Periscope articles and content
I have the feeling that a lot is going on behind the scenes. Day three featured a mix of panels with expert testimony and reports by Working Groups. I’ll talk first about the latter. I attended presentations for the working … Continue reading “Analysis of Day 3”
Oscar Olivera (OO) is a trade unionist and leader of the famous water wars which unfolded in Cochabamba in 2000 following the privatization of the city’s water supply. The water wars, which involved shutting down Cochabamba for six months, were … Continue reading “The Cochabamba Water Wars: An Interview with Oscar Olivera”
I should add that there is, of course, lots and lots of media coverage here. Not enough international though. But Democracy Now!, beating mainstream coverage by a mile as usual, is covering the events. Check out their coverage here. It’s … Continue reading “Not Enough Coverage”
Before everything else, the Cochabamba conference was remarkable for bringing together a large group of radical activists from all around the world. The social connections and sense of possibility that resulted from the exchanges that unfolded in this setting … Continue reading “Cochabamba and Beyond”
Hannah Arendt noted in 1969 that Georges Sorel’s remark in 1906 — that “the problems of violence still remain very obscure” remained true. An additional half-century has elapsed since Sorel made his observation, but his remark remains true. The … Continue reading “Introduction”
My remarks are structured around a consideration of four images.These images will, I hope, enable us to confront the question of violence, of a specific kind of violence, by bringing it to us in its (almost) immediate actuality, in … Continue reading “Forging Life into a Weapon”
In my work, I have defended a nonviolent ethic through Derrida and Levinas, which begins with the commandment, “thou shall not kill.” But this ethic certainly does not end there. My book The Philosophy of the Limit gives us … Continue reading “Politics of Grieving”
My ethnographic work in Northern Ireland and South Africa and on the current war on terror has been an engagement with forms of life, communities, subjects, and silenced sovereignties, navigating, drowning, surviving, and dying, within ecotonesof informalized state violence. … Continue reading “The Becoming Non-State of the State”
If you work on Latin America then you know that there is a field of study there called “violentology,” and there are specialists whom you call violentólogos, particularly in Colombia, where the question of violence has become a kind … Continue reading “Violence and Language”
Michel Foucault observed that, although the head of the king had been cut off, in political theory the king remained in his place.For Foucault, theory did not appear able to think about politics without an organizing center, although in … Continue reading “Afterword”
With so much affect percolating in the public discourse around the recent spate of gay teen suicides, what can an academic teach-in offer vis-à-vis these events? This Periscope dossier features an eclectic collection of essays, blogs, position papers, and op-eds from a multidisciplinary group of scholars zeroing in on a spectrum of issues, from gay rage and new technologies of sexuality to anti-bullying legislation. It organizes a kind of online teach-in, a portal to the multiple conversations and action happening around the country about gay teen suicide.
There are many things lost in the naming of a death as a “gay youth suicide.” I want to focus on two aspects of this naming: one, what is contained in the category of sexuality and two, what … Continue reading “Ecologies of Sex, Sensation, and Slow Death”
I have been teaching a lecture class on “Religion, Sexuality, and American Public Life” at New York University since 2004. I love teaching this class. The students (the class size is usually capped at 60) are uniformly engaged and … Continue reading “Making It Better in the Classroom: Pedagogical Reflections”
At bullybloggers, the blogging site that Lisa Duggan, Jose Munoz and Tavia Nyong’o and I sometimes call our internet home, we believe in bullies. No, not those kinds of bullies, not Tennessee Williams’s no-necked monsters, the brutish boys who … Continue reading “It Gets Worse…”
Suicide is an act of violence. Most of the recent spate of suicides committed by young gay men have been attributed to homophobic bullying. But killing oneself is not necessarily an act of fear and escape. The one who … Continue reading “Gay Rage”
