Friday, October 30th 1:30 – 3:00

Session Room: Studio Theatre

1) Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, York University
“Facing Governments”: Imagining World Citizenship

But how do we begin to imagine world citizenship differently? Who would be the “we” in question, and how could such assemblages “intervene effectively in the sphere of international policy and strategy”? (Foucault, “Facing Governments”) This presentation demonstrates the compelling, complementary ways in which Virginia Woolf, Michel Foucault, and Michael Ondaatje confound conventional thinking about the nation, citizenship, and stateless identity. They are an unlikely threesome only on the surface.

For Woolf, as a feminist and pacifist in the late 1930s, facing tyranny meant triangulating patriarchy, imperialism, and fascism. Strategically, she declared herself stateless and invited others to join a Society of Outsiders: “as a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” Foucault’s 1981 Geneva press conference convened to focus transnational attention on the plight of “boat people” and to announce the formation of an International Committee Against Piracy (plus ça change) redefined “our” obligation to the stateless. Facing governments effectively, he argued, meant identifying and mobilizing the solidarity of an “international citizenship of the governed.” Since the 1990s, Ondaatje has claimed a specific kind of statelessness: “I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.” Assuming multiplicity and transnationality, the Sri-Lankan born, British educated, Canadian author, variously categorized as post-colonial, migrant, and cosmopolitan, tracks the inscription of bio- and thanatopolitics on individuals, classes, and ethnicities.

Taken together, these three tactical shifts adumbrate strategic alliances against biopolitics in historical struggles for world citizenship. At the intersections of literature, social theory, and political activism, we correlate the critical fictions of these public intellectuals to demonstrate how they elaborate new relations of power-knowledge to think otherwise the problematics of nation and citizenship.

2) Victor Li, University of Toronto
"All peoples are Gypsies and all languages are jargons": Giorgio Agamben, Alice Becker-Ho, and the Problem of National Sovereignty.

Alice Becker-Ho, the widow of Guy Debord, the Situationist author of Society of the Spectacle, published in 1990 a book titled _Les Princes du Jargon_ (translated into English as The Princes of Jargon).  Becker-Ho’s book argues that “the coming of the Gypsies into fifteenth-century Europe” coincided with and influenced “the emergence of a specific argot among the organized dangerous classes.”  Though it appears to be a study of etymology and lexical influence, the book also makes the more general claim that “slang has neither clime, nor homeland, nor frontier...It is...the unmistakable sign of a stateless cosmopolitanism.”  It is the Gypsies’ perpetual crossing of territorial and linguistic boundaries that make them the “princes of jargon,” the dangerous class that poses a threat to the nation-state that seeks to preserve and fortify the unifying links between a people and a language.  This is the thesis in Becker-Ho’s book that allows the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to assert that she has “laid a mine—which is ready to explode at any given time—at the very focal point of our political theory.”  By threatening to explode our nation-state based political thinking, Becker-Ho’s book, Agamben argues, leaves us in a situation where “we do not have...the slightest idea of what either a people or language is.”  Focussing on Becker-Ho’s book and Agamben’s essay “Languages and Peoples,” my paper examines how their work contests the idea that peoples and languages are determined or defined by territorial or linguistic boundaries.