Bare Life

Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02759527.2015.11933011

Taking a cue from a reading of Agamben’s essay “Nudity” (2009), the text analyses the
most famous concept of his vocabulary, “bare” or “naked life,” and attempts to understand
the meaning of life’s “nakedness” within the whole project begun with Homo Sacer. By
attempting to disclose and deactivate the theological signature that determines, in our culture,
the concept of “nudity” in exclusively privative terms, “Nudity” provides both an instrument
for the analysis of life’s nudity in the sovereign ban and the model for a philosophical practice
structured on a “denudation” of the signatures and apparatuses which determine and imprison
our life.

Este ensayo discute el concepto de Violencia divina sugerido por Walter Benjamin y su relación con el homo sacer planteado por Giorgio Agamben. Su aplicación se basa en la relación existente entre lo divino (ley), lo teológico (sacrificios en el tabernáculo) y lo político (figura de Moisés como autoridad divina) dentro de la esfera social judía correspondiente a los levitas y sacerdotes, considerados como homo sacer. Se discuten distintos casos de castigo divino dentro del Antiguo Testamento y su implicancia en la figura del homo sacer. Además, se considera el simbolismo que representa el derramamiento de sangre como medio expiatorio de la humanidad, por medio de la violencia divina y su vinculación con la biopolítica entendida como una relación entre zoé (la mera vida o vida biológica) y bios (forma de vida o su humanidad).

This thesis investigates what trauma theory would look like if it were more attuned to the creaturely residues of trauma. Through theorizing Freudian trauma theory and showing how its humanist focus is taken on by literary scholars, the thesis examines how the traditional approach of trauma that focuses on language and narrative could move towards a more affective and embodied approach that finds its origin in animal studies and its theorization of concepts like the creaturely, the open, vulnerability, woundedness, suffering and care. Through a close reading of three literary works by J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K and Slow Man) the thesis argues that, whereas traditional trauma theory focuses on trauma as a construct of anthropological difference, it is also possible to approach trauma in a non humanist and anti-anthropocentric manner by means of body-based relations of caring for oneself and fellow creatures

La nuda vita, ‘bare life’, is certainly the most popular and popularized concept of Giorgio Agamben’s project: it is explicitly, and from its inception, its ‘protagonist’, and has become one of the unavoidable foci of contemporary ethico-political debate. Agamben explicitly derives this notion from Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, where it appears in two fundamental passages at the conclusion of the analysis; however, Benjamin’s admittedly obscure deployment of the concept, and its popularization consequent to the enormous success of Agamben’s use of it, have resulted in an ‘Agambenization’ of ‘bare life’. The essay clarifies, first, the meaning of Benjamin’s notion by situating it within the cultural and philosophical context of ‘Critique of Violence’; second, it explores the way Agamben – very differently from Benjamin – ‘constructs’ bare life, along Schmittian lines, as the ‘exception’; finally, it explores the consistency of the uses of ‘bare life’ in the whole project.

This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography.

Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562

Free download for those without access to Third Text:

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full

Or
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0

"Résumé :

La déconstruction heideggérienne de l’animalité qui a lieu dans les Concepts fondamentaux de la métaphysique va jusqu’à faire disparaître l’idée même d’une vie animale, d’une vie propre aux animaux. La vie, comme le disait déjà Heidegger dans Être et temps, est «un mode d’être propre », ce qui veut dire, comme le confirmera le cours de 1929-1930, que la vie est « le mode d’être de l’animal et de la plante ». D’emblée conçus comme « organismes », les animaux se retrouvent désormais privés de monde, plongés dans une torpeur végétative, dans une Benommenheit, du fond de laquelle ils ne font, comme les végétaux, « rien de plus que vivre ». La méthode de l’ontologie de la vie – annoncée dans Sein und Zeit comme une « interprétation privative » – se révèle être une réduction au biologique : la stratégie consiste à trouver des équivalences fonctionnelles pour tout ce qui a trait chez les animaux à quelque chose comme une vie, à quelque chose comme une existence biographique, pour ne leur laisser que la vie, au sens strictement biologique du terme. Du se-mouvoir jusqu’à la perception en passant par cette forme de désir irrationnel qu’est l’impulsion, les traditionnelles facultés animales seront instituées en propres de l’homme, ne laissant plus aux animaux qu’une forme de vie organique, hors sens, hors possible, hors monde.

