Vikki Bell
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 3583995 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Vikki Bell |
| NOMBRES | Vikki |
| APELLIDO | Bell |
| FIRMA | BELL V |
| AFILIACIONES | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3663-1798 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 340 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1991 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Documenting Dictatorship
In Documentality (2013), Maurizio Ferraris argues that documents are at the heart of social institutions. Taking this notion as a cue, this piece considers a key organisation in the resistance to state violence and Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, and focuses on the remarkable document where the desperate stories of people detained, disappeared and murdered following the coup in 1973 were recorded. This process of …
The Sigh of Sorrow and the Force of Art
This article considers the work of Colombian artist Erika Diettes (b. 1978), specifically her projects Sudarios, Río Abajo and Relicarios, as a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of making artworks amidst conflict. Colombia's internal armed conflict challenges any form of representation, being so complex and on such a scale that words often fall away. Diettes’ art concerns what remains after the monstrosity of violence, where we sigh…
Always another breath in my breath
This article explores Denise Riley’s argument in Words of Selves (2000), that the self is multiply constituted, since many speak through and ‘as’ us. This polyvocality means that there is ‘always another breath in my breath’, she argues, citing Deleuze who is, in turn, citing Pierre Klossowski. Here, I trace the quotation back through Deleuze’s (1969) Logic of Sense to Klossowski’s peculiar Roberte Ce Soir (1953). In that work Klossowski elaborat…
Entwined Tellings and the Fragility of the Unique
This article considers how we put together stories about the (violent) past, emphasising how stories emerge through our selective attentions that are themselves necessarily dependent on the modes by which the past is sustained, whether those be traces or material supports that sign(post) the past, or through the care and words of human subjects. Taking as its focus the author’s experience of chasing stories from the Chacabuco ex-detention centre …
Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina
Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute ‘candidates …
An Interview with Elizabeth Grosz
In this interview with Vikki Bell, Elizabeth Grosz explains some of the key concepts and arguments in her book The Incorporeal (2017), including how this book sits with her earlier interventions, the appeal of Simondon's concept of the pre-individual, Ruyer and the notion of directionality, and why reading the Stoics helps us understand current Deleuzian-inspired debates on immanent ethics
Between documentality and imagination
This article considers the notion that to document or inscribe our lives not only leaves a trace of our creaturely presence, but may also become a form of juris-writing, a writing that concerns and aims at Justice. Employing an expanded notion of Justice that takes it beyond the institutions of law, therefore, it asks about forms of documentality (Ferraris) that put us ‘before memory’ in Derrida’s sense. How is it possible to think curation in re…
Declining Performativity
This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as 'topological'. It argues that we might 'decline' performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the complexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers' recent work in …
Writing to the General, and Other Aesthetic Strategies of Critique
This article considers the long career of Argentine artist León Ferrari, from its beginnings to the midst of military dictatorship, through his political exile, to his return to a renewed democracy that nevertheless remains in need of critique. It approaches his oeuvre as the story of an artist's ‘practices of freedom’, in Michel Foucault's sense, a story that is an exploration of the different modes of critique, witnessing and critical contestat…
Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland
Contemporary artworks in Northern Ireland are explored here as critical constellations, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, that engage the cultural processes of transition through their problematization of it. It is argued that the artworks become sites in which the assumptions of transition are opened up for critical reflection, requesting attention to the foreclosing of the meanings of memory, of past-and-future, of community. A mode of critical quest…
HIV Interventions
Rosengarten, M . HIV Interventions: Biomedicine and the Traffic Between Information and Flesh . Seattle : University of Washington Press , 2009 . £16.99 (pbk) ISBN: 9780295989426 Since the development of anti retroviral drugs (ARVs), with HIV and AIDS now decoupled as it were, the terrain of HIV enquiry has altered. This is not to forget, argues Marsha Rosengarten, the drastically unequal access to such drug treatments, nor their many unwanted si…
Introduction
New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality
On Fernando's Photograph
This article concerns the striking photograph of a young man, Fernando Brodsky, taken shortly after he was kidnapped in Argentina in 1979. Brodsky was detained in the notorious Escuela de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, and remains disappeared. The negative of the photograph was smuggled out of ESMA and the image became part of a bundle of photographic evidence submitted by families of the disappeared during the trials of the military after the…
The HauntedNomos
