Agamben and radical politics

Postanarchism and Radical Politics Today

The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state?.... Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable ...

Benjamin, Agamben, and the Paradox of Translation

In his paper, "Benjamin, Agamben, and the Paradox of Translation," Paolo Bartoloni offers a theoretical discourse on translation that goes beyond the traditional precincts of linguistics and literary theory as well as the disciplines of cultural studies and postcolonial theory. Bartoloni argues that more recently, the discourse on translation has begun to incorporate epistemological concerns, d...

Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

Radical Politics and the Constraints of the Parliamentary System

For most Marxian theorists Britain’s parliamentary system has little to do with the politics of democratic representation. Instead, parliament, as a formal institution, is argued to be inextricably tied to the wider, subtly constraining forces of “omnipresent capitalism”. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has argued that by gradually institutionalising representation under the rubric of parliamentary...

Neo-eugenics: A Feminist Critique of Agamben

IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POVERTY POLICY, the welfare mother is exposed to harsh treatment that is designed to maintain her participation in the low-wage labor force and, arguably, to discipline wage labor as a whole by restricting the alternatives to wage earning. I would contend that she is also being subjected to an extraordinarily invasive form of sexual regulation, ranging from teen pregnan...