Abstract :

The destruction of animality that takes place in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics goes as far as to destroy the very idea of an animal life as distinct from plant life. “Life”, as Heidegger says in Being and Time, is “a specific mode of being”, that is to say, as the 1929-30 lecture course will show, that it is “the mode of being of animals and plants”. Conceived as a mere organism that does “nothing more than to live”, the animal find itself deprived of world, living in a vegetative state, in a kind of stupor (Benommenheit). The method of the ontology of life – announced in Being and Time as a “privative interpretation” – will reveal itself as a biological reduction: the strategy is to find functional equivalences for all that, in animals, resemble in any way what we find in humans. The life of animals is not a life, but biological processes. The traditional faculties associated with animal life – movement, perception and irrational desire (i.e. impulsion) – will be held as properly human, letting the animals a form of life deprived of signification, of possibility, of world."

Abstract Through reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), I will delineate Ray's formal and enunciatory cinematic usages and their applications in Sadgati, along with the critique of Premchand's progressive realism and aesthetics. I address the aporia of the aesthetic to caste issues by exploring and reconfiguring caste in terms of the delineation of Dalit life-worlds in Ray's and Premchand's narratives through modalities of the aesthetic-ethical framework. Engaging recent research on trauma and media concerned primarily with visual evidence—testimony as well as commemoration, precarity and grievability of lives—I attempt to bridge the gap between postcolonial and cinema studies for cross- fertilization of ideas and productive interface between them. By studying one medium's translation, transmission, transformation and appropriation of the other, I wish to enhance not only our understanding of both media but also hope to contribute to studies of comparative poetics and cross-media cultural translation.

This chapter is an overview of Giorgio Agamben's engagement, in the Homo Sacer series (1995–2014), with Aristotelian philosophy. It specifically studies Agamben's attempt to deconstruct two Aristotelian conceptual oppositions fundamental for the Western tradition of political thought: (1) that between the bare fact of being alive and "qualified" living (associated by Agamben with an alleged distinction between zōē and bios) and (2) that between potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia). Agamben's concept of form-of-life (forma-di-vita), a life that is never "bare" but always in the process of qualifying itself, is designed to deactivate and overcome these distinctions. In the final volume of the series, The Use of Bodies (2014), this is done with the help of the Aristotelian concepts of use (chrēsis) and habit (hexis).

Abstract: Taking the cue from a reading of Agamben’s essay Nudity (2009), the text analyses
the most famous notion of his vocabulary, «bare» or «naked life», and attempts to understand
the meaning of life’s ‘nudity’ within the whole project begun with Homo Sacer. By attempting
to disclose and deactivate the theological signature that determines, in our culture, the concept
of ‘nudity’ in exclusively privative terms, Nudity provides both an instrument for the analysis
of life’s nudity in the sovereign ban, and the model for a philosophical practice structured
on a ‘denudation’ of the signatures and apparatuses which determine and imprison our life.

In this paper, I will argue the layout of the notion of freedom in Giorgio Agamben's political thought by relying on his account of potentiality which is put in his two essays On Potentiality and Homo Sacer. It is claimed that while Agamben, in his earlier essay On Potentiality, associates freedom to his peculiar notion of im-potentiality, he later revises his thought and considers im-potentiality with sovereign biopower in which there is no possible way out. Against this reading, by looking into Agamben's conceptualizing of freedom and im-potentiality in his both essays, I will be discussing that im-potentiality continues to play an important role in Agamben's political thought which is, always, considered a way out from biopower.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence," this paper illuminates the complexity of law and violence in global biopolitical cinema. Benjamin's key notions ("lawmaking" and "law-preserving," "mythical" and "divine" violence) are revisited through diverse films such as The Dark Knight series, Dogville, The Act of Killing, and Waltz with Bashir. The paper explores how the sovereign agents of killing here embody 'pseudo-divine violence,' posing ethical dilemmas about justice and life's value. This analysis leads to the quest for 'true divine violence' without sovereign power and the sanctity of humanity believed only as potential to retain and relay.

