Professor of Rhetoric and Ethics
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Lucy Suchman
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1-24
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Kelly E Happe
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25-57
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Sarah Burgess
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58-79
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Anne-Marie Kramer
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80-104
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Brian Beaton
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105-124
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Stuart J Murray, Deborah Lynn Steinberg
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125-139
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Michael Vicaro, Barbara Biesecker
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140-145
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The Human Right to Die
From Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp to Pelican Bay State Prison, in recent years a discourse of human rights has been mobilized to justify the forced feeding of hunger striking prisoners. Keeping alive at all costs, the biopolitical logics of forced feeding are counterposed to suicide, which is presented as an aberration of human life, a temporary deviance in need of correction. Taking solitary confinement as its scene of study, this paper considers suicide as thanatopolitical—that is, as a threat to, interruption of, and corporeal critique of neoliberal biopolitics. But it is not simply death, in opposition to bare life, that is at stake for the suicide: it is what Blanchot theorizes as “the Openness of a community.” This Openness is a condition for human rights, which must be founded in community, and not upon bare biological life. In other words, “the right to have rights,” to use Arendt’s phrase, depends upon the relevance of speech, which is radically undermined by solitary confinement, but which nevertheless emerges in flickering moments of solidarity across the solitary archipelago. Conceived in this manner, the Openness of community must be underwritten by suicide—the only death that actively contests the biopolitical state power “to make live and let die.”
The Circuits of Secret Desire: Masturbation and the Defence of Scholarly Cynicism
According to Michel Foucault, “Masturbation is the universal secret shared by everyone but disclosed to no one.” This paper discusses masturbation in the context of Foucault’s late work on ethics as “the care of the self”—a self-relation that critically resists the institution of abstract rationalism, an ethic of autonomy, and their apotheosis in neoliberal forms of governance. The paper falls into three parts. In the first, I sketch the history of masturbation as a religious, social, political, medical, and economic problem. I’m interested here how masturbation arose as a threat to governing logics and ideologies, and thus as a threat to normative subject formation. In the second part, I venture an apology for the metaphorics of masturbation. Turning to the ancient Greek “care of the self,” I theorize the self’s relation to itself in terms of masturbation and a phenomenology of touch. I argue that the central trope for the masturbator is catachresis. In this context, the masturbator might serve as a critical figure, one whose activities cannot easily be commodified or co-opted by regimes of accountability, efficiency, and utility. In the third and concluding part, I reflect on the circuits and politics of the production of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities. I argue that the scholarly work that we do—often dismissively characterized as “mental masturbation”—might be productively re-figured as an ethic of self-care modeled on Cynic philosophy. A defence of theoretical scholarship, this paper is also a scathing critique of “austerity” and the wholesale neoliberalization of the university.
Stuart J. Murray 
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