life through the creation of social norms, but simultaneously expresses itself through two faces—the juridical and biopolitical, or law and life—wherein the one demands and expresses the other: the juridical expression of sovereignty regulates life, whereas the sovereign’s regulation of life (and death) always takes a juridical form.

Big Hopes and Trouble, 1961–1969

2021 ◽  
pp. 30-76
Author(s):  
Catriona Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Production Planning ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
The Other ◽  
October Revolution ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Film Production ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Government ◽  
Set Up ◽  
General Director

In 1961, the government bodies responsible for film production (the Ministries of Culture of the USSR and RSFSR) forcibly imposed on a reluctant Lenfilm the complete reorganization of production planning. The old Scripts Department was shut down and three “creative units” set up. This change was pushed through by Lenfilm’s energetic and flamboyant new general director, Ilya Kiselev, who had begun his career as an actor. Of the creative units, the earliest to emerge was the Third Creative Unit, which soon had a role as the flagship of contemporary cinema, a genre heavily promoted during the Thaw. However, the Third Creative Unit ran into increasing trouble as political control tightened after Khrushchev was forced to resign, and in 1969, it was closed down altogether. Yet life was not always calmer in the other units, as witnessed in particular by the difficulties that gripped the Second Creative Unit’s efforts to produce movies commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution in 1967, and by the problems of the First Creative Unit in establishing its own character and repertoire. At the same time, the general political line at this period, while unpredictable, was not uniformly harsh, as manifested in the conclusion of Leningrad’s Party leader that audiences could “make up their own mind” about a film he disliked.

Deleuze and the Third World

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-265
Author(s):  
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Third World ◽  
Minor Literature ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Third ◽  
The People ◽  
Representation Language ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Third World

The purpose of this essay is to discuss Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the Third World. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the Third World is not only a geographical term, but also one that denotes the linguistic zones, another term of the minority. The essay argues that the concept of the Third World is related to minor literature, the minor or intense use of language. This ‘transcendental exercise’ of writing is an opposition to the initial purpose of language, namely representation. Language must escape from its normative usage, and then be liberated to a new spatio-temporality, in other words, the linguistic Third World zones. My conclusion is that the creation of Third World linguistic zones is the repetition of differences against the generalisation of representation, such as becoming non-human and non-European, not in imitation of the molar form of the animal or a non-continent extending terrestrial power into the ocean, but as the right way to invent the people missing in the Third World. Inventing the people of the Third World is the right condition in which alternative political subjects can be produced through desubjectification, not domestication, by capitalist axiomatics. In this way, Deleuze's political philosophy aims to use the virtual politics of the Third World to radicalise the actual representation of the existing Left.

Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gyan Prakash
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Third World ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Progressive Change ◽  
The Third ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Mode Of Production

The problem with Prakash, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conclude, is that he tries to ride two horses at once—one Marxist, the other poststructuralist deconstructionist. ‘But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders. …’ So, they say we must choose only one to ride on, not both because the two, in their view, have opposing trajectories. One advances historical understanding and progressive change, the other denies history and perpetuates a retrogressive status quo. Posed in this manner, the choices involve more than a dispute over which paradigm provides a better understanding of the histories of the third world and India. At stake is the writing of history as political practice, and the only safe bet, from their point of view, is Marxism (of their kind), not the endless deferral and nihilism of deconstruction and postmodernism. Having set up this opposition, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's either/or logic has no place for the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates. They are uncomfortable with those recent writings that employ Marxist categories to analyze patterns of inequalities and exploitation while also using deconstructive approaches to contend that Marxism is part of the history that institutionalized capitalist dominance—approaches which argue that although Marxism can rightfully claim that it historicizes the emergence of capitalism as a world force, it cannot disavow its history as a nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode-of-production narrative.

Ground, Pivot, Motion: Ecofeminist Theory, Dialogics, and Literary Practice

Hypatia ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 146-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick D. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Third

Ecofeminist philosophy and literary theory need mutually to enhance each other's critical praxis. Ecofeminism provides the grounding necessary to turn the Bakhtinian dialogic method into a critical theory applicable to all of one's lived experience, while dialogics provides a method for advancing the application of ecofeminist thought in terms of literature, the other as speaking subject, and the interanimation of human and nonhuman aspects of nature. In the first part of this paper the benefits of dialogics to feminism and ecofeminism are explored; in the second part dialogics as method is detailed; in the third part literary examples are discussed from a dialogical ecofeminist perspective.

scholarly journals Critical Theory and Processual Social Ontology

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Renault
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Third ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
The One

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to bridge the gap between critical theory as understood in the Frankfurt school tradition on the one hand, and social ontology understood as a reflection on the ontological presuppositions of social sciences and social theories on the other. What is at stake is the type of social ontology that critical theory needs if it wants to tackle its main social ontological issue: that of social transformation. This paper’s claim is that what is required is neither a substantial social ontology, nor a relational social ontology, but a processual one. The first part of this article elaborates the distinction between substantial, relational and processual social ontologies. The second part analyzes the various ways in which this distinction can be used in social ontological discussions. Finally, the third part focuses on the various possible social ontological approaches to the issue of social transformation.