Mucho se ha escrito sobre las “caravanas” de migrantes centroamericanos que recientemente han llegado a la frontera entre México y los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. Se han analizado los motivos y las rutas de los migrantes. También se ha tocado el tema de la discriminación que los miembros de estas caravanas han sufrido en México. Sin embargo, poco se ha dicho de la manera en qué el tiempo de permanencia de estos migrantes dentro de México transforma cómo son percibidos. En este ensayo se analiza la temporalidad como una de las dimensiones que modifican en qué medida los migrantes son percibidos como merecedores de apoyo por parte de organizaciones no gubernamentales y de la población en general. Utilizando el concepto de “vida nula” de Agamben, analizamos el caso de migrantes centroamericanos en tránsito por Mazatlán, Sinaloa y la manera en que dichos migrantes encarnan el concepto del homo sacer, es decir, un espacio liminal entre la animalidad y la humanidad. Basado en este estudio de caso, argumentamos que el tiempo de permanencia dentro de México, particularmente en Mazatlán, está directamente ligado a percepciones locales con respecto a quiénes son “los verdaderos migrantes”. Según información recopilada durante trabajo de campo en el 2016, vecinos mazatlecas y miembros de organizaciones no gubernamentales distinguen, en base a ciertos elementos espacio-temporales entre “migrantes” y vaquetones—es decir, aquellos que se aprovechan de las personas utilizando una imagen de migrante cuando, en realidad, no tienen el plan de llegar a la frontera. Como resultado, “los verdaderos migrantes” no sólo encarnan la “vida nula” sino que deben de buscar discursos que los presenten como ejemplares de dicho concepto para poder movilizar la economía moral de compasión entre mazatlecos y activistas.

Para ver todo el libro seguir el siguiente enlace: https://elibros.uacj.mx/omp/index.php/publicaciones/catalog/view/191/170/1047-1

HIV is God’s blessing examines the Russian Orthodox Church’s (ROC) role in combating the HIV and drug use epidemics in contemporary Russia.  Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork with a ROC rehabilitation and HIV prevention and care program in St. Petersburg, this book is the first anthropological analysis of these epidemics in Russia.  Beginning from the perspective of the anthropology of moralities, the book considers such critical issues as therapeutics as self-transformation, religious approaches to the relief of social suffering, HIV and injected drug use in the context of globalization and social change, and rehabilitation as moral training and the cultivation of self-governance and responsibility.  Ultimately, it is argued that while the ROC publicly condemns the influences of globalization and the West on post-Soviet Russia, the unintended consequences of the rehabilitation process in the Church-run program is the cultivation of new moral persons better equipped to succeed in the same neoliberal environment the Church blames for the HIV and drug use epidemics in the first place.  Thus, by working on the bare life of rehabilitants the program may help individuals overcome drug addiction, but at the same time is cultivating responsibilized citizen-subjects better attuned to a world the Church ultimately opposes.

This essay discusses Walter Benjamin's concept of divine violence and its relationship to Giorgio Agamben's idea of the homo sacer. This analysis is based on the existing relationship between the divine (law), the theological (sacrifices in the tabernacle) and the political (Moses as a figure of divine authority) found within the social sphere of Judaism that pertains to the Levites and priests, whom are considered homo sacer. This discussion focuses on various instances of divine punishment in the Old Testament and their implications for the figure of the homo sacer. It also takes into the account the symbolism represented by the spilling of blood as a way of expiating humanity; this occurs by way of divine violence and its relationship with biopolitics, understood as a relationship between zoé (mere life or biological life) and bios (way of life or their humanity).

Situated within fifty miles of each other at the heart of Israel-Palestine, three zoos — Jerusalem, Qalqilya, and Gaza — tell three very different stories about nonhuman animals, humans, and their imbricated survival across borders and at times of war. Through in-depth interviews with personnel from these three zoos, this article tracks the material and symbolic identities of three zoo animals. Yet the article is not just about animals; it is also a story about nationalism and its clandestine manifestations in ideologies of conservation. I argue here that alongside the straightforward story about sustaining wildlife, Israeli zoos’ control of zoo animals is a form of postcolonial ecology: an indirect penetration of the nation-state through nongovernmental means — and in the name of conservation.

I would like to show how the existential itinerary depicted in Conjugation can be read as a powerful allegory about how neoliberalism operates as a reduction of the political to a postpolitical, economic management issue. Following on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this reduction will be thought of as an extraction of bare life that can be understood as the production of a form of survival. In the last instance, I wish to show how Emily Tang’s film constitutes a paradigmatic cinematic itinerary illustrating the complex passage from qualified form-of-life to a form
of survival or bare life, a passage whose relevance far exceeds the Chinese context and can directly contribute to a better understanding of the formatting of subjectivities corollary to the ongoing global oikonomic mobilization.

