Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

University of Massachusetts, Boston, Political Science, Faculty Member

Followers

171

Following

107

Co-authors

Public Views

I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Recently, he was the Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory at the University of Bologna/Duke University (2018-2020), and the Karl Lowenstein Fellow at Amherst College (2014). His research seeks to rethink the relationship between politics and aesthetics in relation to gender-differentiated colonial logics of capitalist accumulation. While focused on that question, he has reimagined the relationship between ancient and contemporary political theory, via the prisms of decolonial theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, settler colonial critique and poststructuralism. His current book manuscript, Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press 2021), criticizes the theoretical reception of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, in democratic theory, queer and feminist theory, the theory of biopolitics, and the theory of deconstruction, by foregrounding the settler colonial logics of capitalist accumulation by which subject-positions are aesthetically distributed in the play and its theoretical reception. Currently, he is working on two additional research projects: White Masochism (under revision) and The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (under contract with Rowman & Littlefield). His research has also been published in Settler Colonial Studies, Theoria, Theory & Event, Representation, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia, among others.
Address: https://works.bepress.com/andres_fabian_henao_castro/
https://www.umb.edu/academics/cla/faculty/andres_fabian_henao_castro
http://palabrasalmargen.com/author/henao-andres-f/

less

InterestsView All (12)

Uploads

Talks by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Virtual Colloquium on Antigone

The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University invites you to a Colloquium on Ant... more The John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University invites you to a Colloquium on Antigone’s Worldings, between Thursday October 14th and Friday November 5th of 2021. We are bringing together writers and scholars who can help us to rethink questions of reception, adaptation, and criticism of Sophocles’ ancient tragedy, in times in which people’s grief and mourning are, yet again, in contradiction with the policing agendas of sovereign powers all over the world. We are particularly concerned with how colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism modify interpretations of the tragedy in different parts of the world, and we hope to explore the play’s inter-disciplinary ventures, as we hear from writers, philosophers, comparative literature scholars, and political theorists.

Download

Books by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

AFHC Antigone in the Americas (Excerpt from the Introduction)

Slaves, Metics, Citizens For us, there is no going back to the original text of Antigone, no retu... more Slaves, Metics, Citizens For us, there is no going back to the original text of Antigone, no return to a pure Sophoclean drama that would be shorn of all the translations and adaptations it has inspired. There is no returning to a Greek text somehow outside the political genealogy of its multiple translators. There is no pre-political text named Antigone. There are only the multiple resonances, between Sophocles and Heaney, between Heaney's Sophocles and McDonald's Sophocles, between McDonald's Sophocles and Fugard's Sophocles, and so on, ad infinitum.-Tina Chanter, "Antigone's Political Legacies: Abjection in Defiance of Mourning" The Ancient Drama of Political Membership: Slavery, Metoikia, and Citizenship in Sophocles's Antigone Sophocles's Antigone (441 BCE), which narrates the story of the title character, is both globally the most frequently performed classical tragedy in contemporary theaters and a foundational text for political theory. 1 Antigone is the oldest daughter of Oedipus, the previous sovereign of Thebes, well known for having committed parricide and incest after solving the riddle of the Sphinx. Her brother Polyneices, having been ostracized by their other brother Eteocles, who was unwilling to share the throne, sought to destroy and enslave the city. Polyneices and Eteocles kill each other in battle, but Creon, their uncle and the new sovereign of Thebes, grants proper burial only to Eteocles, who fought on behalf of the city. Creon decides to keep 1

