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  • Introduction:The Power of Life’s Excess
  • Erzsébet Strausz (bio) and Andreja Zevnik (bio)

Before anything else, this symposium is about saying “yes”1 to those forces, experiences, openings and possibilities in our shared modernity that somehow – in their often unnoticed yet disruptive and abundant existence – manifest, express and embody the power of life’s excess over the sovereign order and the processes of sovereign ordering. We chose not to focus either on resistance or revolution (or anything counter-). What we had in mind was a project of joint, interdisciplinary exploration of that “beyond” to sovereign power that claims and asserts a sovereignty of its own. That is, what may be seen, thought, practiced and experienced as life’s untamable, undisciplinable excess and its powers in uncovering and affirming new horizons, new sites, and new possibilities of a world and a politics to come.

The problem of “life’s excess” as a possible interjection into both disciplinary discourses and actual political practices offered itself as a matter of urgency. What this symposium aims to put forward, however, is not an idea of life already encapsulated in the dense network of the social, nor life as a visible, already articulated force in the existing political. We are intrigued by life as such, by the power of that pure existence and radical is-ness that permeates, challenges, and ultimately escapes the sovereign order. Yet our curiosity feeds on and seeks to contribute to much wider debates that concern the government of the present – in particular the government of life. A number of recent publications already began to interrogate the limits of biological life, posing a series of questions regarding the distinctness of natural life over artificially created life. After discarding claims to the superiority of the former what followed was a return to life’s pure potentiality and its political implications either as material or immaterial presence, or animate or inanimate force. Life was further pushed to the forefront by recent developments in technology, which prompted the re-thinking of the technology–politics nexus and the relationship between politics, life and the body (where the body emerges both as a physical and symbolic form). Through these processes and interrogations life has become an important political, social and legal concept. On the side of technological developments the excess of life challenges the sovereign order for it makes claims of being its own God. The horror of life from a test tube testifies to the emergence of a form of life that is independent of human relations. On the side of politics, the excess of life becomes a profound space of contestation in the face of sovereign violence. Asylum seekers, detainees, terrorists, the new precariat or cyborgs are not only accidental political groupings in our shared modernity but also sites of simultaneous emergence of new forms, practices and orders of being through the life of those whose life counts less.

A renewed focus on the relationship between politics, life and the body, we argue, challenges traditional notions of politics. While they continue to frame life as split along classic distinctions between public and private, and campaign to link it decisively to the experience of being human, technological developments unsettle the distinction as they set out to “(re)politicize” what is deemed to be private or apolitical life. Life thus breaks off the chains and frames of being as a “governable object”: it re-emerges as that simple yet powerful expression of existence that provides the contours of jouissance, the excess, the beyond, the Real, the virtual or the Other of sovereign power. Life as such is therefore not the marker of another time and another place but a manifestation of the here and now; an immanent potentiality within the existing political that is often actualized in the form of a mis-encounter in our everyday political discourses and practices.

A privileged site of our daily mis-encounters with life – as the papers in this symposium demonstrate – is “knowledge” in its various forms and incarnations. Knowledge as episteme, a historical order of visibility and articulation is a thoroughly sovereign domain of action, one that also enables and regulates excesses by imposing limits, marking out...

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