- New York, New York, United States
Athens, Greece
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... occasions of collective innovation, over which presided the aphoristic wisdom and dis-arming sense of wonder of Teshome Gabriel. ... Alexander Neha-mas, Yiannis Patilis, Edward Said, Charles Stewart, Khachig Tololyan, Dimi-tris... more
... occasions of collective innovation, over which presided the aphoristic wisdom and dis-arming sense of wonder of Teshome Gabriel. ... Alexander Neha-mas, Yiannis Patilis, Edward Said, Charles Stewart, Khachig Tololyan, Dimi-tris Tziovas, Karen Van Dyck, Sam Weber, and ...
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This chapter engages with the very first political concept—certainly in name, if nothing else. It demonstrates how, from its initial invocation (from its archē, as it were), this concept renders any notions of the first, or of the one,... more
This chapter engages with the very first political concept—certainly in name, if nothing else. It demonstrates how, from its initial invocation (from its archē, as it were), this concept renders any notions of the first, or of the one, impossible, indeterminable, an-archic. In this sense, though the word being is examined is archē, the political concept that the author substantially engages with and cares about is “anarchy,” whose elemental significance is inherent in the archaic conceptualization of archē. This is the archaic conceptualization that is of interest here. The author weaves a thread around four instances of the notion in the Greek philosophical vocabulary, two phrases in Aristotle, one in Herodotus, and the famous passage known as the Anaximander fragment.
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After reviewing the contemporary politics of espousing political theology as a mode of thinking, this essay is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that "every religion is idolatry." Idolatry here is configured... more
After reviewing the contemporary politics of espousing political theology as a mode of thinking, this essay is a meditation on the assertion by Cornelius Castoriadis that "every religion is idolatry." Idolatry here is configured beyond the conventional understanding of the idol as a concrete object of worship which works within the logic of representation. In monotheism, even the unrepresentable—or, perhaps, especially the unrepresentable—is an idol, an object of worship that is otherwise silenced by a language that claims to worship a non-object. In this sense, the prohibition of images in monotheism (Bildverbot) is a highly sophisticated mode of idolatry.
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This essay poses certain theoretical questions regarding the curious (but substantially evident) phenomenon of many of twentieth-century's most experimental poets being avowed (albeit maverick) communists. The first part of the essay... more
This essay poses certain theoretical questions regarding the curious (but substantially evident) phenomenon of many of twentieth-century's most experimental poets being avowed (albeit maverick) communists. The first part of the essay suggests a series of dialectical questions for further examination, built on a constitutive antagonism between the desire to control historical knowledge and the poetic daring to invent the historical horizon. The second part of the essay pursues, as a way of illustration, a comparative reading of two poems by Ritsos and Alexandrou.
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The concerns of this article are twofold: first, it examines the nature of debt as a social and economic force that fosters conditions of alienation in persons and institutions. Debt is also considered ontologically to be pertinent to the... more
The concerns of this article are twofold: first, it examines the nature of debt as a social and economic force that fosters conditions of alienation in persons and institutions. Debt is also considered ontologically to be pertinent to the institution of the family as well as general conditions of kinship, of what determines what is ancestral and what is foreign. Second, it examines the conditions of financial and cultural crisis in Greece in recent years, where debt emerges as a prominent force that works not only at a geopolitical level but on the micro level of society as well. This inquiry is conducted primarily through an elaboration of key instances in recent Greek cinema.
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Essentially a cinema of occupation and dispossession, Palestinian cinema disrupts standard notions of national cinema, complicating conventional expectations of national aesthetics or national dreams. As the borders of Palestine9s... more
Essentially a cinema of occupation and dispossession, Palestinian cinema disrupts standard notions of national cinema, complicating conventional expectations of national aesthetics or national dreams. As the borders of Palestine9s historical territory are continuously under erasure, so too are the symbolic boundaries of its language, which is flexible and inventive; the language of Palestinian cinema is a limit-language . No one has expressed this “limit condition” more succinctly than Elia Suleiman, whose cinematic language exemplifies a poetics of dispossession that depicts the asphyxiating spaces and truncated temporalities of Palestinian life with tragic humor and bold fantasy in defiance of narrative simplicity. Suleiman9s films run counter to the conventional representation of Palestinian existence and are arguably the sharpest expressions of what can be deemed to be the dream-work of that existence against its conventional representation.
