The Mourning Cloak

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • The Bible and Philosophy

    Works Reviewed: Yoram Hazony, The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 379 pages.

    “Philosophy is useless, theology is worse.” There are times when this warning from the Dire Straits resounds,  not prophetically, but with the banal levity of a jingle. Stuck in within the mess of neurons we once called our minds tirelessly forbidding thought or belief. It isn’t a heavy nihilism though, more of a cliche than anything else. And, no doubt because there is no one else to do it, the theologians and philosophers continue to pursue their subtle movements, never quite sure whether it is a dance or a boxing match. This is done, often enough, with an eye to utility that translates philosophy into political philosophy and theology into political theology.

    Politics names only one of the possible connecting points for theology and philosophy. To another we might well give the name religion, and by this we are to understand the questions that arise when approaching questions of ethics, epistemology, and being from a particular confessional tradition. Religion generally conveys the conception of deeply ingrained set of beliefs and mental practices that traverses the psyche of the individual to a much deeper level than that typically associated with politics. From a certain perspective these beliefs and practices are viewed as errant and illegitimate methods of knowing. Religion, then, becomes something opposed to the exercise of human reason and the texts associated with religion are rendered suspect. Particularly when the texts in question are portrayed as originating in a supernatural or revelatory manner.

    Or so the story goes. In The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture Yoram Hazony makes the case that the reason/revelation dichotomy has been used to marginalize the Hebrew Bible and render it obscure to the modern reader. He identifies a typology that divides literature into the camps of reason and revelation, where reason is generally associated with philosophical texts written by people like Plato or Thomas Hobbes, while the Bible is firmly counted in the revelation camp as an example of a miraculous knowledge that is to be believed on faith alone. Hazony argues against this reading, arguing that it is a view of the Hebrew Bible forged by the early Christian readings of the texts as well as by anti-Semitic tendencies in the German Enlightenment that celebrated the advent of Greek thought and sought to exclude all things Jewish from the halls of learning. Noting that even Parmenides and Plato make appeals to gods and goddesses in their philosophies, he argues that the texts of the Hebrew Bible should not be banned as examples of the pursuit of human reason simply because they use phrases like “the Lord said.” Hazony then goes on to outline how one might approach the Hebrew Bible as a work of reason, and draws out an ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology from its texts.

    The result is an intriguing and at times insightful book. Hazony provides a good overview of the three major divisions of the Hebrew Bible into the History of Israel, the Orations of the Prophets, and Writings. This is a fairly standard way of dividing the works of the Hebrew Scriptures according to major genre or literary traditions. Hazony`s main novelty is to place the central focus on the History, rather  than the Torah, as a continuous narrative which opens up “a space in which a certain discourse arises, and a search for truth that is, in effect, unending.“(65) This certain discourse, which is then understood to be written across the face of the Hebrew Bible, is essentially philosophy; Hazony argues that the biblical authors are “concerned to advance arguments of a universal or general significance.t(23)

    Hazony adeptly traverses the biblical narrative, drawing on its typologies and parallels to produce a cohesive and close-knit reading of the text. The ethics of the bible is the ethics of the shepherd, a freedom-loving and at time rebellious figure, who stands in opposition to the pious farmer. This typology is cast first with the story of Cain and Abel, where Cain is supposed to represent the piety of the grain-keeping nations like Babylonia and Abel is the figure of dissent whose echo can be read across the History in the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and all the stories of “dissent and disobedience that give use the courage to wrestle with man and with God where we must.”(139)

    There is certainly something intriguing about this reading, which recaptures a sense of the heroic, of tempering obedience to the law with reason and courage. Hazony’s attention to the literary cohesion of the biblical corpus is exquisite, his attention to the historical context in which it arose less so. The simple dichotomy between shepherd and farmer does not provide an accurate picture of the socio-economic realities of the Ancient Near East, and reading too much into this typology may be to cast the concerns of the modern imagination back into the text. Hazony, who is quite skeptical of most of the efforts of historical criticism, intends to read the Bible as a completed literary work. In this case, one could well imagine, that the mythic past of simpler economic times already informed the contemporary imagination, thus providing the biblical philosopher with a framework within which to advance his arguments. 

