Peninsula: A Journal of Relational Politics

Memoirs and the Writing of Political Life

Guillaume Filion — 2017-03-15

Welcome to the third issue of Peninsula: A Journal of Relational Politics. Click the Full Text link below.

Geste péninsulaire : le lancer, le jeté et sa reprise, avant même de commencer

Simon Labrecque — 2017-03-15

Il s’agit en quelque sorte de donner le ton, étant donné l’acte de lancer cette revue sans pouvoir anticiper ses effets, prévoir ses retombées ni prédire ses points de chute. Je partirai d’une annonce datée pour questionner ce qui, ici, peut être en jeu, c’est-à-dire de quoi il en retourne, à mon sens, dans l’essai de faire Peninsula comme lieu à et où penser politiquement « ici et maintenant. » Bien entendu, ces lignes ne sauraient prétendre représenter Peninsula : il s’agit moins d’en donner univoquement lela pour chercher à s’accorder ou même à s’entendre sur ou quant à la revue que de risquer quelques phrases s’adressant à elle à partir d’elle. J’écris donc pour elle en mon nom seul, et mon geste pose, bien qu’il ne saurait démontrer, qu’il vaut la peine de le faire dans cette langue-ci...

Le labeur d’une politique relationnelle

Sébastien Malette — 2017-03-15

Le texte de Simon Labrecque intitulé "Geste péninsulaire: le lancer, le jeté et sa reprise, avant même de commencer" offre une réflexion stimulante problématisant l’inflexion philosophique que propose la revue Peninsula. Ce texte nous invite à réfléchir sur la signification possible du concept de relationalité en lien avec le politique. L’auteur se questionne à savoir si une pensée politique se posant comme "relationnelle" n’est pas déjà une tautologie. L’auteur poursuit son questionnement en demandant des précisions sur un thème qu’il voit désormais "général" à la pensée politique, sinon sociologique: "mais de quel(s) type(s) de relationalité parle-t-on ici et ailleurs?"...

The Quantum in the Quotidian

Jessica Y. Neasbitt — 2017-03-15

It began with a graduate seminar: Topics in Feminist Science Studies. A theoretical particle physicist housed in the Feminist Studies department of the university taught the seminar, and the course listing declared the seminar’s focus would be exploring "the virtual." As a returning student who left a fifteen-year career in inpatient pharmacy (a field which falls squarely within what are often referred to as the "hard" sciences) in order to pursue a PhD in a field largely characterized as interdisciplinary, I was intrigued. Generally, my research -- which touches upon disciplines as varied as medicine, social sciences, and the humanities -- results in me being faced with an "either/or" decision every time I want to register for a seminar, publish, or speak at a conference. I have learned, as one advisor stated early in my career, that I "will probably have two versions of everything I ever write, and will have to learn to...

Longing to Be Occupied : Trans Desire and Other Technologies of Violence

Diego Semerene — 2017-03-15

*** Warning: the present memoir presents graphic descriptions of a sexual act some readers may consider violent and/or triggering. The author of the piece has expressed objections about the inclusion of such a trigger warning. We acknowledge and value his position even if we think it preferable to inform the reader. ***

On the 6^thday I was a woman in my bedroom I had two men over who referred to me as a she and believed in my she-ness more than I ever could. ‘Because they need to,’ Emily said. At first I thought that the fact that men, real men, were so easily convinced to make love to another man provided there be a few feminine props- I thought it incomprehensible. But is it not just as naïve to think a gay bottom sees manhood where there is nothing but an external version of himself?

A week of faux womanhood has gone by and my head is over-boiling with good ideas, bad theories, and an uncontrollable need...

