This article explores the category of biopolitics through the use Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben make of two Greek words, bios and ōē. In particular, I argue that the separation of bios and ōē as introduced in Homo Sacer has no "natural" nor "lingual" relevance. The exposition of such a fabulous antinomy simply ruins the historical matter of Agamben's discourse on biopolitics. Here, Esposito's research could be read as an attempt to found the category of biopolitics anew without repeating the (...) fiction of a bifurcation between ōē and bios. However, Esposito, in his own celebration of biopower, undermines the very power of language and, thus, ignores the variation of the invariant that is history. Esposito's and Agamben's difficulties lead us back to the possible ambition of all politics to absorb all life, as it was already expressed by Aristotle. In this sense, "modern biopolitics" becomes a case study for the totalitarian temptation of political order. (shrink)

Renaud, the illuminator. Renaud, the chronicler. “JXR” is not exactly recording facts and documents, although he often paints on the basis of “found images,” taking digital photos he collects from websites as a basis for his own work. He is not an archivist either, although he uses collage and routinely incorporates pictures or logotypes into his digital drawings. The chronicling work remains. In Renaud’s oeuvre, the times are being shown in all their glorious stupidity. An optimist nevertheless, the artist exhibits (...) through the grotesque dehiscence of the ordinary the raw nature of survival. By his alliance of artistic métier and critical force, of iconoclastic crudeness and reflection on society, of laughter and precision, Renaud’s art is undoubtedly related to that of Honoré Daumier, George Grosz, or Philip Guston. JXR has in common with all three painters that he excels at displaying the ridicule of adventitious grandeur and the vulgarity of the norm. (shrink)

Peut-être que je devrais commencer par cette scène. Je me retrouve avec des inconnus dans le grand hall intérieur d’un bâtiment aux aspects brutalistes. En face de nous se situe l’autre partie de la construction, rendue visible par de longues baies vitrées, et où réside une famille. Lorsqu’à l’automne 2010, je suis en ce lieu, à attendre pour la première fois ce qui est clairement mis en scène comme une apparition, je connais bien les différents acteurs par des livres et (...) des films, je n’ai pa.. (shrink)

Non, tout n'est pas politique. Il faut sans doute vivre en compagnie des autres, avec des lois et des forces de coercition pour garantir la subsistance commune. Mais cela ne constitue que les conditions du niveau de vie dont la chose publique s'occupe (souvent si mal): il nous reste alors a rendre nos existences vivables. Pour preparer l'insurrection de vivre, ne comptons guere sur la representation nationale, les lois du marche, la technologie, les comportements citoyens, ni non plus les derniers (...) mouvements d'indignation ou de rebellion. Sans abandonner la malheureuse necessite de la lutte (elle a certes son utilite), apprenons plutot a donner a la politique le conge qu'elle merite. Voici une provocation singuliere, une invitation a repenser les pretendues fins de la politique, mais independamment d'elle. (shrink)

"What one cannot compute, one must poetize." So concludes this remarkable sequence of propositions on the centrality of poetry for what we call cognition. Developed through brief, lucid, and eloquent logical elaborations that are punctuated by incisive readings of a range of poems--Western and non-Western, low culture and high--Poetry and Mind offers to theorists and practitioners of literature, together with logicians and cognitive scientists, a more sophisticated account of the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience. Poetry grants us the ability (...) to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein's point of arrival in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary, philosophical, and scientific traditions. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience cannot be ignored if, as humanists, we are interested in the way we think. Dubreuil thus calls for a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition to better situate the normal regimes of thought, as well as to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. Poetry and Mind shows that poetry--a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon among humans--arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations, but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, and singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. Made of iterations and linguistic reorganizations, they exceed their own algorithms and, often, they become reflexive, strange, and cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global": it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, and from cuneiform tablet to rap music. Together, Dubreuil's readings and elaborations offer a major reappraisal of the relations between creation, language and our embodied brains."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics - toward a break from politics, the political and policies. He calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable. The first chapter situates the refusal of politics in relation to different contemporary theoretical attempts to renew politics, and makes the case for a greater rupture. The second moment takes up what is liveable in life by way of apolitical experience, (...) in contrast to appropriations of the collective, including a discussion of the arts. Finally, Laurent Dubreuil draws up an incomplete inventory of means, forms of existence - often frail and fleeting - that make an exit toward atopia. (shrink)