Choose life?

Reivew of Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life
Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 277pp., £91.95 hb., £32.50 pb., 978 0 81013 213 9 hb., 978 0 81013 212 2 pb. In José Saramago’s 2005 novel, Death at Intervals, a land is stricken by a sudden uncooperative maiden of death who brings about the immortality […]

The exemplary exception: Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but […]

The cyborg mother

The cyborg mother Jaimie Smith-Windsor31 January 2003. The birth of my daughter, Aleah Quinn Smith-Windsor. A few days after Quinn was born this quotation appeared, written beside her incubator: ʻEvery blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers: grow, grow.ʼ It was a near-fatal birth. Quinn was born at 24½ weeksʼ […]

Petrified life: Adorno and Agamben

In his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, Adorno maintained that ʻthe form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently todayʼ is ʻthe question whether it is still possible to liveʼ. [1] Such a question is speculative, since the possibility of life is taken to have migrated to the margins of human experience. For Adorno, life in […]

After life: De anima and unhuman politics

After life De anima and unhuman politics Eugene thacker Since the 1960s, the NASA programme has supported research into the exploration of life on other planets. Currently, their astrobiology programme involves multiple institutions and research programmes, including the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Its mission statement defines astrobiology as ‘the study of the origins, evolution, distribution, and […]