Through the words of the English translator of Agamben’s “Requiem per gli Studenti” (“Requiem for the Students”) we come to know that Italy is the exceptional place where the theory of exception holds — “Agamben refers specifically to developments in Italy.”[1] Agamben’s requiem sketches an idyll of the university which, he notes, is coming to an…
Oscar Guardiola-Riverateaches International Law and Globalization and is the Assistant Dean of the School of Law at the University of London, Birkbeck. He is the award-winning author of "What If Latin America Ruled the World" and "Being Against the World: Rebellion and Constitution". He is a member of the Naked Punch Collective and the Editorial…
AN IRREGULAR ODE
Thirty days shy of forty,
on a rush-hour-crowded Coney-Island-bound F train,
I questioned the exact circumference of the sandy circle
in which the Children of Israel wandered for forty years.
Forty years.
Were desert environs so sundry as to provide a passable
facsimile of farther & farther? Of progress rather than round…
ARSENAL
Yesterday was beautiful; today is thick & stagnant:
hurricanes threaten communities from Kitty Hawk to Nantucket –
all low-lying areas are evacuated.
I seek alternatives (routes & pathways previously discredited)
& I understand the efficacy of Harriet Tubman’s oft-brandished
pearl-handled pistol: you go on or you die, she promised,
every wavering runaway slave committed to…
The book Anti-Oedipus, by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has an interesting insight about three types of social formation and their registration surfaces: the primitive society where all is inscribed on land, the bodies are registered on it and everything leads to it; the despotic society where all is inscribed in the despot’s…
The narrative of those who saw the coronavirus as “just another flu”, “hysteria”, “a media product” or the like fell apart. The supposed good reasoning of those immune to panic, calling the hysterical alarmists to reason, was eventually confronted with the abundant evidence of the damage caused by the virus, be it the not negligible…
I.
Late last November, after months of being cut off from Kashmir, I managed to get through to an old friend in my hometown in South Kashmir over a rickety landline connection. There was clicking, popping, and static in the line. “These sounds you hear,” my friend said matter-of-factly, “are coming from third-party interference.” I…
Contingency
In his last courses at the Collège de France, Foucault insisted more and more strongly on a Greek concept that, in fact, designated a way of life: parrhesía. This vocable can be translated as frank or true-speaking. Initially conceptualized as a form of subjectification typical of Hellenistic philosophy, that notion demanded masters to be…
It is frightfully sublime in part because of its obscurity. – Immanuel Kant
Implicit within the debate on Coronavirus curated by Antinomie and archived by Sergio Benvenuto[i] is the question—for what must we carry on? That is, do we—humanity, which has been reckoned by many thinkers as the error in nature—carry on for the sake of carrying on? Or, should…
In philosophizing we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
Implicitly we are asking in these discussions about the COVID-19 pandemic [1] is there a norm for man? Earlier it was philosophy that had the task of constituting the systems under which the limits and also the…