Ethics after liberalism: Why (autonomous) bodies matter

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2010, Pages 723-745

  Shinko, Rosemary E ^a  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Autonomy; Body; Ethics of encounter; Relationality; Resistance

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953191696     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829810366474     Document Type: Article

References (139)

1. Barry Hindess, 'Liberalism: What's in a Name?', in Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, eds W. Larner and W. Walters (London: Routledge, 2004), 23-39;
2. 'The Liberal Government of Unfreedom', Alternatives 26, no. 2 (2001): 93-111;
3. 'Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy, Variations on a Governmental Theme', Economy and Society 22, no. 3 (1993): 300-13;
4. Vivienne Jabri, 'Restyling the Subject of Responsibility in International Relations', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 591-611;
5. Georg Sørensen, 'Liberalism of Restraint and Liberalism of Imposition: Liberal Values and World Order in the New Millennium', International Relations 20, no. 3 (2006): 251-72, provide quite a detailed and provocative critique levelled at what are regarded as political liberalism's more self-congratulatory pronouncements and its most egregious failings and inherent limitations.
6. R.B.J. Walker, 'Gender and Critique in the Theory of International Relations', in Gendered States: Feminist (Re)Visions of International Relations, ed. V. Spike Peterson (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 199.
7. R.B.J. Walker, 'Dialogue: Towards a Critical Social Theory of International Politics', Alternatives Global, Local, Political 13 (1988): 86.
8. Richard Ashley, 'The Achievements of Post-Structuralism', in International Theory: Positivism and Beyond, eds Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243.
9. Richard Ashley, 'Living on Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War', in International/Intertextual Relations, eds James Der Derian and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Lexington Books, 1989), 266.
10. Jenny Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations Bringing the Political Back In (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 21.
11. Ibid., 25-37.
12. Martin Schoolman and David Campbell, 'An Interview with William Connolly, December 2006', in The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, eds David Campbell and Martin Schoolman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 316, emphasis in original.
13. Trenchant critiques of the democratic peace theory include Andreas Behkne, '"Eternal Peace" as the Graveyard of the Political: A Critique of Kant's Zum Ewigen Frieden', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 36, no. 3 (2008): 513-32;
14. Julian Reid, 'War, Liberalism, and Modernity: The Biopolitical Provocations of "Empire"', Cambridge Review of International Affairs 17, no. 1 (2004): 63-79;
15. Brett Bowden, 'In the Name of Progress and Peace: The "Standard of Civilization" and the Universalizing Project', Alternatives Global, Local, Political, 29, no. 1 (2004): 43-69;
16. Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey, 'The Imperial Peace: Democracy, Force and Globalization', European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 4 (1999): 403-34.
17. Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
18. Ibid., 7.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), 30.
21. Ibid., 169.
22. Walker, 'Dialogue', 114.
23. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Foucault and Political Reason Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.
24. Ibid., 8.
25. R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 79.
26. David Campbell, Politics without Principle Sovereignty, Ethics, and the Narratives of the Gulf War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 93. Campbell goes on to argue that 'responsibility to the Other can neither be intentionally ascribed nor purposefully avoided' (ibid., 96). But this appears to be a rather curious evacuation of both the political and the ethical because if responsibility is already in place prior to any engagement with the other then where does the impetus for ethical political choice lie?.
27. (ibid., 96). But this appears to be a rather curious evacuation of both the political and the ethical because if responsibility is already in place prior to any engagement with the other then where does the impetus for ethical political choice lie?.
28. Donald Moon, 'Liberalism, Autonomy, and Moral Pluralism' (A Review Essay), Political Theory 31, no. 1 (2003): 134, argues for a formulation of 'political liberalism that rests on a conception of agency rather than autonomy' because autonomy implies the ability to critically reflect on one's ends, whereas agency merely involves controlling or directing our actions in accordance with one's beliefs and purposes. Making the shift from autonomy to agency would ensure that the basic structures of the society governing its members were not based upon ends that some might deem unacceptable.
29. Wendy Brown, 'Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed', in Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, op. cit., 253.
30. Ibid., 266.
31. Ibid., 267.
32. For discussions of the liberal autonomous individual see Steven Lukes, Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973);
33. Richard E. Flathman, Toward a Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989);
34. Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991);
35. Isaiah Berlin, Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
36. Jeffrey Reiman, Critical Moral Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), who offers a defence of the liberal ideal of individual sovereignty. For communitarian responses and critiques.
