Papers by Geoffrey Whitehall
SUNY Press eBooks, Jun 25, 2018
Relaciones internacionales, Oct 23, 2023
Resilience, Jan 2, 2015
ProMED is a moderated list-serve that was created in 1994 as an early warning system for newly em... more ProMED is a moderated list-serve that was created in 1994 as an early warning system for newly emerging infectious diseases. It operates parallel to, but in advance of, surveillance systems like those operated by the WHO and the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Whereas the WHO and CDC systems operate within the accepted frames of international politics (i.e. state sovereignty) and Science (verified and tested information), ProMED operates through a novel frame of Pre-emptive Global Biopolitics. Specifically, it targets all planetary life and politicises it as emergent life. ProMED creates this ontology through a novel epistemology organised around rumour and sufficiently credible information. The result is a hyperactive alert network that hints at a nascent biopolitical aesthetic which I call global triage.
Review of International Studies, Oct 28, 2022
Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, the... more Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive 'When They Fight Back' records incidences of when animals 'fought back'. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as 'conflicts'. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires 'for' the Animal. As such, the archive stages a Clausewitzian case of escalation from resistances into total war. In open hostility towards a perceived enemy, animals fight backand because they fight back, humanism has built its own form of resistance (i.e., politics, ethics, aesthetics, biopolitics, international relations, etc.). I conclude that Human Being (as a form of resistance) must be surrendered if the war on life itself is to end.
Theory and Event, 2008
include critical international politics and contemporary cultural, social and political thought. ... more include critical international politics and contemporary cultural, social and political thought. His articles have appeared in Borderlands, Theory & Event and Millennium: Journal of International Studies. His current research focuses on aesthetics practices in Asia/Pacific politics and the antigenic shifts of sovereignty in the Avian Flu emergency.
Theory and Event, 2006
... of Tragedy, Apollonian and Dionysian forces are interwoven with each other in the pursuit ofa... more ... of Tragedy, Apollonian and Dionysian forces are interwoven with each other in the pursuit ofart. ... reorganized when the classical table of resemblance was radically disrupted by the event of the ... For Selma's musical horizon to survive, therefore, Selma had to accept her death by ...
Critical studies on security, Aug 1, 2013
In this article I argue that the biopolitical aesthetic can be explored through various anxious t... more In this article I argue that the biopolitical aesthetic can be explored through various anxious tensions between politicization of life and the necessity of killing. I read five films (Gattaca, Children of Men, Valhalla Rising, Sin Nombre, and Essential Killing) in order to cultivate four exemplary tensions: one, Kill or be Killed; two, Kill to Live More; three, Live More to Kill; and finally, four, Kill and be Killed. I conclude by asking whether a post-biopolitical subject can emerge from within this final biopolitical tension whereby, instead of circulating life as freedom, it is killing that is now primarily circulated as life. I conclude with the post-biopolitical subject of indifference and its implications for approaching security beyond the anxieties of both geopolitical and biopolitical aesthetics.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Dec 1, 1999
Organization & Environment, Dec 1, 2011
Matthew Roth is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University. His dissertation, Magic Bean, c... more Matthew Roth is a PhD candidate in history at Rutgers University. His dissertation, Magic Bean, combines environmental and cultural history in tracing the career of the soybean in America. He explores its role both an icon of utopia (tofu) and dystopia (Soylent Green), but focuses on the pathways through which it traveled from one continent into the heart of another. He has also written about nature in Disney films, religion on television, and urban revitalization.
