Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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Author: search.filters.author.Han-yu HuangHas files: Yes

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    The Crime of Indistinction?
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
    The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.
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    The Crime of Indistinction?
    (英語學系, 2012-03-??) Han-yu Huang
    The undead is a crime against the religious and the sacred; it always troubles our received topologies and distinctions between body and soul, life and death, culture and nature, the human and the nonhuman, animate and inanimate,organic and inorganic, etc. It has always been preoccupying, or haunting, writers and thinkers in the fields of philosophy, ethics, theology, and literature. Especially in contemporary biopolitical discourse, where the conditions andessence of life are fervently debated, problematized, and rethought, the undeadcomes to the fore and calls for our critical attention. This paper begins with abrief critical review of Hannah Arendt’s contribution to biopolitical discourse.By way of some psychoanalytic perspectives, I explicate how the “strangelogic of the undead” works in such signature Agambenian categories as the“threshold” and “zone of indistinction,” and in the context of the saturation oflife in the political field. Then, I turn to the homo sacer and the Muselmannwho, as figures of the undead, inhabit the threshold of political life and barelife, and embody the zero degree of humanity as beings that have beendeprived of human communitarian and identitarian registers, while opening asite where new ethical material might appear. The last part of this papercarries the logic of the undead a step further in order to address Agamben’sintervention in contemporary theological theories, and his contribution to thepolitics of emancipation and redemption through his revitalization of Paul andmessianic thinking.
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    Risk, Fear and Immunity:Reinventing the Political in the Age of Biopolitics*
    (英語學系, 2011-03-??) Han-yu Huang
    As an update of his continual concern for contemporary risk society since 1980s, Ulrich Beck’s latest work World at Risk (2009) alerts us to the deterritorializing effects of global risk on national, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. On an increasingly global scale, risk mixes up natives and foreigners, while risk calculus connects natural, technical and social sciences, and incorporates almost all aspects of everyday life. Fear,accordingly, spreads out as a kind of carrier that binds so-called global,multicultural civil society; it even prospers as a lucrative risky business. Such an era has witnessed a structural transformation of the roles of the state andvarious biopolitical institutions, of life itself, of subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Žižek’s theory of ideology critique and radical ethics and politics, this paper firstly presents a critical survey of contemporary biopolitics, focusing on how health needs contagion as its uncanny double to define and of life flourish with uncertainty and administer our body and life. All of these will be discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of the contemporary risk society and culture of fear to critically look at how risk and fear function as depoliticizing biopolitical instruments for disavowing social antagonism. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito caution us against the (auto)immunitary biopolitical logic and call for vulnerability, precariousness and finitude to be adopted as the ethical principles for a “positive” biopolitics, while this paper will query whether human subjects are victimized and depoliticized in their discourses. The final part of this paper will turn to Žižek’s recent formulation of radical ethics and politics to address the possibility of reinventing the political in contemporary biopolitics.