Download

Articles by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

The Dialectical Image of White Masochism and the Fugitive Spectator

Modern Drama, 2023

Based on a close reading of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2018), in this article I argue... more Based on a close reading of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card (2018), in this article I argue that Rankine offers a political view of the theatre as capable of producing a dialectical image of white masochism in service of a critique of the neoliberal present. Drawing from Walter Benjamin’s theory of dialectical images, I further contend that Rankine’s dialectical image intervenes in helpful ways in the famous debate between Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten regarding how to represent the scene of racial/sexual subjection. In that debate, Hartman decides not to focus on the “intolerable image” that spectacularizes Black suffering to defamiliarize the terror of slavery, concentrating instead on the terror of the mundane. Moten questions that move and turns back to that image in order to unpack a different kind of agency he identifies as the resistance of the object. Rankine’s theatre succeeds, I claim, in rendering both mundane and schocking violence visible without replicating it, while also foregrounding the otherwise compromised and often erased agency of the enslaved. In doing this, I conclude, Rankine’s theatre offers us a fugitive rather than emancipated spectator. Here I question the limits of Jacques Rancière’s theory of the emancipated spectator to address the politics of the theatre, when one understands policing not as an abstract logic of power but as a historically changing technology of racial/sexual subjection

Download

From a Euromodern Biopolitical Antigone to Postmodern Necropolitical Antigones in

Philosophy and Global Affairs , 2023

In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone's adaptations that contrasts Sophocle... more In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone's adaptations that contrasts Sophocles' classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh's Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe's postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I trace back to the settler colonial logic of elimination whereby settlers claim nativity to the territory by means of erasing its prior inhabitants.

Download

Necropolitics

Political Concepts, 2023

Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" (2003) represents death's entrance into the conceptual field of ... more Achille Mbembe's "Necropolitics" (2003) represents death's entrance into the conceptual field of political science. 1 Since Socrates defined philosophy as the art of dying in order to qualify the nature of being human in the Phaedo, death had been under philosophy's conceptual domain in the Western tradition. 2 Other disciplines, however, had already started to think about death differently. Psychoanalysis did, for instance, when Sigmund Freud subverted his own theory of the libido by introducing the concept of the death-drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920); anthropology did too, when Johannes Fabian challenged the field claiming that death had "ceased to be a problem of anthropological inquiry." 3 So did sociology, when Orlando Patterson conceptualized modern slavery as a form of social death. 4 But death had-when not subordinated to the concept of war (as in Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, etc.)-escaped the conceptual field of political science until Mbembe. Mbembe writes "Necropolitics" under a double motivation. On the one hand, he does that to disrupt the ethical turn of critical theory toward ideal norms, under the influence of Jürgen Habermas. Here, Mbembe follows Paul Gilroy's critique, who shows communicative reason to have been shaped by the "anti-discursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power" characteristic of plantation slavery and colonization. 5 On the other hand, Mbembe introduces necropolitics to expand on Michel Foucault's critique of power, as an alternative path for critical theory. Foucault identified a historical change in Western modernity's technologies of power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when state power took life, rather than death-the sovereign right to killas its main object. Having already distinguished disciplinary from sovereign power, Foucault named this technology "biopolitics" and qualified it as invested in the government/administration of the life of the population. 6 Biopolitics, however, has a kind of double origin in Foucault's work. The same year the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976) was published, Foucault delivered his yearly Lectures at the Collège de France on the

Download

The Racial Contract of White Masochism

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2023

In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze's "Coldness and Cruelty" (1967), his introduction of Le... more In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze's "Coldness and Cruelty" (1967), his introduction of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs (1870). Having rightly emphasized the contract as the most important political aspect of masochism, and precisely the feature that psychoanalysis, as a theory of sexuality, could not account for, I argue that Deleuze nonetheless fails to confront the racial contract that renders this masochism white. By failing to confront the racial contract that informs not only the social contract but also the sociality implicit in the masochistic contract, Deleuze idealizes masochism. Drawing from queer of color critique, and especially from the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, I show the ways in which anti-Blackness supplements the masochistic contract in the effort of the sexual parties to reach for that modality of desire that approximates death. Notwithstanding Deleuze's powerful critique of the complementariness that psychoanalysis wrongly establishes between sadism and masochism, I conclude this article by showing how the racial contract makes it possible for sado-masochism to become complementary in this case.