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I remember the devastating irony of a new york times frontpage photograph on thanksgiving day 2011 depicting a row of people who had pitched tents outside a Best Buy department store in Mesquite, Texas. Alas, the campers were not staging... more
I remember the devastating irony of a new york times frontpage photograph on thanksgiving day 2011 depicting a row of people who had pitched tents outside a Best Buy department store in Mesquite, Texas. Alas, the campers were not staging an Occupy Best Buy but positioning themselves at the head of Black Friday's mad rush. At any other time, the photograph would have been unremarkable, perhaps not even newsworthy. This itself shows how extensively consumerist desire is internalized in the American psyche. Black Friday (what a cynical name!) is so ingrained in American life that it occupies its own slot in society's calendar. Some years ago a person died on Black Friday, trampled in the mad storming of a Walmart palace in New Jersey. I argued then that charges should be brought against President George W. Bush for instigating a homicide, since on the day after 9/11 he had commanded the American people to respond to the catastrophe by going shopping.
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In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from... more
In this brief meditation i am less concerned with how tragedy as a theatrical form relates to democracy than with how democracy entails a tragic politics, in its ancient and contemporary manifestations. My broader argument follows from three presuppositions: Philosophically speaking, democracy is a historical manifestation of self-organized politics that rests on no foundation other than self-authorization, which, being occasional and provisional, has no antecedent and is therefore abyssal. Politically speaking, democracy requires an imaginary of rule without archē or telos—an an-archic imaginary that disengages itself from traditional parameters of the command-obedience structure. This isn't to say that democracy entails no rule. On the contrary, it engages in the paradoxical practice of anarchic rule, or rule shared by all (even those in opposition), so that the traditional division of power between rulers and ruled is destabilized. Ethically speaking, there is nothing good or bad about democracy; all moral imperatives are foreign, perhaps even contrary, to democracy. Hence, democratic politics operates in an ethical realm without categorical imperatives, a priori principles, or transcendental guarantees and is thereby constitutively perilous and precarious. Democracy involves a tragic imaginary, enacting a politics of tragic life that includes folly without heroic salvation and demands lucidity in conditions of total uncertainty.
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Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe. Edited by ML CLE´ MENT and S. VAN WESEMAEL. Amsterdam, Rodopi. 2007. 405 pp. Pb E80.00. In December 2004, two academics from the University of Amsterdam approached the future participants at the... more
Michel Houellebecq sous la loupe. Edited by ML CLE´ MENT and S. VAN WESEMAEL. Amsterdam, Rodopi. 2007. 405 pp. Pb E80.00. In December 2004, two academics from the University of Amsterdam approached the future participants at the 'World of Houellebecq' ...
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This essay belongs to a series of meditations on the secular imagination, by which I mean, very broadly, the capacity of humanity (occasional though it is) to conceptualize its existence in the absence of external and transcendental... more
This essay belongs to a series of meditations on the secular imagination, by which I mean, very broadly, the capacity of humanity (occasional though it is) to conceptualize its existence in the absence of external and transcendental authority, and thus to exercise its radical potential for transforming the conditions of its existence in full cognizance of its historical character. Obviously, such a meditation also involves an interrogation as to what constitutes the historical subject, the subject of history, as well as, of course, the subject in history, and would thus require equally an investigation of subjectivity’s psychic dimensions. (Hence, the simultaneous interest of the overall project in the politics of sublimation, though on this occasion this will be broached only tangentially.) The central figure in this essay is what Edward Said has called ‘‘secular criticism,’’ a notion I take to be indicative of an intransigent intellectual position that seeks to critique and transform existing conditions—and this holds true both in matters of aesthetic form (literature, music) and social-political action—without submitting to the allure of otherworldly or transcendent solutions. The motif of transformation against the grain of transcendence is the core element in Said’s con-
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Derek Walcott’s staged encounter with George Seferis, by explicit invocation, in his poem “From This Far” (1980) is a nearly unprecedented instance of postcolonial confrontation with Greek antiquity, not through the conventional avenues... more
Derek Walcott’s staged encounter with George Seferis, by explicit invocation, in his poem “From This Far” (1980) is a nearly unprecedented instance of postcolonial confrontation with Greek antiquity, not through the conventional avenues of colonial classicism but through the wayward paths of Greek modernity. It therefore presents a rare opportunity for a series of reconsiderations of the tension between the poetic and the political, whether the co-incidence between Philhellenism and Orientalism that makes possible the colonization of the Hellenic ideal or the incapacity of the poetics of “world literature” to engage the ever-changing vicissitudes of postcolonial globality.
