School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Type: Journal Article × Start date: 2010 × End date: 2020 × Author: Clemens, Justin ×

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    Bentham, torture, modernity
    Clemens, J ; Peden, K ; Roe, G (TAYLOR & FRANCIS AS, 2017-11-03)
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    First Fruits of a Barron Field
    Clemens, J (WILEY, 2019-04)
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    A Journal of the Plague Year
    Clemens, J (MEANJIN COMPANY LTD, 2020-06-01)
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    Not Not. A Note on the Figures of Power in Giorgio Agamben
    Clemens, J (Università degli Studi di Trieste, 2020-12-13)
    When one starts to read the work of Giorgio Agamben, one cannot not be struck by his erudition, his eye for previously overlooked or under-interpreted details in the philosophical, political, artistic and legal archives, not to mention his commitment to rethinking those received traditions according to new means. Yet what is also very striking is Agamben’s unceasing attention to the apparition and construction of what I will term figures of power. At the beginning of Means Without End, Agamben asks himself “Is today a life of power available?”. If Agamben’s word here is ‘life’, it is just as critical to understand that such a term is not to be taken in its biological acceptation; on the contrary, what he means by ‘life’ must be something other than a scientific category. I will make a number of suggestions as to why the word ‘figure’ has some pertinence in this context, and why it leads, on the one hand, to a new analysis of operations of negation, and, on the other, to a paradoxical kind of non- or extra-ontological act of impotentiality.
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    Where then shall hope and fear —
    Clemens, J (University of Melbourne, 2020-08-03)
    The article examines a radical tradition of poetry in which the phenomena of hope and fear are thematized. Moving backwards in time, the argument focuses on work by Ali Alizadeh, John Ashbery, Samuel Johnson, Juvenal, Benedict Spinoza, Plato, and others.
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    Morbus Anglicus; or, Pandemic, Panic, Pandaemonium
    Clemens, J (Crisis and Critique, 2020-11-30)
    Mid-17th century England births two fateful new signifiers: pandemic and pandaemonium. Although both words are founded on a Greek root pan, meaning all, neither designate a firm or flourishing polity. The words also retain close etymological, homophonic, and semantic relations to another crucial word of the time: panic. Yet these terms do not simply indicate the destruction or abolition of politics or the political, but rather reconstitute the problem of politics according to a radical paradox. This essay examines the emergence and reconstitution of these signifiers in a philological matrix inflected by plague, civil war, religious violence, scientific inquiry, and monarchical restoration, in order to proffer several theses about their significance and operations in and for politics that subsists beyond the specificities of that site.
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    In the State of Nature Nothing Will Be Lost
    Clemens, J (Australian National University, 2020-05-01)
    This article argues that the cryptocurrency Bitcoin functions according to a contemporary form of political theology: an instrumental technology that forecloses the operations of art, on the one hand, and represses mathematics, on the other. It is further shown that the blockchain on which Bitcoin is founded is a technicized form of Von Neumann ordinals, which simultaneously 'finitizes' and 'unifies' the latter.
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    Barron Field's Terra Nullius Operation
    Ford, TH ; Clemens, J (Australian National University, 2019-11-30)
    In ‘Barron Field’s Terra Nullius Operation’, Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens show how a jurisdictional dispute over the application of taxation law in the New South Wales colony led to the performative annulment of the idea that the land—decreed ‘uninhabited’ and a ‘desert’—was already occupied.
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    As Fire Burns: Philosophy, Slavery, Technology
    Clemens, J (Taylor & Francis (Routledge), 2018-03-15)
    There is an ancient, if rarely thematized bond between philosophy and slavery. As Alain Badiou has recently remarked, ‘this [rarety] is especially because from the outset everything is in some sense divided.’ For the figure of the slave divides philosophy at its inception, cutting across the divisions of the polis, freedom, and justice. My thesis is that this paradox of the slave is at once foundational and aporetic for philosophy: when the slave appears within the text of philosophy, it thereafter has certain disorganising, if revelatory effects. Moreover, the paradox of the slave is linked integrally to another ancient phenomenon: judicial torture as the model of the extraction of knowledge from a resistant or un-knowing body. This essay examines this situation, in which slavery, torture, and philosophy are variously linked, through a series of vignettes drawn from Spinoza, Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel.
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    Syllable as Syntax: Stephane Mallarme's Un Coup de des
    Clemens, J (ZRC PUBLISHING, 2016)