Download

Ontological Captivity

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2021

Departing from where Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Martin Heidegger's gender-neutral Dasein... more Departing from where Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of Martin Heidegger's gender-neutral Dasein left off, in this article I argue for "ontological captivity" as a critical analytic that can help us to question Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, I argue for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois's analysis of the "color line" to Calvin Warren's analytic of "onticide," from Lewis Gordon's "antiblackness" to Nelson Maldonado-Torres's "coloniality of being," and from Hortense Spillers's "being for the

Download

Towards a Black Radical Critique of Natality: Beyond Hannah Arendt’s Biopolitics

Critical Philosophy of Race, 2022

In this article I criticize Hannah Arendt's concept of natality as unable to confront the ways in... more In this article I criticize Hannah Arendt's concept of natality as unable to confront the ways in which racial capitalism links the biopolitical cultivation of natality to the necropolitical natal alienation that is structural to modern slavery. I base this argument in an understanding of social death as the production of racial capitalism, one that gives slavery an aftermath, post-abolition, which continues to dispossess Black and brown people of their capacity to begin something anew via their inclusion into juridical personhood. I conclude this article with an articulation of the political impossibility of Black and brown people to begin something anew under a polis that remains structured by racial capitalism in Ralph Ellison's phenomenological description of the invisible man's misrecognized new beginnings with the Brotherhood.

Download

Settler Colonial Studies Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A political reinterpretation of Judith Butler's ethical turn

Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A political reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ethical turn, 2019

In this article I argue that Judith Butler’s move from Antigone’s Claim to Precarious Life is not... more In this article I argue that Judith Butler’s move from Antigone’s Claim
to Precarious Life is not a move away from politics and towards
ethics, but rather a refusal to separate ethics from politics when
confronting the politics of queerness in a different geo-political
context, that of settler colonialism. I thus criticize Bonnie Honig’s
interpretation of that move and argue, instead, that Butler’s
ethical supplement to politics is her way of addressing the
speechlessness that prima facie disavows the Palestinian claim to
equality by coding their mourning as an act of vengeance against
the colonial order. Having questioned Honig’s oversight of the
difference in the subject positionality of Butler’s move, I then
show that Butler’s ethical-political frame of grievability functions
as a theoretical performance of the kind of sororal conspiracy that
Honig in fact offers as a more suitable model of democratic action.

Download

Queering Lucrezia's Virtú A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Radical Machiavelli

Theoria, 2019

This article argues for a feminist reinterpretation of the 'radi-cal Machiavelli' tradition which... more This article argues for a feminist reinterpretation of the 'radi-cal Machiavelli' tradition which pushes Machiavelli's performative theory of power towards emancipation. I base my argument on a reread-ing of Niccolò Machiavelli's Mandragola, whose historical use of the mandrake legend, I claim, symptomatizes historically gendered forms of labour expropriation characteristic of early modern capitalism. Against the background of that historical contextualisation, I then argue against James Martel's interpretation of Machiavelli's theory of open secrets, as one that remains unable to extend to Lucrezia the democratic insights that he identifies in Callimaco and Ligurio's textual conspiracies. Dia-lectically relocating the political heroism of this play in Lucrezia's performance, I conclude, Machiavelli's comedy becomes nevertheless useful for a subaltern theory of democratic action.

Download

Reception of the Antigone

by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro and Melissa Mueller

Reception of the Antigone, 2012

Download

Nietzsche and Haiti: The Post-Colonial Rebirth of Tragedy

I propose the constellation “Nietzsche and Haiti” for a decolonial reinterpretation of the Haitia... more I propose the constellation “Nietzsche and Haiti” for a decolonial reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution as an emancipatory destiny. Inspired by Buck-Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti,” my refusal to sever Haiti from the history of western political theory turns this time towards Nietzsche. In Nietzsche’s genealogy I seek for a way of dramatizing history so that revolutionary events acquire a renewed vitality through the alternative modes of emplotting them. It is Nietzsche’s dramatization of history, in other words, what I consider most useful for a decolonial reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution. The post-colonial contradictions of modern freedom, I conclude, are dramatized via the post-colonial rebirth of tragedy, a la Nietzsche, in the Afro-Caribbean reinterpretation of the Haitian Revolution.
Key words: Nietzsche, Haitian Revolution, Post-colonial, Tragedy.

