Leigh M. Johnson

Bon Mots: Coetzee on the Origin of the State

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007, p.3), J.M. Coetzee’s chief narrator, Señor C, speculates: Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”– not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one– participate in its coming into being….

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The Not-Long-Enough Arm of the Law

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 4 Comments

Earlier this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued its second arrest warrant for the President of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on his watch in the course of the ongoing conflict in Darfur. Included in the charges against Bashir is the crime of genocide, which the ICC claims…

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Bon Mots: Arendt on the Rights of Stateless People

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt/HBJ, 1979, p. 295-6), Hannah Arendt tracks the coincidence of statelessness and rightlessness: The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion– formulas which were designed to solve problems within…

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The Uncanny Valley 4: Magic, Miracles, and the Necessary Third

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive, Uncanny Valley 3 Comments

As many of you know, I was a tad bit obsessed with a certain theory in robotics known as “the uncanny valley” several months back. I even delivered a philosophy paper this past Spring using the uncanny valley as one way of explaining our aversion to racial passing. (You can read my series of posts…

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Bon Mots: Agamben on Ausnahmezustand

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

In State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2003, p.86-7), Giorgio Agamben writes:The aim of this investigation– in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”– was to bring to light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the “ark” of power contains…

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Closer than Gitmo, Further from Humane

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

In case any of you were still operating under the illusion that our prisons at home are somehow better than our secret prisons abroad, Lousiana has stepped in to disabuse you of that misconception. Sheriff Jack Strain of St. Tammany Parish is currently under scrutiny for his practice of confining “suicidal” inmates to 3’x3′ metal…

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Bon Mots: Derrida on the future of the Humanities

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Human Rights, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

From “The University Without Conditions” in Without Alibi (Stanford University Press, 2002, p.231), Jacques Derrida describes “the Humanities of tomorrow”: These new Humanities would treat the history of man, the idea, the figure, and the notion of “what is proper to man.” They will do this on the basis of a nonfinite series of oppositions…

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Kermit and Me

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Music, RMWMTMBM Archive 3 Comments

I just returned from a long weekend in New Orleans, the second-greatest city in the U.S. South. One of my chief aims while in NOLA was to see Kermit Ruffins, an absolutely amazing trumpet player, co-founder of the legendary Rebirth Brass Band and, more recently, a regular star on the HBO series “Treme.” Before I…

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Doing Harm

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Human Rights, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Torture, Weak Humanism 4 Comments

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, Physicians for Human Rights, has just released a White Paper entitled “Experiments in Torture” that documents medical professionals’ complicity with CIA human intelligence collection programs, which include the now-infamous “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs), in post-9/11 detention centers. There is, of course, a continuing (and, at least on one side, entirely…

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Ass[backwards]essment in Higher Ed

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive, Teaching 6 Comments

About a week ago, in a NYT article entitled “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” professor and provocateur Stanley Fish lambasted the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Texas Governor Rick Perry for proposing that the evaluation of faculty should move to a more “consumerist” (Fish calls it “mercenary”) model. The proposal would require college and…

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