    Taken in isolation the distaste for historical criticism would be excusable. It is, indeed, a growing trend within the field of biblical interpretation to pay more attention to the literary qualities of the works themselves. Hazony’s insistence on reading the Hebrew Bible strictly as a work of philosophy, however, leads him to dismiss many of the developments in biblical studies as irrelevant or misled. This comes out most strongly in his analysis of the New Testament. Hazony begins the book by castigating the reason/revelation dichotomy for the way in which it obscures the meaning and purpose of the Hebrew Bible. This dichotomy, he maintains, is largely the result of early Christian distortions. The New Testament, it appears, was composed principally to bear witness to certain events and establish their reliability. The New Testament, essentially juridic in its character, perpetuates a secretive esoteric knowledge that is anathema to the philosophic pursuits of the Hebrew texts. This is Hazony’s take on the New Testament and, while it certainly points to one of the ways those texts have been read, it is not a reading well-informed by scholarship in the field of biblical studies. The New Testament is a work of diasporic thought whose authors are struggling to make sense of their ancestral culture and the promises of God in light of a new cultural, political, and religious context. True the format of the narrative is different, the individual witness and the juridical metaphor do take a more central role. A form of collective identity other than the national or ethnic also emerges. Does this mean that the New Testament is a work devoid of reason? 
    Hazony, in a reading shaped almost exclusively by Tertullian, suggests that the answer is yes. In doing so he is forced to repeat the reason/revelation dichotomy which he had earlier decried. He is also bound to a philosophy that is bound to a national character, a philosophy that has no room for the concerns of  individual, no resilience or resistance for times when the prevailing wisdom is bound up with the violent unjust excesses of state. It is unfortunate that Hazony cannot find in the diasporic some resonance with the post-exilic. Unfortunate too that, despite protestations to the contrary, Hazony ultimately reads both scripture and philosophy as closed books, everything has been written there is no room for the new in political configurations, ethical views of the self, or understandings of truth.
    Yet, at its strongest moments, Hazony does point to these possibilities. The task of the reader is perhaps to take him seriously in his suggestion to read the biblical texts as works that are not entirely foreign to human reason and to expand this reading in ways that are historically consistent and engage more fully with the breadth of human experience and imagination, allowing for the divine spark of creativity and the revelatory character which accompanies not only religion but all forms of true knowledge. Perhaps, then, we could shake off the persistent commercial jingles that stifle thought and erode conviction. 

  • Bolivia:entre amor y fantasía

    Esta noche me agarro una nostalgia fuerte para Bolivia. Para la Bolivia de mi juventud, y para su música. No la música tradicional sino el rock, el híbrido. La escena musical en cual participé. Como espectador, es verdad, pero sin embargo fue parte de mi realidad, una parte que se queda, de una forma que poco entiendo, hasta ahora. Esa música, y estoy hablando específicamente de la época en cuando el rock boliviano salio de la valle de la sombra de heavy metal y nació un rock mas indígena y localizado. Indígena, pero todavía bajo el señal del imperialismo y el capitalismo. Nacido bajo el auspicio del reino de los muerte-vivientes.

    Y que es la nostalgia sino una síntoma de la mala consciencia? Y yo, huyendo de Bolivia tras años y kilómetros de que tiemblo. Es simplemente que Bolivia amenaza a sus hijas? Pues, en Canadá la realidad es lo mismo. Bajo el signo del imperio todas las naciones practican el sacrificio de Moloch. Los faraones tiemblan las niñas, tiemblan lo nuevo, siempre. Lo que nació con Moisés no fue solamente otro israelita. Fue una generación híbrida; de un nuevo orden completamente. Pero híbrida; eso lo sabemos porque el infante fue criado por su madre bajo el autoridad de la princesa. La hibridad, aveces, genera lo nuevo. Por supuesto, tendrá que haber un sitio donde puede pasar un evento para tener un cambio verdadero. No es simplemente que una mezcla de productos o situaciones culturales resulta en la producción de un presente radicalizado. Cuando uno habla de nacimiento el alumbramiento de un mortinato es siempre una posibilidad. Especialmente en una cultura del aborto. Entienden, por favor, que hablo del aborto cultural, el aborto de la política, el aborto de la justicia. Pero, ni modo, no puedo administrar lo de que yo estoy culpable en las fuerzas del faraón. Siempre hay parteras, y los que huyen la responsabilidad del renacer son tan culpables como los soldados.

     Que son tus bendiciones, Bolivia? Bendiciones maldichos, que siempre son, te los agradezco. Pero siempre has sido mi penitencia, no mi refugio. Me identificaste como gringo, como agente estraño, y yo no me radicalice. No me permite identificar con tu pena y tu pasión. Yo se lo que llevo en mi alma. Ese amor primaria que me queda como presencia fantasmatica, o hasta como fantasmagoría. Y los que teman espantos son los que no han realizado la presencia de seres humanos, de seres vivientes. Eso también me regalaste Bolivia. Temor de los demonios. Es por eso, y solamente eso, que te he maldicho. Es por eso que llevo en mi corazón el deseo de venganza alado del amor. Tu no me dejaste vivir; me quede en tu presencia como fantasma, ahora te llevo igual. Yo se que no fue tu culpa. Si la culpa fuera tuya te pudiera perdonar. El culpable soy yo, culpable de no amarte fuerte. Culpable de tratarte como colonizador. Hasta hoy en día no he tratado tu memoria con el respecto que mereces. He menospreciado no solamente tu cultura, pero tus luchas. Y los he menospreciado precisamente por serte extranjero y extraño. Extranjero te fui por la naturaleza, ajeno por decisión. Tu decisión y mi decisión. Tu no me entendiste, y yo te menosprecie. Me hablaste con voz de superstición, me hablaste de satanás, de demonios, de los duendes. Condene la debilidad de tu mente, sin saber que llevaría tus demonios conmigo. Sin saber que tu espíritu, a la vez beneficente y maligno se quedaría atrapado en mi Psique. Mas que atrapado, porque es enteramente parte de la fabrica de mi ser. Que es este tumor, y yo soy el tumor. Este fantasma, y yo soy el espanto. No te puedo echar, no te puedo dejar. Tampoco no te puedo besar, no te puedo abrazar. Nos quedaremos, quizás siempre, en este lugar de los ajenos intimas. Te perdonare, quizás, y tu perdóname? Te suplico, lo que quiero es que me entiendas, deseo amarte. Deseo pasar de este lugar espiritual, y partir el pan con los seres vivientes. Los humanos no pueden vivir entre angeles y demonios. Somos carnales, seres materiales. Nuestro deseo, nuestro espíritu es el espíritu humano. Nunca fui tu dios, nunca fuiste mi demonio, ni tampoco mi ángel.

