This paper analyzes "ticking time bomb" scenarios in the discursive legitimation of torture and other coercive interrogation techniques. Judith Butler proposes a Foucauldian framework to suggest that Adminstration policies can be read as the irruption of sovereignty within governmentality. Rereading Foucault, I suggest that the policies could equally be understood as an exercise of governmentality, i.e., the subordination of juridical law to economy. I then propose as a reconciliation of these readings that time bomb scenarios serve rhetorically to make the (...) exercise of arbitrary power Butler identifies appear as an exercise of governmentality; sanitized of complications, coercive interrogation appears efficient. (shrink)

If, as Vandana Shiva has argued it in Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (1997), that ‘the new colonies are to be found in the bodies of women, plants and animals,’ then what are the new and not yet evidenced consequences of the efforts to make women ‘a site of passivity and negotiation’? There are little to no intergenerational studies of the impact of the chemical load on reproduction and future generations. The erosion of regenerative power, through exhaustive practices (...) as Teresa Brennan describes it in Exhausting Modernity (2000), in a novel way has become a radical form of toxicity that is disproportionally distributed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a comparative analysis of the legitimate exercise of democratic power in the philosophies of Montesquieu and Locke. This analysis not only highlights a strong bifurcation in liberal thought, it also sheds light on the contemporary practice of liberalism through the example of the United States’ ‘War on Terror.’ I argue that although it is Locke who at first blush gives an account of the exercise of democratic power that is more opposed to tyranny, it is Montesquieu’s (...) broader conception that is in many ways more effective at tracking and combating tyranny. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Nancy’s conception of the ‘inoperative community’ is one of the most original attempts in recent memory to develop a theory of the political that addresses contemporary concerns for difference and singularity. In this paper, I will argue that despite the deep rapprochement between Nancy and Heidegger, Nancy’s insistence upon the connection between community and singularity allows him to twist free from the more duplicitous features of his Heideggerian heritage. In contrast with Heidegger, Nancy interprets the political significance of finitude (...) with reference not to the work of a people, but, instead, to the finitude of singular beings that we encounter in our exposure to the death of others. From Nancy’s interpretation emerges a view of community that resists, or, as he puts it, unworks all tendencies toward totalitarian politics. (shrink)