JUDITH BUTLER. Why are we bringing together comparative literature and global states? What are literary scholars doing with global states? We are, of course, caught by the words. What state are we in that we ask these questions about global states? And which states do we mean? States are certain loci of power, but the state is not all that there is of power. The state is not always the nation-state. We have, for instance, non-national states, and we have security states that actively contest the national basis of the state. So, already, the term state can be dissociated from the term "nation" and the two can be cobbled together through a hyphen, but what work does the hyphen do? Does the hyphen finesse the relation that needs to be explained? Does it mark a certain soldering that has taken place historically? Does it suggest a fallibility at the heart of the relation?
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There are many critical questions to be posed, but one surely has to do with how a population is cast out of the polis and into bare life, conceived as an unprotected exposure to state violence. Can life ever be considered "bare?" And has not life been already entered into the political field in ways that are clearly irreversible? The questions of when and where life begins and ends, the means and legitimate uses of reproductive technology, the quarrels over whether life should be conceived as cell or tissue, all these are clearly questions of life and questions of power容ようxtensions of bio-power in ways that suggest that no simple exclusionary logic can be set up between life and politics. Or, rather, any effort to establish such an exclusionary logic depends upon the depoliticization of life and, once again, writes out the matters of gender, menial labor, and reproduction from the field of the political. The recourse to Arendt痴ち The Human Condition is all the more curious here since it relies on Aristotle痴ち notions of biology, suggesting not only that contemporary science is irrelevant to the matter of thinking in the sphere of the political but incapacitating any vocabulary that might explicitly address all that falls under the rubric of the politics of life.
It may be the case that one crucial and central operation of sovereign power is the capacity to suspend the rights of individuals or groups or to cast them out of a polity. When cast out, one is cast out into a space or a condition of bare life, and the bios of the person is no longer linked to its political status. By "political" here is meant membership in the ranks of citizenship. But does this move not precisely place an unacceptable juridical restriction on the political? After all, if to be "bare life" is to be exposed to power, then power is still on the outside of that life, however brutally it imposes itself, and life is metaphysically still secured from the domain of the political.