{"title":"An Affirmation That Is Entirely Other","authors":"M. B. Rasmussen","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242616","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this article is to juxtapose the notion of refusal in Maurice Blanchot, Herbert Marcuse, and the Invisible Committee. The article opens by considering Blanchot's 1958 notion of a radical refusal and then turns to Marcuse's idea of a “great refusal” against one-dimensional society. It then concludes with a consideration of the Invisible Committee's theory of destitution, which aims to rethink revolution in light of an analysis of the contemporary cycle of insurrections. Although Blanchot's and Marcuse's notions of the refusal might appear dated, trapped within the agitated political climate of the 1950s and 1960s, in their time they each signaled a conscious rupture with a certain Marxist-Leninist theory of revolution that could not imagine the transformation of social relations except through the seizure of state power. For both thinkers, the proto-revolutionary gesture of refusal sought to respond to a historical conjuncture in which the integration of the working class into the circuitry of capital was a fait accompli. For Blanchot, refusal was a withdrawal from, and abandonment of, politics and representation, whereas for Marcuse it involved a transformation both of one's immediate social relations and of social relations more broadly. It is these aspects of refusal that anticipate and overlap with more recent theories of destituent power emerging from the new cycles of protests. Over the last decade, the notion of destitution has come to prominence as one of the most important reformulations of radical political action. In response to a new insurrectionary wave, characterized by new forms of action, destitution signals an attempt to reimagine the emergence of a new revolutionary force in the wake of the disappearance of Marxist dialectics and the established working-class movement.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"90 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85945151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Dance without a Song”: Revolt and Community in Furio Jesi's Late Work","authors":"Kieran Aarons","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242644","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces a logical and political thread leading from the theory of revolt in Furio Jesi's 1969 Spartakus to his later work on festivity and the “mythological machine model.” It opens by arguing that the humanist model that frames Jesi's early efforts to disarm the allure of insurgent violence, sacrificial mythology, and Manichaean politics generates insoluble aporias that spur the development of a radically different approach to the study of myth and human nature. Next, it shows how Jesi's studies on festivity from the 1970s redound upon and transform the theory of revolt in Spartakus, bringing this theory more in line with current epochal conditions. In doing so, they presage and lay the groundwork for the theory of destituent power developed in recent decades by Giorgio Agamben.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"66 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78316901","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Anarchy of Power","authors":"K. Nelson","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242630","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers an account of the anarchy of power in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer corpus. From this perspective, governmental power is anarchic in the twofold sense of lacking an independent legitimating foundation and being divided between ontology (what it is to be) and praxis (what is done). To think beyond the bind of anarchic power, Agamben and others have conceptualized a destituent politics that abandons legitimation in an independent authority. Attending to recent interpretations of destitution, this article proposes that, precisely in light of the anarchic structure of power as it shows itself today, destituent politics harbor a unique risk of lethal violence. Avoiding this risk requires cultivating a political force or potentiality that, as Agamben puts it, would be “strong enough to remain destituent.”","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"147 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76746853","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Destituent Urge Is Also a Destructive Urge: Agamben, Aristotle, and Benjamin on the Potentiality for Destitution","authors":"Idris Robinson","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242714","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242714","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that a theory of destituent power must imply a twofold strategic orientation toward the state, based simultaneously in desertion and destruction. The article opens by first situating Giorgio Agamben's account of destituent power within the broader framework developed throughout his Homo Sacer project. Through a close consideration of his engagements with both Aristotle's modal ontology and Walter Benjamin's political theology, it aims to demonstrate that, although Agamben tends to disavow their consequences, the theoretical resources on which his project depends nevertheless entail destructive capacities.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90417789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Destituent Potentiality and the Critique of Realization","authors":"Giorgio Agamben","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242602","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242602","url":null,"abstract":"Before we can think what a destituent power might be, we must first dispense with a concept that has surreptitiously dominated Western thought and politics, namely, that of realization. By realization, we understand the idea that political action consists in realizing in practice a doctrine, a philosophy, an ideal, a project, or whatever else you want to call this kind of obscure presupposition of every political practice.