Showing posts with label extra-territorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label extra-territorial. Show all posts

Sunday, 1 March 2015

Revanchism

Irredentism (from irredento for "unredeemed") is any political or popular movement intended to reclaim and reoccupy a lost homeland. As such irredentism tries to justify its territorial claims on the basis of (real or imagined) historic and/or ethnic affiliations.



Saturday, 10 August 2013

Giorgio Agamben - We Refugees


Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees." Symposium. 1995, No. 49(2), Summer, Pages: 114-119, English, Translation by Michael Rocke.

7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).
This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory, nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world

Wednesday, 26 June 2013

Saturday, 1 June 2013

sibyl

Children are particularly fond of haunting any site where things are being visibly worked on... "They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring, or carpentry" (One Way Street 449-50

When the urge to play overcomes an adult, this is not simply a regression to childhood. To be sure, play is always liberating. Surrounded by a world of giants, children use play to create a world appropriate to their size. But the adult, who finds himself threatened by the real world and can find no escape, removes its sting by playing with its image in reduced form. The desire to make light of an unbearable life has been a major factor in the growing interest in children’s games and children’s books since the end of the war.” (Benjamin “Old Toys” 100)

Sunday, 21 October 2012

About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you

"Sojourning" translates the Greek word paroikousa . Paroikein means "to sojourn, to live as an alien," as opposed to katoikein, "to have a permanent residence, to live as a citizen with full rights." The true residence of the Christian is heaven; the time of his earthly life is only a preparation for his permanent residence with Christ. Similarly, the Church will obtain its permanent residence only when the heavenly Jerusalem of which the Apocalypse speaks has come to pass. The same idea is felicitously expressed in Preface 1 for a Mass of the Dead in the Toman Missal; dissoluta terrestris huius incolatus domo aeterna in caelis habitatio comparatur [literally: "when the house in which they sojourn on earth has been destroyed, an eternal dwelling place awaits them in heaven"]... The paroikousa formula also occurs in the address of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.

The meaning of "to live as an alien" lies behind the use of paroikia [Latin: paroecia], "parish", to designate a group of Christians in a city or territory, with a religious leader at their head and with a place in which to gather for the worship of God. But the term parochus which the Code of Canon Law uses for "parish priest" has a different origin: the parochus is a "provider" one whose function is to distribute [Greek: parechein] spiritual goods to his flock.

The Eucharist of the Early Christians / Johanny / 1992



Paul reminds the Thessalonians, "About dates and times, my friends, we need not write to you, for you know perfectly well that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night. [1 Thess 5.1-2;262]. In this passage 'comes [erchetai]" is in the present tense, just as in the Gospels the messiah is called ho erchomenos, 'he who comes' - that is, he who never ceases to come. Having perfectly understood Paul's meaning, Walter Benjamin once wrote that 'every day, every instant, is the small gate through which the messiah enters.

The Church & The Kingdom / Agamben

Saturday, 30 April 2011

extraterritorial / peculiars, mints, liberties

But there are some few spots of ground in London, just in the face of the Government, unconquer’d yet, that hold in Rebellion still. Methinks ’tis strange, that places so near the Kings Palace should be no parts of his Dominions

Thomas Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia, 1688.

Sunday, 19 December 2010

the thin fluorescent line/ kettled at the palace 30.11.10




Labour of Dyonisus: Weak subjects and the politics of avoidance.

In the development of the postmodern liberal argument State power is not exerted according to what Foucault calls a disciplinary paradigm […]. State power here does not involve the exposure and subjugation of social subjects as part of an effort to engage, mediate, and organise conflictual forces within the limits of order. The thin state avoids such engagement: this is what characterises its “liberal” politics. […]

The liberal notion of tolerance coincides here perfectly with the decidedly illiberal mechanism of exclusion. The thin state of postmodern liberalism appears, in effect, as a refinement and extension of the German tradition of the science of the police. The police are necessary to afford the system abstraction and isolation: the “thin blue line” delimits the boundaries of what will be accepted as inputs in the system of rule. […]

The crucial development presented by the postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft, is that now society is not infiltrated and engaged, but separated and controlled: not a disciplinary society but a pacified society of control. The police function creates and maintains a pacified society, or the image of a pacified society, by preventing the incidence of conflicts on the machine of equilibrium. […]

The method of avoidance then carries implicitly a postmodern Polizeiwissenschaft that effectively, and in practical terms, abstracts the system from the field of potential conflicts, thus allowing the system to order an efficient, administred society.