Introduction

Seven essays and six book reviews comprise this issue of Theory & Event. We begin with a work by Grégoire Chamayou and an excellent introduction to it by Kieran Aarons (who also translated the essay). Chamayou is a researcher with the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) at the École normale supérieure de Lyon. In the essay "Fichte's Passport - A Philosophy of the Police," Chamayou explores the development of the passport as a technology for the traceability of peoples. Rather than an object of identification and/or recognition, the passport becomes an archetypal medium for what Chamayou articulates as the paradigm of traceability. Amongst the many unique and distinguishing features of this paradigm is its code-like function which is not dependent on an art and science of semiotics for its critical deciphering, but is grounded in signaletics that absolves the police from the interpretive work of investigation because, to quote Chamayou, "the recording and coding of traces ... have become at once signals and signatures." More than a history of documentary practices, Chamayou's focus on the science of signals, or signaletics, proves a fruitful starting point for any contemporary or future study of network politics.

Chamayou's contribution is followed by Amber Jamilla Musser's essay on objects, and specifically on reciprocal love relationships with objects. In "Objects of Desire: Toward an Ethics of Sameness," Musser challenges our conventional understandings of subject/object relations by raising a newly emerging sexual orientation of the objectum sexualis. Crucial to Musser's explorations is the aspect of reciprocity in subject-object love relations. Such a sense of reciprocity, for Musser, "queers our understandings of romantic love and relationality." To experience reciprocity in object-love relations ultimately means to consider such relations as modes of desubjectification, or of a becoming-object.

Thomas Dumm's essay on philosophical autobiography is a study in voice, in tone, and in the pitch of an auditory breath. Upon reading this essay one is compelled to think with it so as to hone one's intuitions about the nature of telling and saying as acts of revelation. Dumm is writing about Stanley Cavell's autobiography, Cavell being a thinker who challenges our assumptions regarding the proximity or distance - definitely the tensions - between revelation and identification. But Dumm doesn't keep his distance from Cavell; instead, he personalizes the autobiography by writing of himself. The essay thus proceeds precisely around the issue of what can or should, and what must or must not, be revealed. To what extent should or can I publicize my privacy? This is, no doubt, a question regarding the limits (both political and personal) of varying degrees of guardedness, but it also at its core poses the question of skepticism that Cavell - via Wittgenstein - raises again and again: how do I know that you suffer? For Dumm, this is a deeply personal, political matter.

Nicholas Tampio's essay, "The Politics of the Garden (pairadaeza)" turns to Gilles Deleuze's idea of regimes of signs in order to gain purchase on certain important principles in Islamic political thought. Tampio provides readings of the Sufi scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the al-Qaeda ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the Shi'i political reformer Abdolkarim Soroush in order to explore the porous points of political engagement between Deleuzian and Islamic political thought. The essay concludes by illuminating a path whereby Muslims and naturalists may work together to inhibit or reverse the ecological crisis.

James Phillips' essay on Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy of community defends Nancy as a political thinker against critics who have accused him of being apolitical and ethically ambiguous. For Phillips, Nancy's philosophy offers a critique of ontology and sociology by means of rearticulating both the social and the ontological as open-ended entities. In this regard, Nancy is a critic of Heidegger; but rather than breaking with Heidegger's project of Dasein and, as in the case of Deleuze, who turns to the 'stuttering and' of empiricism, Nancy develops a "first philosophy of the 'with'" that foregrounds his thinking about relationality in political communities.

The final essay of issue 16.2 is Jan De Vos' critical engagement with William Connolly's neuropolitics. De Vos introduces the idea of interpassivity which he defines as a kind of neuroreductionism whereby "the very core of our being is transferred to the brain." Reminiscent of the kinds of critical engagements with artificial intelligence proposed by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor in the late 1960s, De Vos is weary of the manner in which the turn to neuroscience in the humanities and social sciences results in the outsourcing of our subjectivities. In performing such a gesture, he argues, there is the very real risk that what is championed as political is actually not, precisely because of the interpassivity that is implicit in the neuroscientific turn in political theory.

Issue 16.2 concludes with the following book reviews: Donovan Schaefer reviews Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness and Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism; Sammy Badran reviews Alain Badiou's The Rebirth of History; Sinja Graf reviews Samera Esmeir's Juridical Humanity; Loren Goldman reviews John Dewey's Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy; James Muldoon reviews John P. McCormick's Machiavellian Democracy, Philip Pettit's Republicanism, and Miguel E. Vatter's Between Form and Event; and Paul A. Passavant reviews Jinee Lokaneeta's Transnational Torture.