Žižek's piece on Greece and the Rise of Nephopolitics

I believe it goes without saying that it is almost impossible for a layperson - even an academic one - to follow all events and opinions surrounding the Greek crisis. But Žižek's piece for the New Statesman is refreshing and sobering in its diagnosis of the state of contemporary capitalism and power, in my opinion. I agree with everything he writes there, but I would like to quote this passage regarding the rise of what I call nephopolitics.

An ideal is gradually emerging from the European establishment’s reaction to the Greek referendum, the ideal best rendered by the headline of a recent Gideon Rachman column in the Financial Times: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters.”
In this ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link” and experts gain the power to directly impose necessary economic measures – if elections take place at all, their function is just to confirm the consensus of experts.

Neo-liberalism - and global financial capitalism as a political entity - is slowly making biopolitics a thing of the past. Power doesn't care about the population's biological life anymore. It actually wishes everyone would just hurry up and die, so money can flow unencumbered in the "cloud" of financial systems: this would be the dream of nephopolitics.

I have this mental image from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None [spoilers!] where the killer finally kills himself to complete his master plan, since even his own existence distracts from the plan's perfection. And the plan can only elegantly exist without him.

So I picture David Cameron as the last person alive in Britain, after the Tories have allowed everyone else to die so people wouldn't bother the Holy Market Forces. Smiling a victorious, complacent smile, he unplugs himself from life, while with his last moments of consciousness he contemplates the beauty of money virtually circling around in the cloud, in perpetuity, finally free of those pesky people/citizens/organisms.

Teeth

For millennia and in different discursive practices, a very common distinguishing mark between humans and animals has been the former's lack of weapons. The story goes that animals are "perfectly adapted" to their environment and behaviour, so that their own bodies furnish them with the tools they will need to survive. More often than not, that means weapons. The story then concludes that, to balance it out and conquer the animals, we have technology.

Animal silhouettes

Many have talked about the fact that, in Derrida's deconstructive readings, the signifier he obsesses over doesn't need to be really there. To be sure, in many of his analyses he finds a specific word whose flickering of meanings will reveal the symptoms of différance at play in the given text (think of Rousseau's supplement, or Plato's pharmakon). But that is not always the case, and some have stressed that such a privileged signifier does not need to actually feature in the text. Its importance, however, is situated by the other signifiers, so that it's silhouetted against them. It may not emerge once, but its 'presence' is secured precisely by the strategic placement of all the other words. Like this:

Scriptural, electric animality

When writing about zoogrammatology, I often make the point that animality threatens to short-circuit language and literature (to use an expression sometimes employed by Cary Wolfe). I was happy, but not really surprised, to find further theorization of such short circuit in Of Grammatology: it is basically the complex, presuppositional relationship that obtains between writing and science:

New issue of ICAS journal

The latest issue of the Journal of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies is out. I'm proud to say that I have a small participation on it - a review of Tom Tyler's book CIFERAE: A Bestiary in Five Fingers which is just great, by the way.

I'm particularly curious about Iveson's article on Butler, and Taylor's about Foucault and "alimentary monsters". I plan to read and re-read a lot of Butler for my PhD, and I've been thinking whether the people who are writing about animals in Butler (like James at Critical Animal) have given any thought to the question of animal embodiment via Bodies That Matter. I don't know if they have, that's why I ask, but it should be interesting.

You can check out the issue (for free, as usual), right here.

Human exceptionalism in "Gattaca"

I say "more" thoughts because I have been thinking about and discussing Gattaca for years now, and it's certainly one of my favorite films. The persecuted underdog story, coupled with Michael Nyman's beautiful score, always gets to me. I have, of course, also detected in it the Romantic notion that being sick in a sick society is actually being healthy. As such, Gattaca is also a powerful defense of the Romantic idea of the visionary individual who, swimming against the tide - as it were -, is somehow above the law. That, together with the "no gene for the human spirit" BS seems to make for a deeply humanist film (and I use that adjective as an insult). But right now I'm interested in the cues the film presents to warrant a post-humanist reading.

Bare life and animal life

I'm currently reading Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life carefully for the first time and I'm having a hard time separating the many thematic strands that comprise such issues as the homo sacer itself, bare life and sovereignty. Let me just also add that I'm also currently reading (i.e. haven't finished) the 1st volume of Derrida's The Beast and the Sovereign and Ludueña-Romandini La comunidad de los espectros: Antropotecnia ("The community of specters: Anthropothecnics"), and both can be said to be responses to Agamben, so they may still hold answers to me.

First, I'm having trouble pinpointing exactly what the homo sacer is. I know it is a life which can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed in a religious rite, what kind of life is that exactly? I guess I'm trying to establish the frame-of-mind/rationalization behind the granting of the homo sacer status, but it's hard. Let's see what I could gather so far:

What is language, after all? (+ a short review of "The Sensible Life")

Recently I've been attempting to think of language as having no inherent relationship to communication. I believe it could be argued that communication and transmission of information are purely accidental and contingent to certain kinds of language (such as so-called natural human languages). Language is, in this tentative opinion of mine, ultimately an issue of relating to alterity, environment, specularity, spacement, death, etc. In this sense, every living being - down to single-cell organisms - would have a linguistic relationship to their (or "the") world. Chemical reactions would eventually be identified as the model linguistic phenomenon. To a molecule or a bacteria, a chemical connection would effect linguistic meaning (I refuse to employ the expression "carry linguistic meaning"), rendering this interaction as a instance of language.

From the little I know about second order systems theory via Cary Wolfe, this formulation does indeed resemble language viewed from such perspective - systems in general would "communicate" to their environments (or constituent parts) via effects of meaning. I like how it seems that Cary Wolfe has finally convinced me that systems theory does resemble Derridean philosophy of language. Derrida's defense of writing as the ultimate model of grammaticality and diacriticity (the conditions of possibility for language, since all language must be built upon schematic differences) reflects precisely this idea that language is, after all, nothing but a relationship to a differential and "grammatical" alterity. Only specific instances of "messages" (we could call them "grammatical") trigger the effects of meaning in chemical compounds, paramecia, systems in general, or in human language. This leads me to the exciting book I'm currently reading - Emanuele Coccia's La Vita Sensibile ("The Sensible Life," or "The Sentient Life").

A zoogrammatology of literature

Having recently been to a major international conference here in Brazil on the interfaces between animality and literature (the name translates to "Animals, Animality and the Limits of the Human"), I'm beginning to feel even more the urgent need for the very thing my talk was about - a zoogrammatology of literary texts, literary theory and literature in general.

Kojève's posthumanism

The first time I got in contact with Kojève's thinking was in Agamben's The Open, where he quotes what Kojève has to say about the End of History and what that would imply - the end of dialectics and Man. In general, I thought it was a really interesting discussion, if overall a little naïve in its understanding of history (does it really march forward towards a completion?). What I found very uncomfortable was Kojève's diagnoses of Japan and the USA's societies, in which he concluded that they were living in post-history. That made me feel uneasy, because that sounded very clearly to me as if he was saying he believed those societies had returned to a certain animal state.

Disability, the animal, and the question of the "lack"

Long time since I've posted, but I've certainly been busy reading and writing and going to conferences. Right now we are having our annual international seminar on Gender Studies here at UFSC called Fazendo Gênero, which is in its 9th installment. I've had the pleasure of participating of a symposium within the event focused on culturar criticism, Border Studies and Silviano Santiago's concept of the entre-lugar, which was later adopted by Mary Louise Pratt as The Contact Zone.