    Vivientes. Hay veces que pienso que los que somos, realmente vivientes, es lo único que no fuimos. No te pido salvación. No te pido venganza. A la misma vez, si te los pido. Dame salvación. Dame venganza. Dame absolución. Te suplico, como a un cura. Pero no es la divinidad que busco, lo que busco, lo que no encuentro es la humanidad. Mas que eso, es la vida material. Basta con los espíritus, con almas desincorporados. Maldito tu espiritualidad. Tal como el mio. Yo se que es debido al protestantismo, no es solamente Boliviana. Es mi experiencia, de eso y nada mas hablo. No quiero decir que hay una esencia boliviana. Precisamente no quiero decir eso. Y he dicho que el español es mi penitencia y no mi refugio. Y porque? Los espíritus son los que inhabitan purgatorio, son los corporales que buscan refugio. Y la confianza de que saldré de purgatorio? Pues allí queda la clave de mi suplicación. El cura trabaja en signo de la cura. Solamente renacer. Amantes, enemigos, comadres, algo. Solamente quiero pasar, junto con todo lo que para mi es Bolivia, de la nostalgia y la fantasía  al amor y la comunión.

  • Education, truth and the labour of love.

    Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths, A.J. Bartlett, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011 (ISBN: 9780748643752) vii+248 pp.


    Every so often a book comes along that, in its utter relentlessness, forces its reader out of the complacency of his or her habits of thought. A.J. Bartlett’s latest offering, Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths, stages just such an encounter. Written in a dense, elliptical style, Bartlett draws on categories from Alain Badiou’s Being and Event to present a vigorous and systematic reading of Plato’s body of work. With philosophical flair Bartlett shows that the question of education is at the heart of philosophy.

    Readers of Badiou will immediately recognize the six categories Bartlett utilizes in his reading of Plato: state, site, event/intervention, fidelity, subject, and the generic or indiscernible. Those unfamiliar with Badiou’s mathematically charged lexicon will find it harder going. Badiou is committed to a philosophical language that spans the registers of mathematical formality and poetic diction, and this decision is taken up by Bartlett and reflected in his style. That being said the fact that Bartlett’s is an interventionist reading – directed at a particular textual corpus, namely, the writings of Plato – provides narrative depth and helps contextualize Badiou’s philosophical project. 

    Bartlett’s thesis revolves around Badiou’s claim that “the only education is an education by truths.” (Badiou and Plato, 2) Bartlett argues that precisely such an education is staged across the breadth of the Platonic corpus and he discerns its form and trajectory using the aforementioned categories as a framework.  Each of the categories marks a link in what Badiou calls a “truth process.”(4) Unapologetically interventionist, in that they deploy categories created outside the Platonic texts, this reading does allow a dialectical trajectory to unfold from the texts themselves.  Badiou describes his own philosophy as a “contemporary Platonism” particularly in regard to a commitment to truth. For Bartlett this identification allows for a productive dialogic encounter with the two philosophers:

    To reinsert Badiou’s concepts and categories back into Plato is, in a certain sense, to return them anew to whence they came: a return, moreover, whose form is dialogical rather than repetitious, productive rather than comparative, whereby, in speaking to the Platonic corpus, it once again speaks back. In this way the Platonic corpus avoids the fate Plato describes for what is written down – the inability to answer back – and instead resumes again as dialogue, as subject. (3, italics in the original)

    The hope, Bartlett says, in deploying Badiou’s platonic categories back into the Platonic corpus is to draw a logical and implicative link between the axiomatic statement that “the only education is an education by truths” and a subsequent axiomatic that “thought is nothing other than the desire to finish with the exorbitant excess of the state.” (3)

    Education names a site of contestation.  Badiou tells us that truths are what “force holes in knowledge.” (1)  Knowledge here refers to the circulating rule of opinion that is the order, rule and currency of the ‘state.’ For Badiou the “state of the situation” is defined as “that by means of which the structure of a situation is in turn counted as one… The state secures and completes the plenitude of the situation” (Being and Event, 522).  The role of the state towards knowledge is a managerial one; it is tasked with keeping out the dangerous and disruptive elements. In the final analysis this amounts to a security against the threat of the void. Truth is subtracted; it cannot be merely added to rule of opinion and so to The excessive character of the state.  For the sophists of Athens knowledge is predicated on interest and education revolves around exchange and investment. Education, in the sense described here, becomes an instrument of privilege and a tool of exclusion. It is this kind of education that Plato’s Socrates denounces as unworthy of the name.

