Stanford University Press Blog

Learning from Turkey’s Coup Attempt

The failed coup can offer a chance for a new democratic settlement.

by ALI YAYCIOGLU

Anti-coup protesters after the July 15 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt in Bağcılar, İstanbul, Turkey. Taken July 19 2016, photo by Maurice Fleiser. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

On July 15, 2016, a coup attempt shook Turkey and though it failed, it left us with many questions. While the details of how the coup was attempted and why it failed remain unclear, first indications suggest that the coup was initiated and orchestrated by a clandestine network within the army and perhaps other state institutions (including the judiciary, intelligence, and police forces). We do not know with certainty how this network was organized and how it operated, but what we do know is that the spiritual leader of this network is Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim cleric, who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. Though he and his advocates deny any accusations of his involvement, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems convinced of his guilt and intent on rooting out his network in Turkey.

Until recently, Erdogan and Gülen (and his followers) were political allies in total accord with one another.

Just a few years ago, such an accusation would have been unthinkable—until recently, Erdogan and Gülen (and his followers) were political allies in total accord with one another. Gülen, a religious and political figure and writer, is the founder of the Gülen movement, which was propelled, in part, by the rise of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party in the early millennium. A Cold War man, Gülen became a popular preacher during the anti-communist struggle in Turkey in the 1970s (likely sponsored by American intelligence). From the early 1980s on he and his followers, the Gülenists, built an international network of businessmen, teachers, journalists, intellectuals, and bureaucrats, some of whom graduated from the schools that this network established in Turkey.

Living in the Hamster Wheel

Ever-increasing cultural and economic pressures are taking their toll on Chinese students.

by SUSANNE BREGNBÆK

Photo by Derek Bruff. CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.

Shortly after I had started my fieldwork among Chinese elite university students, a young woman jumped to her death from a university building. Statistics around student suicides in China can be difficult to obtain, but suffice it to say that her death was not an anomaly—the phenomenon of suicide among Chinese students at elite universities is something of a public secret: generally well-known but rarely discussed in official channels. I was drawn to this paradox of why young people like her, who have made it to the top of China’s extraordinarily competitive educational system, would choose to take their own lives: What actually happens to the lucky few at the top of the pyramid?

Suicide among Chinese students at elite universities is something of a public secret.

In recent years globally-oriented educational debates often play out in relation to the ambiguous rise of China, which has emerged as a figure of both allure and anxiety for a number of reasons. China’s system of rigorous testing is well known; The fact that Shanghai students topped the PISA tests in 2010 (tests designed by the OECD to assess scholastic performance across countries) gave rise to a sense that China is beating us on our own terms. And yet, as the West seems to be looking East to find the key to success in a brave new knowledge society, the East is looking West.

Mum’s The Word

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s silence around her pregnancy is an act of resistance.

by RENÉE ANN CRAMER

Feminist storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, featured on the cover of Ms. Magazine. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikipedia.

Though women in the United States enjoy much more freedom today in expressing their pregnancies than they used to, their behavior is still constrained by social expectations and stereotypes. The cultural mores surrounding pregnancy—for example that pregnant women ought to be health-conscious, self-sacrificing, retiring, and exceedingly careful—are perhaps nowhere more visible than when viewed through pop culture’s coverage of pregnant celebrities, who find themselves surveilled by the mainstream press and tabloids, their motherhood narrative crafted by media onlookers and held up under the microscope of the public eye.

The internationally renowned novelist has refused to write a narrative of pregnancy in the public eye, at all.

Celebrities like rapper M.I.A. and actress Mila Kunis, though, have recently offered performances of pregnancy that disrupt these expectations, and refuse to comply with popular wisdom. As I argued in my study of celebrity pregnancy M.I.A.’s “pregga swagga” on display at the 2009 Grammy awards, asserted the power of women: With it, she refused to perfo rm the wilting, fragile, incommodious feminine associated with late stage pregnancy, charging onto stage to deliver an energetic performance while nine months pregnant. Mila Kunis’ performances of pregnancy—from a fire-and-brimstone skit on the Jimmy Kimmel show, to an unassuming interview she gave to Ellen—all combined to deny the press an easy verdict on maternal style—narratives that often slate into two types: the docile good girl or the bad mom.

Now Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has taken this disruptive denial of narrative to glorious new heights: the internationally renowned novelist has refused to write a narrative of pregnancy in the public eye, at all. As she told an editor from the Financial Times over lunch at the end of June, “I have some friends who probably don’t know I was pregnant or that I had a baby.”

