Review of Adam Kotsko (2020), Agamben’s Philosophical Trajectory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 241.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, several institutional policies and discourses, speaking in tandem with a ‘health’ and ‘financial crisis’, have highlighted what seems to be the consequences of an aporetic disentanglement of capitalist relations of production and reproduction. Indeed, partial halts to economic production in the wake of COVID-19 have become equivalent – through symbolic and material actualisations of vulnerability and care – to a suspension of people’s capacity to sustain themselves. This dynamic has thus overshadowed alternatives to the capitalist tie (...) of economic production with social reproduction. Resisting this landscape, local solidarity groups have emerged globally to counter the flattening of reproduction for the perpetuation of the socio-economic status quo by creating networks of mutual aid and support. Learning from these movements, I propose affect-ability as a philosophically productive term and tool to conceptualise resistant practices of care, toward underscoring the inherent relationality and vulnerability of bodies as well as its unequal and inequitable effects, while rethinking the notion of care itself from these ontological, political, and ethical premises. (shrink)

Review of Emma Dowling’s The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It (2021).

Review of Mark Neocleous (2022) The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies. London and New York: Verso Books, 358 pp.

The Critical Naturalism Manifesto is a common platform put forward as a basis for broad discussions around the problems faced by critical theory today. We are living in a time, e.g. a pandemic time, when present-day challenges exert immense pressure on social critique. This means that models of social critique should not be discussed from the point of view of their normative justification or political effects alone, but also with reference to their ability to tackle contemporary problematic issues (like the (...) dismantlement of the welfare state, the environmental catastrophe, and the sanitary crisis). With this manifesto, we invite varying practices of philosophical, artistic and scientific social critique to take seriously the enormous challenges our societies face with regard to inner and outer nature. We first identity eleven theses of critical naturalism which contemporary critical theory should take into consideration. We then identify the historical crises and catastrophes that critical naturalism seeks to respond to, dispelling the prejudices against naturalism in contemporary critical thought, and considering alternative answers to these questions such as social constructivism, accelerationism, xenofeminism, flat ontologism, and monist world ecology. By sketching the notions of nature and naturalism, we anchor critical naturalism in the history of materialism and critical theory, understood initially as that of the Frankfurt School, but expanded and enriched by other approaches to social critique. Finally, we sketch models and projects of critical naturalism, which are exemplary fragments of varying ways to practice naturalist social critique. (shrink)

Between sprawling urban spheres and a return to the rural, between technological advancements and historical preservation, built environments become a productive sphere to explore imaginations of a shared future on a changing planet. At the same time, contemporary architectural writing appears to increasingly extend further than considering environmental care – particularly in relation to spaces and places frequently criticized for their ‘uncaring’ neoliberal politics. This article will argue that architecture is increasingly infused and saturated with affective connotations of care. Approaching (...) global examples critically allows for a further exploration of the interdependency between spaces, places and communities that care. In this understanding, care becomes, quite literally, structural. (shrink)

The present COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated conditions for continued survival, and community-based mutual aid networks have appeared seemingly organically to address such conditions. I argue these networks often fail to recognize capitalism’s mediation of caring labor, namely, the processes of survival and reproduction which are consistently undermined and demanded by capital’s accumulation. Instead, I propose a politics of care built on insights from the Black Panther Party’s and the Wages for Housework campaign’s respective responses to a lack of reproductive resources, (...) which emphasize the position of survival struggles as a primary site of anti-capitalist political agitation and mobilization. (shrink)

In this article I reflect on the deployment of crass vandalism in contemporary decolonial and anti-racist struggles, as exemplified by the recent activist campaign against Belgium’s colonialist patrimony. Through a consideration of two internal, “enlightened” critiques of such vandalist activism, I argue that an irresolvable, recurrent conflict between two fundamental performative politics, based on the performance of civility and barbarity respectively, plays itself out here. In recourse to arguments by Benjamin, Žižek, Jameson and Fanon, I offer a redemptive critique of (...) the second type of politics and examine the “paradoxical efficacy” of “staging barbarity” for decolonial, anti-racist purposes. (shrink)

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she (...) discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state. (shrink)

Review of Mihaela Mihai (2022) Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance.

Review of: Jason Stanley (2015) How Propaganda Works. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 353 pp.

The authority of a souverain no longer seems important if one wants to analyse complex modern democratic societies. At the same time, one can observe an increasing desire for authority in social and political life, a longing for orientation and guidance. This paper wants to investigate how authority and gender are intertwined, and how this is expressed in the current crisis of normality. The paper shows why a return to authority cannot solve this crisis. In order to co-create a new (...) normality one needs to accept the ambiguity of existence and the relational character of freedom (see De Beauvoir). (shrink)

Ever since the publication of Read’s The Politics of Transindividuality (2015), the academic interest in transindividuality has steadily mounted. In this conversation, Bram Wiggers and Jason Read discuss the current state of affairs around the concept of transindividuality. The conversation begins with a definition of transindividuality and discusses what sets the term apart from other philosophies of social individuation. Having defined the concept of transindividuality, the conversation then engages with the question of how transindividuality can be adopted as a means (...) of social-political critique. First, Bram and Jason discuss how transindividuality is evoked but not explicitly mentioned in the social-political critiques of Spinoza and Marx. Secondly, the conversation takes up the social-political critiques of Paolo Virno and Bernard Stiegler who make explicit use of transindividuality. Central to the later parts of the conversation is the complicated interrelation between the political and economic domains of individuation, as well as the tendency of collective modes of representation to be effaced and obscured by (neoliberal) individualism and the post-Fordist conditions of labor. Overall, the conversation highlights the relevance of transindividuality for social-political philosophical critique. (shrink)