CFP: Except Asia — Agamben’s Work in Transcultural Perspective

Over the past sev­eral dec­ades, Italian philo­sopher Gior­gio Agamben’s work has attrac­ted a grow­ing amount of interest span­ning a wide range of dis­cip­lines in the human­it­ies and the social sci­ences, includ­ing philo­sophy, lit­er­ary the­ory, polit­ical philo­sophy, migra­tion stud­ies, secur­ity stud­ies, geo­graphy, social and cul­tural stud­ies of sci­ence and medi­cine, etc. The increas­ing recog­ni­tion accor­ded to Agamben’s oeuvres has more recently res­ul­ted in the begin­ning of a ser­i­ous dia­logue about the transcul­tural aspects of his work, par­tic­u­larly with regard to the epi­stem­o­lo­gical leg­acy of col­on­iz­a­tion, state-​building, and revolu­tion in the non-​Western world. This con­fer­ence aims to explore the enorm­ous trans­versal poten­tial of Agamben’s work by sta­ging its trans­dis­cip­lin­ary and transcul­tural dimen­sions. It is open to non-​specialists (“spe­cial­iz­a­tion” defined here in rela­tion to both Asia and Agam­ben) from any dis­cip­line inter­ested in the mix and muta­tion of Asia and Agam­ben as a plat­form for transcul­tural investigation.

Too com­plex to char­ac­ter­ize under a single rub­ric, Agamben’s work is prob­ably best known for the Homo Sacer series of books and essays that trace out the con­tours of “the logic of the excep­tion” that oper­ates across dis­crete domains of mod­ern exper­i­ence. Sov­er­eignty, as Agam­ben shows, is the name given to the forms of exper­i­ence that adhere to an excep­tional logic, begin­ning with the onto­lo­gical status of the philo­soph­ical sub­ject and extend­ing dir­ectly through the polit­ical one. For Agam­ben, this is as much a found­a­tional moment of West­ern civil­iz­a­tion as a tra­ject­ory of his­tor­ical devel­op­ment. Sov­er­eignty itself, in its rela­tion to social onto­logy, is not a mod­ern inven­tion. The spe­cificity of mod­ern­ity lies in appro­pri­at­ing the dis­tri­bu­tion of the excep­tion between polit­ics and life in such a way that the format of the excep­tion is no longer invis­ible and/​or con­cen­trated in a single point in the social body, but has rather been gen­er­al­ized through­out the body politic, cre­at­ing spaces of “per­man­ent exception.”

The con­fer­ence organ­izers would like us to recon­sider the logic of the excep­tion in rela­tion to Asia. This means, first of all, that we will have to aban­don the norm­ativ­ity of the historically-​determined notion of social organ­iz­a­tion that has come to coalesce around the term sov­er­eignty in the mod­ern age. Although sovereignty’s excess of norm­ativ­ity has always been open to wild oscil­la­tions induced by the incess­ant trans­itions of cap­it­al­ist devel­op­ment, for that part of the world whose his­tor­ical exper­i­ence of mod­ern­ity has been medi­ated by col­on­iz­a­tion, sov­er­eignty has never been some­thing that could be taken for gran­ted. Stim­u­lated by Agamben’s gene­a­logy of sov­er­eignty, an increas­ing num­ber of post­co­lo­nial the­or­ists have begun to ques­tion the role of the excep­tion in the con­sti­tu­tion of that very par­tic­u­lar spa­tial­ized form of excep­tion known as “the West and the Rest.”

The con­fer­ence title — “Except Asia” — thus begins with the status of the uni­ver­sal that Agam­ben has recently done so much to prob­lem­at­ize and rein­vig­or­ate. The term “Asia,” like that of “the West,” names neither an essen­tial civil­iz­a­tion nor a sub­stan­tial geo­graph­ical entity but rather some­thing like what Agam­ben iden­ti­fies, fol­low­ing Michel Fou­cault, as an appar­atus: a net­work of het­ero­gen­eous ele­ments span­ning sev­eral registers. Through­out the period of colonial/​imperial mod­ern­ity, the appar­atus of “Asia” was expli­citly used to man­age spaces of excep­tion, seen for instance in the frame­works of extra­ter­rit­ori­al­ity that anchored the dis­tinc­tion of an Asian “con­tin­ent” on the Euras­ian land­mass stretch­ing from the Bosporus to the Yel­low Sea. It goes today without say­ing that it can no more be a ques­tion of attempt­ing to assim­il­ate Asia to yet another form of a particularism-​masquerading– as-​a-​universalism than an attempt to estab­lish a simple equi­val­ency between the two terms, “Asia” and “excep­tion.” In this sense, the con­fer­ence title is pre­cisely a ges­ture, which, as Agam­ben notes, is the “com­mu­nic­a­tion of a com­mu­nic­ab­il­ity.” From this per­spect­ive, “Asia” and “Agam­ben” are points of depar­ture for dis­cus­sions about sub­ject­ive form­a­tion in transcul­tural prac­tice. Although these two points taken together cer­tainly might open, for instance, dis­cus­sions about “Asia” as, altern­ately, civil­iz­a­tional con­struct, mar­ket assemblage, eco­nomic player, know­ledge archive, trans­la­tion machine, site of excep­tional space or prac­tice, etc., the con­fer­ence title is def­in­itely not inten­ded to limit dis­cus­sion to either “Asia” per se or to Agamben’s con­tri­bu­tions to polit­ical philo­sophy. It is inten­ded to act rather as a moment of invit­a­tion that points to some­thing mani­festly com­mon and mul­tiple in the human being. It might, if we are lucky, even engage the pro­cess iden­ti­fied by Agam­ben as profan­a­tion: the pro­cess whereby an appar­atus (of cap­ture), such as the civil­iz­a­tional region in this case, is wres­ted away from the excep­tion and returned to the common.