The Condition of Migrant-hood

Modern politics—whether left or right—has a vexed relationship with the migrant … and the citizen.

by GREGORY FELDMAN

"Odysseus and Polyphemus" by Arnold Böcklin (1896).

It seems odd that frustration with global migration and global frustration with mass democracy could signify opposite sides of the same coin. Yet, these two antipathies find their condition of possibility under the banner of modern political philosophy, which no longer inspires new ideas for political action.

On one side, modernity’s vexed relationship with the migrant requires a dogged belief that all people are categorically the same. The assumption of sameness underpins traditional politics across the spectrum and positions one’s politics toward the migrant according to the category invoked: nationalism (all citizens are the same; all migrants different from us); socialists (all workers are the same; all migrants are exploited like us); and liberals (all humans are the same; we must save the migrants). The issue is not whether the ideology holds a hostile or sympathetic stance toward the “migrant.” Rather, none of these ideologies holds a place where a migrant speaks for him/herself.

Redefining Organic

On the animal rights revolution in organic farming.

by MICHAEL A. HAEDICKE

Organic beef and chicken comes from cattle and poultry who have not been fed antibiotics. Photo by Ryan Thompson/U.S. Department of Agriculture. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

Organic food shoppers have become accustomed to looking for green-and-white “USDA Organic” stickers on the products they buy, but they are not always familiar with the rules and standards that lie behind these labels. For example, many people believe that animals that produce organically-certified meat, eggs, and dairy products live very different lives than those on conventional farms. They would be surprised to learn that the rules dealing with animal welfare are ambiguous. This may be about to change significantly—the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently considering a proposal that would transform the treatment of poultry and livestock on organic farms.

Many would be surprised to learn that, when it comes to organic certification, the rules dealing with animal welfare are ambiguous.

As published in the Federal Register, the proposed rules are wide-ranging. Among other things, they would increase the minimum size of dairy cow pens, require farmers to allow chickens to roam freely on soil and grass, and prohibit certain physical alterations, such as poultry debeaking and the removal of tails from cows and pigs.

The president of the ASPCA, an animal welfare organization, has asserted that the new rules would “make ‘organic’ mean something” by forcing farmers to “deliver on its humane promises.” But not everyone is cheering the proposal. Some farmers have argued that it would drive up the cost of organic foods, increase livestock disease exposure, and add to the risk of foodborne illnesses. There are also concerns that senators from agricultural states might vote to de-fund the new rules, blocking their implementation.

Superpolitically Apolitical

A conclusion to the Homo Sacer project.

by LORENZO CHIESA

Antigone in front of the dead Polyneices by Nikiforos Lytras, 1864. Public domain.

1. The Use of Bodies coalesces around what, borrowing from Sophocles’ Antigone, Agamben calls the “superpolitical apolitical.” The phrase appears only twice in the volume, but it proves decisive.

2. What is it to live as superpolitically apolitical? It is to live and, at the same time, to think a politics “set free from every figure of relation” (and representation), in which, however, “we are together beyond every relation.”

3. This non-relational togetherness requires the “use of bodies”—in the subjective sense of the genitive. That is: another—unproductive, non-instrumental—body is possible for the human being, whereby a “zone of indifference” emerges between one’s own body and that of another. Use becomes common use.

The superpolitical apolitical also ambitiously involves deactivating the entire apparatus of Western ontology, beginning at least with Aristotle.

4. The superpolitical apolitical also ambitiously involves deactivating the entire apparatus of Western ontology, beginning at least with Aristotle. Ontology, as inextricable from politics, is in fact founded on the relation of the ban, which ultimately founds every relation. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life argued that the separation between natural life (zoè) and political life (bios), i.e. our understanding the anthropogenetic threshold as a fracture between life and language, is always accompanied by the banning (or better, the “inclusive exclusion”) of “bare life”, i.e. of a life deprived of its form, from the polis. The Use of Bodies complicates and substantiates this scenario. Ontologically, it is the very notion of the subject, the Aristotelian hypokeimenon as a singular existence that “must be at once excluded and captured in the apparatus.”

Giorgio Agamben’s Political Paradigm

Notes on Stasis.

by ALBERTO TOSCANO

Adapted from the original frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan.