The current 'pandemic' is approached through the lens of (mainly) the concept of Homo sacer, elaborated on by Giorgio Agamben (1998). Taking the work of Michel Foucault on the 'disciplinary society' and 'bio-politics' further, and drawing on the role played by the principle of homo sacer in antiquity, Agamben uncovers the disconcerting extent to which this principle has become generalised in contemporary societies. In antiquity the principle of 'sacred man/human' was invoked in cases where someone was exempted from ritual sacrifice, but simultaneously seen as 'bare life', and therefore as being fit for execution. Agamben argues that the sphere of 'sacred life' has grown immensely since ancient times in so far as the modern state arrogates to itself the right to wield biopolitical power over 'bare life' in a manner analogous to ancient practices, and finds in the concentration camp the contemporary paradigm of this phenomenon. Arguing that today we witness a further downward step in the treatment of humans as 'bare life', these concepts are employed as heuristic for bringing into focus current practices under the aegis of the Covid-19 'pandemic'. In particular, the spotlight falls on those areas where burgeoning 'bare life' practices can be detected, namely 'origin of the virus', 'lethal vaccines', 'engineered economic collapse', 'chemtrails' and 'what (to expect) next'. In the light of emerging evidence it is argued that these practices take the notion of homo sacer, 'bare life' and its concomitant biopolitical and pharma-political practices to unprecedented, virtually incomprehensible levels of depravity.

Ben Smith's debut novel, Doggerland (2019), is a vivid portrait of a claustrophobic post-industrial environment with strong ethical implications. Set in a near future, the novel stages an old man and a boy who work in a wind farm in the North Sea, bound to a contract with a mysterious corporation. And yet, what appears at first sight to be a melancholic lamentation soon veers towards the genre of environmental dystopia. On the one hand, Doggerland, with its marine setting and ghostly atmosphere, manifests an elegiac obsession with loss and mourning. On the other, the narrative overarching organisation presents occasional incursions into a deep geological timescale concerned with the changing nature of Doggerland, the mainland that once connected England to continental Europe. Starting from this premise, my presentation seeks to illustrate how Smith's opera prima ties in with Judith Butler's categories of 'precariousness,' 'grievability' and 'dispossession.' By focusing on its fragmented and precarious narrative form and on its disarrayed temporal frame, I intend to emphasise how Smith's novel not only promotes attentiveness to bare life, but also favours an ethical encounter with eco-precarious manifestations, thereby expanding on Butler's conceptualisation of grievability.

The installation of the hydroelectric power plant Belo Monte in the Brazilian Amazon displaced more than 40,000 people , among them numerous riverine families who were not recognized as such. Their displacement resulted in the loss of their territory and the forced abandonment of their way of life. Struggling against their precarization and for recognition , affected riverine people founded a Riverine Council as a political body through which they organized themselves and reclaimed interpretative power over their 'being riverine'. Discovering the category of traditional people as a legal shell to introduce their epistemic and ontological perspectives, they tried to force the state and the construction consortium to recognize their rights, guarantee access to their territories and, hence, compensate for environmental injustices. This paper focuses on the epistemic dimension both within the installation of Belo Monte and within the resistance struggle of the riverine population. For this purpose, we use a decolonial framing of Agamben's (2002; 2005) perspective on the state of exception and the assignment of bare life that considers the epistemic character of the coloniality of power working within (see Mignolo 2005; Quijano 2009). This forms the basis for the occurrence of epistemic injustices (see Fricker 2007), which is discussed in connection with the environmental justice debate. In order to shed more light on the mechanisms of the production of disposable and bare life and the possibilities of resistance within the struggle for epistemic justice, we finally add the idea of precarization and performative resistance (see Butler 2009; Butler and Athanasiou 2013).

Dissertação de Mestrado em AntropologiaA crise dos refugiados despoletou a corrida às fronteiras por parte dos meios de comunicação social. São estes que, através da sua própria perspetiva, divulgam através de imagens os acontecimentos, criando consequentemente uma representação dos “refugiados” através dessas mesmas imagens. A tendência representativa deste fenómeno assenta numa perspetiva monocular, que influencia a opinião coletiva, vincando a relação entre o “eu” e o “outro”. Uma primeira pessoa fotografa para uma segunda pessoa sobre uma terceira pessoa. Neste sentido, a perspetiva monocular chama à discussão o olhar panótico de Michel Foucault, pois a terceira pessoa, o “refugiado”, é vista sem ter a oportunidade de ver, sem ter a oportunidade de se “defender” da representação que lhe é atribuída. Como consequência, a constante reprodução de imagens torna o fenómeno universal aos olhos de quem as vê. Esta regularidade fomenta a banalização do fenómeno, evocando na opinião cole...

