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

Rosalind Cooper, Trent University
“From the Biopolitics of Immortality to the Sovereignty of Symbolic Exchange: An Essay on Jean Baudrillard’s Dedoublement of Death”
Mark Pettus, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“‘Whatever it was’: Coetzee, Camp Life and Creating Humanity”
Russell Samolsky, University of California, Santa Barbara
“The Dogs of War: Agamben, Animals, and the Scene of Torture”

Saturday, March 25

Yaoci Pardo, University of Western Ontario
“Body-prop: bare power in the amphitheatre of the Baroque”
Maria Polychrona, University of Cyprus
“Biopolitical transformations and fictional metamorphoses: bare life and literature”
Nichole Miller, University of California, Irvine
“‘Thus have I politicly begun my reign’: Arendt, Agamben, and the gendered ideology”
Stephan Packard, Institute of Comparative Literature, LMU, Munich
“Lacan’s Tragic Figuration and the Moral Suspension of Undeath”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Producing the Human in the Politics of Life and Death