From the vantage of the overall montage of the Homo Sacer series, the slim volume Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm would appear to be at once peripheral and interstitial. Unlike any of the other volumes, it consists of two public lectures, rather than a newly crafted text. These lectures were delivered in October 2001 at Princeton, giving their reference to global terrorism a curiously diffracted and belated, though topical, echo. Stasis is situated between State of Exception (2.1) (a concept that is explicitly, if briefly, tied to civil war), and The Sacrament of Language (2.3) and a decimal point away from The Kingdom and the Glory (2.4), with which it entertains more tenuous links: its treatment of the thresholds between oikos and polis prepare possible interrogations on what becomes of these with the Patristic introduction of oikonomia, of divine management, while the tantalising foray into Hobbesian eschatology opens up a different avenue into a critique of the theocratic imagination, and resonates with a passing mention of Hobbes on the oath in Sacrament. Stasis was also published in Italian a few months after the final volume with which Agamben “abandons” the project, The Use of Bodies.

Stasis » looks at how civil has been conceived in Western thought.

Over and above its specific thesis and position, Stasis also presents us with two miniatures or models of the theoretical archipelago of Homo Sacer as a whole. I will try to elucidate this point with special focus on the first essay, “Stasis.” In a gesture that is a veritable signature of Agamben’s thought, he identifies a tremendous lacuna in our thinking, one that he proceeds if not to fill at least to delineate, in a mix of problematizing modesty and forceful conviction (or, depending on your taste, conceit). A science is pronounced missing. Here, the science of civil war itself, a stasiology that contemporary polemology is incapable of producing but which becomes all the more urgent as civil war becomes more pervasive.

As Agamben asserts: “It is generally acknowledged that a theory of civil war is completely lacking today, yet this absence does not seem to concern jurists and political scientists too much. … There exists, today, both a ‘polemology,’ a theory of war, and an ‘irenology,’ a theory of peace, but there is no ‘stasiology,’ no theory of civil war.” With characteristic erudition, a related contention governs the second essay, “Leviathan and Behemoth”:

I Can See Your Halo

Marginal notes on Homo Sacer.

by DAVID KISHIK

Madonna with angels and saints

It is easy to get lost in Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical forest. Planted tree after tree, reference after reference, interpretation after interpretation, thesis after thesis, book after book, for more than two decades, the Homo Sacer series is vast and manifold. It can hardly be surveyed with a single, sweeping glance. Here and there are clearings—his external texts such as The Open and The Time That Remains, Profanations and Nudities—that help the dedicated reader not so much to get oriented, as to get some air and sun before heading back into this predominately dark woodland. But now, with The Use of Bodies, Agamben’s ninth and last installment, we discover the limits of this botanical metaphor. In retrospect we can see that his literary project, composed with quiet determination and unrivaled mastery, is actually structured like the nine circles of Dante’s Inferno. Despite Agamben’s predilection for archaic sources, he has written the perfect guidebook to our still young but already scarred twenty-first century as it grows old and decrepit.

In The Use of Bodies, Agamben deploys a revealing quote that can function as a useful epigraph for his lifework: “The historical vocation is always that of transforming the already-given into what is given-as-task.” This Heideggerian formulation can correct a common misreading of Homo Sacer. The series is not a description of a distinct problem that we ought to either solve or transcend. The progressive attempt to include the person who is being excluded makes little difference from this perspective. There is no “before and after” in Agamben’s thought: the misery of our current politics is the only place where the potentiality of the politics to come can be found. To use Agamben’s own words from his Prefatory Note to the final volume, “In a philosophical inquiry, not only can the pars destruens [the destructive, negative part] not be separated from the pars construens [the constructive, positive part], but the latter coincides, at every point and without remainder, with the former.” Which might sound like what Derrida calls deconstruction, but is probably closer to what Weil calls decreation.

There is no “before and after” in Agamben’s thought.

Whither Topology?

On structure and order in Homo Sacer.

by PETER FENVES

"Topology." Photo by Jeff Kubina. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

As Agamben “abandons” the Homo Sacer project with the publication of The Use of Bodies, there arise a number of questions concerning the former’s seriality. What, for instance, governs the order and numbering of the volumes? And is the series ultimately convergent or divergent? Questions of this kind extend beyond the Homo Sacer project. As early as his first book, Stanzas, Agamben launches an inquiry into certain “zones of indetermination” that he would specify and develop under the “homo sacer” rubric. What first emerges from a retrospective glance at Stanzas, however, is not so much the intimation of a more expansive series as the surprising importance Agamben attributes to another term of mathematical modernity, namely topology, for, from the perspective of topology, the opening sections of the Homo Sacer project can be seen as a repetition of the Introduction to Stanzas.

