Rights of passage: law and the biopolitics of dying

Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures explores the relation between law and life and the advent of a politics of 'life'. How have recent events focused social, political and cultural attention on the living body and its maintenance and management? The central concept, through which the embodiment of the subject will be examined will be that of 'bio-power'. Articulated by Michel Foucault, but brought to attention more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this concept recognises that the relation between life and law is both historical and necessary: the law must operate on bodies but can only do so by establishing a border between the body of the polity, and the mere life excepted from political concern. The contemporary advent of bio-politics occurs when the polity increasingly and invasively operates on this 'mere' life, and the body or organism – rather than the self – becomes the object of political management. The manner in which the body becomes the focus of contemporary power has led legal theory to explore new questions of the threshold between life and death and has led social theory to question the new extensions of the law and the polity into embodied life. The contributors explore the forensic shift in contemporary social theory and cultural sensibility from a number of perspectives. Description of book from publisher website at: http://www.palgrave.com

Metrics for Dynamics: How to Improve the Behaviour of an Object Information System

If we ask about which is the main difference between modelling a system using a traditional model like the entity relationship model or an object oriented model, from our point of view the answer is that, in the first one, the processes are not located somewhere, and, in the second one, the processes (operations or methods) are encapsulated in classes. The choice of the right classes to home every operation is essential for the behaviour of the system. It is totally useless to design a well built system, according to a lot of statics metrics, if the system does not run well after. In other words, dynamic metrics allowing to evaluate the behaviour of a system when it runs are much more useful than any static metrics used to tell if the system is correctly built or not. According to this, we propose in this paper, a new approach to evaluate a priori the behaviour of a system, by taking into account the notion of event cost and the notion of time (which is obviously essential). The final goal of this approach is to deliver information on the way operations have to be placed in classes in order to get better performances when the system is running. However, the proposal of metrics is of no value if their practical use is not demonstrated, either by means of case studies taken from real projects or by controlled experiments. For this reason, an optimisation tool is being under construction in order to provide solutions to this proble

Building Class Diagrams Sistematically

The class diagram has become more important since the object-oriented paradigm has acquired more acceptance. This importance has been translated also in the new field of web engineering. However, in a lot of cases, it is not easy to get the best class diagram in a problem. For this reason, it is necessary to offer systematic processes (as cheaper and easier as possible) to give a suitable reference to the development team. This work presents two different processes developed in the University of Nice and in the University of Seville and applies them to the same problem comparing the results and getting some important conclusions

Postmodern and Political Theory in a New Context

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Encountering violence: terrorism and horrorism in war and citizenship

This article introduces Adriana Cavarero's concept of “horrorism” into International Relations (IR) discussions of the relationship between war and citizenship. Horrorism refers to a violent violation of vulnerable humans who are defined by their simultaneous openness to the other's care and harm. With its motif of physical and ontological denigration, horrorism offends the human condition by making its victims gaze upon and/or experience repugnant violence and bodily disfiguration precisely when the vulnerable are most in need of care. The article argues that horrorism complicates disciplinary understandings of contemporary violence which tend to see terrorism, but not horrorism, in war and which generally neglect to theorize how violence—and particularly horrorism—is embedded in, and exchanged, through state/citizen relationships. To elaborate these arguments, the article analyses three pieces of war art: Jeremy Deller's “Baghdad, 5 March 2007,” Donald Gray's mural, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” and a still image from Cynthia Weber's film, “Guadalupe Denogean: ‘I am an American.’” By taking the War on Terrorism as their subject, these pieces demonstrate how war makes visible the terror and horror in state/citizen relationships. The article concludes by reconsidering how encountering signs of horrorism might broaden our frames of war and further our empathic vision toward the precarious victims of horrorism or, alternatively, might confirm the patriotic allegiances of imperial citizens in ways that further bind their citizenship to state political and economic violence and narrow the scope for genuine empathy

Inclining mimesis: continuing the dialogue with Adriana Cavarero

Modern and Contemporary Studie

Condição humana contra "natureza"