    Plato is nonetheless committed to education and the “lifelong task” of setting aright an education devoid of wisdom or truth. Bartlett describes the lack of truth Plato identifies in “state education” as constitutive of its form, and not an incidental effect of particular teachings. Yet, although the state dominates and misuses the name of education, education is still the site wherein its truth can come to be known. The struggle between Socrates and sophistic Athens arises precisely around Socrates’ refusal to submit to the dominion of state knowledge and his delineation of an education by truths.  In Plato’s texts Socrates is to be understood as the name of the event which ruptures the encyclopedia of Athenian knowledge.

     Bartlett suggests that Socrates’ oft-repeated claim to “know nothing” should not be dismissed as ironic posturing. Read alongside the charges against Socrates – that he corrupts the youth – it should be read both as openness to truth and a bitter indictment of Athens.  Bartlett reads the entire Platonic corpus as a re-staging of Socrates trial. This retrial finds that Socrates is indeed a corrupter, though what he corrupts is a corrupt state of affairs.  If this were to end simply with Socrates death it would be a despondent case indeed, however, “(f)or Plato, this retrial does not end in the execution of Socrates but in the Republic – a place where this corrupt state cannot be” (31).  Socratic education cannot be recognized by Athens because it does not lead directly to the polis, market, school, or stage. This is so because Socrates begins from a position of admitted ignorance, but with the avowed hope of coming to know what he did not know before. The Republic, says Bartlett, is the generic extension of what Socrates names in Athens:

    That the Republic exists is the very idea of the subjective procedure; that it insists is the result of forcing the truth of this idea into the situation as the condition of its thought. The knowledge of this truth must be forced into existence by the subject. All that the subject has to hang on, so to speak, is the belief that it can be forced, such is why this Socratic procedure is fragile, limited, and under attack…The only education is that which addresses the generic ‘capacity for reason’ whose disavowal is the constitutive condition of the sophistic state. Surely the formalisation of this address is Plato’s singular and decisive in(ter)vention. What this Socratic taking place makes manifest is simply that the sophist cannot educate, that what one receives in exchange for one’s ‘callous cash payment’ is not an education but a calculated return one’s investment and a stake in the regime predicated on the conceited yet powerful knowledge of what – at all costs – must not be. In the Republic – the decided place of philosophy, constituted by a thoughtful, subjective transformation – a place where sophistry cannot be for all, it cannot be simply because it never was an ‘education by truths.’ (226)

    The quotation above encapsulates precisely the book’s trajectory. What I have left out here is a detailed discussion of the fidelity to the event/intervention by which a subject is produced. Bartlett deals with this in considerable depth, reflecting on the Plato/Socrates relationship and Plato’s own interventionism. Following Badiou intervention “forms the kernel of any theory of time.” Intervention is time itself as the gap between two events. To intervene is therefore to take on the task of fidelity to an event and undertake the labour that, in the Republic at least, “is the collective production of justice of that which is for all and, as such, is the work of love.

    In Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths Bartlett has created a powerful text. There is here a reinvigoration of Plato studies, casting them not in a narrow academic sense but in a way that touches questions important to all; the questions of education and truth. At the very least they should give us pause at the varied ways in which our current forms of education serve the interests of power and pleasure. Read carefully they may spur a revolution in which education is wrested from the service of privilege and begins the work of love. 

