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raxI swear I've read this before. Flogging in Australia was part of the penal system abolished for whites in the 1800s, but continued well after directed at aboriginal populations; many depressing examples are provided, as well as animalizing rhetoric about "thick hides" (thus the title).
This takes Agamben and uses it to say that colonial Australia is a space of exception, but also critiques Agamben to say that there is a "Relationship of colonialism, race and whiteness to biopower." [0] Also, critical whiteness needs to look at biopower.
Foucault suggests torture of the soul rather than of the body --- but what does that mean? Aren't these things connected? (Is there not torture of the soul as well as of the body through torture of the body?)
Whiteness assumes the presence of a soul, and non-whiteness does not -- question of existence of "animal" soul... "the whip only sought to achieve through force what the missionary and the reserve manager, and other sentinels of white power sought through other means." (55)
"To be white is to possess a soul that may be transparently interrogated by power; to not posses this invisibility, on the other hand, is to feel the consequences of having one’s soul always in question, to endure the probing white sting of power." (55)
The ending of this is potentially very useful to me --- is the move of biopolitics to separate human from nonhuman problematic? What if we assume the animal has a soul? "There is a structuring assumption that guides the Western philosophical tradition, and surfaces today in contemporary bipolitics: namely, that the animal soul is always in question. This is an assumption that organizes our relationship not only to non-human entities, but to all those who bear animality as the prominent sign of their essence: the savage, the black, the infant." (56)
[0] None of these Australian papers use the Oxford comma. It's confusing.
This takes Agamben and uses it to say that colonial Australia is a space of exception, but also critiques Agamben to say that there is a "Relationship of colonialism, race and whiteness to biopower." [0] Also, critical whiteness needs to look at biopower.
Foucault suggests torture of the soul rather than of the body --- but what does that mean? Aren't these things connected? (Is there not torture of the soul as well as of the body through torture of the body?)
Whiteness assumes the presence of a soul, and non-whiteness does not -- question of existence of "animal" soul... "the whip only sought to achieve through force what the missionary and the reserve manager, and other sentinels of white power sought through other means." (55)
"To be white is to possess a soul that may be transparently interrogated by power; to not posses this invisibility, on the other hand, is to feel the consequences of having one’s soul always in question, to endure the probing white sting of power." (55)
The ending of this is potentially very useful to me --- is the move of biopolitics to separate human from nonhuman problematic? What if we assume the animal has a soul? "There is a structuring assumption that guides the Western philosophical tradition, and surfaces today in contemporary bipolitics: namely, that the animal soul is always in question. This is an assumption that organizes our relationship not only to non-human entities, but to all those who bear animality as the prominent sign of their essence: the savage, the black, the infant." (56)
[0] None of these Australian papers use the Oxford comma. It's confusing.
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Date: 2010-11-02 06:12 pm (UTC)p 13 (http://books.google.com/books?id=ESTjQYS_8hMC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA13#v=onepage&q&f=false): "Aquinas answers in a line almost entirely taken over from Aristotle... 'Dumb animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason... they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others.'"
p 15: "Aquinas' doctrine has become the dominant Western position on animals since the thirteenth century. Those in any doubt about this should consult Keith Thomas' excellent survey entitled Man and the Natural World. Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do we find Aquinas seriously challenged." (Linzey goes on to cite the challenges/ers)