Adriana Cavarero: Quando o tema e a natureza humana, e quase obrigatorio acenar para Aristoteles. Na sua filosofia ja surgem duas questoes fundamentais. Uma diz respeito a propria plausibilidade de uma "natureza humana", entendida em termos objetivos e a-historicos (e, alem disso, modelada sobre o homem como paradigma abstrato e universal, ou seja – conforme observa Hannah Arendt – ficticio). Outra tem a ver com a necessidade de definir o humano com referencia ao nao-humano, que, em termos aristotelicos e por uma longa tradicao, e o animal. Hoje, o pensamento radical sobre a etica e a politica, e, de qualquer modo, o pensamento que julgo mais interessante, nao so nega que exista uma natureza humana entendida universalmente, mas tende, sobretudo, a definir o humano mais com referencia ao inumano do que ao nao-humano. Nao se trata apenas de um jogo de palavras. Assim, o nao-humano diz respeito – pelo menos tradicionalmente – ao animal. O inumano, por sua vez, alude a uma negacao do humano que e interna ao proprio humano. A barbarie de Auschwitz poderia servir de exemplo. Parece, alias, que a epoca historica inaugura uma reflexao sobre o humano que nao pode deixar de se confrontar com o abismo da sua autonegacao. E como se a natureza humana fosse uma questao que nao tem a ver com o lugar da especie humana na classificacao do mundo dos seres vivos, mas sim com o modo como os humanos desvelam para si mesmos o paradoxo da sua humanidade. Condicao humana contra "natureza"

Beginners on Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance

This paper examines the complex questions that arise around the appearance of children in contemporary performance. Drawing on performances by Nottingham-based theatre company Zoo Indigo and Tim Etchells and the Flemish theatre company Victoria, I consider the extent to which Hannah Arendt’s theorisation of natality as ‘the new beginning inherent in birth’ that gives rise to the political potential to ‘begin something anew’ can help us to understand the ethico-political dimensions of children’s appearance as natal, biological and relational beings in contemporary performance. In particular, I draw on feminist interpretations of Arendt’s work to articulate the significance of the embodied aspects and ethical quality of children’s relation to adult spectators and performers. I argue that these performances prompt a rethinking of the child’s potential to generate political intervention, which moves beyond Arendt’s gendered account of political agency in a public sphere from which children are excluded

Turning back

This response to Miri Rozmarin’s paper, Staying Alive, focuses on the question of what it might mean to create a response to matricide and patriarchal violence that is grounded in the particularities of cultural and personal history. Rozmarin’s rendering of a possible response to matricide through the mother-daughter genealogy is illustrated in her analysis of the Biblical myth of Lot’s wife. She claims that this story of destruction, punishment and incest reveals ‘an option of non-matricidal relations’ and she gives a compelling account of how this could be so. In my response, I suggest that there are alternative ‘against the grain’ readings that are grounded in the Jewish traditions and sensibilities in which such ‘mythic’ material is embedded and from which it draws its vitality. I offer an example of this, not to refute Rozmarin’s claims, but to suggest that something more nuanced and even loving can be found in the specificity of this cultured and gendered encounter, and that this better meets the conditions for ‘concrete’ ethical resistance that she seeks

Los ataques con agentes químicos como forma de violencia extrema contra las mujeres en Colombia

Teniendo en cuenta la relativa novedad del concepto de violenciaextrema y del fenómeno de los ataques con agentes químicos, el presentetexto pretende analizar los diferentes contextos desde los que puede servista la violencia extrema y los elementos que la describen, con el fin dearticular dicho concepto al fenómeno de los ataques con agentesquímicos. Es decir, se busca determinar y explicar por qué este tipo deataques se configuran como un acto de violencia extrema,específicamente sobre las mujeres, en consideración de las historias ytestimonios de las víctimas sobrevivientes de este flagelo en Colombia.A partir de ello, se pretende visibilizar la obligación del Estado deprevenir y reducir estos ataques, proponiendo soluciones a mediano ylargo plazo, desde las tres ramas del poder público &nbsp