Download

Teaching to Trangress' Death Drive, or bell hooks as Educator

Placing desire in the pedagogical milieu, this article is about the revolutionary desire articula... more Placing desire in the pedagogical milieu, this article is about the revolutionary desire articulated in bell hooks' radical pedagogy. I trace the liberatory force of hooks' radical pedagogy back to her Teaching to Transgress (hooks 1994). More importantly, I reinterpret that teaching as the setting in motion of a death drive that orients critical thinking towards the destruction of the Symbolic order of our desires, influenced by the political interpretation of this psychoanalytical category in the queer theory of Lee Edelman (2004). Thus, I claim that Teaching to Transgress succeeds in destroying an affective attachment to domination by killing the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal super-ego injunction to enjoy life as such, that is, life unmitigated by additional adjectives that would complicate the universality of its reach. Teaching to Transgress enacts such a death drive by making us confront the relational dependency of the Symbolic order of " life " upon the " social death " of Real others in the alienated structure that organizes the exchangeability of our desires. The suffering involved in undoing that relation becomes the condition of possibility for an emancipated enjoyment and one that, as

Download

Can the Subaltern Smile? Oedipus Without Oedipus

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different m... more This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics.
Keywords: decolonial intellectual; dramaturgical reading; subaltern; Gayatri Spivak; Michel Foucault; Oedipus Tyrannos

Download

Slavery In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and the Militant Intellectual from the Global South

In this article I reinterpret Plato’s allegory of the cave as dramatizing democracy’s dependency ... more In this article I reinterpret Plato’s allegory of the cave as dramatizing democracy’s dependency on slave labor. Doing so, I argue that Plato allegorizes not the birth of the philosopher, as in the dominant readings of the allegory, but of the militant intellectual, one invested in the axiom of equality and the problem of emancipation. Equality, emancipation, intellectual militancy, and the meaning of Plato’s dramatic allegories are the main attributes of Alain Badiou’s and Jacques Rancière’s long investments in Plato’s Socratic plays, which explains why they are my main interlocutors in this article. However, in this article I argue that a decolonial interpretation of the allegory shows ways in which Rancière and Badiou’s interpretations of Plato ultimately undermine their own commitments to the axiom of equality by radicalizing the axiom in a different geopolitical location.

Download

The Crack in the Mask, the Wound in the Flesh: Political Representation as Symptom

This article criticizes Lawrence Hamilton’s disavowal of more radical political positions on the ... more This article criticizes Lawrence Hamilton’s disavowal of more radical political positions on the basis of their ‘unrealistic assumptions,’ by putting his concept of ‘real modern freedom’ in conversation with a Lacanian notion of the Real, yet one that invests that Real with the historically differentiated modes of concrete racialized and gendered labor that capitalism obscures in order to create value. Drawing from critical race theory I argue against the reformist impulse that seeks to improve the representational reach of liberal masks. Instead, my understanding of political representation argues for the crack in the mask as the symptom that reminds us of the Real, the irreducible antagonism at the heart of the social.
Key Words: Political Representation, Real, Symptom, Mask, Flesh.

Download

Who Says, " I'm undocumented " ? Theatrical Strategies in the Politics of Undocumented Immigration

This article offers a political interpretation of the theatrical strategies employed by undocumen... more This article offers a political interpretation of the theatrical strategies employed by undocumented immigrants to legitimize their existence in the city. Linking performative and de-colonial theory, it argues that the “I’m undocumented” protests constitute a case of mimetic insubordination, in which the injurious name, “undocumented” is re-appropriated in order to trouble who has a right to be and to speak in the city.