  • Review: Third Person


                  Roberto Esposito Third Person: Politics of life and philosophy of the impersonal (Translated by Zakiya Hanafi) Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, 177 pages.
    At the outset of Third Person Roberto Esposito forcefully asserts that the category of person occupies an almost unassailable position in contemporary discourse. From analytic to continental philosophies and Catholic to secular schools of thought the idea of the person holds sway as the definitive category of meaning. Esposito holds that the category of personhood, allegedly the qualification capable of bridging the gap between human being and citizen, is in fact guilty of creating the separation between the voluntary rational part and the purely biological part of human life.  Against the performative power of the person Esposito pursues a philosophical inquiry into the impersonal, as a category which can release us from the “exclusionary mechanism” of personhood into the originary unity of living being.
    Esposito draws on the language of philosophy, bioethics, and law to make his case.  Bioethics seems to hinge on defining when a living being becomes a person or what kind of living can be considered a person. Yet whether the definition is slated to begin at conception or birth or somewhere in between, it is the entrance into personhood that secures its unquestionable value. The centrality of the person cuts across what Esposito calls the Catholic and secular schools of thought as well:
    If a tacit point of tangency exists between the seemingly opposing conceptions of the Christian sacredness of life and the secular notion of its quality, it resides precisely in this assumed superiority of the personal over the impersonal: only a life that can provide the credentials of personhood can be considered sacred or qualitatively significant. (2)
    Turning to the lexicon of law Esposito points to the belief that personhood has the conceptual, and subsequently practical, function of bridging the gap between the concept of human being and that of citizen. The contemporary discourse on human rights, he argues, is conceivable and viable only through the language of personhood. In legal discourse too “the category of person appears to be the only one that can unite human beings and citizens, body and soul, law and life.” (4)
    But all is not as it seems.  Growing numbers of deaths from hunger, war, and epidemics stand as a testament against the effectiveness of “human rights.” How to respond to this divergence between principle and practice? One answer is that the concept of the person has simply not been fully affirmed, and has not taken “root at the heart of interhuman relations.” Esposito offers us a rather different perspective, wherein the ancient Roman separation between persona and homo remains firmly engrained in modern philosophical, political and legal conceptions.  To be human is not necessarily to be a person, and vice versa. One need only think of the status of corporations for a contemporary example of this logic. A person is therefore an artificial entity, the result of abstract categories which resulted in procedures of exclusion. Esposito argues that the process whereby the experience of personhood is defined by reducing others to the level of a thing is still very much at work today, and can be seen at work in the rise of twentieth century biopolitics as well as the liberal tradition.
     Drawing our attention to the work of the 19th century physiologist Xavier Bichat, Esposito traces the lineage of biopolitics through linguistics and anthropology. Esposito argues that the mixing of new biological knowledge with politics and philosophy set in motion a biopolitical current which, under the guises of the hierarchical anthropology of the 1800s and later the racist anthropology of the early 1900s, appeared to crush the person-human dualism into a single biological referent with incredible and decisive violence.  This biological referent, articulated in terms of comparative zoology, sought to judge types of human species on the basis of “how closely or distantly they are related to animal species.” (7) The animal, held by Darwin to represent the origin of species, thus became a point of division and a mechanism of exclusion.
    That the biopolitical currents produced a politics of exclusion and destruction in the Nazi regime, dubbed “thanatopolitics” by Esposito, could be read as an argument in favour of the personal.  Surely the performative space opened up by the separation of the person from the body affords some protection against the crushing politics of death which, after all, appeared to undo the distinction. Esposito, however, makes the case that appearances once again deceive. While conflict between cultures built around personhood and the ideological attempts to crush the person back into pure biology certainly exists, there are continuities as well as ruptures between the two perspectives.
    Hearkening back to Roman law, Esposito points to the position of the slave who is not considered a person, but instead occupies a place somewhere between person and thing. More than this, the act of defining who is counted as a person depends on the act of excluding what does not, as Esposito says,
    -not only in the general sense that the definition of the human-as-person emerges negatively out of that of the human-as-thing, but in a more meaningful sense that to experience personhood fully means to keep, or push, other living individuals to the edge of thingness. (10)
    On this reading it becomes clear that the “animal” of the emergent biopolitics and later thanatopolitics of the late 1800 and early 1900s functions precisely to define the lines between person and thing.  The relationship between the two, Esposito is careful to note, exists at different levels. Under liberalism it is the individual (person) who is considered to own the body wherein it is implanted. Under Nazism, by contrast, ownership of the body is assigned to state sovereignty. What remains constant is the role of bodily life as a subordinate thing to the higher aims of the person who owns it. Even when the goal of the person is the maximization of individual freedom, as under liberalism, this freedom “comes by way of potential reduction of the body to an appropriated thing.” (13) On careful reading the bioethics developed as part of the liberal tradition reveals the ancient Roman distinction between persona and homo; not all human beings are persons and not all persons are human beings.  “Hence” Esposito relates,
    the resulting gradation –or degradation –from full person to semi-person, non-person, and anti-person, represented respectively by the adult, the infant or disabled adult, the incurably ill, and the insane. Hence to each level of personalization – or depersonalization – there corresponds a different right to determination, and even preservation of one’s life. Here, too, in formulations that closely recall the sovereign power of the paterfamilias over his children and over anyone whose condition is a reified reproduction of that state, the personhood-deciding machine marks the final difference between what must live and what can legitimately be cast to death. (13)
    Personhood, and the politico-legal machinery behind, thus threatens to overwhelm contemporary discourse, but this is not the end of the story. Esposito counsels the impersonal as a way to trace lines of resistance. The impersonal, while lying outside the horizon of the person, remains related to the person; this peculiar relationship allows the impersonal to function as an alteration to the personal, calling it into question and overturning prevailing meanings.  Esposito draws on the work of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Gilles Deleuze among others to sketch out the figures of the impersonal in twentieth-century philosophy.
    Following Weil, Esposito establishes the third person as a figure of justice. Opposed to the privative, exclusive character of both Roman and modern law, the figure of the third person or the impersonal is a generalized term. As such it renders possible the thinking of a “common right” a term which appears nonsensical in the lexicon of privative law. The radical formulation here is that it is not the personal, but the impersonal that constitutes the sacred.
     Esposito traces this figure in from the non-person Emile Benveniste’s linguistic studies, the animal in the thought of Alexander Kojeve, the neuter in Blanchot’s writing, and the figure of the outside in the work of Michel Foucault. All of these come to a mighty crescendo in Deleuze’s “systematic destruction of the category of the person in all its possible expressions.” (142). In situating the philosophical horizon towards the impersonal event the category of the person becomes decentred, its boundaries opened to investigation and reinterpretation.  Couched in terms of our animality, what is at stake here is the possibility of being human in ways not coextensive with the person or thing, but rather as living persons, that is, coextensive with life itself.
    Third Person recasts the nebulous history of biopolitics with insight and ingenuity. Weaving together the biological, anthropological, linguistic and philosophic filaments of its genesis, Esposito finds that both liberal traditions of personalism and the catastrophic biopolitics of the twentieth-century share a common focus in the centrality of personhood. Esposito goes as far as to suggest that the horrors of biopolitics, which began as a naïve and unprejudiced science, are attributable to the cult of the personal. The figure of the impersonal, then becomes the place of refuge, or rather resistance. The book ends with a sort of invitation to meditate upon the impersonal as a way of being open to the radically new. Whether or not the impersonal is successful in unseating the hegemony of the personal, or indeed whether it provides sufficient resources for the conception and practice of politics, is still very much an open question.  Regardless Third Person stands as an important reflection whose demanding rigor and sparkling insight prove very much worthwhile. 