The Man Who Was Not There: A Writer’s Memoir of Self

Peter Unwin — 2017-03-15

The story begins in a kitchen with an ashtray on the table. The ashtray is congealed with the ash of my mother’s cigarettes. She is barely real, my mother, but more real than me. It was her who filled the ashtray with her cigarettes; the Players Navy Cut without filters, with the rugged, bearded sailor on the front. In my story, I once wrote that I believed this man on the front of the cigarette package was my father (my father was in the navy, he must be that man!), but those were just words that I wrote, and I don’t think I ever believed this man was my father. He was just a cartoon man painted on the front of a package of cigarettes that my mother smoked...

Curiosities

Marta Bashovski — 2017-03-15

It’s my first visit to the British Museum. Previously, I’ve avoided it, viewing the space as an homage to the spoils of colonialism. That, and I tend to feel anxious around large groups of tourists. I find myself here now, on the recommendation of a professor who suggests that, given my interest in the history of ideas and their ordering, the Enlightenment Gallery would be the one spot in the Museum I really should see. I arrive only a couple of hours before the museum’s 5:30 closing time and right away, I am sucked into the vast gift shop that takes up most of the central section of the Museum’s Great Court, a wide marbled space with rooms and hallways jutting off to the galleries. Much of the gift shop is aimed at children -- there are toy Vikings, toy pharaohs, costumes, colouring books. A series of costumed rubber ducks, including one wearing what appears to be a version of...

The Creation of Epistemological-Empirical Knowledge, with Hillary Clinton's Political Speech as an Example

Beatriz Revelles Benavente — 2012-10-22

This article is concerned with a different conceptualization of the political speech, and of language. The political speech will be re(con)figured as an "apparatus" (Barad 2001, 2007) and language as "a living force" (Colebrook, 2008). In order to make this clear, extracts from political speeches will be analysed. Throughout, the validity of another analysis of political speeches -- one inspired by new materialism -- will be emphasized. This feminist epistemological-empirical shift will be exemplified by a study of the political speeches of Clinton on 9/11. This type of epistemological-empirical knowledge proposes the inseparability of theory and emprical data in the analysis of any (sociological) event. As such, the results can be used in future sociological research and for future theoretical purposes. This article is a claim for a multi-directional sense of reality, since it is structured around the impossibility of dualist categorizations in sensible accounts of reality. In other words, this article forms the materialization of new materialism as a solution to the representationalist paradox present in current-day knowledge production in the field of politics.

Aesthetics of Coherence in Politological Thought: Engaging Impredicativity

Simon Labrecque — 2012-10-22

This essay approaches possible relationships between the fields of politological thought and logic. First, I claim that the logical problem of impredicativity (of self-referencing definitions, or of concepts that apply to themselves) offers a thought provoking site for unfolding a series of practical demands placed on students of politics (e.g. not presupposing your conclusions). Engaging this site in political and politological terms prompts a complex account of what goes on in logic, an alleged stronghold of coherence. This is significant insofar as self-described critical students of politics tend to hold fast to a simplified account of what logic is about, and quickly dismiss it as incoherent and violent. Second, trying to further texture what it can mean to take logic into account, I claim that the propositions formulated by Alfred North Whitehead on the interweaving of logical and aesthetic problems are relevant for apprehending the stakes of in/coherence at the time of writing. As two fields of "fundamental research," I think that logic and politological thought face similar challenges, especially in the form of the market-driven imperatives of productivity and usefulness. I propose that scholars working in those fields (and others) seriously consider possibilities of alliances.

Dreaming with the Zeitgeber, Part I: A Lecture on Moderns and Their Night

Stefan Morales — 2012-10-22

How awake are we during the day, and how asleep are we during the night? What are the implications of having become delinked from the Zeitgeber ("time giver") of terrestrial day and night through the invention and proliferation of electric light? This paper explores the division between industrial and pre-industrial times, not by underscoring the importance of the factory or the steam engine, but by taking an object lesson from the light bulb: elaborating on the bio-physio-political influences that electric light has had on our night and daytime experience. The paper explores the why and how of dreamtime exploration within a field of practice tightly circumscribed by everyday electric light, seeking to begin elaborating the outlines of a sleep practice geared towards realigning secular individualism with the unchanging Zeitgeber as a lost cue to quasi-religious experiences.

