Queer Epidemics

This chapter of my book Bodies Out of Rule (2014) considers John Greyson's Zero Patience – a 1993 musical satire on the early days of the AIDS epidemic – in the context of the epidemiological and immunity discourses inherent in neoliberal biopolitics. Greyson's film can be read as a queer critique of the broadly understood epidemiological operations of biopower, especially its authoritarian systematizations and taxonomizations that establish a certain "regime of truth" and are a necessary condition for the effective regulation of social practices and subjects. Through my reading of Greyson's film, I argue for a queer reclamation of the feared figure of the virus as a thoroughly transversal figure that transcends existing boundaries, identities, and cognitive categories.

Epilogue

The epilogue concludes the book by clarifying how Critical Humanism makes possible an ethics of religious studies. Positioned against an episteme that draws its sustenance from Reformation, Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment thinking, Critical Humanism provides reasons that enable present and future generations to grasp the values of studying religion and provides a model of reasoning that can break the spell of the field’s regime of truth of value-neutrality. It thereby enables scholars to overcome a long-standing repression of desire and discover humanistic excellences according to which motives for studying religion are desirable and worthy of attachment and transmission. Seen in this way, the epilogue argues, Critical Humanism is a vocation. It allows scholars to recommend religious studies for the present and in ways that make possible hope for the future.

On Justifying the Study of Religion

This chapter takes up the question whether the study of religion can be justified and indicates why scholars of religion deny themselves reasons for tackling that question. It uses as its point of departure Max Weber’s lecture, “Science as a Vocation” as articulating a methodological standard for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality and avows an “ascetic ideal” (following Nietzsche). It is argued that this ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive scholarly conscience in the field’s regime of truth. The chapter adds that this conscience is not entirely repressive and notes the presence of quixotic, haphazard appeals to normative ideals that materialize in the study of religion. Lastly, it sketches the book’s alternative to the ascetic ideal and describes ideas from moral philosophy that inform the book’s critical and constructive argument.

Why Study Religion?

This book asks, can the study of religion be justified? It poses this question on the view that scholarship in religion, especially work in “theory and method,” is preoccupied with matters of methodological procedure and is thus inarticulate about the goals that can justify the study of religion and motivate scholarship in the field. For that reason, it insists, the field suffers from a crisis of rationale. The book identifies six prevailing methodologies in the field, each of which it critically examines as symptomatic of this crisis, on the way toward offering an alternative framework for thinking about purposes for studying religion. Shadowing these methodologies is a Weberian scientific ideal for studying religion, one that privileges value-neutrality. This ideal poses obstacles to making justificatory claims on behalf of studying religion and fortifies a repressive conscience about thinking normatively within the field’s regime of truth. After making these points, the book describes an alternative framework, Critical Humanism, especially how it theorizes about the ends rather than the means of humanistic scholarship and offers a basis for thinking about the ethics of religious studies as held together by four values: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. Ordered to such purposes, the book argues, the study of religion can imagine itself as a valuable and desirable enterprise so that scholars of religion can relax their commitment to matters of methodological procedure and avow the values of studying religion.

The Chinese Diplomacy and the Battle for Truth During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article analyzes Chinese diplomacy during the Covid-19 crisis and the struggle for control of narratives aimed at constructing an image of a responsible nation. In this paper I assume that the emergence of COVID-19 represented a critical problem for the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, forcing the authorities to fight not only to contain the spread of the virus but also to create and maintain a favorable public opinion regarding management of the crisis both nationally and internationally. It is in this context that the Chinese government launched an active diplomacy offensive, presenting itself as a responsible state through both “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” and “Mask Diplomacy”. Based on Foucault´s approach to the Regime of Truth, I analyze the narratives and activities of the Chinese government and how diplomacy was employed in order to create a truth about the coronavirus outbreak. In addition, I review how social mechanisms and conventions were utilized to emphasize and validate knowledge linked to power systems. I conclude that if the Chinese government has the “truth” as a part of a regime, it both enhances the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and increases its power. At the same time a strong Chinese government is able to devote significant resources to spreading a discourse both nationally and internationally which is purportedly true. The point of the discourse however is to further strengthen the power of the CCP, rather than to achieve global hegemony.