37. Gerald Dworkin, The Theory and Practice of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
38. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982);
39. Robert Young, Personal Autonomy: Beyond Negative and Positive Liberty, 1986), who have expressed dissatisfaction with liberal conceptions of the autonomous self.
40. Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, 'Autonomy Refigured', in Relational Autonomy Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, eds Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5, provide an overview of different views of autonomy within a liberal context. 'For example, within liberal political theory, autonomy is considered to be an individual right. For liberals of a libertarian persuasion, the right to autonomy is construed as negative liberty. For Rawlsian liberals, autonomy is understood in Kantian terms as the capacity for rational self-legislation and is considered to be the defining feature of persons.'
41. Christine Di Stefano, 'Autonomy in the Light of Difference', in Revisioning the Political Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory, eds Nancy Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 99.
42. Ibid., 111.
43. Lois McNay, Gender and Agency Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 121.
44. For other feminist reconceptualisations see Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985);
45. Nancy Chodorow, Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989);
46. Jennifer Nedelsky, 'Reconceiving Autonomy: Sources, Thoughts and Possibilities', Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 1 (1989): 7-36;
47. J. Ann Tickner, Gender in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
48. Linda Barclay, 'Autonomy and the Social Self', in Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy, op. cit., 52-71;
49. for postmodern interrogations see Judith Butler, 'Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism", in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3-21;
50. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)
51. 'The Speaking Subject Is Not Innocent', in Freedom and Interpretation: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures, ed. Barbara Johnson (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
52. McNay, Gender and Agency, 129.
53. Ibid., 131.
54. Ibid., 133.
55. Ibid., 152.
56. Ibid., 151.
57. Ibid., 154.
58. Anthony Burke, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War against the Other (London: Routledge, 2007), 20.
59. Jasmina Husanovic, '"In Search of Agency": Beyond the Old/New Biopolitics of Sovereignty in Bosnia', in Sovereign Lives Power in Global Politics, eds Jenny Edkins, Veronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (New York: Routledge, 2004), 232.
60. Mackenzie and Stoljar, 'Autonomy Refigured', 3.
61. Michel Foucault ('Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon Books, 1984], 83) contextualises the body as 'the inscribed surface of events (traced by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration'. Thus I argue that it is the malleability of the body which accounts for its location at the nexus between materiality (the fleshy substance of the physiological human body) and disciplinarity (those representational practices and discursive fields which serve to train and mould the body).
62. Vivienne Jabri, 'Shock and Awe Power and the Resistance of Art', Millennium:Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006): 819-39, 829, clearly and convincingly argues that the strategy of 'shock and awe' is 'not just a strategy of war that has associated with it the awesome display of technological power, but one that targets bodies in strategies of abjection, including the hooding of prisoners of war and their abuse' (emphasis added).
63. William Connolly's (Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed [Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2002], 68).
64. reference to Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 255-6,
65. Is cited by Thomas Dumm, 'Connolly's Voice', in Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, op. cit., 78.
66. Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, 7.
67. However this is not a call to reinvest the materiality of the body as a ground but to call into question the very notion of materiality and examine how bodies are formed and marked as certain types of subjects invested with certain characteristics, abilities and valuations, see Edkins, Poststructuralism and International Relations, 32-3. Butler, 'Contingent Foundations', 9, refutes the idea of the body as a site or surface, viewing it instead as that which is materialised through processes of inscription and reinscription. I wish to reopen this discussion and interrogate the space of resistance where bodily enactments emerge to challenge sovereign power and to reproblematise the question of autonomy.
68. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 35-6.
69. Also see David Campbell, 'Identity, Difference and the Global: William Connolly's International Theory', in Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, op. cit, 297, who draws attention to Connolly's visceral register and tactics such as 'image, movement, posture, concept and argument' which can be combined in various iterations to prompt questions about 'the process by which the habit in question became embodied the first time around'.
70. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 74.
71. Michael J. Shapiro, 'The Ethics of Encounter', in Moral Spaces: RethinkingEthics and World Politics, eds David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1999), 70, 77.
