Volume 18, Issue 2 - Focus: Nomos, Theos and Cultures of Violence

It is tempting to attribute state violence to the imposition of a normative order, and it is tempting to construct an opposition between sanctifying that order and messianic interruptions of that order. This framework supposes that God, and the surrounding language of the sacred, follows the logic of rule, imposing a set of expectations on what is to be done enforced by threat of punishment. But what if we centre the story of Job in our account of the divine and with it an image of God as abuser rather than ruler, that is, God as only imposing the phantom of norms, norms that shift or evaporate as soon as they are imposed, never fulfilling a promise of reward or threat of punishment as expected? I explore this possibility through brief encounters with two texts on the racial violence of the state, one by Aimé Césaire and the other by the contemporary Black American writer Kiese Laymon.

This paper examines the notion of destituent power in the work of Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. In contrast to constituent power's emphasis on the formation of a people relying on the metaphysical presuppositions this entails, including representation and identity, destituent power does away with such categories and renders them inoperative. This paper explores this gesture, together with the idea of a modal ontology that substitutes the “what” in the questions “what is being” for “how”. It is argued here that this reconceptualization has the capacity to reorient the mode of politics functioning to take account of power’s anomie and false promises to ever delay the catastrophe that has already arrived.

‘British values’ have recently been invoked by the Right in Britain – both in the Conservative Party and outside by the Reform Party led by the Right insurgent and public school educated (Dulwich College) ‘man of the people’ Nigel Farage. Such values are directed at communities of colour, as well as those communities that stand apart from the logic of ‘phallologentricism’. Factions of the secular Left too have engaged in an iteration of ‘culture wars’ by targeting Jewish communities who may not share Hamas’s desire to eradicate Israel in favour of a monistic Palestinian State. At the heart of these contested cultural terrains is an overarching issue: namely, the question of the universal , and how the universal informs the States’ politics of representation (the “General Will”, the “nation”, “citizen” etc…). Derrida reminds us that “the social” – let alone the State and the polity it brings to life – can never be reduced to a single meaning, that the nature of community will always be subject to contestation contra the telos of monism .

México is powerfully associated with extreme violence. We explore why this should be in terms of the war on drugs, colonialism, oligarchic history, neoliberalism, and gender.

The massive expansion of the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1943 involved a panoply of German lawyers and public officials, who laboured diligently at the legal clearance of title to lands belonging to multiple Polish owners so that the German Reich would have complete, legal, and unchallengeable ownership of the death camp site. These bureaucratic actions in pursuit of unspeakable ends, presented here in a historical-political inquiry, reveal fundamental – and much contested – issues of justice and legality, law versus non-law.

The apocalyptic genre was from the beginning in the centre of the theologico-political discourse which, according to Jacob Taubes, always has to choose one of the two fundamental options: either in favour of the apocalypse (“from above,” as in early Schmitt, or “from below,” as in Taubes himself), or against it in the katechonic defense against the apocalyptic chaos and destruction (late Schmitt). In Taubes’s account, apocalypse is simultaneously revelatory and destructive. By assuming the standpoint of the Last Judgment, it passes an ultimate verdict without appeal over the world – as indeed in Taubes’s most famous statement: “I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it come down.” It is precisely this form of position assuming the uncompromising perspective of the Last Judgment, which will occupy me in my essay. I want to approach critically the most recent phenomenon of what we may call an absolute judg-mentaility  – or, in Nietzschean terms, a “mentality of judgment” – which takes apocalyptic form of a violent negation, exposing the whole “world as it is” to the scorching light of the verdict and leaving no space that would be free from adjudication.

Is there more powerful revenge narrative in contemporary popular culture than that of all-time über -nerd, Carrie White? For Carrie is a figure of abjection nonpareil, one who is, routinely, subjected to ongoing and intensifying humiliations. Given this treatment, it should come as no surprise when, finally, the tormented Carrie turns the tables, quite spectacularly, on her tormenters – and everyone else who gets in her way. A catastrophic state of affairs that Carrie so clearly ‘enjoys’, embodying what might be called revenge’s jouissance. Utilising a perspective that is broadly psychoanalytic, this article will take up Carrie’s jouissance of revenge, situating it in terms of three registers: phallic jouissance , juris- jouissance and feminine jouissance . All, with this end in sight: nothing less than the re-inscription of feminist connection and, with it, the possibility of forgiveness – instantiated in Carrie as victimised outlier and victimising jouisseuse  – at the very centre of the Law’s psychic subjectivity and social bond.