Theme and Variation

Homo Sacer in retrospect.

by KEVIN ATTELL

With the publication of The Use of Bodies, Agamben’s monumental Homo Sacer project has now come to an end. Notwithstanding Agamben’s characterization, in the book’s “Prefatory Note,” of the project as now being abandoned rather than completed, future readers of the nine-volume series will inevitably have an impression of the project as a closed whole—and with good reason: though written over a period of twenty years and spanning an astonishing spectrum of times and topics, there is a remarkable continuity of concern and argument presented across the volumes, with this last offering something resembling a final cadence. In his contribution to this forum, Adam Kotsko notes how the organization of Agamben’s project often seems carefully planned, but at other times can appear quite open to contingency, modification, and digression. And certainly, anyone who has read Agamben’s work, both within and beyond the Homo Sacer project, knows that he is illuminating when writing not only on, say, Heidegger or Benjamin, or Aristotle, but also on Don Quixote, on Orson Welles' Don Quixote (at least six minutes of it), on Pinocchio, on Pygmalion, on Paracelsus, on Pope Benedict XVI. . . . But while many of Agamben’s short essays, aphoristic vignettes, and even passing remarks over the years might come across as unique gems, one striking fact that can be observed from what is now a panoramic retrospective view of Agamben’s work is the uncanny way they often turn out, after intervals of many years, to be crucial elements in the system of his thought. I will give just two of many possible examples.

The Yields of A Digressive Style

Through surprising detours, Agamben plumbs Western thought to reveal unexpected insights.

by ADAM KOTSKO

The School of Athens by Raphael (1509-1511). Public domain.

Since its inception over two decades ago, Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series has emerged as one of the most ambitious, influential, and hotly debated intellectual projects of our time. As Agamben brings this series to a close—or, in his words, “abandons” it—with The Use of Bodies, this blog event will explore the stakes of the project as a whole from a variety of perspectives. Kevin Attell takes a very Agambenian approach of jumping between the micro- and macroscopic view, highlighting the unexpected contribution of what might initially have appeared as isolated bons mots to Agamben’s systematic concerns in the Homo Sacer project. Peter Fenves connects Agamben’s most famous project to his less well-known early works, guided by Agamben’s use of the concept of topology. The concept of form-of-life, arguably the most crucial in all of Agamben’s work, is at the center of David Kishik’s contribution, which also gathers materials from Agamben’s earlier writings as well as more recent texts that fall outside the Homo Sacer architectonic. By contrast, Alberto Toscano provides an account of the place of Stasis—an “in-between” volume of the series that was paradoxically published after its official concluding (or abandoning) installment—and what Nicole Loraux, one of Agamben’s most important interlocutors, can tell us about what remains unthought in Agamben. Lorenzo Chiesa focuses on teasing out the political implications of Agamben’s work, as clarified in light of The Use of Bodies.

Homo Sacer: A Blog Series

As Agamben’s flagship project reaches completion, scholars reflect on its significance.

All nine volumes of the Homo Sacer series, from the inaugural Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life to the final installment, The Use of Bodies published earlier this year. (Two of the nine volumes were published in English by fellow university presses—The State of Exception by University of Chicago Press and Remnants of Auschwitz by MIT Press).

Leading Italian philosopher and political theorist, Giorgio Agamben is perhaps best known for his Homo Sacer project, composed over two decades and launched with the publication of the volume that gave the series its name, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Recruited by Werner Hamacher for Stanford University Press’s Meridian Series, where it appeared in English in 1998, the book signaled a new direction for contemporary political thought.

To celebrate the publication of its ninth and final volume, The Use of Bodies, in English translation, Stanford University Press is hosting a blog roundtable to reflect on the stakes of the series as a whole. The posts that follow will approach Agamben’s work from a variety of intellectual perspectives, approaches that echo the interdisciplinary resonances of this vast and important undertaking.

 

Tuesday

The Yields of a Digressive Style

Through surprising detours, Agamben plumbs Western thought to reveal unexpected insights.

by ADAM KOTSKO

 

Wednesday

THEME AND VARIATION

Homo Sacer in retrospect.

by KEVIN ATTELL

 

Wednesday

Whither Topology

On structure and order in Homo Sacer.

by PETER FENVES

 

Thursday

I Can See Your Halo

Marginal notes on Homo Sacer.

by DAVID KISHIK

 

Thursday

Giorgio Agamben’s Political Paradigm

Notes on Stasis.

by ALBERTO TOSCANO

 

Friday

Superpolitically Apolitical

A conclusion to the Homo Sacer project.

by LORENZO CHIESA