Slide 2:
Identify the state (in the episode and) on the map. Identify the nation in relation to the map. How do you understand Navajo citizenship in relation to biopower? How does kinship in the Navajo nation differ from kinship systems in the U.S.?
Foucault, 17 March 1976, “Society Must be Defended” :
Foucault, 17 March 1976, “Society Must be Defended” “Security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life.” (246)
power exerts force through regularization/normalization. (247)
Degeneracy is the point where the “body” and the “population” articulate (come together).
F. explores this idea through racism and war BIOPOWER
Foucault on Racism, which is the “break between what must live and what must die.” :
Foucault on Racism, which is the “break between what must live and what must die.” Bio-power:
control over human bodies and their livelihoods through their consent and dissent. Examples include sexual politics such as reproduction.
is inscribed in “the mechanisms of the state.”
State Racism:
1) separates groups within a population—fragmentation of biology,
2) killing of the “other” becomes acceptable
F. explores WWII and the Nazi regime.
We explore the Navajo nation specifically.
Lacan’s contribution to theories of subjectivity :
Lacan’s contribution to theories of subjectivity The Imaginary – the mythic, deceptive combination of symbols with imagination. Narcissistic.
The Symbolic – the linguistic realm, which “law” and “structure” depends upon. Oppositional relationships/binaries define the symbolic. (Butler, “Regulating Gender”)
The Real – ontologically absolute and always in its place
Language depends upon both the imaginary and the real.
The human enters subjectivity through language. Language is a system complete and outside the human, thus a human is at once alienated upon entry into the system.
Desire :
Desire Lacan argues “it is only once it is formulated, named in the presence of the other, that desire appears in the full sense of the term.”
This naming of desire “is not a question of recognizing something which would be entirely given. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world.”
The truth about desire is somehow present in discourse, although discourse is never able to articulate the entire truth about desire—whenever discourse attempts to articulate desire, there is always a leftover or surplus.
Butler, “Gender Regulations” :
Butler, “Gender Regulations” Gender performs a regulatory operation of power that naturalizes the hegemonic instance and forecloses the thinkability of its disruption.
The norm actively confers reality; indeed only by virtue of its repeated power to confer reality is the norm constituted as a norm. (52)
Norms work in the service of parameters of personhood and the “condition and exceed the lives they make—and break.” (56)