This dissertation challenges the failure of the contemporary political imagination. Effectively t... more This dissertation challenges the failure of the contemporary political imagination. Effectively to do politics today is to say I oppose. With this failure in mind, the dissertation explores what it can mean to affirm new horizons of political possibility by being attentive to political grammars. I ask what it means to exceed the political grammar of sovereignty and, by moving grammars of the political, affirm different verbs in its wake. In the wake of sovereignty, I explore the following types of questions: 1) how can what exceeds accepted structures of intelligibility be appreciated. 2) How can difference be politicized without reducing it to the logic of the same? 3) How is it possible to think about a politics of time? How is language, grammatically and rhetorically, a set of limits that holds people to singular identities and calibrates political action to predetermined positions? With these questions in mind, the general question being asked is: how can different linguistic practices open up competing political grammars? To this end, the dissertation pushes Gilles Deleuze beyond his inherited political grammar. Specifically, I amplify Deleuze's philosophy, which celebrates creating concepts above all else, into a moving politics. The dissertation demonstrates that Deleuze's emphasis on the concept neglects the verb "to create" which is always indebted to sovereignty's intellectual patrimony. For Deleuze to become political, other verbs are needed that do not reproduce sovereignty's political grammar. To aid developing different verbs, I dedicate a chapter to rewriting the Pacific Rim as a temporal Event in order to affirm the verb to exceed. In a chapter dedicated to reading the genre of Science Fiction, the verb to encounter is affirmed. Finally, in a chapter dedicated to the problem of Music appreciation, the verb to amplify is affirmed. Such affirmations offer a contribution to political and philosophical discussions about the crisis of the political. They push celebrating movement and change towards developing linguistic practices that embody movement and change.
Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2003
... The result is emphasized in Michael Shapito's statement that" the world in which (K... more ... The result is emphasized in Michael Shapito's statement that" the world in which (Kant) imagines the possibility of hos-pitality and peace is ... Against, yet within, its cliched ontological galaxy, Stanhip Troopers mobilizes the beyond to critique this dominant us/them natra-tive. ...
Review of International Studies
Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, the... more Since humanity is no longer the epistemological, ontological, or moral measure of all things, then (how) should international political theorists rethink animal politics? The archive ‘When They Fight Back’ records incidences of when animals ‘fought back’. It explores ways of conceptualising resistance and the implications of broadening the concept to include non-human actors via three findings: (1) Animal conflicts are everywhere and classifying them as revolt, reaction, and resistance is a creative exercise that encourages reflections about interspecies relations; (2) Most animal/human conflicts are not treated as ‘conflicts’. Instead, they are normalised within a biopolitical discourse that seeks to reduce resistance (characterised as Animal living) in order to promote living (characterised as Human resistance). (3) If excluded, animal resistance finds its way back into literatures via ethical-aesthetic figurations, traces, and desires ‘for’ the Animal. As such, the archive stages...
Deleuze & Fascism, 2013
No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, th... more No, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (29) The likelihood that someone in a western leadership position (i.e., George W. Bush, Barak Obama, Stephen Harper, Nicolas Sarkozy or Silvio Berlusconi) will be called a fascist today has increased (and perhaps for good reason). Underlying this trend is an abandonment of the exceptionalism of historical fascism and Nazism and either 1) the generalization of fascism as if it were a logic of politics or 2) the mobilization of fascism as an axiological marker. In this paper, I am uninterested in the second (but very likely) explanation and am more sympathetic to the possibility of the former. In fact, the desire to find another way to call someone or something bad, evil or alien seems to lie within the domain of an ever-proliferating logic o...
Much has been made recently about the use of fear and anxiety in emergencies to justify extraordi... more Much has been made recently about the use of fear and anxiety in emergencies to justify extraordinary pre-emptive actions. In this paper I explore how pre-emption feels as an after-affect. To this end, I argue that pre-emption has become a generalized grammar that rivals sovereignty. On the backs of fear and anxiety, pre-emption, the precautionary principle, the responsibility to protect etc… have become effective ways of managing a proliferating range of political problems. However, once pre-emption is realized, I argue the after-affect changes. Instead of fear, anxiety or even docility becoming the affective experience in the after-glow of pre-emption, I conclude the paper by arguing that hope sets in and rules the day. I explore this argument through the case of the Avian Flu Emergency.
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Papers by Geoffrey Whitehall