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83698336","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Absolute Gift: Martyrdom as Destituent Power","authors":"Rodrigo Karmy Bolton","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242728","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242728","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that martyrdom carries with it a destituent power. To this end, it examines the difference between martyrdom and sacrifice in five sections. The first four discuss sacrifice in French anthropology; Bataille's proposal of an “unemployed negativity”; the sacrificial question is reframed by the emergence of contemporary capitalism as a “debt without gift” ; martyrdom as a form-of-life that can destitute sacrifice by being open to the gift without the debt produced by the contemporary sacrificial machine. We call this gift absolute because it is not just any gift but one capable of destituting the gift-debt system. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the witness, the final section shows how the subjective structure of martyrdom is that of the witness insofar as a gesturality occurs in it that takes the form of a desubjectification.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"46 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91285558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constructing a Communal Form of Life: Destituent Praxis in the Peripheries of Mexico City","authors":"S. Law, A. Cruz, Vanessa Nava","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242686","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242686","url":null,"abstract":"Born of revolutionary struggles in the peripheries of Mexico City, the Panchos have spent the past three decades transforming land occupations into vibrant communities aiming to take charge of every aspect of their lives. To date, they have constructed eight autonomous territories that are home to thousands of families. The Panchos insist they are building not housing projects but life projects. The struggle to transform the material environment to meet immediate needs forms part of a larger political struggle for a qualitatively different form of life, a dignified and communal life grounded in quotidian practices of self-organization, collective decision making, and shared labor. This article argues that the deepening of this communal form of life exemplifies a destituent praxis, one that reveals, refuses, and abandons the world imposed by the metropolis. By placing Ivan Illich's critique of institutionality in dialogue with recent theorizations of destituent power, this article explores emergent practices of emancipation that abandon the classical locus of revolutionary struggle—seizing state power—and instead combatively assemble, here and now, other ways of living.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80284969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anthropocene Destitution","authors":"Stephanie Wakefield","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242700","url":null,"abstract":"This article situates the concept of destituent power as a historically specific, still unfinished problematization of political thought and practice in the Anthropocene. It explores multiple, conflicting understandings and manifestations of destitution as they relate to climate change, civilizational breakdown, and political practice, suggesting that experimental practices of destitution as “exiting” are increasing in number and political potential alongside infrastructural and ecological crises. However, too often readers and theorists overemphasize this form-of-life-centric and use-centric version of the concept, thereby risking reproducing the political impasses the concept seeks to overcome, mirroring dominant counterrevolutionary depictions of life in the Anthropocene. In contrast, bringing work by Idris Robinson and Alexandre Monnin together with urban climate adaptation examples, this article explores an emergent destitution-as-negation perspective that attempts to respond to these impasses. The article concludes by asking what it might mean and require to destitute the Anthropocene, as not only an environmental matter but also one dominated by particular governmental, economic, and knowledge systems.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"50 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75824108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Self-Destituent Power in Iroquois Diplomacy: Interpreting the 2020 Talks on the Tyendinaga Tracks","authors":"P. Blouin","doi":"10.1215/00382876-10242672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-10242672","url":null,"abstract":"Preserving the original agreement between the Rotinonhsión:ni (Iroquois) and the first settlers, the Two Row Wampum belt (Teiohá:te) displays two parallel lines, where the original peoples’ canoe and the settlers’ ship are said to sail side by side, suggesting that allied parties to move in the same direction they must respect their mutual autonomy. Drawing on the transcripts of negotiations between Canadian officials and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) warriors in Tyendinaga, this article examines how the Two Row Wampum's notion of alliance through separation played out in the 2020 rail blockade movement in support of the Wet'suwet'en people's fight against the Coastal GasLink pipelines. Central to the text is Kanien'kehá:ka warriors’ suggestion that, beyond relations with settlers, the Two Row Wampum applies to relations between and among Indigenous nations, clans, genders, and even nonhumans. The intricate consensus-based decision-making protocols that compose the Rotinonhsión:ni Confederacy's precolonial governance system likewise attest to the respect for separation that pervades all relations, as if the potential of Rotinonhsión:ni diplomacy to render sovereign power destitute had reached a constitutional stature.","PeriodicalId":21946,"journal":{"name":"South Atlantic Quarterly","volume":"239 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85151605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}