what's Athena's beef?

With Heidegger that is....

Alright so let's break it down Athena's article without the jargo jargon:

The “cut body of humanity” refers to the Other / Humane dualism. You can't be 'humane' with out knowing what it is to be inhumane. So we point to other 'bodies' as "Other" to stablize our concept of "humane" as the opposite.

Athena criticizes Hiedegger for ignoring the power politics of "Enframing" in reference to Auschwitz. Rather than seen as a part of the tandem of sitting reserved: agricultural production and airplanes...etc; mass deaths (not corpses) have to bee seen as a separate segment of that tandem to understand the biopolitics at work. If it is dismissed as a just a product of "enframent", then it falls into the danger of "neutralizing biopolitcs", that is letting it go unnoticed.

Athena adamantly re-reads Hiedegger’s Enframing as the “technomediated representation of bodies,” and thus, “the language of biopolitics”. In other words, if bodies are seen as “sitting reserved”, then a body of power (sovereign) can determine whether these bodies are worth living, and which are not. Hiedegger does not differentiate between the body of the “sovereign” and the bodies of the “other”- the victims of enframing.

Thus, Athena concludes (I’m omitting of course many other points raised in the article) that the biopolitics experienced in the Holocaust, is experienced presently on a global and local forefront. Yet, it is the invisibility of biopolitics that is responsible for the “loss of humanity”, not enframent as Hiedegger claims.


A Question of Ethics: Discussing the languages of representation

Poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. –Adorno.

Athanasiou proposes to take up Foucault’s challenge to “rethink technology”. That is to re-orient the body outside of an ‘enframing’ biopolitics, and towards an ‘ethicopolitical force’ that manages the welfare of individuals and populations, and acknowledges human life (145). Yet she concludes the essay with little aid in providing a path, and unlike Heidegger, refers to Rose’s “Holocaust Piety”, purporting that art is not the way.

Thus, we are left with the dilemma of how to steer clear of the technomediated body as a political site “sitting reserved”, while avoiding the danger of mystification of literary, poetic, or artistic representation. The dilemma then precipitates into the paradoxes within the languages of representation, since both fail to represent the ‘Other-ed’: the former as silenced, the latter as aestheticized or dismissed as the “limits of language”.

Yet, is not the ‘enframing’ of art as a means of representation the negation of individual agency? Can art be appreciated as a terrain of individual expression, and not singularly as a project of representation; but equally as a process of exploring the sentiments experienced as humans? Can the failure of language in art be recognized rather than the limits of language, but the ambiguities inherent in the aporias of expressing ‘human life’? In Defense of Poesies, Philip Sydney argues poetry (and art) does no seek truth, or attempt to be “Truth”, but rather a process of dealing with the fragility of language and understanding.