Download

Antigone Claimed: " I Am a Stranger! " Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political pos... more This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of tex-tual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of

Download

Book Chapters by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Whose Tempest? Performance Philosophy and/as Decolonial Cacophony

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, 2020

Download

Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe and La Llorona

The Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, 2024

Medea, the most irredeemable mother of them all (Jacqueline Rose) Decolonization is not a metapho... more Medea, the most irredeemable mother of them all (Jacqueline Rose) Decolonization is not a metaphor (Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang) 1 What Does it Mean to Decolonially Ruminate on a Classic? There are two predominant understandings of decolonial theory. First, one that identifies decolonial theory with the series of influential texts produced by the Coloniality/Modernity Working Group, after their meetings at SUNY-Binghamton during 1999 and 2000. Inspired by Aníbal Quijano's concept of "the coloniality of power," and Maria Lugones' feminist reworking of that concept in what she called the "modern/colonial gender system," this group took as its object of study not colonialism per se but the "long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations" (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 243). 2 Decolonial theory, one could argue, was this Group's creative response to the challenges posed by Anne McClintock to the pitfalls of "postcolonialism," which paradoxically recentered European time as proper history while seeking to decenter it (everything else being either pre-or post-) and rendered secondary colonial relations that could by no means be understood as "post." As McClintock argues, for indigenous peoples in the US, and Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories, among other cases, "there might be nothing 'post' about colonialism at all" (McClintock 1992: 88). "De," rather than "post," offered a more suitable approach to confront colonialism's striated yet enduring power relations. The second understanding of decolonial theory, the one that I embrace here, thinks of this field as a much broader space of inquiry in which various theoretical frameworks converge to critique colonial capitalism from unique perspectives: postcolonial theory, indigenous criticism, Black feminist intersectionality, queer of color critique, settler colonial critique, the Black radical tradition, Afropessimism, Chicanx/Latinx studies, and decolonial theory itself,

Download

Virtual Colloquium on Antigone

Download

AFHC Antigone in the Americas (Excerpt from the Introduction)

Download

The Dialectical Image of White Masochism and the Fugitive Spectator

Modern Drama, 2023

Download

From a Euromodern Biopolitical Antigone to Postmodern Necropolitical Antigones in

Philosophy and Global Affairs , 2023

Download

Necropolitics

Political Concepts, 2023

Download

The Racial Contract of White Masochism

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2023

Download

Ontological Captivity

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2021

Download

Towards a Black Radical Critique of Natality: Beyond Hannah Arendt’s Biopolitics

Critical Philosophy of Race, 2022

Download

Settler Colonial Studies Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A political reinterpretation of Judith Butler's ethical turn

Can the Palestinian Antigone Grieve? A political reinterpretation of Judith Butler’s ethical turn, 2019

Download

Queering Lucrezia's Virtú A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Radical Machiavelli

Theoria, 2019

Download

Reception of the Antigone

by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro and Melissa Mueller

Reception of the Antigone, 2012

Download

Nietzsche and Haiti: The Post-Colonial Rebirth of Tragedy

Download

Teaching to Trangress' Death Drive, or bell hooks as Educator

Download

Can the Subaltern Smile? Oedipus Without Oedipus

Download

Slavery In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and the Militant Intellectual from the Global South

Download

The Crack in the Mask, the Wound in the Flesh: Political Representation as Symptom

Download

Who Says, " I'm undocumented " ? Theatrical Strategies in the Politics of Undocumented Immigration

Download

Antigone Claimed: " I Am a Stranger! " Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger

Download

Whose Tempest? Performance Philosophy and/as Decolonial Cacophony

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, 2020

Download

Decolonial Ruminations on a Classic: Medea, Sethe and La Llorona

The Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy, 2024

Download

"Hic Rhodus, Hic Salta!" Postcolonial Remains and the Politics of the Anthropo-ob(S)cene (2019, Ch4)

by Henrik Ernstson and Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Urban Political Ecology in the Anthropo-obscene: Interruptions and Possibilities, edited by Henrik Ernstson and Erik Swyngedouw, 2019

We use postcolonial theory to interrogate the discourse of “the Anthropocene” and its depoliticiz... more We use postcolonial theory to interrogate the discourse of “the Anthropocene” and its depoliticizing effects. It is maintained that the way that “the Anthropocene” discourse has been articulated within parts of postcolonial theory is deeply problematic and risks making the political itself categorically unthinkable and ontologically evacuated. In an attempt to disrupt this deadlock, we combine post-foundational and postcolonial theory to propose three performative interruptions against conditions of exclusion—the politics of time, the politics of translation, and the politics of the stage. These build a platform to re-launch the political performativity of subaltern experiences in the here and now.