72. Michael J. Shapiro, 'Radicalizing Democratic Theory: Social Space in Connolly, Deluze, and Ranciere', in Campbell and Schoolman, The New Pluralism, op. cit., 216.
73. Shapiro, 'The Ethics of Encounter', 80.
74. Shapiro, 'Radicalizing Democratic Theory', 216.
75. R.C. Hoogland, 'Fact and Fantasy: The Body of Desire in the Age of Posthumanism', Journal of Gender Studies 11, no. 3 (2002): 213-31;
76. Jabri, 'Shock and Awe Power'; and Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (New York: C. Hurst and Co., 2010).
77. Cristina Masters, 'Bodies of Technology and the Politics of the Flesh', in Rethinking the Man Question, eds Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski (New York: Zed Books, 2008), 87.
78. Ibid., 91.
79. Ibid., 99.
80. Ibid., 103.
81. Melinda Cooper, 'Pre-empting Emergence: The Biological Turn in the War n Terror', Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 4 (2006): 113-35, 118.
82. Ibid., 129.
83. Ibid., 124.
84. Ibid., 116. As Cooper notes, this new permutation in the war on terror is rawn from the work of microbiologist René Dubos who argues 'there can be no inal equilibrium in the battle against germs... because there is no assignable imit to the co-evolution of resistance'.
85. Samuel Chambers and Terrell Carver, Judith Butler and Political Theory Troubling Politics (London: Routledge, 2008), 69, argue that 'Butler both insists upon the precariousness of politics and focuses her arguments upon the very vulnerability of bodies.' Thus my focus on a reconfigured sense of autonomy attempts to address the ways in which 'the body serves both to constrain and to enable our capacity for action' as noted by Chambers and Carver (ibid., 67). Hence, Butler's observation that 'our bodies constantly insist, despite our protests, on the fact of our being as always a being-with others... [because] bodies expose us to others' is characterised by Chambers and Carver (ibid., 67) as an attempt to avoid the voluntarism-determinism binary by rendering bodily autonomy paradoxical. But I argue that it is necessary to account for the potential for creative resignification and repetition in bodily actions upon actions and such an accounting would seem to necessitate reinterrogating how autonomy is embedded in and revealed through bodily enactments.
86. Refer to Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) for a wide-ranging inquiry into the vulnerability of the human body.
87. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) for her rendering of the radical dependency of bodies coupled with their vulnerability to violation.
88. However, for Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 32, the struggle involves the recognition that one is a person which entails more than just the granting/securing of individual rights. For her, norms are the crucial component that enable us to not only understand how bodies emerge as human but how bodies' unruliness with respect to norms is an opening for reinscriptive practices. But contra Butler I am arguing for redescribing autonomy in terms of relationality.
89. Colin Gordon, 'Afterword', in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 255.
90. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 138.
91. . Jabri, 'Shock and Awe Power', 823, regards 'any discourse that brings forth experience and its embodiment... [as constituting] a moment of resistance' and she especially draws attention to the ways in which Rebecca Horn's performative work compels the viewer to take a stand. Jabri secondarily argues that body art's purpose is to create 'a creative dissensus'
92. ibid., 837.
93. . Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 98.
94. David Campbell, 'Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance', in Governance and Resistance in World Politics, eds David Armstrong, Theo Farrell and Bice Maiguascha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 73, who observes that photographs can open 'spaces for critical thought (and political enactments)' and can serve as forms of resistance. But what of the bodies that serve as their critical fodder? How do we comprehend and respond to them? How do we regard the tortured bodies in the photographs from Abu Ghraib?
95. Also see: Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1990);
96. John Tagg, 'Evidence, Truth and Order: A Means of Surveillance', in Visual Culture: The Reader, eds Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1999);
97. W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005);
98. John Taylor, Body Horror: Photojournalism, Catastrophe and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).
99. David Campbell and Michael Dillon, eds, The Political Subject of Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 162.
100. Also see Michael J. Shapiro, 'Warring Bodies and Bodies Politic', in Challenging Boundaries, eds Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward Alker (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1996), 455, for an examination of the 'symbolic connections between individual bodies and the body politic as represented by the state' in the context of modern warfare.
101. Shapiro is concerned with the drive for coherence and unity because he (ibid., 478) suspects that these demands frame depictions of 'external dangers and over determine belligerence'.
