Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

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    (英語學系, 2015-05-??) William Franke
    My contention is that apophatic or negative theology is a classic tradition of interpretation of what Agamben is (not) talking about but of what is silently manifest in the phenomena he analyzes. Negative theology happens to be lucidly revealing of the logic of exception that the political-juridical history reconstructed by Agamben also reveals. I advocate negative theology as a model for understanding Agamben’s logic of exception because it has a certain precedence historically and serves as matrix for later, more secularized forms of thinking. It is itself a decisive first step on the path of secularization. It remains conversant with both theology and its negations—and precisely negation is foundational for so many distinctively modern approaches to reality. Yet apophatic postures of thinking are most natural to Asian philosophical and religious traditions. Deeply probing apophatic insight has been developed from earliest times in Asian currents of culture such as Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism. The not very well acknowledged apophatic thrust of Agamben’s thinking is thus one axis aligning it with the Asian traditions that are generally excluded from his otherwise exceptionally wide-ranging interests and allusions. I maintain that exposing apophatic thinking as the underlying (a)logic and driving inspiration of Agamben’s thinking shows him to be in unexpected proximity with millennial tendencies of thought running deep in Asian philosophy and culture. Fittingly, the deep and far-reaching significance of Agamben’s own work is thereby revealed by what it ostensibly excludes—or at least leaves largely out of account.
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    Zones: Beyond the Logic of Exception?
    (英語學系, 2014-09-??) Brett Neilson
    Over the past five decades the proliferation of economic zones has been crucial to the emergence of Asian economic power. With historical precedents in ancient free ports, pirate enclaves, and colonial concessions, zones have become crucial spaces of labor and production. They are sites in which globalized forms of capital and logistics interact with populations and administrative bodies to augment the conditions for profit-making and accumulation. How are we to understand the political and legal constitution of zones? In an important sense they are spaces of exception since states create them by sectioning off locations in which foreign investors enjoy exemptions to law and other forms of normative regulation. These exceptions, however, are often established by normative means and are almost always partial. Exceptional forms of rule in zones tend to exist alongside domestic civil laws, opportunistic applications of international law, and diverse norms and standards promulgated by corporate actors. Zones can at once be spaces of exception and spaces saturated by competing norms and calculations. They are strategic sites in which to test the applicability of Agamben’s work on sovereignty, exception and governmentality to the contemporary Asian context. Mindful of the plurality of zones across Asia, the paper highlights mutations in these forms of power to explore how zones disarticulate jurisdiction from territory, produce new kinds of laboring subjects, and prompt processes of spatial and social reorganization.
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    The Immunity Paradigm’s Contradictory / Complementary Facets
    (英語學系, 2014-09-??) Rada Iveković
    Immunization, a protocol for hammering identities and national, sexual, racial or class differences, is also a “creative” border-multiplying game. It can, but need not, revert against oneself (as autoimmunity), while it was meant to protect from the other. It is ambiguous. Extreme immunization is suicidal (because murderous), yet immunity is also vital, in a balance or percentage impossible to theorize. It is a matter of cognitive choice as well as, for Agamben, some kind of epistemological and “testimonial” ethics. While forms of immunization against others multiply from within society or from within the “camp” (as the pattern of society in Agamben’s parlance), the citizenship/ representation pattern is depoliticized i.e., subjected to immunity. The present paper argues that such depoliticization has become particularly visible since the “end” of the Cold War. Is immunity equilibrium for the community possible? The paper tests some such models with regard to Asia since 1989, articulated in politics and spelt out by some western philosophers, including Agamben, regardless of whether they actually mention Asia or not: the “with regard to Asia” aspect is here the clue for reading them, that against which they are probed. How much of the other (in this case, Asia) do they miss out? How much is left to the “politics of the people”? How much does “governance’s” democratic empty formalism enforce from above?
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    (英語學系, 2015-05-??) William Franke
    My contention is that apophatic or negative theology is a classic tradition of interpretation of what Agamben is (not) talking about but of what is silently manifest in the phenomena he analyzes. Negative theology happens to be lucidly revealing of the logic of exception that the political-juridical history reconstructed by Agamben also reveals. I advocate negative theology as a model for understanding Agamben’s logic of exception because it has a certain precedence historically and serves as matrix for later, more secularized forms of thinking. It is itself a decisive first step on the path of secularization. It remains conversant with both theology and its negations—and precisely negation is foundational for so many distinctively modern approaches to reality. Yet apophatic postures of thinking are most natural to Asian philosophical and religious traditions. Deeply probing apophatic insight has been developed from earliest times in Asian currents of culture such as Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, and Mahayana Buddhism. The not very well acknowledged apophatic thrust of Agamben’s thinking is thus one axis aligning it with the Asian traditions that are generally excluded from his otherwise exceptionally wide-ranging interests and allusions. I maintain that exposing apophatic thinking as the underlying (a)logic and driving inspiration of Agamben’s thinking shows him to be in unexpected proximity with millennial tendencies of thought running deep in Asian philosophy and culture. Fittingly, the deep and far-reaching significance of Agamben’s own work is thereby revealed by what it ostensibly excludes—or at least leaves largely out of account.