Official Landscapes in Traditional China

1980 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 153-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Leeming
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Northern China ◽  
The Other ◽  
Land Allocation ◽  
Management Systems ◽  
Fourth Section ◽  
The Third ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Topographical Maps

AbstractThis article is arranged in seven sections. In the first section, attention is drawn to the remarkable and extremely extensive rectilinear land layouts which can be deduced from large-scale topographical maps of northern China, to the likelihood of their having been constructed in periods of official land allocation schemes, and to various problems of procedure which arise in the attempt to study them systematically. The second section surveys the chün-t'ien land management systems, as they are known from the traditional historic sources, and a number of special features of these systems, especially the relations between changes in land allocations and changes in the official units in which they were measured. It is argued that the rectilinear forms indicated by the maps could not easily have been set up in chün-t'ien times, because the land was then already closely settled, and that the prominent strip systems which can be found on most of the maps, not always clearly an outcome of the chun-t'ien systems, suggest an earlier origin for these basic rectilinear forms. This reasoning, and even more the study of the dimensions used in the strip systems, leads back to the tradition of ching-t'ien. In the third section, examples are given of military farm layouts, which are a special and local feature of some of the maps. In the fourth section, two examples of contrasting rectilinear layouts are described and analysed as types-one from Anhwei, the other from Shensi. Both appear to be T'ang reconstructions of much older formal layouts, and both are thought to lead back to ching-t'ien through detectable steps in Ch'in or Han time. The fifth section gives three examples of layouts from Shantung, all apparently rebuilt under Northern Ch'i, but all based upon ching-t'ien foundations. The sixth section illustrates and analyses a layout from Honan, apparently reconstructed in Sui times but also apparently built upon ching-t'ien foundations. In the seventh and last section, the salient features of the argument and the interpretations are summarised.

scholarly journals What If? The Exploration of an Idea

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Priest
Keyword(s):  
Paraconsistent Logic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Semantic Paradoxes ◽  
Crucial Question ◽  
The Third ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Logic Of Paradox

A crucial question here is what, exactly, the conditional in the naive truth/set comprehension principles is. In 'Logic of Paradox', I outlined two options. One is to take it to be the material conditional of the extensional paraconsistent logic LP. Call this "Strategy 1". LP is a relatively weak logic, however. In particular, the material conditional does not detach. The other strategy is to take it to be some detachable conditional. Call this "Strategy 2". The aim of the present essay is to investigate Stragey 1. It is not to advocate it. The work is simply an extended exploration of the strategy, its strengths, its weaknesses, and the various dierent ways in which it may be implemented. In the first part of the paper I will set up the appropriate background details. In the second, I will look at the strategy as it applies to the semantic paradoxes. In the third I will look at how it applies to the set-theoretic paradoxes.

scholarly journals O PRAWNOKARNEJ OCHRONIE NASCITURUSA W III STATUCIE LITEWSKIM

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 175
Author(s):  
Sławomir Godek
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Criminal Responsibility ◽  
German Law ◽  
The Other ◽  
Right To Life ◽  
The Third ◽  
Criminal Protection ◽  
The One

Legal and Criminal Protection of ‘nasciturus’ in the Third Lithuanian StatuteSummary The Third Lithuanian Statute of 1588 regulated the issue specified in the title only partly and quite inconsistently. On the one hand, the Third Statute introduced criminal responsibility for injuring a pregnant woman, which caused a miscarriage; nevertheless, the penalty was insignificant. On the other hand, the legislation stipulated that carrying out a capital punishment must be put off until a child’s birth, which shows the the Lithuanian legislator’s intention to respect the fetus’ right to life. The Statute also provided for the death penalty for abortion and infanticide; nevertheless - contrary to the German law applied in cities - it did notintroduce an explicit distinction between these two crimes. Another inconsistency of the Statute is a lack of punishment in case of a homicide of a bastard child.

Political Theory and Clerical Radicalism

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-12
Author(s):  
Robert A. Monson
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Third World ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Third ◽  
Current Events ◽  
The One ◽  
The Third World

When viewed within the perspective of a possibly new American foreign policy, two sets of dramatic and apparently unrelated current events display a clear relationship. On the one hand are particular influences upon the thought of the radical left in America and elsewhere, notably the neo-Marxist ideas of men like Herbert Mareuse'and the Third World revolution ideas of men like Frantz Fanon. On the other hand there are recurring references to differences in the way clerical defections are taking place in the United States and Europe. An interesting framework for unifying these apparently unrelated phenomena suggests itself from the broader perspective of traditional Western political theory.

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