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Lecture

“Humanities on the Edge” presents Gregg Lambert

“To Have Done with the State of Exception”

Date:
Time:
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Sheldon Museum of Art
451 N 12th St
Lincoln NE 68588
Additional Info: SHEL
Contact:
Marco Abel / Denise, (402) 472-3191, mabel2@unl.edu
Gregg Lambert (Dean’s Professor of the Humanities, Syracuse University), will deliver a lecture entitled, “To Have Done with the State of Exception.” Lambert writes: “One of the most glaring contradictions from Deleuze’s early reading of Foucault’s concept of biopower is contained in the following observation: “When the diagram of power abandons the model of sovereignty in favor of a disciplinary model, when it becomes the ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio- politics’ of populations, controlling and administering life, it is indeed life that emerges as the new object of power. At that point law renounces that symbol of sovereign privilege, the right to put someone to death (the death penalty), but allows itself to produce all the more hecatombs and genocides … from that point on the death penalty tends to be abolished and holocausts grow ‘for the same reasons’, testifying all the more effectively to the death of man.” Perhaps, in the simplest of terms, it is around this point that the State renounces its sovereign privilege (or right to violence) only with respect to individual life, but tends to increasingly exclude entire populations from this protection according to new economic and juridical calculations that attempt to stem a growing quantitative imbalance in the total administration of life (public health, security, toxic contamination, birthrate, education, and social debt). It is also around this distinction between bios and Zoe, or political life and bare life, that the most intensive disagreements have subsequently occurred concerning the current and future role of sovereignty in contemporary dispositives of power. In my talk, I will return to Foucault’s original motives for by-passing a traditional theory of sovereignty in his analysis of biopower, motives which were subsequently misconstrued by Agamben and others. As a result, I will show how today we are working with a hybrid construction of power, that is, a body composed of micro-organizations and disciplinary techniques following Foucault, and the archaic head of sovereignty which is stuck back on top of the body like the head of a cabbage or a pumpkin following Hobbes. Consequently, I will ask whether our current theories of power and sovereignty need to be revised in order to account for the contradiction that while the modern security state may have taken life as its object, it has still not completely renounced its symbol of sovereign privilege either.”

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