Book Review Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

A book review of Janae Sholtz, The Invention of a People (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

The Missing Politics of Restitution:Answering Esposito’s Triptych of Political Ontology

This article discusses Roberto Esposito’s three paradigms of political ontology: destitution, constitution and institution, based respectively on (post-)Heideggerian, Deleuzian and neo-Machiavellian/Lefortian concepts. I argue that we need to enlarge this conception of political ontology to make room for other ontological theorizing. I therefore present a fourth paradigm – restitution – that conditions the other three paradigms. This alternative conception of ontological politics is derived from social anthropology with the aim to integrate environmental justice in the three-fold framework. Restitution here accounts for multiple worlds, composed of different modes of existence. In late capitalist ontology, there is no room for other ontologies. Esposito misses that there are at least a thousand political ontologies that cannot be subsumed into an overarching whole, whether it is constituting power or instituting power. Restituting is not about reifying or preserving existing ontologies as late capitalist ontology does (Povinelli). It is about reclaiming practices, techniques and local knowledges for new problems arising from extractivism, the climate emergency and technological disruptions

The Missing Politics of Restitution:Answering Esposito’s Triptych of Political Ontology

This article discusses Roberto Esposito’s three paradigms of political ontology: destitution, constitution and institution, based respectively on (post-)Heideggerian, Deleuzian and neo-Machiavellian/Lefortian concepts. I argue that we need to enlarge this conception of political ontology to make room for other ontological theorizing. I therefore present a fourth paradigm – restitution – that conditions the other three paradigms. This alternative conception of ontological politics is derived from social anthropology with the aim to integrate environmental justice in the three-fold framework. Restitution here accounts for multiple worlds, composed of different modes of existence. In late capitalist ontology, there is no room for other ontologies. Esposito misses that there are at least a thousand political ontologies that cannot be subsumed into an overarching whole, whether it is constituting power or instituting power. Restituting is not about reifying or preserving existing ontologies as late capitalist ontology does (Povinelli). It is about reclaiming practices, techniques and local knowledges for new problems arising from extractivism, the climate emergency and technological disruptions

Suffocation and the Logic of Immunopolitics

In this chapter, I argue that the traditional opposition between sovereignty and biopower is often artificial, and that sovereignty as a scheme of thought is more pervasive than is sometimes accounted for in biopolitical studies. Second, I demonstrate how contemporary biopolitics is best thought of as immunopolitics, by following the work of Esposito and Neyrat. Modern societies and human collectives have changed their relation to the munus, they feel exempted from obligations and duties – and equating taxes with a burden is particularly symptomatic of this exemption. As a complement to the existing life-affirming and death drives, Neyrat noted that a third drive is central to biopolitical rationality: the drive to remain untouched. This drive is further strengthened by a large technical, political and financial infrastructure that is created by the increasing interconnectedness produced by globalisation. Nancy on the other hand argued that the becoming-technical of the world is the dominant feature of globalisation; the biopolitical discourse documents this becoming-technical when analysing the management of life, birth and mortality rates, reproductive medicine, post-Fordist exploitation of life as affective and digital labour and so on. Thus, Nancy poses that biopolitics should be thought in terms of ecotechnics instead. Therefore my brief turn to ecology and global climate change, since the intersectional politics to come can only take place if it reunites the four axes: race, gender, class and nature (Keucheyan 2016, 5). As Esposito’s affirmative biopolitics is rather abstract and disconnected from practical politics, particularly the issues of climate change and technological disruption, it is then Neyrat’s proposition for an ecology of separation that provides new theoretical insights to confront more directly the political emergencies of our time

Beyond technofix:Thinking with Epimetheus in the Anthropocene

The Prometheus myth has long now provided inspiration for those who envision solutions to environmental issues. Prometheus is the figure par excellence of human forethought and progress in the anthropocene. In this article, we introduce the concept of ambient Prometheanism to describe the way of thinking that foregrounds foresight and anticipation and advances technological solutions developed by capital and energy-intensive projects. We question this stance, arguing that ambient Prometheanism, with its emphasis on technofix, leads to the economisation and depoliticisation of planetary environmental issues. Following Bernard Stiegler, we recover from the myth the figure of Epimetheus, Prometheus’ brother, as well as his associated faculty, epimetheia to theorise what we call an ‘Epimethean politics’. Thinking the anthropocene from the perspective of ambient Prometheanism and Epimetheanism means to consider the role of technology in climate politics, and in particular to make the case for the importance of afterthought in face of unintended consequences and accumulated errors. To substantiate our argument, we outline the challenge posed by emerging solutions focussed on technological intensification (geoengineering) and socio-economic acceleration (green growth and accelerationism). An Epimethean politics of the climate requires to use reflexivity as a capacity to anticipate, but also to mobilise epimetheia to account for accidents and past mistakes. Such a politics builds from an alternative conception of technology, one that radically differs from ambient Prometheanism. Finally we read as actualisations of Epimethean politics contemporary eco-political struggles and their imperatives for multispecies living and convivial livelihoods