This article offers an ethnographic comparison of two genres of waiting for healthcare in Northeast Brazil in order to explain the persistence of patron-client practices at a time when people otherwise reject patronage. The explanation turns on a recasting of patronage as a form of sovereignty whereby politicians and afflicted persons may choose to suspend the emerging rights-based care regime in favour of older patronage-based approaches to care. Motivating such decisions is the afflicted person's experience of the wait for rights-based healthcare as a form of 'bare life', an experience they hope to escape.

http://www.diaphanes.net/titel/whats-legit-6053

Arendt’s criticism of human rights is not that they are powerless — and therefore useless but also harmless. Her criticism is rather that human rights entail disastrous negative effects when incorporated in the heart of nation states. She argues that it was the institution of human rights as “the basis of the constitutions of all civilized countries” which made possible that a vast number of people in the twentieth century — for the first time in history — lost any protection that human rights were originally supposed to provide. At the heart of this problem there is, as I will show in this article, a division between two kinds of rights: between human rights as citizen rights and human rights as such (1). The main difference between these two kinds of rights lies, according to Arendt, not in their form but in their content (2). The fatal consequences of this difference become evident when citizen rights are lost (3). This loss of citizen rights is not just the end of human rights, but involves the realization of a problematic aspect of their idea (4). Contrary to expectations, this realization takes place as a killing of the juridical person, that is, of legal capacity (5). As opposed to this effect of human rights, Arendt develops, as I will outline, the “right to have rights” as a right to being judged (6). In the last step, I will show what transformation of the idea of rights this involves, which problems this transformation answers — and what problems it raises (7).

This article develops the concept of bare nature by examining the interdependent and underlying conditions that make genocidal and ecocidal processes possible. Agamben identifies states of exception as a juridical key to understanding the legitimating logic that facilitate acts of arbitrary exclusion, targeted killing, and the life and death policy decisions that affect large segments of the population. Such regulated, collective precarity constitutes bare life. I argue that bare nature
is produced through a parallel process involving ecological “sacrifice zones” that function as states of exception that regulate other-than-human life in service of extreme energy extraction, creating the conditions for ongoing ecological destruction. In the second part of the article, I argue that the local impacts of extreme energy projects like the Canadian Tar Sands contribute to the conditions of bare nature and bare life globally, presenting a “. . . general (transnational) danger threaten[ing] the interests of several states and their inhabitants.” In closing, I turn to the ascendant Indigenous politics in Canada to consider what local cultural survival, global ecological adaptation, and nonsovereign governance models involve in the era of climate change. Indigenous-led politics grounded in land-based normative ethics provide a basis for building alternative futures based on establishing and maintaining conditions of holistic interdependence. Such interdependent
conditions will be able to emerge in direct proportion to the extent that the conditions of bare
life and bare nature are delegitimated, decommodified, and rendered inoperative.

Este curso se propone introducir a los estudiantes en los debates contemporáneos alrededor de la biopolítica y su productividad como aparato teórico-crítico para los estudios literarios. Organizado a través de tres núcleos problemáticos (la nuda vida, la definición de lo humano y la informatización), el curso pretende recorrer algunas de las discusiones fundamentales del campo y destacar su relevancia para el análisis crítico de una zona importante de la literatura actual. Se buscará propiciar la lectura y la discusión grupal de textos teóricos (Foucault, Agamben, Negri, Butler, Esposito, entre otros) y de narrativa tanto latinoamericana como extranjera (Sergio Bizzio, Megan Boyle, Mario Bellatin, Sergio Chejfec, etc.). Se espera poder ofrecer una serie de herramientas conceptuales que permitan interpretar una amplia gama de fenómenos sociales, culturales y artísticos del presente.

