Monthly Archives: June 2015

Jennifer Greiman (bio) jgreiman@albany.edu University at Albany, SUNY   Kir Kuiken (bio) kkuiken@albany.edu University at Albany, SUNY     In 1989, Étienne Balibar responded in Cahiers Confrontations to the question Jean-Luc Nancy had posed to a number of well-known French philosophers earlier that year: “who comes after the subject?” The apparent simplicity of the question […]

Étienne Balibar (bio) Columbia University in the City of New York eb2333@columbia.edu   Abstract This essay is based on a reading of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach from 1845, especially Thesis 6, which discusses its wording with reference to signifying chains tracing back to the constitution of Western Metaphysics. The claim that “the human essence is […]

Warren Montag (bio) Occidental College montag@oxy.edu   Abstract Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Balibar’s “Citizen Subject,” and Esposito’s Communitas may be read together as insisting on the indissoluble link between the notion of the subject as agent and the subject as the name of the subjected individual, the one who is submitted to the […]

Gavin Walker (bio) McGill University gavin.walker@mcgill.ca   Abstract The work of Étienne Balibar has long emphasized the link between the juridico-political forms of citizenship and subjectivity implied by the transition to a world order of “bourgeois universalism,” while also linking the emergence of the nation-form and accompanying regime of “anthropological difference” to the specific concerns […]

Craig Carson (bio) Adelphi University ccarson@adelphi.edu   Abstract Recent Adam Smith scholarship, whether focusing on his Stoic inheritance, Moral Sentiments‘ impact on economic theory, or influences of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson or Rousseau, has gained traction rereading Smith against the cultural myths in which his name stands as cipher for self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. Ironically, Smith has […]

Ji-Young Um (bio) Williams College Ji-Young.Um@williams.edu   Abstract This essay compares figurations of racialized soldiers in the U.S. military to argue that while they may stand as proof of democratic nation and polity, they also serve as reminders of the unfulfilled promise of equality and inclusion and reveal the duplicitous role of the military in […]

Erin Obodiac (bio) Cornell University emo57@cornell.edu   Abstract Citizenship exposes non-humans and sub-humans—both animate and inanimate—to abandonment on the far side of its amity line. This essay explores how the figure of the human being designates a technical limit to the isometric principle of limitless access to civil and political rights. As zoon politikon, the […]

Robert P. Marzec (bio) Purdue University rmarzec@purdue.edu     Abstract This essay argues that current efforts by United States security institutions and the security society to adopt climate change as a central mandate have begun to reformulate radically the constitution of the citizen-subject. State-formed life and the liberatory pole of citizen-subject life face a collapse […]

Charles J. Gordon (bio) University of California, Irvinecjgordon@uci.edu     Review of Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Law. New York: South End Press, 2011.     Roughly ten years ago, the government changed my name to Charles. Ironically, this closely followed the moment when I’d decided to go by […]

Kurt Cavender (bio) Brandeis University kcavende@brandeis.edu A review of Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. Digital Memory and the Archive represents the first collection in English of Wolfgang Ernst’s particular brand of media theory. As such, the volume necessarily attempts to satisfy three distinct demands: to outline the […]