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Notes
I must thank Henry Giroux, Max Haiven, and Susan Searls Giroux for their capacious input and helpful advice, and Wendy Stoneman for her extraordinary patience.
In an interview with Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann, Slavoj Zizek discusses this notion of the “post-political” world, which is terrifying to some and profoundly reassuring to others. He argues that while certain of his books are sometimes misread as propounding such a world, this is not the case. He explains: “I refer to a wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a world, but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the sense that there is some kind of basic social pact that elementary social decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions” (Zizek Citation2001).
In his follow-up to Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Agamben writes that, confronted by “the unstoppable progression of what has been called a ‘global civil war,’ the state of exception tends increasingly to appear as the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics. This transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens radically to alter—in fact, has already palpably altered—the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms” (2).
Derrida: “Second missile, second missive: For such a feat, we may consider ourselves competent” (22). And: “Third missile, third missive: We can therefore consider ourselves competent because the sophistication of the nuclear strategy can never do without a sophistry of belief and the rhetorical simulation of a text” (24).
The pronouncement, “In the beginning there will have been speed” not merely augurs an apocalyptic present to come, but as well underscores that our present historical conditions are not yet entirely anomalous or discontinuous—a position that Derrida, after a lengthy consideration of the question, gradually assumes over the course of his article. It is “up to” the humanities, for Derrida, to decide such things, but also to make of that knowledge, to argue from that knowledge, decisively, what sort of future we are to inhabit.
While “hegemonic masculinity” is recognized unequivocally in the handful of disciplines concerned with it as an important target of interrogation, the concept is no longer the uncontested one it was at its inception. It originates in the work of Robert W. Connell, who in my reading is only concerned with the concept to the extent that it might be put to use to theorize non-hegemonic or marginal male subjectivities, ec-centric intersections of specific identificatory matrices—race, sexuality, age, body morphology, and so on. I am actually puzzled, to a certain extent, by the ambivalent inheritance engendered by this term. Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell effectively disavow the concept, claiming that it somehow fails to register what has been called the discursive turn. They prefer what they term “psycho-discursive practices” to establish the theoretical groundwork for a critique of male subjectivity, because “hegemonic masculinity,” they argue, “offers a vague and imprecise account of the social psychological reproduction of male identities” (335). They fault Connell in particular on the question of what is done and what is to be done in practice: meaning that the idea does not provide the most convenient ethnomethodological means of amassing and reorganizing “data.” Susan Speer expresses similar disdain for this “impenetrable” concept and its awkward applicability when she concludes that it “actually explains nothing” (108).
Work has been done in feminist studies for years on the question of gender and the possibility of perpetual peace. Of particular importance is Jacklyn Cock's work on the ways that gender is constructed through war, and on the necessity of feminism for demilitarization.
For a brilliant consideration of the political consequences of this masculine knowingness, see Max Haiven's look at Adbusters in this issue.