Foucault News

Ethics And The Problem Of Contingency, Ed. Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi, Fordham University Press (2021)
Foreword by Alain Badiou
Contributor(s): Étienne Balibar, Rosi Braidotti, Thomas Claviez, Drucilla Cornell, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Viola Marchi, Michael Naas, Cary Wolfe and Slavoj Žižek

Description
More than a purely philosophical problem, straddling the ambivalent terrain between necessity and impossibility, contingency has become the very horizon of everyday life. Often used as a synonym for the precariousness of working conditions under neoliberalism, for the unknown threats posed by terrorism, or for the uncertain future of the planet itself, contingency needs to be calculated and controlled in the name of the protection of life.

The overcoming of contingency is not only called upon to justify questionable mechanisms of political control; it serves as a central legitimating factor for Enlightenment itself. In this volume, nine major philosophers and theorists address a range of questions around contingency and moral philosophy. How can we rethink contingency in its creative aspects, outside the dominant rhetoric of risk and dangerous exposure? What is the status of contingency—as the unnecessary and law-defying—in or for ethics? What would an alternative “ethics of contingency”—one that does not simply attempt to sublate it out of existence—look like?

The volume tackles the problem contingency has always posed to both ethical theory and dialectics: that of difference itself, in the difficult mediation between the particular and the universal, same and other, the contingent singularity of the event and the necessary generality of the norms and laws.

From deconstruction to feminism to ecological thought, some of today’s most influential thinkers reshape many of the most debated concepts in moral philosophy: difference, agency, community, and life itself.

Contents
Foreword: Ethics and Contingency
Alain Badiou | ix

Introduction” Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics 2.0, Contingency, and Dialectics
Thomas Claviez and Viola Marchi | 1

I Throwing the Moral Dice: Ethics and/of Contingency

Three Notes on Contingency Today: Stress, Science—and Consolation from the Past?
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht | 33

Cosmopolitan Ethics as an Ethics of Contingency: Toward a Metonymic Community
Thomas Claviez | 45

Dumb Luck: Jacques Derrida and the Problem of Contingency
Michael Naas | 69

The Apophatic Community: Ethics, Contingency, Negation
Viola Marchi | 94

II Other Others: Ethics 2.0 and the Problem of the “Unsynthesizable”

Commonality versus Individuality: An Ethical Dilemma?
Étienne Balibar | 127

Critique, Power, and the Ethics of Affirmation
Rosi Braidotti | 145

The Promise of Practical Philosophy and Institutional Innovation
Drucilla Cornell | 162

Ethics of Circular Time
Slavoj Žižek | 182

The Road Not Taken: Environmental Ethics, Reciprocity, and Non-Negative Nonagency
Thomas Claviez | 206

“There Is No World”: Living Life in Deconstruction and Theoretical Biology
Cary Wolfe | 229

Vicente L. Rafael, The Sovereign Trickster. Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte, Duke University Press, 2022

In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism. He is less concerned with defining Duterte as a fascist, populist, warlord, and traditional politician than he is with examining what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. Locating Duterte’s rise within the context of counterinsurgency, neoliberalism, and the history of electoral violence, while drawing on Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics, Rafael outlines how Duterte weaponizes death to control life. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex account of Duterte’s regime and the social conditions that allow him to enjoy continued support.

Table of Contents
Introduction. Prismatic Histories 1
1. Electoral Dystopias 6

Sketches I: The Dream of Benevolent Dictatorship 18
2. Marcos, Duterte, and the Predicaments of Neoliberal Citizenship 21

Sketches II: Motherland and the Biopolitics of Reproductive Health 36
3. Duterte’s Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity 42

Sketches III: Duterte’s Hobbesian World 57
Duterte’s Sense of Time60
4. The Sovereign Trickster 63

Sketches IV: Comparing Extrajudicial Killing 87
Death Squads 89
On Duterte’s Matrix 94
Fecal Politics 98
5. Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War 103
Conclusion. Intimacy and the Autoimmune Community 131

Author

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington and author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation; The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines; White Love and Other Events in Filipino History; and Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, all also published by Duke University Press.