Introduction

We begin Issue 17.3 with an essay by Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol that discusses how images of banality in war and occupation in some ways may be more effective than the usual fare of suffering and death to which we have become accustomed. Given that, due to the ubiquity of social media and its many forms of imagery, there has been a blurring of the line between the insignificant and the meaningful, the seemingly insignificant can move and shock us in ways that are unexpected (and hence, meaningful). The authors speak of the concept of “ethical spectatorship,” recuperating the power to understand and respond to visual and other forms of representation in ways that do not simply perpetuate the status quo, but allow for “disharmonious affective responses.” This, in turn, makes possible the appearance of ethics in the face of what these images tell us about the world.

Emilio Allier Montaño and Peter Bloom challenge the hold that the term democracy has on our contemporary political imagination. Turning to a Lacanian analysis, the authors argue that democracy works as an effect of fantasy fulfillment. Even Derrida’s celebrated notion of “democracy to come” turns out, in these authors’ view, to serve to keep a population in a perpetual state of expectation rather than delivering any of the promises democracy seemingly offers. The authors illustrate this notion through an analysis of Mexican democratization in the contemporary period. When the PRI’s 70-year reign came to an end in 1988 with the triumph of the PAN, it was proclaimed to be a democratic breakthrough. Yet, in fact, this moment allowed the solidification of existing elites and further economic liberalization. The term “democracy” became the tool by which the elites thoroughly dominated the political and economic system in Mexico even while promising to deliver the opposite (a move that the authors claim is not atypical but rather a harbinger of democratic discourse more generally).

Matthew Carlin follows this with an interview from November 2013 of Silvia Federici. Federici is well known for her work in feminism, autonomism, and workerism (operaismo), as well as the Wages for Housework movement of the 1970s. Carlin’s interview with her covers issues ranging from the reasons why questions about the exploitation of women have been largely excluded from most contemporary analyses of capitalism, to the role of reproduction in the perpetuation of capitalist forms of production, to the future of autonomism. In the interview, Federici shows herself to be as critical as ever to understanding the connection between gender oppression and capitalism.

In his essay, Jonathan Short seeks to think about rights in a way that does not merely perpetuate existing biopolitical arrangements. He does so through an examination of both Esposito and Foucault, using the one to bolster the other. In this view, otherness, rather than being the basis of division and racism (as Foucault’s and Esposito’s analyses both imply) instead becomes built into a concept of rights wherein we recognize the way we are “constitutively exposed to non-identical difference.” In this way, the author hopes to contribute to a conversation on the left about the commons, and how a concept of rights might (or might not) serve as a resource for struggle and resistance.

In the essay that follows, Joseph M. Spencer considers some of the scholarship on Marx’s dissertation on Greek atomism and the way it helps us to rethink Marx’s work more generally. Focusing specifically on Althusser and Badiou’s respective readings of Marx on this question, the author notes that while Badiou rejects the uses of Epicurean atomism for the left, Althusser embraces it. At the same time, while Badiou accepts a generally Hegelian reading of Marx’s dissertation, Althusser rejects it. The author argues that in the end, Badiou’s position is more consistent (which might get us to rethink a lot of our current fascination with atomism). Yet the essay is sufficiently nuanced that even this position is complicated by his considerations of a possible reconciliation between the two thinkers and/or alternative ways in which Althusser might have approached this aspect of Marxist politics.

Jarrett Zigon’s essay seeks to examine the performative nature of human rights discourse, especially in terms of the concepts of “inherent dignity” and “inalienability.” These and similar concepts, the author suggests have become “universal” by virtue of their constant repetition such that they have become effectively “true” as far as an international human rights regime is concerned. In looking at this phenomenon, the author examines how human rights discourse itself serves as part of a larger scheme of management, to limit and control the varieties of human expression and, in this way, transfer control from the supposed recipient of the rights (i.e., the human beings in question) to larger forces of normativization and domination.

Issue 17.3 concludes with five book reviews: Jennie Han reviews Christopher Holman’s Politics as Radical Creation: Herbert Marcuse and Hannah Arendt on Political Activity; Mabel Wong reviews Lisa Guenther’s Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives; Wendy Pearlman reviews Andrew A.G. Ross’ Mixed Emotions: Beyond Fear and Hatred in International Conflict; Nancy Luxon reviews Ella Myers’ Worldly Ethics: Democratic Politics and Care for the World; and, Colin Koopman reviews Louise Amoore’s The Politics of Possibility: Risk and Security Beyond Probability.