Disposable Life (Page 1 of 2)

Disposable Life: Zygmunt Bauman

presented by Zygmunt Bauman

In pre-modern soci­eties there was no idea of waste; every­thing was going back into life—recycled, as we would say today. If there were more chil­dren com­ing into the world in a fam­i­ly, then obvi­ous­ly there was room for them, and extra work some­where in the farm­yard, in the field, in the sta­ble. And of course a place around the table. So the idea of being redun­dant, hav­ing no place in soci­ety, sim­ply did­n’t occur. 

Disposable Life: David Theo Goldberg

presented by David Theo Goldberg

I’m not here going to think aloud about these var­i­ous con­tes­ta­to­ry forms of evidence-giving, although much might be said about that in rela­tion to think­ing about vio­lence. But rather to think about the Michael Brown shoot­ing in Ferguson, Missouri and the kinds of police response to it in rela­tion to the his­to­ry of vio­lence and the way in which race shapes said his­to­ry of vio­lence in a coun­try like the United States…

Disposable Life: Étienne Balibar

presented by Étienne Balibar

It’s not the case of course that any con­tem­po­rary philoso­pher or pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy has been par­tic­u­lar­ly deal­ing with ques­tions of polit­i­cal the­o­ry. I nev­er thought about vio­lence. But I want to recall the moment in which I specif­i­cal­ly start­ed to sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly work on that.

Disposable Life: Jean Franco

presented by Jean Franco

I sup­pose Foucault has to be cred­it­ed with talk­ing about dis­pos­able life. And it’s inter­est­ing to me that at the very moment when he was giv­ing the lec­tures on this top­ic, Henry Kissinger in the United States was admit­ting, or pub­lish­ing, the results of the com­mis­sion on ster­il­iza­tion. The idea was that ster­il­iza­tion should be encour­aged in Third World coun­tries in order to reg­u­late the population.

Disposable Life: Ananya Roy

presented by Ananya Roy

I think what is par­tic­u­lar­ly strik­ing about the ques­tion of dis­pos­able lives in the 21st cen­tu­ry is what seems to be a new glob­al com­mon sense about pover­ty, the ways in which pover­ty and par­tic­u­lar­ly poor oth­ers have become vis­i­ble. And how that in turn, par­tic­u­lar­ly for mil­len­ni­als in the Global North—college stu­dents, young pro­fes­sion­als, so-called ordi­nary glob­al cit­i­zens of the world—how this has mobi­lized them to action.

Disposable Life: Carol Gluck

presented by Carol Gluck

I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life and the mean­ing that might have in soci­eties today. And I decid­ed that the kind of dis­pos­able life that most con­cerns me is the kind that we either res­olute­ly don’t see, ignore, or neglect. Or the kind that we do see but can’t seem to deal with. 

Disposable Life: Cynthia Enloe

presented by Cynthia Enloe

When I think about dis­pos­abil­i­ty, I think about name­less­ness. I think about whose pic­tures are tak­en in refugee camps. Or whose stones with­out names you look at at a mass grave, or just a ditch for that mat­ter. To be dis­pos­able is to be name­less in some­body’s eyes.

Disposable Life: Slavoj Žižek

presented by Slavoj Žižek

Under cap­i­tal­ism, the prob­lem is not there are evil peo­ple here and there. The prob­lem is the basic log­ic of the sys­tem as it was devel­oped by Zygmunt Bauman and many oth­ers. Some peo­ple even claim that if you look in a non­hu­man­i­tar­i­an way just at the pure log­ic of today’s glob­al cap­i­tal­ism, you arrive at a ratio even some peo­ple claim of 2080%.

Disposable Life: Griselda Pollock

presented by Griselda Pollock

At the inter­sec­tion of the pol­i­tics of art or lit­er­a­ture or film and polit­i­cal the­o­ry, I’ve been think­ing about dis­pos­able life through a num­ber of lens­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly through work on the Holocaust and work that I’ve been doing with Max Silverman on a slight­ly dif­fer­ent ele­ment of it called con­cen­tra­tion­ary memory.” 

Disposable Life: Saskia Sassen

presented by Saskia Sassen

Disposable life. What comes to my mind is a set of dynam­ics, I think, that are mark­ing the cur­rent peri­od, that are mark­ing a dif­fer­ence in the cur­rent peri­od. And it is the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of expul­sions. And once some­thing is expelled (and I’ll elab­o­rate) it becomes invis­i­ble. And that is part of the tragedy, I think.

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