Author: influxus

29 Jun

As many worlds as it takes to make a world

I’m just in the tidy up phase of marking. It’s a thin state, like butter scraped over too much bread. It leaves me nostalgic for the dreamt figures of childhood, Hollywood cinema and processed, probably non-vegan, food.
22 Jun

Norm & Emergency

Noel Pearson, allegedly, made it legitimate for white politicians to finally take some action on the national emergency of Indigenous child abuse. His (or the Cape York Institute’s) massive proposal [pdf] for controversial, welfare “reform” experiments as a solution to problems in remote Indigenous communities came after the Little Children are Sacred report [pdf] and [...]
06 Jun

Contagion:Carrier

So I’m writing about the politics of contagion and 28 Weeks Later, which I saw after having encountered foucaultisdead’s viral reading of the film. The sensibility is, then, of a reading already gathered by FID’s. 28 Weeks Later illustrates a logic of viral containment that targets the host. It secures territory against people. This logic of [...]
04 Jun

Preoccupied Biopoliticals 3: The Faculty of Health

Last time on Preoccupied Biopoliticals: Kant distinguishes medicine, from the other higher faculties of law and theology, as the most autonomous from sovereignty because its concern is nature. Still, Kant describes a threefold relation between the study of medicine and the state, in each case the medium of relation is the people or public. Firstly, [...]
04 Jun

Preoccupied Biopoliticals 2: Kant on the Faculty of Medicine

A while back Angela Mitropoulos in her contribution to the edu-factory discussion used a portion of Kant I hadn’t come across before. The Conflict of the Faculties [pdf] is an account of the university, as composed of 3 higher faculties - in [...]
24 May

Preoccupied Biopoliticals 1

Is it possible to think a politics of health, that includes the child yet to be born, that is not biopolitical? Nancy in his note on biopolitics suggests that Foucault’s historical thesis on the birth of biopolitics from the 18th century requires: a more precise examination of what the biopolitical preoccupations were before the modern era [...]
20 May

The somatic J-L Nancy: biopolitics

ancy in his recently translated (into English) work, La création du monde ou la mondialisation, has a note on the term biopolitics. The note is reproduced in full below. This note in 3 pages, with its own set of notes, at first occasions a few points of clarity, a direction of further research and then [...]
19 Feb

Anger

pparently torture gets politicised ‘because of very real stories and events.’ The moral issues of representation come down to quantity and quality. The executive producer of 24 decides to tone it down because: What was once an extraordinary or exceptional moment is starting to feel a little trite. The idea of physical coercion or torture is no longer [...]
17 Feb

Normalisation II

anguilhem continuing from precisely where the last left off:
14 Feb

Normalisation

rom Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological:
20 Jan

Selfish Preconceptive Parents

meant to write about Babel this evening as it haunts me and s0metim3s’ post brought it back. But Alice Dreger writes about the ashley treatment which is all the outrage at the moment. And she holds back any invective to draw out the way parental decision making is continually recoded along an [...]
18 Jan

The somatic J-L Nancy, a guided tour: part the preface

o this is a tour of (some of) Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on bodies. My aim in this tour is to find ways of writing about bodies and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). I’m hoping that the tangibilities Nancy describes - his own disintegrating body; the impenetrability of bodies, the intercorporeality of touch and his projected [...]
08 Jan

The future of nonspecific children

t the heart of much bioethics discussion around reproductive technologies is a binary conceived between chance and choice. Between an idea that what is valuable in the child is its unexpectedness, the gift of its arrival. And an idea that we should be free to choose as much as possible about our lives including [...]