What in the hell …

Crojas in his contribution to the partisan party at LS quotes Agamben:

the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with one another. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition, and the zone of anomie that is establishes is not (or at least claims not to be) unrelated to the juridical order

I’ve been revising some stuff I wrote before, and had a few thoughts. I’ve argued before that, at least in the sense that Hardt and Negri use the term, biopolitics is not new. This is how I understand some of Agamben’s remarks on biopolitics too. (more…)

Can’t think of any more clever history quotes.
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Or, what in the hell is a camp? Or, what in the hell can homo sacer do?
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There’s a great post and discussion on the theme of emergence and emergency over at the Archive which provoked me to put down notes on how some other friends and I have been trying to think through this stuff. I realize there are limits to word origins as theoretical resource, but I’ve found it useful as a means to begin reflection. (more…)

“A definition contained in the first issue of the Internationale Situationniste states that this is a moment in life, concretely and deliberately constructed through the collective organization of a unified milieu and through a play of events. Nothing would be more misleading, however, than to think the situation as a privileged or exceptional moment in the sense of aestheticism. The situation is neither the becoming-art of life or the becoming-life or art. We can comprehend its true nature only if we locate it historically in its proper place: that is, after the end and self-destruction of art, and after the passage of life through the trial of nihilism. The ‘Northwest passage of the geography of the true life’ is a point of indifference between life and art, where both undergo a decisive metamorphosis simultaneously. This point of indifference constitutes a politics that is finally adequate to its tasks. The Situationsists counteract capitalism – which ‘concretely and deliberately’ organizes environments and events in order to depotentiate life – with a concrete, although opposite, project.”

Agamben, Means without end, p78.

“[A] life directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life is thinkable only starting from (…) the irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty.”

“I call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as form-of-life. I do not mean by this individual exercise of an organ or of a psychic faculty, but rather an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence. (…) The experience of thought that is here in question is always experience of a common power. Community and power identify with each other without residues because the inherence of a communitarian principle to any power is a function of the necessarily potential character of any community.” (more…)