  • Christian Call for Strangers in Our Midst.

    Our Christian Call to Care for the Strangers in our Midst

    Posted on December 8, 2012 by Catholic Commons

    A Biblical and Theological Reflection

    Maggie Helwig
    The Hebrew scriptures are deeply marked by the experience of displacement. The story of the exile of Jacob’s descendents in Egypt, their time of wandering in the desert after being delivered from slavery, and, later, the deportation of a large part of the population of Jerusalem to Babylon, all became part of the self-understanding of the ancient Israelites. These stories of being uprooted and endangered in unfamiliar lands influenced the ethical teaching of the scriptures; frequently, the Israelites are reminded of their obligation to care for the stranger and the exile, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:34, Deuteronomy 10:19). Care for the displaced person is a priority in many Old Testament texts, not simply as an act of charity, but out of a sense of identity with the outcast.
    The New Testament continues this emphasis on hospitality to the stranger and the alien. Throughout the gospels, Jesus is shown interacting with people who are foreign to his culture – a Samaritan woman (John 4), a Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:25-30) – and the stories are told in a way which emphasizes the “border violations” involved. Outsiders and those whose status is “irregular” clearly have a particular importance in Jesus’ ministry.
    Moving even beyond the Old Testament sense of identity with the stranger, the New Testament texts present the foreigner and the outcast as those in whom we directly encounter God. In Matthew’s judgement parable (Matthew 25:31-46), the Son of Man presents himself as one who was “a stranger” and received welcome or rejection. Similarly, the author of the letter to the Hebrews draws upon Abraham’s hospitality at Mamre to stress that we encounter God in the person of the stranger (Hebrews 13:2).
    Perhaps most important of all, when we read the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, we find Jesus himself entering our world as one of the excluded. In Luke’s gospel, Mary and Joseph are forced by imperial order to leave their home, and must search for shelter in a busy city where there is no room for an unimportant peasant couple. In Matthew’s gospel we see Jesus as a refugee baby, whose family must flee into a foreign country to avoid a politically-motivated massacre. In these stories, God comes among us as a wholly vulnerable displaced person.
    In a meditation on the nativity story, the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton wrote,
    Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it – because he is out of place in it, and yet must be in it – his place is with those others who do not belong, who are rejected because they are regarded as weak; and with those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, and are tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.
    The imperative of care for the displaced and endangered is profoundly rooted in our Christian narrative; if we neglect this imperative, we are, in effect, turning away Christ himself. And we believe that the uninvited, displaced Christ meets us, sometimes, in those who come from situations of violence and oppression, those who have been “denied the status of persons” in their countries of origin, and who seek safety in Canada.

    View Full Article at Catholic Commons

  • Advertise. Economy. Propaganda

    Le Roi reigne mail il ne gouverne pas. 



