Organized rape has been an integral aspect of warfare for a long time even though classics on warfare have predominantly focused on theorizing ‘regular’ warfare, that is, the situations in which one army encounters another in a battle to conquer or defend a territory. Recently, however, much attention has been paid to asymmetric warfare and, accordingly, to phenomena such as guerrilla tactics, terrorism, hostage taking and a range of identity-related aspects of war such as religious fundamentalism, holy war, ethnic cleansing and war rape. In fact, war rape can be taken as a perfect example of an asymmetric strategy. In war rape the soldier attacks a civilian (not a fellow combatant) and a woman (not another male soldier), and does this only indirectly with the aim of holding or taking a territory. The primary target here is to inflict trauma and through this to destroy family ties and group solidarity within the enemy camp. This article understands war rape as a fundamental way of abandoning subjects: rape is the mark of sovereignty stamped directly on the body, that is, it is essentially a bio-political strategy using (or better, abusing) the distinction between the self and the body. Through an analysis of the way rape was carried out by the predominantly paramilitary Serbian forces on Bosnian soil, this article theorizes a two-fold practice of abjection: through war rape an abject is introduced within the woman’s body (sperm or forced pregnancy), transforming her into an abject-self rejected by the family, excluded by the community and quite often also the object of a self-hate, sometimes to the point of suicide. This understanding of war rape is developed in the article through a synthesis of the literature on abandonment (Agamben, Schmitt) and abjection (Bataille, Douglas, Kristeva) and concomitantly it is argued that the penetration of the woman’s body works as a metaphor for the penetration of enemy lines. In addition it is argued that this bio-political strategy, like other forms of sovereignty, operates through the creation of an ‘inclusive exclusion’. The woman and the community in question are inscribed within the enemy realm of power as those excluded.

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Becoming Abject: Rape as a Weapon of War:

The discourse of zero-waste and the circular economy has been championed by key players, such as the European Commission, management consultancies, NGOs, academics and multinational companies, in recent years Given the all too obvious social and environmental crises associated with out-of-bounds growth capitalism, the circular
economy has been one of the main references for rebuilding and reforming a political economy of sustainable growth In this paper we detect a de-politicizing strategy in this attempt of reform, and, consequently, aim at re-locating a position for the politicization of growth-driven capitalism and the circular economy We do this by offering a unique
discursive-material theoretical framework, bringing together Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic readings This will allow understanding both the subjective relation with the meaning of waste and the material exchanges that place the subject in the position to
produce and consume waste as a valuable commodity In our quest to (re-)politicize waste, we offer three practical steps that aim at interrupting the endless repetition of
waste, which include attempts to eradicate it This argument will be illustrated by making reference to the circular strategies of Apple Inc, the world’s largest and most iconic consumer electronics company

Against wasted politics: a critique of the circulareconomy

Applications of ‘resilience’ have stretched it to the point of breaking, yet it still maintains a remarkable capacity to organize relations in diverse fields of geographical concern such as ecologi...

/pdf/geography-ontological-politics-and-the-resilient-future-2je9t3hkti.pdf

Geography, ontological politics and the resilient future

A wide range of critical theorists is used in the study of international politics, and until now there has been no text that gives concise and accessible introductions to these figures. Critical Theorists and International Relations provides a wide-ranging introduction to thirty-two important theorists whose work has been influential in thinking about global politics. Each chapter is written by an expert with a detailed knowledge of the theorist concerned, representing a range of approaches under the rubric 'critical', including Marxism and post-Marxism, the Frankfurt School, hermeneutics, phenomenology, postcolonialism, feminism, queer theory, poststructuralism, pragmatism, scientific realism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Key features of each chapter include: a clear and concise biography of the relevant thinker an introduction to their key writings and ideas a summary of the ways in which these ideas have influenced and are being used in international relations scholarship a list of suggestions for further reading. Written in engaging and accessible prose, Critical Theorists and International Relations is a unique and invaluable resource for undergraduates, postgraduates and scholars of international relations.

https://gendocs.ru/docs/37/36046/conv_1/file1.pdf

Critical Theorists and International Relations

Britain and the United States at the world's fairs, 1851-1893

For many, Jacques Lacan represents postmodern theory at its height?that is, at its worst. Lacan, so say his detractors, made a career out of obscurantism, and may not even have believed very much of what he said. Noam Chomsky once indicated such a hypothesis when he explained that "my frank opinion is that [Lacan] was a conscious charlatan, and he was simply playing games with the Paris intellectual community to see how much absurdity he could produce and still be taken seriously."1 Even Lacanians might find it in their hearts to forgive Chomsky such a remark, since it was Chomsky who, after asking Lacan a question concerning thought (at the latter's 1968 presentation at MIT), received the reply, "We think we think with our brain; personally, I think with my feet. That's the only way I come into contact with anything solid. I do occasionally think with my forehead, when I bang into something."2 As if to condense the aura of contrariness and enigma he cultivated in such exchanges, Lacan often relayed his teachings through now-infamous maxims and mathemes, those Zen koans of the French postmodern era: "Desire is desire of the Other," "There is no sexual relation," "The Woman does not exist."3 No wonder Chomsky and many others turn their heads in exasperation. The best counterpoint to suspicions such as Chomsky's may well be found in the work of Slavoj Zizek, whose frenetic endorsements of Lacanian theory achieve a dense complexity even as they provide moments of startling (and typically humorous) clarity. Take Zizek's way of explaining why even one of the most banal features of late twentieth century culture, the laugh-track of situation comedy, is itself an illustra tion of the Lacanian thesis that "desire is desire of the Other":

Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek

Table of Contents Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Transatlantic Bloodlines and English Traits Chapter 2: Feeling Free in Medieval America Chapter 3: Picturing America Chapter 4: John Pendleton Kennedy's Plantation of the Picturesque Chapter 5: Embodied Eloquence, the Sumner Assault, and the Transatlantic Cable Chapter 6: Henry Timrod's Global Confederacy Coda

America's England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism

"It is the doctrine of the popular music-masters that whoever can speak can sing"-or so Emerson opens his essay "Eloquence," included in the 1870 volume Society and Solitude. As Emerson describes it near the end of his career as an orator, verbal eloquence becomes a form of musical expression, not only inasmuch as both share the formal elements of pitch, rhythm, and meter, but also to the extent that both make "instruments" of their audience. Hence, "Him we call an artist who can play on an assembly of men as a master on the keys of the piano,-who, seeing the people furious, shall soften and compose them, shall draw them, when he will, to laughter and to tears" (1903-04, 7. 65). The Emersonian speaker is a "master" of men, an Orphic wordsmith who "will have them pleased and humored as he chooses." But eloquence is for him no mere art of domination, the art of propaganda Emerson keeps in mind as he paraphrases Plato's definition of rhetoric: "the art of ruling the minds of men" (7. 64). The symphonic and harmonic dimensions of eloquence suffuse Emerson's essay of 1870, so that when he describes the eloquent speaker's art as that of "compos[ing]""the people," he does not primarily point toward the power of the -word to dominate and control un-self-reliant minds. Composing the people may involve calming them, as it did for Emerson during the opening moments of the Civil War and later, after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, but it also means constituting them as a group, composing them as a "social organism." But more so than either of these, Emerson thinks of eloquent composition as a process of musical collaboration that draws upon, channels, provides a conduit for energies already in circulation among "the people." "Of all the musical instruments on which men play," Emerson explains, "a popular assembly is that which has the largest compass and variety, and out of which, by genius and study, the most wonderful effects can be drawn." This is because "An audience is not a simple addition of the individuals that compose it. Their sympathy gives them a certain social organism, which fills each member, in his own degree, and most of all the orator, as ajar in a battery is charged with the whole electricity of the battery. No one can survey the face of an excited assembly, without being apprised of new opportunity for painting in fire human thought, and being agitated to agitate" (1903-04, 7. 62-63).Emerson's model of spoken composition, proceeding from the recognition that every listener is also a potential speaker ("How many orators sit mute there below!" [1903-04, 7. 63]), also captures the most charged moments of eloquence to appear in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel that measures the self-reliance of its nameless protagonist through his growing acumen as a public speaker. Midway through the novel, Ellison's narrator stands before a massive audience after his initiation into the political organization called the Brotherhood, observing that "The audience seemed to have become one, its breathing and articulation synchronized" much like the "social organism" or "battery" to which the Emersonian speaker both addresses and connects himself. The Brotherhood has hired Ellison's protagonist as a political agitator, but having achieved only measured success with past public speeches, he now approaches his first large audience with trepidation. Fumbling at the lectern and blinded by the spotlight, he makes an awkward beginning:The microphone was strange and unnerving. I approached it incorrectly, my voice sounding raspy and full of air, and after a few words I halted, embarrassed. I was getting off to a bad start, something had to be done. I leaned toward the vague audience closest to the platform and said, "Sorry, folks. Up to now they've kept me so far away from these shiny electric gadgets I haven't learned the technique. . . . And to tell you the truth, it looks to me like it might bite! Just look at it, it looks like the steel skull of a man! …

Eloquence and Invisible Man

Hanlon's essay depicts South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks's 1856 assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as a flashpoint for 1850s controversies over the laying of transatlantic telegraphic cable between the United States and England. Widely treated by both Northern and Southern commentators as a form of political discourse, Brooks's caning of Sumner also reverberated with a broad set of concerns over telegraphic communication. Many noted that the cane with which Brooks assaulted Sumner was constructed of gutta-percha, the substance that was used to insulate the transatlantic cable and that served, over the course of the decade, as a metonym for advanced telecommunications technology. In Congress, Brooks's assault was depicted by Senator Andrew Butler as a rejoinder to Sumner's speech as an improper-because prepublished and internationally distributed-abolitionist diatribe. The Brooks-Sumner affair, in which a Southern legislator smote his abolitionist colleague using a fragment of the era's most salient symbol for global peace and goodwill, called forth a set of anxieties concerning the telegraphic disembodiment of the voice, the unchecked proliferation of speculation and rumor, and the globalization of the American cotton trade.

Christopher Hanlon

Papers

Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj Zizek

America's England: Antebellum Literature and Atlantic Sectionalism

Eloquence and Invisible Man

Embodied Eloquence, the Sumner Assault, and the Transatlantic Cable

Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style