ข้อเสนอทางการเมืองที่เรียกร้องให้มีการจัดตั้ง “เขตปกครองพิเศษ” ในจังหวัดชายแดนภาคใต้ด้วยมุ่งหวังว่าจะคลี่คลายความขัดแย้งระหว่างศูนยกลางของรัฐประชาชาติกับชนกลุ่มน้อยได้รับการถกเถียงอย่างกว้างขวางในรอบปีที่ผ่านมา บทความชิ้นนี้มุ่งศึกษาทบทวนแนวคิดเกี่ยวกับ “อัตตบัญญัติ” และความเป็นประชาชนของชนกลุ่มน้อยที่ดำรงอยู่ในรัฐประชาชาติสมัยใหม่ โดยพิจารณาไปยังสถานะของชาวมลายูมุสลิมใน “ปาตานี” หรือจังหวัดชายแดนภาคใต้ ซึ่งในท้ายที่สุดแล้วค้นพบความลักลั่นหลายประการ ไม่ว่าจะเป็นความไม่ลงรอยระหว่างชาติกับประชาชน สถานะของชนกลุ่มน้อยที่สร้างความชอบธรรมให้แก่รัฐประชาชาติที่ขัดแย้งกับความปรารถนาในการสถาปนาชุมชนทางการเมืองของตนเอง เป็นต้น นอกจากนี้ ยังพิจารณาถึงวาทกรรมหลักที่เข้าถึงปัญหาชนกลุ่มน้อย อันนำมาซึ่งปฏิบัติการที่แตกต่างกัน

The calling for " the Special Administrative Zone " in the southern border provinces of Thailand is a political proposal which has long been debating since it was expected to solve the conflict between the secular modern state and the Malay-Muslim minority. This essay emphasizes on reviewing the concept of " Autonomy " and " the People " of minority that exist in a modern nation-state, by considering the status of Malay-Muslim in " Patani " in the southern border province. The essay also explores some ambiguities such as incongruence between nation and people, the contradiction of minority desire between living in nation–state and establishing their own political community. Moreover, this paper considers look into discourses of minority problems which bring about different minority movements.

This dissertation seeks to shed light on the issue of homelessness in the City of Cape Town, with the intention that its findings might achieve traction further afield. Central to the thesis is the idea that homelessness is not a homogenous category and yet frequently finds itself treated as such. Within vagrancy’s multiplicities, appears to lie a distinction between those who are considered more and less acceptable to the norms of neoliberal society. Included in the acceptable are those individuals who are willing and able to partake of the services offered by non-governmental homeless shelters; who subscribe to an ontological model of self-betterment; and who are actively attempting to get off the streets. Within the unacceptable set are those, such as transgender sex workers, who appear unenthusiastic about living in a shelter; who are not actively engaged in altering their situation; and who seem unmotivated to get into stable accommodation. However, at the very heart of this concern lie two fundamental problems that demand scrutiny: firstly, what forces govern the mechanics of social acceptability in contemporary South Africa, and secondly, who sets the criteria by which acceptability can be judged? By interrogating these questions, the author hopes to unearth some of the anxieties at play in Cape Town society. The research is based on six weeks of field research completed in a single district of the city between March and April 2016. It is based primarily on original qualitative data collected by the researcher during conversations, interviews, walks and lunches with research participants, and included a brief period living in a homeless shelter.

This article examines three of Joseph Roth’s feuilletons in the context of the intersecting discourses of anthropology, medicine, and politics in post– World War I Europe. Specifically, the article connects Roth’s description of the reconstructive surgery ward at the Charité in Berlin, founded by pioneering surgeon Jacques Joseph, to the political- philosophical notion of “bare life,” in order to show how Roth thereby points to a new concept of human being beyond the prevailing anthropological categories of the time.

"Resumen

Sloterdijk y Agamben coinciden respecto a la importancia de repensar el humanismo (en especial el conflicto entre animalidad y humanidad) y en situar a  Nietzsche en el epicentro de dicha problemática. Sloterdijk rastrea la concepción nietzscheana del hombre para encontrar sus antecedentes tempranos en Platón (El Político), particularmente en las nociones de cría y doma que el propio Nietzsche utilizará.
Para entender los alcances del tema, se requerirá delimitar qué se entiende por humanismo y en qué medida puede hablarse de un fracaso del mismo.

Abstract
Sloterdijk and Agamben agree on the importance of rethinking humanism (especially the conflict between human and animal) and locating Nietzsche in the epicenter of this problem. Sloterdijk traces the Nietzschean conception of man to find his early background in Plato (politician), particularly in the concepts of breeding and Dressage to Nietzsche's own use.
To understand the scope of the topic will require defining what is meant by humanism and to what extent can we speak of a failure of it.

Palabras clave:
Biopolítica, nuda vida, 'homo sacer', Agamben, biopoder, humanismo, animal,  Nietzsche, educación, Sloterdijk,  Parque Humano, poshumanismo, política

Keywords:
Biopolitics, bare life, 'homo sacer', Agamben, human, animal Nietzsche, education, Sloterdijk, Human Park , poshumanismo, politics.
Dr. Adolfo Vásquez Rocca"