The paper is based on a lecture and workshop that took place during the OFF LABEL Festival and The Art of the Placebo at Open Space in Victoria, BC from October 26 to November 2, 2011. Following the first lecture, participants were enrolled in three subsequent "dream-share" workshops to share nighttime journeys and experiences and encourage one another's dreamtime practice. The lecture itself was a performance: no lights were turned on, allowing the natural light to imperceptibly shift from daytime to nighttime. "Dreaming with the Zeitgeber Part II" (forthcoming) deals with the implications sleep-practice has on the micropolitics of everyday life.

Review of The Liberty of Servants: Berlusconi's Italy

Charles Dumais — 2012-10-22

A Critique of the Call to "Always Indigenize!"

Elina Hill — 2012-10-22

Intent on working toward decolonization, Len Findlay encourages scholars in Canadian universities, particularly in the humanities, to "Always Indigenize!" Findlay is aware that this is no simple task, yet he remains hopeful that academics can maintain active and political stances, refusing to "play down or attempt to suspend sociopolitical determinants," in order to bring people's attention to "Indigenizing vision". Such vision, he argues, if ethically attended to, "can be of enormous benefit to all people", not only enriching and diversifying Western knowledge and thinkers, but also connecting and informing Indigenous scholars. Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers can then better exploit the university in order to reach Indigenous goals, including decolonization.

Indigenous peoples have had little choice but to engage with Western institutions imposed upon their lands, and have sought to make such spaces more responsive to their needs and goals. As such, Findlay insists that the master's tools can "be used to dismantle the master's house," despite Audre Lorde's argument to the contrary. However, Findlay does not sufficiently consider the implications of such an undertaking. As Lorde points out, expecting the oppressed to educate their ignorant and reluctant oppressors can lead to "a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought." When Indigenous people participate in efforts to make Indigenous thought coherent for university scholars, and consequently the colonial state, they spend less time engaged with institutions of knowledge in their communities. Figuring the university as a central site of Indigenous knowledge "can displace and demean the knowledge of elders in people's own communities," as Andrea Bear-Nicholas writes. Meanings are often lost as Indigenous languages are translated into the lingua franca of the university. Critical frames of reference may also be lost. As Indigenous thinkers are focused away from engagement with community members, important issues and debates may become obscured by academic interests and deliberations that are less relevant. While attending to Indigenous thought is crucial, a focus on "Indigenizing" might actually help to avoid self-critical work toward decolonization on the part of the university. Instead, work aimed to always decolonize, for example through the support of Indigenous knowledge (social, political, linguistic, etc.) in situ, might better resist exploitative moves on the part of the university and the state, as well as set the ground for thinkers to pay attention to the already coherent narratives of Indigenous people.

Performing the Iranian 2009 Show-Trials in the Theatre of History

Setareh Shohadaei — 2012-10-22

In the beginning, there was protest and then theatre. No -- there was theatre and then protest. Yes: in the beginning, there was the word.

Editorial: In/Coherence

Liam Mitchell — 2012-10-22

Welcome to the second issue of Peninsula: A Journal of Relational Politics. Click the Full Text link below.

Situated Relations

Liam Mitchell — 2011-02-02

Welcome to the first issue of Peninsula: A Journal of Relational Politics. Click the Full Text link below.

