Introduction

In this issue, we present six articles, the first three of which engage in policy (especially in terms of Obamacare and immigration) in the US and beyond and the last three that deal more broadly with ways to resist existing conceptions of causality, representation, and teleology in order to maximize the subversion and complication of existing power structures. Drawing on a mix of philosophy, film, court cases, and political theory, each essay insists upon the centrality of human experience over larger theories and particular cases over general principles.

Jack Jackson’s “Not Yet an End: Neoliberalism, the Jurisprudence of Obamacare, and the Welfare-State Left” is an important contribution to the newfound and growing literature on neoliberalism, not merely in terms of thinking about it conceptually but also concerning how it is actually and tangibly practiced and (in this particular case) opposed. Jackson argues that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents an important break with the standard litany of neoliberal orthodoxies (“deregulation, privatization and the withdrawal of the state”). Looking in particular at the landmark supreme court case N.F.I.B. v. Sebelius (2012), Jackson looks to the ways that the case and the mechanisms of Obamacare create important exceptions and “partial emancipations” of workers and individuals from neoliberal conceptions of work and family. Opposing the suspicion that many of the left have of modern incarnations of the welfare state, Jackson argues that the ACA is part of a network of acts that assert democracy over the market and are hence valuable in terms of resisting the hegemony of neoliberal forms of economics and politics.

But public policy can also dehumanize. R. Andrés Guzmán argues in “Criminalization at the Edge of the Evental Site: Undocumented Immigration, Mass Incarceration and Universal Citizenship” that the categories of criminality or the undocumented worker can serve as a basis by which to act back upon the oppressive mechanisms of the contemporary US state via the concept of universal citizenship. Drawing from the work of Alain Badiou, Guzmán challenges liberal democratic renderings of citizenship by the “evental site” produced by forms of resistance to that hegemony. Here, Guzmán participates in Badiou’s own reappropriation of terms like universality and citizenship for radical left purposes. In looking at this, Guzmán focuses on several key events in US history from the Immigration Act of 1924 to more recent 2006 immigrant rights marches to think about politics from the perspective of the outsider, one who remakes these categories from a conflictual perspective to subvert their own assertions of membership.

James Chamberlain’s “Migration and the Politics of Life,” also deals with questions of migration and membership, although on a somewhat more international scale. For Chamberlain, the limitation and control of migration not only causes enormous difficulty for the migrant herself but it also limits the would-be controlling states themselves. Chamberlain draws not upon Badiou but Esposito and his work on the way borders and states limit communitas, the effect of other that threatens (and thus complicates and enriches) the life of the community in question. In the attempt to achieve immunity from this threat, the community goes too far and ends up deadening its own life. In his own search for an “affirmative biopolitics,” Chamberlain locates part of this discussion in a critique of and engagement with Obama’s recent attempts to change US immigration policies through executive fiat. More broadly, he looks at the possibility of unconditional hospitality (a term he takes from Derrida) as well as impersonal becoming (Esposito), thus breaking with the logic of nation states and their exclusive forms of sovereignty and citizenship that they confer and enforce.

Part of the state’s effort to control its citizenry emerges through how the state remembers. In “Machiavelli’s Constellative Use of History,” Chris Holman shows why and how Machiavelli uses history to escape the idea of events as merely cause-and-effect. Through the “constellative” method, by bringing different and seemingly divergent historical memories into conjunction, Machiavelli imagines the creative and powerful individual actor as the operator of state power. But this is neither an argument nor a description of a general rule, Holman points out; instead, it arises from the active juxtaposition of events and instances. Machiavelli’s realism thus opposes the transcendent not through an overarching theoretical perspective but through a repetition of singularities which, together, imply a new and normative effectual truth.

Matt Applegate similarly attends to the particularity of human effort through representation, but along cinematic lines. In his essay “Imagining the End of Late Capitalism in Shane Carruth’s Primer and Upstream Color,” Applegate investigates a particular set of affective relationships that the actor and director Shane Carruth builds into his films. Both movies create a transindividual relationship to our bodily identities, bringing the intermediated nature of the human sensorium into focus. Both also show the potential for escape, not from the body but through it. While in one film the manifestations of contemporary capitalism create the conditions of isolation and anomie, and the second dramatizes the metaphorical escape from its claims on human experience and memory, both projects, Applegate argues, show how the resolute materiality of human senses create conditions that extend beyond the modern market’s reach, even containing the seeds of its end.

But this is not the only end that can be imagined. What is messianism without the messiah - Benjamin’s weak messianism, the non-sovereign individual, the hope of salvation? In this issue’s final essay, Danielle Celermajer argues that the potentially “anti-teleological and anti-ontological” role of messianic thought encourages a recognition of solidarity and meliorism: the attempt to create a concrete utopia. While continually skirting the dangers of theological absolutism – the assumption that humanity is perfectible or aimed at a goal – such an approach allows for the appreciation of suffering, and the ability to escape the strictures of individual meaning, which are central to the creation of a democratic ethos.

Issue 19.2 concludes with four reviews: Jodi Dean reviews Artemy Magun’s Negative Revolution: Modern Political Subject and Its Fate After the Cold War; Robyn Marasco reviews Miguel Vatter’s The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society; Désirée J. Weber reviews Paolo Virno’s When the World Becomes Flesh: Language and Human Nature; and, Bal Sokhi-Bulley reviews Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights.