Sovereign-less subject and the possibility of resistance

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 83-106

  Zevnik, Andreja ^a  

^a ABERYSTWYTH UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Resistance; Sovereign power; Tiananmen

Indexed keywords

EID: 70349188692     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829809336255     Document Type: Article

References (106)

1. Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 1 (2005): 1-24.
2. Ibid., 2.
3. There is a considerable amount of discussion over the relationship between sovereign and the subject in international relations literature. Claudia Aradau, Law Transformed: The Other Exception and the "War on Terror", presented at the BISA Conference in Cork, 2006 [http://www.bisa.ac.uk/2006/pps/aradau.pdf].
4. Bülent Diken and Carsten Bagge Lautsen, Zones of Indistinction: Security, Terror and Bare Life, Space and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002): 290-307.
5. Michael Dillon, Network Society, Network-Centric Warfare and the State of Emergency, Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 4 (2002): 71-9.
6. Vivienne Jabri, War, Security and the Liberal State, Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (2006): 47-64.
7. Claudio Minca, The Return of the Camp, Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 4 (2005): 405-12.
8. Andrew Neal, Cutting Off the King's Head: Foucault's Society Must Be Defended and the Problem of Sovereignty, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 4 (2004): 373-98.
9. Sergei Prozorov, X/Xs: Toward a General Theory of Exception, Alternatives: Global, local, Political 30, no. 1 (2005).
10. Nick Vaughan-Williams, The Generalised Border: Re-Conceptualising the Limits of Sovereign Power, Review of International Studies, forthcoming 2009.
11. Rob Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
12. Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics, Alternative: Global, Local, Political 28, no. 2 (2003): 267-86.
13. Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional, Security Dialogue 37, no. 1 (2006): 65-82.
14. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5.
15. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
16. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
17. Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti (London, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
18. Agamben, Means without Ends, 20.
19. Lacan associates revolutions with the discourse of the Hysteric in: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Book XVII, trans. Russell Grigg (London, New York: WW Norton & Co Ltd, 2007), 29-39, 55-68, 87-99.
20. Slavoj Žižek, Paralaksa: Za Politični Suspenz Etičnega [The Parallax: For Political Suspension of Ethics] (Ljubljana: Analecta, 2004), 111-13.
21. The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 297-300, 303-5.
22. Object a in Social Links, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, eds Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 107-28.
23. Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernst Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 28.
24. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1-2.
25. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 140-4.
26. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-76, trans. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana and David Macey (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
27. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4.
28. Jenny Edkins, Sovereign Power, Zones of Indistinction, and the Camp, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 25, no. 1 (2000): 5.
29. Vaughan-Williams, The Generalised Border.
30. Giorgio Agamben, Interview with Giorgio Agamben - Life, a Work of Art without an Author: The State of Exception, the Administration of Disorder, and Private Life, German Law Review 5, no. 5 (2005).
31. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 25.
32. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 35.
33. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109.
34. Minca, The Return of the Camp, 406.
35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109.
36. Ibid., 153.
37. Ibid., 134.
38. Ibid., 43-4.
39. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
40. If the Enlightenment is characterised by the emergence of a rational and independent human subject that is freed from the word of God, the break with the Enlightenment associated with "whatever being" implies the emergence of a different kind of being. As such this new being is not irrational or non-human, but rather alien to these Enlightenment categories of, for example, humanity, reason or nature. Naturally the break from the Enlightenment was not simple and clear-cut, but went on for centuries. The postmodern subject of the Other is commonly understood as a first step away from the rational being, following this the second step would then be the "whatever being".
41. Ibid., 107.
42. Jenny Edkins, Whatever Politics, in Sovereignty and Life: Essays on Giorgio Agamben, eds Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
43. Agamben, The Coming Community, 1.
44. Agamben, The Coming Community, 2.
45. Ibid., 85.
46. Ibid., 86.
47. When referring to Agamben's concept of bare life as a form of life where you can no longer distinguish between bios and zoe, I write "form of life" (no hyphens) and when referring to the "life" where living itself is at stake in its own living, where bare life can potentially become a form of life, I write bare life as potentially "a form-of-life".
48. Edkins and Pin-Fat, Through the Wire, 13.
49. Ibid., 2.
50. Ibid., 14.
51. Ibid., 15.
52. Ibid., 16-18.
53. Ibid., 18.
54. The article, although it is single authored by Edkins, is a result of conversations and suggestions Edkins received from Véronique Pin-Fat.
55. Edkins, Whatever Politics.
56. Agamben, The Coming Community, 87.
57. Edkins and Pin-Fat, Through the Wire, 23.
58. Ibid., 24.
59. Ibid., 13.
60. Ibid., 9.
61. Ibid., 10, 11.
62. Ibid., 15.
63. Ibid., 9, 12.
64. Ibid., 17.
65. Cocktails usually consist of bodily liquids and excrements that the detainees throw onto the guards watching over the blocks.
66. See for example: Moazzam Begg, Enemy Combatant: The Terrifying True Story of a Briton in Guantanamo (London: Pocket Books, 2007).
67. Murat Kurnaz, Five Years of my Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
68. Both concepts - passage à l'acte and a demand of being - were developed by Lacan in relation to his discussions of ethics, moral law (das Ding) and comments on Antigone.
69. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Denis Porter (London: Routledge, 2008).
70. Jacques-Alain Miller, O nekem drugem Lacanu [Of some other Lacan] (Ljubljana, Analecta, 2001), 45-54.
71. Ibid., 49.
72. Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), 81.
73. Ibid., 80-1.
74. I must emphasise here that the Tiananmen protest was just one event in a series of very significant occurrences in 1989. Many would compare that year with the "revolutionary year" of 1968. Indeed, protests became part of everyday life not only in China, but throughout most of "the communist world". For example, protests and riots started in Poland, the former Yugoslav republics, the Baltic States, Hungary, former Czechoslovakia, Romania and Georgia, among others. These happenings, including the end of a nine-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, led to the fall of the Berlin wall. The events of 1989 marked at least a symbolic end of one ideology that dominated Eastern Europe since the end of the Second World War.
75. A similar observation is made by Agamben in The Coming Community.
76. Lacan discusses a symbolic death of the subject in relation to Sophocles's Antigone. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 332-53.
77. For more on the demand of being, look at: Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: Le Sinthome (Paris: Seuil, 2005); The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 357-70.
78. Jelica Šumič-Riha, Jetnik Drugega, ki ne obstaja [Prisoner of the Inexistent Other], Filozofski Vestnik XXVIII, no. 1 (2007): 88.
79. Ibid., 90.
80. A good account of the lead-up to 4 June is presented in: Chu-Yuan Cheng, Behind the Tiananmen Massacre: Social and Economic Ferment in China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990).
81. Timothy Brook, Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
82. Andrew J. Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers, Foreign Affairs 80, no. 2 (2001): 1-5.
83. A Workers Letter to the Students, 28 April 1989, in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire: China's Road to Democracy, Yan'an to Tian'anmen, 1942-1989, eds Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 270.
84. Preparatory Committee of the Autonomous Federation of the Workers of the Capital, Worker's Declaration, 21 May in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire, 280-1.
85. Preparatory Committee of Beijing University Students, 'Letter of Petition of April 21 1989, in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire, 266.
86. More: A Student Party Member of People's University, A Choice Made on the Basis of Conscience and Party Spirit: An Open Letter to All Party Members, in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire, 270-1.
87. A Member of the Communist Party, Where I Stand, in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire, 274.
88. Timothy Brook, Quelling the People, 37.
89. Wu Hung, Tiananmen Square: A Political History of Monuments, Representations 35 (2001): 84-5.
90. Cheng Zen, Tiananmen Remembered, Personal testimonies, BBC News [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3769371.stm], 2 June 2004.
91. An Eyewitness, The Massacre in Tian'anmen Square, in Wild Lily, Prairie Fire, 286-90.
92. Graham Earnshaw, Tiananmen Story [http://www.earnshaw.com/memoirs/content.cfm?ID=16], accessed 3 August 2008.
93. The exact number of people that died is unknown and the Chinese government tried hard to prevent any counting. According to Brook's investigation presented in Quelling the People, the most likely estimate is between 2500 and 3000.
94. The story presented here is a brief overview of the events; I am aware that the situation on Tiananmen Square is not so simplistic, and that there were huge tensions inside the Chinese Communist Party on how to respond. However, it is far beyond this article's remit to address all these aspects. For a detailed overview of the events that occurred on and around Tiananmen Square, see Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership Decision to Use Force against their Own People - In their Own Words (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).
95. Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers, 3.
96. By using the spatial metaphor instead of territorial one, I try to demonstrate that although the "zone of indistinction" was opened on the Tiananmen Square (territory), it was a result of student demonstrations. If the students moved to some other place, so would the "zone".
97. Earnshaw, Tiananmen Story.
98. See: Tiananmen Remembered, personal testimonies, BBC News [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3763831.stm].
99. Brook, Quelling the People, 164-7.
100. Louisa Lim, China's Students Changed by the Tiananmen, BBC News [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4191129.stm], 29 January 2005.
101. Earnshaw, Tiananmen Story.
102. Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers, 13.
103. Ibid., 9.
104. Ibid., 18.
105. Edkins and Pin-Fat, Through the Wire, 3.
106. Edkins, Whatever Politics.