102. Andreja Zevnik, 'Sovereign-less Subject and the Possibility of Resistance', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 1 (2009): 83-106;
103. Jenny Edkins and Veronique Pin-Fat, 'Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 1 (2005): 1-25;
104. Jabri, 'Restyling the Subject of Responsibility in International Relations', 591-611;
105. Michael J. Shapiro, 'The Sublime Today: Re-partitioning the Global Sensible', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006): 657-81;
106. Cynthia Weber, 'An Aesthetic of Fear: The 7/7 London Bombings, the Sublime and Werenotafraid.com', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34, no. 3 (2006): 683-710;
107. David Howarth, 'Space, Subjectivity, and Politics', Alternatives Global, Local, Political 31, no. 2 (2006): 105-34.
108. Mark Salter, 'The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics', Alternatives, Global, Local, Political 31, no. 2 (2006): 168.
109. Charlotte Epstein, 'Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders', International Political Sociology 1, no. 2 (2007): 163.
110. David Campbell, 'Why Fight: Humanitarianism, Principles, and Poststructuralism', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 27, no. 3 (1998): 497-521, 520.
111. Ibid., 521.
112. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 151-2.
113. Campbell, 'Why Fight', 514.
114. Ibid., 520.
115. Diane Enns, 'Bare Life and the Occupied Body', Theory & Event 7, no. 3 (2004): 17.
116. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06192009/watch.html for an interview with Leymah Gbowee regarding the women's peace initiative in Liberia.
117. Butler, Undoing Gender, 217.
118. Johanna Oksala, 'Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question', Hypatia 19, no. 4 (2004): 99-122, 107, 111.
119. Ibid., 113.
120. Butler, 'Contingent Foundations', 3-21.
121. Yet other feminists like Moira Gatens, 'Power, Bodies and Difference', in Feminist Theory and the Body, eds Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999), 230, draw upon Foucault and advocate that we view the body as both a target and vehicle of discourses and practices;
122. Susan Bordo, 'Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body', in Price and Shildrick, Feminist Theory and the Body, op. cit., 255, credits Foucault with two key insights, one which provides us with an 'understanding of the "grip" of systemic power on the body [coupled with an] appreciation for the creative "powers" of bodies to resist that grip';
123. Cressida Heyes, 'Foucault Goes to Weight Watchers', Hypatia 21, no. 2 (2006): 131, takes Foucault to Weight Watchers in order to demonstrate 'that normalizing disciplinary practices are also enabling of new skills and capacities'.
124. Judith Butler, 'Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions', The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 11 (1989): 607.
125. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 33.
126. Ibid., 148.
127. Judith Butler, 'Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault', in Feminism as Critique, eds Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 133.
128. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8yqVxuT-U. This is the link to the video clip of Victor Jara. The link to Oswaldo Guayasamin's 'Los Torturados' commemorating the death of Jara is http://art-for-a-change.com/blog/2009/09/guayasamin-rage-redemption.html
129. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), 115, discusses how the body serves as a stage for the performance of torture which enables the state to reproduce itself through the 'raw' material of the captive body.
130. Also see Renato Martinez, 'On the Semiotics of Torture: The Case of the Disappeared in Chile', in Reading the Social Body, eds Catherine Burroughs and Jeffrey Ehrenreich (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 87-108.
131. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 4.
132. Ibid., 13.
133. Ibid., 14.
134. Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, 'The Economy of Violence: Black Bodies and the Unspeakable Terror', in Feminist Theory and the Body, eds Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (New York: Routledge, 2000), 314.
135. Enns, 'Bare Life and the Occupied Body', 16, advocates that we begin with the bodies of the colonised such as Fanon, Memmi, Biko and Mandela as a way to trace the interplay between resistance and power. But she cautions that 'there is little hope for resistance if it is instantly recuperated into the sovereign power it contests'.
136. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1418581.html?storylink=mirelated (accessed on 23 January 2010).
137. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1418581.html?storylink=mirelated (accessed on 23 January 2010).
138. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/guantanamo/story/1418581.html?storylink=mirelated (accessed on 23 January 2010).
139. Ladelle McWhorter, 'Culture or Nature? The Function of the Term "Body" in the Work of Michel Foucault', The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 11 (1989): 608-14, 613.