Download

Between Nothingness and Infinity

Download

AFHC From the Bio to the Necro 2015

Download

ACLA 2018 CFP: Theatricality and the Political: Imagining New Theoretical Prolegomena

by Ryan Anthony Hatch and Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

ACLA, 2018

How might we newly theorize the relation, or non-relation, between theatricality and politics? Th... more How might we newly theorize the relation, or non-relation, between theatricality and politics? This panel invites scholars of political theory, theatre, performance, comparative literature, philosophy, aesthetics, and the intersections of these fields to make theoretical interventions that advance our understanding of this pairing, and so question the familiar assumptions that have grown up around it. We are less interested in “empirical” instances of “the politics of theatricality” or “the theatricality of politics” than in the conceptual conditions that make such a relation thinkable in the first place.

We posit that theatricality, ultimately a mode of relation, precedes and exceeds the theatrical medium as such, and involves (as Michael Fried has argued) a blurring of boundaries between spectator and actor, subject and object. We likewise assert that “politics” names a relational mode that can contest “property” and “the proper” alike, interrupting regimes of perceptibility that render something sensible on the condition that something else is not (as Jacques Rancière has claimed). We wish to ask: as modes of relation, at what foundational levels do the theatrical and the political either intersect or fail to intersect? And which theoretical orientation(s) afford(s) us the most rigorous and productive account of this (non)encounter, and why?

Participants will read and discuss a shared set of texts prior to the conference. Papers topics might examine questions regarding: understudied genres or thinkers; counter-hegemony, subaltern positionality, and social death; senses other than the verbal and optical; non-presence, and post-dramatic poetics, among others.

Download

Review of Cristina Pérez Díaz’s Antígona: A Bilingual Edition with Critical Essays

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2023

Download

AFHC Oedipus at the Border Public Books

Download

Review of Cull, Laura and Alice Lagaay (eds.). Encounters in Performance Philosophy and Chow, Broderick and Alex Mangold (eds). Žižek and Performance.

A new discipline has emerged from the encounteras the title of Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay's coll... more A new discipline has emerged from the encounteras the title of Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay's collection suggestsbetween philosophy and performance, two disciplines with a contentious history dating back to Plato's 'ancient quarrel' between philosophers and thespians in the Republic. That "performance philosophy" includes neither conjunction nor hyphen to secure the link between these disciplines leaves their relationship undetermined, according to Laura Cull (chapter 1). It is this gap between them that offers a stage for the new discipline to perform its ur-scene. We should "mind the gap" (20), says Martin Puchner (chapter 3), aware of the institutional and disciplinary differences between philosophy and theater as two distinctive traditions. Cull argues for an alternative articulation, that of performance as philosophy, not because she denies the differences between the two disciplines but because a more immanent look at their opposition reveals the two "as the differential tendency of a single (differential) process" (22). Aware of the persistent hierarchy between modes of knowledge Cull concedes to Puchner that we should "mind the gap" (33) at the institutional level, but performance as philosophy seeks equality where the philosophy of performance reproduces hierarchy: by understanding performance "as doing its own kind of philosophical work" (24). The as that Cull offers as an alternative grammar to Puchner's "mind the gap," however, does not reduce performance to philosophy, in part because, as she rightly argues, philosophy itself is irreducible to forms of self-sameness. To put it differently, rather than leaving the two disciplines stable in order to investigate their encounter, we should approach the encounter itself as performative in that it changes both performancewhich is no longer conceived as a mere illustration of philosophical ideas but as partaking in the experience of thoughtand philosophy, where Cull invokes François Laruelle's idea of "non-philosophy" (29) to argue for an anti-objectifying form of doing philosophy that refuses the 'of,' philosophy's tendency to place itself outside the object that it examines. Such an immanent gesture concludes with a