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This article questions the culturalist and civilizational taxonomies of postsecular theory by redirecting attention toward the practical consequences of public theology in the realm of neoliberal welfare reform. Tracing the simultaneous... more
This article questions the culturalist and civilizational taxonomies of postsecular theory by redirecting attention toward the practical consequences of public theology in the realm of neoliberal welfare reform. Tracing the simultaneous rise of faith-based welfare and the religious Right in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, and India, it argues that the postsecular posture of anticapitalist critique testifies at best to a misunderstanding of the constitutive relationship between the neoliberal and the neopaternal. Returning to Marx, the essay posits (contra Polanyi) that capital demands the constant reassertion of fundamental value, even while it works to undermine all historically specific instances of foundation.
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In the manufactured politics of crisis that we see increasingly in many societies around the world, the question of what politics can overcome the impasse of so-called democratic rule, which serves as a cover for the domination of liberal... more
In the manufactured politics of crisis that we see increasingly in many societies around the world, the question of what politics can overcome the impasse of so-called democratic rule, which serves as a cover for the domination of liberal oligarchies, has become urgent. Mining the most radical elements in Foucault's thinking about governmentality, this essay seeks to imagine a politics of left governmentality that would evade the pitfalls of left populism.
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At the heart of this volume are questions about the psychic components of the modes of thinking we call fundamentalist-that is, thinking that disavows multiplicities of meaning, abhors allegorical elements, and strives toward an... more
At the heart of this volume are questions about the psychic components of the modes of thinking we call fundamentalist-that is, thinking that disavows multiplicities of meaning, abhors allegorical elements, and strives toward an exclusionary orthodoxy that codifies not just its own world but that of its adversaries, itsothers. The essays address transcendentalist orthodoxies of all kinds, whether religious or secularist. Fundamentalist elements in psychoanalysis itself are also placed in question, at the same time as psychoanalytic thinking and practice is explored as a mode of knowledge that ultimately unravels fundamentalist tendencies.The texts in this collection represent a wide array of disciplinary standpoints. Their overall aspiration is to interrogate discourses of orthodoxy, literalism, exclusion, and dogma-that is, discourses obsessed with monolithic (monolingual, monological, monolateral, monomythical, and certainly monotheistic) encounters with the world.
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Examines the concept “border” bearing in mind Etienne Balibar’s extensive work on the matter of geopolitical borders, animated by analysis of the problem of “Europe” which ranges from a historical demand to account for the trajectory of... more
Examines the concept “border” bearing in mind Etienne Balibar’s extensive work on the matter of geopolitical borders, animated by analysis of the problem of “Europe” which ranges from a historical demand to account for the trajectory of European thought and its political implications to a philosophical demand to account for the present as it unfolds, often unpredictably, in real time of thinking and acting. To the first belongs a huge corpus addressing almost the entirety of modern European thought, from Balibar’s early work on Marx and Spinoza onward, and to the latter the work that encounters key landmarks of European reality (from those texts on capital, class, nation, and race to their eventual implication with questions of universality, secularity, citizenship, anthropology, and subjectivity). In a more pointed sense, this meditation on the concept of border in this European trajectory spans the range from the early analysis of the “interior frontier” in Fichte to multiple inte...
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The preface is a description of the project as a collective pedagogical experience. Cavafy's orientations are reconsidered as responses to the contradictions of colonial life in the Southeastern Mediterranean world and his poetics as... more
The preface is a description of the project as a collective pedagogical experience. Cavafy's orientations are reconsidered as responses to the contradictions of colonial life in the Southeastern Mediterranean world and his poetics as a rubric for disrupting interpretive orthodoxies all around.
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This essay takes as point of departure three phrases by Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin in order to restage Aristotle’s notion of zōon politikon as a way of rethinking humanism as a radical political project for our times. At the same time,... more
This essay takes as point of departure three phrases by Marx, Heidegger, and Benjamin in order to restage Aristotle’s notion of zōon politikon as a way of rethinking humanism as a radical political project for our times. At the same time, it reconfigures ontological questions of human-being through a consideration of human animality beyond the traditional divide between nature and culture.
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Le projet d'autonomie individuelle et collective constitue le coeur indissociablement pratique et théorique de toute l'oeuvre de Castoriadis. C'est lui qui fait le lien entre rengagement militant au sein de Socialisme ou Barbarie et la... more
Le projet d'autonomie individuelle et collective constitue le coeur indissociablement pratique et théorique de toute l'oeuvre de Castoriadis. C'est lui qui fait le lien entre rengagement militant au sein de Socialisme ou Barbarie et la réflexion philosophique la plus abstraite, depuis la parution de L'institution imaginaire de la société jusqu'aux séminaire donnés à l'EHESS. C'est aussi le projet d'autonomie qui constitue le carrefour originaire où se rejoignent tous les aspects de l'oeuvre e...