    Recently I wrote a letter to my local Member of Parliament  expressing concern over some of the provisions of Bill C-31 (the perversely titled “Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act) which is already beginning a much harsher and less hospitable place for refugees. The Canadian Council of Refugees has pointed out that the provisions made in this bill will be unfair to refugees from designated countries, will grant sole power over refugee status to the Minister of Immigration – rather than a committee whose task would be to assess particular cases. The provisions will also allow for refugee claimants to be jailed, without review, for a minimum of one year. (http://www.change.org/en-CA/petitions/withdraw-anti-refugee-bill-c-31-protecting-canada-s-immigration-system-act). This is remarkably inhumane, it is also contrary to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom and International Law. 
     I also wrote expressing concern over the undemocratic procedures and general decline of political culture heralded by the Omnibus Budget Bill. I knew, even at the time of writing, that is was a crazy foolish gesture. I appealed to themes of justice and robust political culture to someone who grovels in adulation of some weird libertarian logic. Or, perhaps, at the end of the day, just another criminal in politician’s clothing. At any rate, I did get a letter in return, which informed me that I had not addressed my criticism particularly enough, and also pointing out to me how great the Conservative government was with its Economic Action Plan and all the jobs they had added to the “Economy.” I had composed my letter, initially, in response to a piece of propaganda I had received in the mail proudly touting the Tories commitment to the “Economy” and “Jobs”. I had explained in the letter how politically and ethically reprehensible it was to use “The Economy” as a justification for undermining human freedom and dignity and debasing Canadian political culture. I suspect it did not compute. 
    It seems the only language our current Canadian government speaks is that of “The Economy”, and that in a particularly truncated way. My MP did use the word shamelessly to refer to the NDP, for their efforts in attempting to block the legislation referred to above, and therefore “harming the economy.” Just what is the economy, though. Looking at the cuts that have been made recently the economy does not contain anything as substantial as, for instance, scientific research, education, environmental management, or other social services. What it does include is advertising – specifically advertising to praise the Conservatives “Economic Action Plan. In other words the Economic Action Plan ads are the Economic Action Plan end of story. As a recent CBC headline reveals: Conservatives commit $16M to ‘action plan’ ads while cutting programs. Approved funds just part of multi-million ad blitz by federal government. 
    I was reminded again of Giorgio Agamben’s work in The Kingdom and The Glory. Agamben argues that glory is a constitutive feature of modern political power. Power in the West, which has always assumed the form of an economy, that is, a government of people and things is actually constituted by the process of glorification, that is of liturgical ceremony and proclamation. In the phenomenon of advertising, then, we should be aware of what is going on. The “Economic Action Plan” is, in fact, a liturgical proclamation of the divine power of “the economy.” Only last Sunday I heard someone say that “money was as essential as God.” They said this not despondently or triumphantly but as though it were a lived reality. This is the message we are constantly fed, but  that does not make it true. Any true Christian (or Marxist for that matter) should quickly smell the stench of idolatry here. Yet the fact that it was said is far less disturbing than the reality that our behaviour is conditioned by this statement. 

  • Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

    Is This Child Dead Enough for You? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

    I felt like this article bore sharing on this site. I have been deeply troubled over the last few days at the victory celebrations I have witnessed, in people I know and respect, celebrating the re-election of Barack Obama. People who should know better but are either deluded by the smoke and mirrors of the American political scene, or else persist in subscribing to this perverse “lesser evilism” that has us all descending into a moral hellhole. These are dark times. When will we say that enough is enough? When will we agree that killing children is actually wrong, and that no amount of military might or flash rhetoric can make it right?

    In conversation this evening someone mentioned to me the endearing photographs of Obama taken with children during his campaign. Now, on the Counterpunch site, I see the other side of the story. The child who has been killed at Mr. Obama’s command. There is no celebration, there is no victory. There is no endearment, only a sick reality where children are valued only as cute or endearing subjects of the propaganda machine or tossed aside as useless chattel.

    We don’t need this grotesquery. The slick and sleazy campaign. The president with his noble face and his noble rhetoric and his kill lists. The endless security and the manufacturing of fear in order to pursue the eternal and infinitely perverse securitization of the world. The time has come to announce a simple and powerful truth. We are not afraid. We are not afraid of the world. We are not afraid of terrorists, we are not afraid of jihad or of economic ruin, we are not afraid of the media, or the powerful speakers, or the security cameras or the drones. We are not afraid of the financial elite or the power they command. We are not afraid of children. We are not afraid of human relationships.

    We can learn this, the art of being unafraid. Collectively we can take up our common humanity and cast off the yoke of oppression, of surveillance and fear and mistrust. We don’t need to hand up power to weak-minded foolish puppets whose idea of managing the affairs of the world is to fill the banks with money, the skies with death planes, and the streets with the wretched poor. 

  • Holocaust 2.0

    The twilight of the American Empire, it thus appears, will be remembered for its endless kill lists and its codification of murder. -Ben Schreiner 

    It is high time we learned to read the signs of the times. The epitaph above is taken from the recent Counterpunch article “Obama’s Endless Kill List.” In that article Schreiner briefly illuminates some of the key facts about Obama’s drone program, including the administrative policy defining any military age male in so-called combative area as combatants, and the assumption of guilt unless proven innocent. Schreiner goes on to call our attention to the total credulity of those in government, and the absolute lack of challenge from the Republican quarter. Whatever the differences Obama and Romney both agree that killing poverty-stricken people in Pakistan is a good thing. And that is all that was said in the presidential debates, maybe not in those words.

    The mainstream American media is onboard too, perpetuating an incredibly callous attitude human life, which, as an aside, I remember all too well from the attitudes of people around me at the onset of the Iraq war. Because the people being killed are so far away it is easy to lump them into some indiscriminate category of “the enemy” as though the people in question were simply elements in a video game. (This in fact was the exact attitude of some of the people who attended my high school.) Schreiner has this to say:

    The callous absence of doubt is just apparently just as prevalent among elite U.S. media. For instance, in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday, Time columnist Joe Klein chillingly sought to justify the gravest horror’s of Obama’s drone program. 

