Notes for 8 March 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Administrative things
  • Remember that things are coming due.
  • You've all been a great group to work with. Yes, all of you, including you, [insert your name here].
  • This has been much like a grad student class.Remember the grad student proverb: Done is better than good.
  • Questions? Issues? Complaints? How can I help you?
  • (At end of class:) Evals!
• Mbembé's Necropolitics
  • Presentation by Rose Spanbock
• Other questions? Difficulties? Problems? Objections?
  • This is a particularly dense text ...
  • Some particularly difficult places, perhaps
    • what the good life is all about (13)
    • Within the Hegelian paradigm, human death is essentially voluntary (14)
    • Bataille's excess (15–16)
    • The primacy of race (over class, etc.) (17&ndash18)
    • As a political category, “the people” is gradually displaced from concrete reality to rhetorical figure. (19)
    • Slavery as laboratory of biopolitics (21–23)
    • Colonialism as laboratory of biopolitics (24–25)
    • Late colonialism as praxis of biopolitics (25–30)
    • Contemporary wars as praxis of biopolitics (30–35)
    • technē and death (35–36)
    • suicide and murder, death and freedom (36–39)
• Other questions:
  • What other boundaries are effaced by contemporary changes in the politics of sovereignty?
    • See conclusion for an overview ...
  • Connections with Beloved:
    • slave's life, slave's value (21)
    • the slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury (21)
    • mere tool and instrument of production (22)
    • Arendt: when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. (qtd. on 24)