“They Don't Represent Us!”: From the Crisis of the Organic Intellectuals of 1978 to the Exhumation of Buried Imaginaries

Based on the notion of événement (event), elaborated by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, this essay aims to offer a definition of the 15M movement as an event. According to Badiou, the event has the capacity to perforate established knowledge and to transform the codes of communication. The event destabilizes the regime of truth to the extent that what was assumed to be obvious now appears as unstable, and, consequently, the need arises to explore and construct other discourses capable of naming the new situation. In this essay, I locate two moments of the event: the political moment and the theoretical moment; the first is the time of the revolution, while the second is devoted to the study and theorization of this revolution. I argue that the radical effects of the event can be registered in the second moment. In the theoretical moment, there is a crisis of the organic intellectuals of the Regime of ’78, and the empty space they leave behind may begin to be occupied by other voices that were previously barely heard. In the same way, during the theoretical moment, the revolution without a genealogical tree that was the 15M, which was not inscribed in a revolutionary continuity, begins to seek its roots in discourses of the past that were silenced or forgotten, or that simply did not have a framework that would give them back their conditions of legibility.

Diversidade sexual e de gênero, Estado nacional e paisagens heterotópicas no Irã: Foucault e depois

<p>No final da década de 1970, o mundo acompanhou os acontecimentos revolucionários que levaram à destituição da monarquia e à instauração de uma república islâmica no Irã. Michel Foucault viu nesses acontecimentos, caracterizados pela “espiritualidade política”, um potencial crítico à modernidade ocidental. Trata-se aqui de produzir uma reflexão sobre o impacto dessa “espiritualidade política” na construção de um Estado nacional baseado em tecnologias de poder/saber geradoras de distopia e conformadoras de uma ideologia nacional teocrática preocupada com o controle dos corpos e a imposição da heteronormatividade. Será possível, assim, abordar os modos criativos de resistência ao regime de verdade vigente e de produção de formas de subjetivação alternativas, principalmente no que diz respeito às experiências da diversidade sexual e de gênero. Esses modos compõem paisagens heterotópicas que desafiam a distopia reinante, como sugerido por minha experiência etnográfica no Irã em fevereiro de 2019.</p><p> </p><p>Gender and Sexual Diversity, National State and Heterotopic Landscape: Foucault and Beyond</p><p>At the end of the 1970s, the world followed the revolutionary events that led to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Iran. Michel Foucault saw these events, characterized by a “political spirituality”, as a potential critic of Western modernity. This study presents a reflection on the effect of this “political spirituality” in the construction of a national State based on technologies of power/knowledge that generate a dystopia and shape a national theocratic ideology concerned with the control of bodies and the imposition of heteronormativity. This article shows the original ways of resistance established to counter the regime of truth and to produce an alternative way of being, especially regarding the experiences of gender and sexual diversity. These ways compose a heterotopic landscape that challenge the reigning dystopia, as suggested by observations in Iran in February 2019.</p><p>Sexuality | State | Nation | Heterotopia | Iran</p>

Regimes of Relevance

At the core of this essay is an exploration of the notion of regime of relevance introduced by Galin Tihanov in his monograph The Birth and Death of Literary Theory (2019). On the one hand, the author traces the ramifications of Tihanov’s coinage and demonstrates possible arenas for its further application; on the other, the essay researches the origins of the notion in Michel Foucault’s formulation of regime of truth. After a brief account of the Bulgarian reception of Foucault’s work, the text turns to Foucault’s early monograph The Order of Things (1966) to explore the paths that link Tihanov’s work to Foucault’s and then compares a reconstructed version of Foucault’s project for literary theory to Tihanov’s project.

Il respiro corto dello Spirito nelle mega-chiese, ai tempi della pandemia

What effect has the pandemic on Mega-churches? The forced closure or drastic reduction of those present admitted to religious services has in fact called into question both the regime of truth that many of these churches follow, from the theological and spiritual point of view, and the drama-liturgy of hand-to-hand combat between the transmormative force of the Spirit and the prince of all evils, Satan. In this way, Mega-churches moved from the mass event experienced in large auditoriums to an online service, on a domestic scale, for many anonymous and distant faithful, to which a consoling message can be conveyed in a phase of inconvenience and suffering in their daily life. The epidemic has stolen the scene from the great performers of the Mega-churches and from those who, enthusiastic, took their seats in the stalls or moved freely possessed by spirits waiting to be freed, actively participating in the deliverance’s rite. These faithful, probably, now watching from a distance at home, in front of their computer screen, another scene, less involving and, above all, without the parrhesia of the regime of truth, which materialized in the ritual space. The epidemic represents a double contingency for the Mega-churches: on the one hand, it weakens the theological vision of a God who can do everything and of the Spirit who blows triumphantly and defeats all evil, on the other, it dematerializes the presence of the enemy who becomes invisible and intrusive, no longer physically dominable, from which no charismatic leader is more able to delivere the faithful.