Fertilizing Problems: Singularization and the Guerrilla Gardens at the University of Victoria

Nick Montgomery — 2011-02-01

This paper discusses the guerrilla gardens planted at the University of Victoria using Félix Guattari's concept of singularization. Rather than explaining reasons for planting the garden, or speaking on behalf of others who were involved, this paper argues that these forms of representation are complicit with hegemonic procedures of classification, judgement and decision-making. Instead, this paper puts forward a conception of relational politics, in hopes of interrogating the procedures that classify and contain processes of political transformation. This paper interrogates processes of habit, recognition and judgement in the context of the University of Victoria, and the ways in which they were problematized through the guerrilla gardens. Protest, bureaucracy and resolution are conceptualized as interlocking forces that inhibit radical political transformation. It is argued that the guerrilla gardens were enveloped by a process of open-ended change or singularization, which seems inchoate because it does not fit within established categories of political analysis. Political theory can affirm processes of singularization by connecting and deepening political problems, rather than seeking their resolution. The article concludes with a more general discussion of singularization and the promise of relational political theory.

The Soil Food Web: Notes towards Cultivating "New" Alliances between Earthlings

Stefan R. D. Morales — 2011-02-01

How can we grasp our relationship to the Earth through the earth? In dealing with the human and its relationship to the soil food web, this lecture traces translations as they occur through the sense of smell and taste using Thomas A. Sebeok's concept of the chemical sign. What world do we share with nonhumans when we cultivate the soil? Employing Félix Guattari's "pseudo-narrative detour" through myth, ritual and science and Gilles Deleuze's elaboration of uncertainty in The Logic of Sense, the lecture criticizes subject-centred encounters with the soil food web and its complexity, aiming instead for an anexact science of Earth-earthling relations. It advances the notion that the mundane eating and defecating tendencies shared by all earthlings is the basis of a renewed material alliance with the Earth. Though the Earth and its earthlings share what may be called flesh (organic and nonorganic), it is what passes through and is exchanged by flesh that is of interest here. Moving from retracing the "new" assemblies of plants, animals, and microbes that are produced through cultivated efforts at rearranging the mundane (spatial questions), the lecture closes on an exploration of the differing layers of time (Chronos and Aion) bound up in the "new" assemblies.

Politics and the Political: Correlation and the Question of the Unpolitical

Inna Viriasova — 2011-02-01

This essay discusses the underlying logic of the relation between the concepts of politics and the political, i.e., “political difference,” specifically in Carl Schmitt’s and Michel Foucault’s works, as well as in the post-foundational thought of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. It is suggested that the political, as the new common sense of critical political theory, is characterized by its correlation with the classical, state-oriented conception of politics. The essence of the political is a critique of politics, each concept (politics and the political) functioning primarily as the negative of the other. Politics and the political are involved in a never-ending relation of differentiation and play, which is at the heart of the concept of the political difference. However useful and innovative, the political is not devoid of problematic moments, in particular as it exhibits a tendency toward totalization. Since the political is presented as the ontological condition of politics and of being-together in general, it results in the exclusion of so-called unpolitical elements from the conceptual schema of post-foundational political thought. The present critique concludes in raising the question of the unpolitical and providing a brief account of the latter in the works of Schmitt, Foucault, Rancière and Badiou.

Desperation or Dissent? An Ethnographic Perspective on Capitalism, Alienation, and Transgressive Sexuality

Eugenia Tsao — 2011-02-01

Review of Wardlow, Holly. 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.

Altermodernity and the Ethics of Translation

Michael Larson — 2011-02-01

This essay considers the relational ontology behind Nicolas Bourriaud's conception of "altermodernity." Bourriaud's notion of the altermodern is meant to diagnose our current emergence from the period of postmodernity. In the altermodern, there is a rethinking of the attitude of modernity which involves a new thinking of subjectivity as constitutively relational, or "radicant." This mode of subjectivity also implies a form of ethics, which Bourriaud calls an "ethics of translation." This theme of the ethics of translation correlates closely with Paul Ricoeur's work on translation and I seek to interrogate this connection to further explore what an ethics of translation might entail. Finally, I look to how this notion of modernity and relationality fits into the ontological framing found in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and the sort of politics entailed in this understanding of relationality.

An earlier draft of this essay was delivered at the Society for Ricoeur Studies Annual Meeting. October 30, 2009.