We all think we know what war is, yet it has always been explained in relation to something else:... more We all think we know what war is, yet it has always been explained in relation to something else: sovereign authority, civil society, peace, friendship, love. Traditionally, war has been perceived as either the opposite of these values, or as their instrument. Yet, in our time, it seems to be both of these things at once: social values, like human rights, are both what justifies war, and what we need to protect from war. In this book, Nick Mansfield studies this paradox through a reading of canonical thinkers on war like Hobbes and Clausewitz, and also of other thinkers (from Freud and Bataille to Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas and Derrida) who have attempted to deal with our complex and contradictory relationship to war. He also investigates the way that the most influential recent thinkers (from Virilio and Baudrillard to Mbembe, Badiou and Zizek) have theorized war
The subject and technology
Routledge eBooks, Jul 25, 2020
Theoretical Perspectives on Human Rights and Literature
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Aug 8, 2019
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2022
Bastard Politics : Sovereignty and Violence
Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1999
This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the politica... more This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name of the very values-freedom, democracy and human rights, for example-they purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that other accounts like Agamben's try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.
“Cosmopolitics”: Derrida on Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty
BRILL eBooks, Aug 3, 2023
Introduction: The Political Futures of Jacques Derrida
Social Semiotics, Sep 1, 2006
... Robert Sinnerbrink's “Deconstructive Justice and the 'Critique of Violence&... more ... Robert Sinnerbrink's “Deconstructive Justice and the 'Critique of Violence': On Derrida and Benjamin” is an important essay that addresses a topic for our time, that of locating the space for a transformative political practice. Sinnerbrink ...
Hospitality and Sovereign Violence: Derrida on Lot
Derrida today, May 1, 2018
Derrida's work on hospitality presents particular local conventio... more Derrida's work on hospitality presents particular local conventions of hospitality as in a necessary but impossible relationship with an absolute hospitality, the obligation to welcome the other without conditions. Although this absolute hospitality is commonly read as the aspiration to which all of our practices of hospitality should tend, Derrida proposes a series of examples that show the dangers implicit in an automatic or limitless welcoming. The most famous of these is that of the Old Testament patriarch, Lot. The aim of this paper is to show, however, that the Genesis story is not primarily a parable about correct and incorrect practices of hospitality. In fact, what is at stake in the visit of the angels to Lot is the covenant between Abraham's line and the divine and the coming into the world of God's absolute sovereign violence. Derrida's account of hospitality is thus part of his discussion of sovereignty, its limitlessness, force and danger.
Sovereign Counter-Sovereignty, Justice, and the Event
Fordham University Press eBooks, Aug 2, 2010
The Impossible quiet: the limitless politics of art
War as double : modern and postmodern thinkers redefine war
... Derrida, J., Politics of Friendship. G. Collins (trans.), Verso, London, 1997. ... A. Richard... more ... Derrida, J., Politics of Friendship. G. Collins (trans.), Verso, London, 1997. ... A. Richards (ed.) and J. Strachey (trans.), Penguin Books, London, 1985. Hardt, M. and Negri, A., Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books, London, 2004. ...
How do you locate Gilles de Rais (1404-1440)-military figurehead, national hero, serial child-kil... more How do you locate Gilles de Rais (1404-1440)-military figurehead, national hero, serial child-killer, archetype of Bluebeard-in any cultural, historical, political imaginary, in any religious inscape that can make sense of what he was, warrior, homicidal maniac and despicable fool? This is precisely what Georges Bataille attempts in his essay 'The Tragedy of Gilles de Rais', where de Rais finds his place as a remnant of the collapsing world of the feudal seigneur, a world he had outlived, with its military reforms and complex ecclesiastical politics. De Rais' behaviour and fate is tied up in the reconfiguration of a wealth and prestige he had inherited and that he chose to squander, or that he squandered recklessly, mindlessly, without thinking enough to choose. He could do what he did because of the liberties and resources available to the medieval lord: the property, the wealth, the disposability of the plebeian masses ('the little beggars whose throats he cut were worth no more than the horses'), 1 the stunning irresistibility of the spectacle of aristocratic indulgence ('he gave way without measure to his need to astonish through VOLUME18 NUMBER2 SEP2012 130 magnificent fairytale expenditures'). 2 To Bataille, de Rais was a savage child, an animal: Joined to the god of sovereignty by initiatory rites, the young warriors willingly distinguished themselves in particular by a bestial ferocity; they knew neither rules nor limits. In their ecstatic rage, they were taken for wild animals, for furious bears, for wolves. 3 The career of Gilles de Rais is caught up then in the rampant libertinage of feudal sovereignty, a sovereignty de Rais risks sovereignly, without regard for the future, for property, for lives, for his social and political place or eternal afterlife. It is in the unfolding of Bataille's account of sovereignty that his story makes sense in its abandonment of sense, its extravagance, its determined, cruel, unnecessary and pointless waste. Yet, Gilles' fate is also wrapped up in the meaning of Christianity or, for Bataille, religion more generally, a religion Gilles embraced by spurning it in his toying with necromancy, but that nevertheless still governed his decisions, even when he was at his most insolent, and to which, in the end, as he approached his execution, he at least pretended to submit. About this religion, Bataille says in a telling aside: 'It may be that Christianity would not want a world from which violence was excluded.' 4 What hypocrisy lurks in the will to denounce Christianity's essential violence?
The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida
... John D. Caputo, series editor m Perspectives in Continental Philosophy ... its most absolute ... more ... John D. Caputo, series editor m Perspectives in Continental Philosophy ... its most absolute form, the energetic-ists' theory is that everything is energy: mind, matter and spirit" (Hoch-roth 1995, 68 ... Hochroth argues that there are 10 m Economies of Subjectivity: Bataille After Freud ...
Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
Acknowledgements Introduction: War and Its Other PART I: POSING THE PROBLEM Hobbes: War Redeemed ... more Acknowledgements Introduction: War and Its Other PART I: POSING THE PROBLEM Hobbes: War Redeemed by Sovereignty Kant: Peace through War Clausewitz: War as the Activation of the Social PART II: THE WAR/OTHER COMPLEX Freud: War and Ambivalence Bataille: War, Consumption and Religion Deleuze and Guattari: Owning the War-Machine Under the Black Light: Derrida, Levinas, Schmitt and the Aporia of War PART III: THE PROBLEM OF DIFFERENCE The Collapse of Difference: Insisting on Clausewitz Global War Recovering Difference Conclusion: War and Human Rights Bibliography Index
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