How should we respond to the urge to cat­egor­ize Agamben’s work — like that of count­less other import­ant the­or­eti­cians of mod­ern­ity — as symp­to­matic of that asym­metry that maps the uni­ver­sal­ity of the­ory onto a region — cur­rently called “the West” — that is but a par­tic­u­lar­ity in its own right? What ele­ments in Agamben’s work present par­tic­u­larly use­ful — or dis­rupt­ive — points of depar­ture for recon­sid­er­ing the rela­tion between gen­esis and valid­ity, ori­gin and propaga­tion? What is the cost of ignor­ing, or cor­don­ing within a single civil­iz­a­tional tra­di­tion (if not a historically-​determined idea of the human itself), the idea expressed by Agam­ben in Homo Sacer that we must “put the very form of rela­tion into ques­tion, and to ask if the polit­ical fact is not per­haps think­able bey­ond rela­tion and, thus, no longer in the form of a connection”?

In keep­ing with our bias towards trans­versal, transcul­tural approaches, the con­fer­ence is inter­ested in accom­mod­at­ing a vari­ety of per­spect­ives on Agamben’s diverse body of work. Two gen­eral tra­ject­or­ies of encounter between Agam­ben and the non-​West sug­gest them­selves from the out­set. The first, a com­par­at­ive approach, would act­ively pur­sue a com­par­at­iv­ist agenda, match­ing Agamben’s char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion of the West­ern tra­di­tion with what we know about other civil­iz­a­tional tra­di­tions. To what extent have other tra­di­tions offered con­trast­ing solu­tions to the prob­lems, and powers, of onto­lo­gical and polit­ical excep­tion? How have other tra­di­tions iden­ti­fied and man­aged the prob­lems of indic­a­tion and sig­ni­fic­a­tion that are under­stood, by Agam­ben, to lie at the heart of the meta­phys­ical quest? What does Agamben’s ana­lysis of sov­er­eign power in the West mask from view in our approach to non-​Western soci­et­ies? The second, an applied-​theory approach, would find in Agamben’s work an intriguing set of ana­lyses about West­ern cul­ture that could provide a power­ful tem­plate for re-​examining the under­stand­ing of other cul­tures caught in the multi-​faceted pro­cesses of mod­ern­iz­a­tion. How can Agamben’s work be effect­ively mobil­ized in con­texts far from those of its inception?

Bey­ond the strategies of applic­a­tion and com­par­ison, can we not also ima­gine a third tra­ject­ory of encounter that would seek to prob­lem­at­ize the polit­ical rela­tion that char­ac­ter­izes the meet­ing between Agam­ben and Asia at every point in its form­a­tion and devel­op­ment? What kind of work needs to be done to mobil­ize Agamben’s accom­plish­ments in the ser­vice of a gen­eral eco­nomy of polit­ics no longer indebted to the restrained eco­nomy of colo­nial and post­co­lo­nial rela­tions? Situ­ated as we are at a point of his­tor­ical trans­ition affect­ing the human­it­ies as a whole, we launch this call for papers as an open invit­a­tion to invent anew the mean­ing of the­or­et­ical reflec­tion for a frac­tious global age.

CONFERENCE VENUE

Depart­ment of Eng­lish, National Taiwan Nor­mal Uni­ver­sity, Taipei, Taiwan

With the par­ti­cip­a­tion of

Insti­tut d’Études Tran­s­tex­tuelles et Transcul­turelles, Uni­versité Jean Moulin, Lyon, France

CONFERENCE LANGUAGE

Eng­lish

Dates

June 25 – 27, 2013

FEATURED SPEAKERS

Simone Big­nall (Uni­ver­sity of New South Wales, Australia)

Joyce C. H. Liu (National Chiao Tung Uni­ver­sity, Taiwan)

Brett Neilson (Uni­ver­sity of West Sydney, Australia)

Mark Rifkin (Uni­ver­sity of North Car­o­lina at Greens­boro, USA)

Naoki Sakai (Cor­nell Uni­ver­sity, USA)

Mar­celo Svirksy (Uni­ver­sity of Wollon­gong, Australia)

SUBMISSIONS

500-​word abstracts in Eng­lish should be sub­mit­ted to conference2​0​1​3​@​gmail.​com before Septem­ber 21, 2012. Abstracts should be accom­pan­ied by a list of keywords and a brief cur­riculum vitae.

Your punc­tual sub­mis­sion would facil­it­ate our admin­is­trat­ive work. If you are inter­ested in par­ti­cip­at­ing but need more time, please write us by Septem­ber 21 provid­ing a tent­at­ive title of your paper and a copy of your CV, and we will be happy to dis­cuss a new dead­line for you.

For pro­pos­als sub­mit­ted by the due date, notice of accep­ted abstracts will be sent out by e-​mail before Octo­ber 10, 2012.

TIMELINE

Full-​length con­fer­ence papers (approx­im­ately 4,000 – 5,000 words) are due a month prior to the con­fer­ence. Papers may be com­piled into a reader for con­fer­ence participants.

PUBLICATION

Pub­lic­a­tion pro­jects are planned fol­low­ing the con­fer­ence. Details will be announced in due course.

CONTACT

For gen­eral inquir­ies, please con­tact Chun-​yen Chen (chunyenchen@​hotmail.​com or jochen@​ntnu.​edu.​tw).

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

http://​www​.con​cent​ric​-lit​er​at​ure​.url​.tw/​A​g​a​m​b​e​n​C​o​n​f​e​r​e​nce

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