I wrote my article on and talked about the sometimes tense contact zone between Disability Studies and Animal Studies. This has been explored by many scholars I have read, and the main dilemma seems to be that DS asks us to humanize our ideas of disability, while AS urges us to let go of the concept of the human as a yardstick for moral relevance and, sometimes, to pinpoint how dangerous it might be to a trans-species ethics to give higher moral consideration to humans regardless of their cognitive capacities. This last argument is, of course, based on the premisse that all our ethical systems are sustained by the concept of mental capacity, which supposedly is the only thing that can make you even realize that you're happy or suffering.

Temple Grandin's ableism

As an autistic animal scientist who seemed to problematize even further the connections between the disability critique and posthumanist thinking, Temple Grandin had always been a very interesting and intriguing character and author for me for a long time, when I finally found a reason to buy one of her books from Amazon. One of my Literature teachers in my undergrad program, Eliana Ávila, who was also in my BA dissertation committee, has recently become deeply interested in Disability Studies to the point that she founded a research group focused on the interconnections between post-colonialism and disability. She invited some of her students to present something in a future conference on Gender Studies about disability-related othering. And my publication-greedy self thought that that was exactly what I needed to finally start reading Temple Grandin, to analyze what she brought of interest to the posthuman/disability 'conflict', and to present her to the Brazilian academia.

The Production of Early Modern Humanism in "The Tempest"

The following is a term paper I wrote for a course I had this semester on The Tempest and how it has been read by several theoretical frameworks. In it I analyze the ways in which Prospero (and consequently the play) produces Early Modern humanism by the means of a reconfiguration of Renaissance science and (especially) art, together with the inauguration of the human/animal divide.

Origami chickens

That's what McDonald's "chicken" sandwiches are made of. At least according to the little box the sandwich comes out of. Now they have the "ingredients" of the sandwich pictured around it, and there are two origami chickens standing in for the actual meat. I checked it online and found that Brazilian McDonald's had adopted the same boxes that are used internationally - so I guess this new box with fake paper animals can be found anywhere.

September 1, 1939

On September 1st, which was last Tuesday, I was watching Katyń by Andrzej Wajda and I realized during it that that Tuesday marked the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Poland, and of the Second World War. I was really intrigued that no one had mentioned anything during that day (but not so much, since I hadn't turned on the TV or opened up a newspaper). I had to check afterwards to see if it had been really September 1st, but yes, it had. Because I came of age in the 90s, I got used to the idea that WWII had happened 50 years ago, because my mind always made the math based on 1945. But realizing that such event happened exactly 70 years ago kind of disturbed me. Seventy years felt like a long time ago, and I felt a pang of fear that it might some day be forgotten.

Animality, animals and racial Otherness

Renee, posting in two feminist blogs (Feministe and Womanist Musings), authored a comment on the connections between animal rights groups and the political fight of people of color that has sparked relative polemic in philosophy and Animal Studies blogs. She says she feel uncomfortable with animal rights groups' (such as PETA) discourse on the seemingly unquestionable fact that human, as animals, are the same as the latter. Quoting her:

Much of the time, they buttress their position by saying that we are no different than animals and therefore are undeserving of special treatment.   This line of thought does not solely apply to PeTA.  Many animal rights groups are fond of pointing out that humans are also animals.  This is a biological fact, however; using it to defend your position can be extremely problematic and it is rarely to ever acknowledged as such.

What's in a name? or Post- vs. Trans-

Within the larger field of the (post-)humanities, the terms 'posthumanism' and 'posthuman' have been difficult to determine. A quick Google search on any of these words will list many websites which don't seem to tackle the topics which are in discussion here, such as animality and the limits and limitations of what has been called 'humanity'. Many people seem to consider the prefixes 'post' and 'trans' as interchangeable, and therefore use 'posthumanism' and 'transhumanism' as synonyms, when, in fact, they must be conceptualized as two very distinct lines of thought.

The Cat Who Reads the Map: Posthumanism and Animality in "Harry Potter"

To premiere the blog, I thought it would be fitting that I should post the full text of my latest research - which was my undergraduate end-of-course thesis, focusing on a posthumanist reading of animality and humanity in the Harry Potter novels. This is an embedded version of my text on Scribd.