ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

In light of Giorgio Agamben’s ground-breaking theory of bare life, this seminar seeks to create an interdisciplinary discourse that re-examines the politics of life and death which produce, police, and define the human in opposition to the animal. In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben writes: “What is captured in the sovereign ban is a human victim who may be killed but not sacrificed: homo sacer” (83). Following Michel Foucault’s concept of “bio-power” and his claim that the modern state supplants the sovereign “right of death” by the power to “make live,” Agamben suggests that in the extreme case of the state of exception, sovereign authority propels this power to “make live” to a paradoxical excess; stripping individuals of the significant markers of social and political existence, only bare life can subsist. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben further argues that the anthropological machine itself produces bare life, a life that is neither human nor animal. We invite papers that explore how the dichotomy between man and animal produces a definition of the human that calls into question the relationship between the human and the non-human. Possible topics include: Can the animal respond?; “Biopower,” animality, and humanity; Dasein, the openness to a world, and the animal; animality, voice, and performative; “bare life,” death and the human; procreation, animality, and sexual difference; human, animal, and the (war) machine.

Friday, March 24

Peter Paik, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
“Ecce Homo Sacer: Agamben, Girard and the Inoperable Sacrifice”
Brooke Holmes, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“The history of forgetting: time and stasis in The Open”
Sean Connolly, Cornell University, “Playing with the Animal: Agamben, Homo Ludens, and the Politics of the Profane”
Masha Mimran, Princeton University
“Inscribing the Law in Linguistic Displacement: Agamben’s “bare life” and animal Motifs in Narrative”

Saturday, March 25

Victor Fan, Yale University
“War and the Optical Machine: Negotiating Time, Animal, and Death in the Cinematographic Image”
Magda Romanska, Cornell University
“‘The Infertile Animal’: Gendering Fertility and the Production of a Human: Reading Agamben with Edelman”
Olga Solovieva, Yale University
“Man and Animal in Dostoyevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness”
Lily Gurton-Wachter, University of California, Berkeley
“Traces of the Future: The Child Historian in Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900”

Sunday, March 26

Michael Marder, New School for Social Research
“Right-less Possession of Life: Animal Configurations in Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts”
Walter Johnston, Princeton University
“Facticity and Animality: The problem of perception in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics”
Nima Bassiri, University of California, Berkeley
“Positing the Human: On the Grounds and Limits of Scientific Thinking”
Stephanos Geroulanos, Johns Hopkins University
“Sovereignty as Philosophical Antisubjectivism: The Politics of Tumult and Being in Bataille’s The Blue of Noon”