    In a debate over drones with right-wing host Joe Scarborough Klein went on to aver: “The bottom line, in the end, is this: whose four-year old gets killed. What we’re doing is limiting the possibility that four year olds here are going to get killed by indiscriminate acts of terror.” 

    The very fact that rationalizing the killing of children can freely emanate from amongst “respectable” circles in Washington is indicative of the severe moral deterioration from which the  Obama administration’s drone program was born. (Obama’s Endless Kill List)  

    This is disgusting. The subtext of Klein’s statement is perfectly clear; it is okay to kill the poor Arab Muslim child. But of course it isn’t okay. When anyone, even a liberal American, starts to justify the murder of children then it is time to stop listening to that person. It is time to denounce them as cold-hearted killers and face the facts of what is going on. Murder is murder. Obama’s drone program is not a foreign policy it is a brutally vicious extermination program. There are lists, lists of people who are condemned to die at the say-so of the American president without evidence, without trial, without justice. Anyone who gets in the way is “collateral damage.”

    The technology may have changed, but the game is the same. Welcome to Holocaust 2.0.

  • Reactivating the Social Body: Interview with Bifo

    In my view, ima­gin­a­tion is the cent­ral field of social trans­form­a­tion in the age of semiocapital.[2] Capitalist dom­in­a­tion is sus­tained by the per­sist­ence of men­tal cages that are struc­tured by the dog­mas of growth, com­pet­i­tion and rent. The epi­stem­o­lo­gical dic­tat­or­ship of this model – its grip on the dif­fer­ent spheres of human know­ledge – is the very ground of power.  So the task of trans­form­a­tion requires us to ima­gine and make sens­ible a dif­fer­ent con­cat­en­a­tion of social forms, know­ledge, and tech­no­logy. Of course, ima­gin­a­tion will never be enough on its own.  We need to build forms of social solid­ar­ity that are cap­able of re-​​activating the social body after the long period of its isol­a­tion and sub­jug­a­tion to com­pet­it­ive aggress­ive­ness.  Solid­ar­ity – in con­trast to this aggress­ive­ness – is based on empathy, on the bod­ily per­cep­tion of the pres­ence of the other…

    We con­tinue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to ima­gine new forms that are cap­able of actu­ally strug­gling against fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship. In my opin­ion, the first task – which we have begun to exper­i­ence over the last year – is the react­iv­a­tion of the social body that I have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough.  We will also have to begin to learn to cre­ate new forms of autonomy from fin­an­cial con­trol and so on.  For instance, in Italy we have been talk­ing increas­ingly of “insolv­ency.” Of course, insolv­ency means the inab­il­ity to pay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in mon­et­ary terms. There is also a sym­bolic debt that is always implied in power rela­tion­ships. Ima­gin­a­tion might mean the abil­ity to cre­ate the pos­sib­il­ity of insolv­ency – to cre­ate the right to be insolv­ent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semi­otic and a sym­bolic level.  We need to ima­gine forms of social rela­tion­ships that escape mon­et­ary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks, new forms of cur­rency, com­munity cur­rency and so on. Do you see what I am try­ing to say? The pro­cess of ima­gin­a­tion begins with the react­iv­a­tion of the social body but next this body has to cre­ate new levels of social inter­ac­tion.  Escap­ing fin­an­cial dic­tat­or­ship, in other words, means ima­gin­ing new forms of social exchange.  I don’t know what form eman­cip­a­tion will take in the com­ing years.  I can only pro­pose this little meth­od­o­lo­gical start­ing point from what we already know.


  • Alexander Cockburn

    A few months ago, on July 21 to be exact, the world of journalism lost one of its bright lights. At the time I was completely unaware, was unaware in fact until a few days ago, that Alexander Cockburn even existed. It is probably a testament to my own erratic reading habits that I discovered Cockburn through Robin Blackburn’s obituary of him in the New Left Review. Blackburn attributes to Cockburn the founding of a new kind of radical journalism and says

    Alexander saw journalism as a craft or trade and brooked no excuses for those who out of laziness- or cowardice- endorsed the idees recues of the age. (Blackburn NLR 76, p.68) 

    The article goes on to tell the story of a challenging and insightful journalist who read the signs of the times with wit and accuracy. Cockburn was the founding editor of a political newsletter CounterPunch, a publication which I had heard of, but never paid any attention to; the loss it turns out was mine. I have since been going back and reading old articles, including some rather vitriolic exchanges with Christopher Hitchens. Vis-a-vis the whole Mother Teresa fiasco Cockburn comments:

    Anyway, between the two of them, my sympathies were always with Mother Teresa. If you were sitting in rags in a gutter in Bombay, who would be more likely to give you a bowl of soup? You’d get one from Mother Teresa.  Hitchens was always tight with beggars, just like the snotty Fabians who used to deprecate charity. (CounterPunch) 

    Now, maybe everyone else knows who Alexander Cockburn is, but we all almost certainly know about Hitchens. I can’t help but feel a little bit sad about that.