Download

Review of Antigone in Postmodern Criticism

Download

Review of Bonnie Honig Antigone Interrupted

Download

The Militant Intellect

From a Euromodern Biopolitical Antigone to Postmodern Necropolitical Antigones in Latin America

Philosophy and Global Affairs

In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocle... more In this article, I offer a preposterous history of Antigone’s adaptations that contrasts Sophocles’ classical tragedy with Jean Anouilh’s Euromodern melodrama and Ariel Dorfman, Patricia Nieto, and Sara Uribe’s postmodern Antigones in Latin America. I offer that history to understand a significant change in sovereign power when the state takes hold of the socially dead rather than living body. Here, I argue, we need to move from the theory of biopolitics to the theory of necropolitics to further explain the role that slavery and its aftermath play in the radicalization of state violence under contemporary neoliberalism. I thus contrast the ancient violence inflicted in the publicly desecrated corpse of Polyneices with the Euromodern violence that misidentifies Polyneices and the postmodern violence that instead disappears not one but many Polyneices. This explains why enforced disappearances figure so prominently among postmodern Latin American Antigones, a form of violence that I t...

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Multitude

Paramilitarismo, Desmovilización y Reinserción. La Ley de Justicia y Paz y sus implicaciones en la Cultura Política, la Ciudadanía y la Democracia en Colombia

“Gilles Deleuze y la fórmula queer de Bartleby: La destitución de Petro, el aborto y la locura de Dios” (Gilles Deleuze and Bartleby’s queer formula: On the Impeachment of Petro, Abortion and God’s Madness)

$Research paper thumbnail of “ESCÁNDALO PÚBLICO”: LA DESTITUCIÓN DE MIGUEL ÁNGEL BELTRÁN, LAS ÚLTIMAS INVESTIGACIONES DE MICHEL FOUCAULT Y LA AUTONOMÍA UNIVERSITARIA ( Public Scandal : The Dismissal of Miguel Angel Beltrán, Michel Foucault\u27s Final Lectures and the Principle of Autonomous University)$

“ESCÁNDALO PÚBLICO”: LA DESTITUCIÓN DE MIGUEL ÁNGEL BELTRÁN, LAS ÚLTIMAS INVESTIGACIONES DE MICHEL FOUCAULT Y LA AUTONOMÍA UNIVERSITARIA ( Public Scandal : The Dismissal of Miguel Angel Beltrán, Michel Foucault\u27s Final Lectures and the Principle of Autonomous University)

En este artículo he querido repensar la destitución del profesor Miguel Ángel Beltrán como consti... more En este artículo he querido repensar la destitución del profesor Miguel Ángel Beltrán como constituyente de un evento en el que se reconfiguran las relaciones entre el poder y el saber en Colombia; un evento que manifiesta una doble transformación: de un lado, un cambio en el riesgo que supone el conflicto entre el discurso de la verdad y el ejercicio del poder y, de otro lado, una reconfiguración del actor social que produce la partición ya no solo ética sino también política de este mundo en dos

The Political Uses of Memory

La tragedia de la Revolución Haitiana (The Tragedy of the Haitian Revolution)

La tesis de este artículo sugiere la tragedia como el género dramático que expresa y problematiza... more La tesis de este artículo sugiere la tragedia como el género dramático que expresa y problematiza la brecha existente entre la liberación y la libertad, la brecha que caracteriza la eticidad de la post-colonialidad haitiana. Una doble ausencia estructura dicha brecha en el horizonte de la libertad, una que marca la primera afirmación de la libertad ilegible en la segunda o, en otras palabras, una que cuestiona la imposibilidad de traducir la liberación en la libertad de acuerdo a los términos constitutivos de una modernidad incapaz de confrontar la historia de su colonialidad

La tortura como dispositivo necropolítico de división racial y la abolición de la tortura como estrategia de guerra imperialista

“Una oda para las FARC-EP: El legado de Esquilo” (An ode to the FARC-EP: The Legacy of Aeschylus)

LOIS LANE Y SUPERMAN: EL PERIODISMO Y LA DEMOCRACIA CONTRA EL NEOLIBERALISMO (Lois Lane and Superman: Journalism and Democracy Against Neoliberalism)

En este artículo propongo una interpretación política del comic de Superman, que destaca el valor... more En este artículo propongo una interpretación política del comic de Superman, que destaca el valor democrático de la actividad periodística contra la hegemónica alianza neoliberal entre la industria militar y el capital transnacional. Mi interpretación parte de re-significar el vínculo existente entre Superman y Lois Lane, a partir de una traducción política del heroísmo en el universo igualitario de lo público

De la reciprocidad del amor queer a la densidad del amor quare: la objeción de Aristófanes y la severidad del afro-pesimismo

En el rechazo contra el amor queer, que corta al ser para establecer una jerarquía hetero-normati... more En el rechazo contra el amor queer, que corta al ser para establecer una jerarquía hetero-normativa entre el erastes y el eromenos, resuena una doble cortadura, todavía más fundamental, contra el amor denso, históricamente reducido por el sistema racista de la supremacía blanca a la condición del animal. Se trata no del amor queer sino del amor quare, como bien lo dice Patrick Johnson (2005), al rehusarse a escindir la diferencia racial en la diferencia sexual, un amor denso que no produce a un hijo, ni una idea, sino la revolucionaria destrucción de este mundo anti-negro

LA NECROPOLÍTICA Y EL “MAL MENOR”: HACIA UNA NUEVA ECONOMÍA DEL PODER DESPUÉS DE GAZA (Necropolitics and the lesser evil : Towards a new economy of power after Gaza)

La matanza protagonizada por Israel en Gaza pone de presente que la necropolítica y el “mal menor... more La matanza protagonizada por Israel en Gaza pone de presente que la necropolítica y el “mal menor” continúan siendo los dos idiomas centrales para describir las formas más extremas de violencia neocolonial actual. Esta nueva economía del poder acentúa las formas estatales del “dejar morir”, la creación de condiciones que garantizan la “muerte lenta” del “otro”, el exterminio de los palestinos mediante el racionamiento mortal de sus condiciones de vida y la anexión ilegal de sus territorios por parte del Estado de Israel. En esta nueva economía del poder la crítica y el conflicto aparecen ya anticipados en el cálculo de la destrucción (bajo el argumento del “mal menor”), una dinámica que alterna entre la muerte intensa del genocidio y la muerte lenta de la ocupación

“Antígona y los ‘falsos positivos’” (Antigone and the “False Positives”)

“La economía política de la pregunta, o una poliética del periodismo: Reseña del libro Tzompaxtle. La fuga de un guerrillero, escrito por John Gibler” (The Political Economy of the Question, or Poliethical Journalism: A Review of John Gibler’s Tzompaxtle. La fuga de un guerrillero)

“Kafka, la excepcionalidad y el ‘fuero militar’” (Kafka, Exceptionality and “Military Privileges”)

Modernity and “Whiteness”

Philosophy and Global Affairs

¿ Tiene El Problema De La Verdad Alguna Relación Con La Democracia?

saga.unal.edu.co

Page 1. saga - revista de estudiantes de filosofía ¿TIENE EL PROBLEMA DE LA VERDAD ALGUNA RELACIÓ... more

El Dieciocho Brumario de Donald Trump

En este artículo argumento que la elección de Donald Trump es una farsa histórica en el sentido p... more En este artículo argumento que la elección de Donald Trump es una farsa histórica en el sentido político que Marx le atribuye a dicho término, en donde la farsa es una herramienta crítica para entender la profunda desconexión existente entre la radicalización del movimiento social de base y su representación política en las instituciones del Estado

“Wittgenstein, el mito de Filomela y las bordadoras de Mampuján” (Wittgenstein, Philomela’s Myth and the Weavers of Mampuján)

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Uploads

Talks by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Books by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Articles by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Book Chapters by Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Log In