The article considers the role that contemporary visual art and activist-artists have played in transitional Argentina, beginning from the premise that they might be understood as involved in the staging of a wide-ranging shift implied by the term transition. We have chosen three points of entry into this exploration, discussed in three sections: first, the debates around the future of the building Escuela de Mechanica de la Armada (ESMA) in Buen…
From Performativity to Ecology
The Burden of Sensation and the Ethics of Form
While many films over the past decade have turned on the issue of memory (Mulholland Drive, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and others have combined that with a focus on child sexual abuse (notably Mysterious Skin, 2005), Capturing the Friedmans (dir. Jarecki, released 2003, DVD distribution 2004) is remarkable for its combination of both within a documentary film that also places the two themes historically, becoming in effect a…
Special Section
The Politics of Framing
Performative Knowledge
On the Critique of Secular Ethics
Referring to Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Southern US fiction writer Flannery O'Connor expressed the effect of the revelations about the horrors of Nazi Germany as 'haunting'. Taking this comment and her admiration of Arendt as a cue, this article rereads Flannery O'Connor's fictional depiction of secular characters. Usually lauded or critiqued for her entanglement in 'otherworldly' concerns, here these concerns become comprehe…
The scenography of suicide
It is argued here that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses. The article considers the scene of devastation created by a Chechen suicide bomber in Moscow in 2003. Drawing upon a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt that ties her to the tradition of thinking the sublime, it sug…
Out of Conflict
Spectres of Peace
Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the …
In Pursuit of Civic Participation
Northern Ireland's Civic Forum is a key civic participation mechanism agreed as part of the Belfast Agreement and established under the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It brings together representatives from various sectors to act as a ‘consultative forum’ on ‘social, economic, and cultural issues’. This article argues that ‘civic society’ has to be understood as a ‘transactional reality’ in the Foucauldian sense, such that the task of the Civic Forum…
Performativity and Belonging
This short piece introduces the Special Issue, giving both a general sense of the terms 'belonging' and 'performativity', and discussing key related concepts that unite the articles of the issue: difference and their differences; the politics of visuality; embodiment; and the idea of routes. The predominant themes as they appear in the different articles are discussed under these headings
On Speech, Race and Melancholia
In this interview, Judith Butler speaks about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, she addresses both possible critiques of her work, expecially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and responds to que…
Governing childhood
Recent legal movies - stemming from the Gillick decision and incorporated into the Children Act 1989 - appear to champion the right of the mature child to autonomy. This article argues that these have been contradictory manoeuvres, both at the level of statute and in practice. Although (some) children's wishes are being listened to, the shift toward giving children independence in decision making about their lives has not been straigtforward. How…
Declining Performativity
This article explores what might happen to the concept of performativity within arguments that are understood as 'topological'. It argues that we might 'decline' performativity, which is to say, elaborate the concerns that are expressed in the concept, but inclining it more boldly towards the complexities of a world whose elements are always in process of constitution, of reiterative enfolding. Taking a cue from Isabelle Stengers' recent work in …
New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality
Performative Knowledge
On Fernando's Photograph
This article concerns the striking photograph of a young man, Fernando Brodsky, taken shortly after he was kidnapped in Argentina in 1979. Brodsky was detained in the notorious Escuela de la Armada (ESMA) in Buenos Aires, and remains disappeared. The negative of the photograph was smuggled out of ESMA and the image became part of a bundle of photographic evidence submitted by families of the disappeared during the trials of the military after the…
The Politics of Framing
In Pursuit of Civic Participation
Northern Ireland's Civic Forum is a key civic participation mechanism agreed as part of the Belfast Agreement and established under the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It brings together representatives from various sectors to act as a ‘consultative forum’ on ‘social, economic, and cultural issues’. This article argues that ‘civic society’ has to be understood as a ‘transactional reality’ in the Foucauldian sense, such that the task of the Civic Forum…
The vigilant(e) parent and the paedophile
Between 1821 and 1824 Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) attempted to capture on canvas the faces of various ' monomanias' , including a portrait of a ' man with the ' monomania' of child kidnapping(1822-3) which was recently exhibited in London as part of the Spectacular Bodies exhibition (Hayward Gallery, 2000). The exhibition traced, inter alia, the development of the aestheticisation of insanity through technologies of knowledge production. To th…
Mimesis as Cultural Survival
Focusing on Judith Butler's highly influential work on gender, this article draws attention to a certain feminist inheritance of an emphasis on mimesis and imitation that resonates with the ways in which theoreticians responded to the calamitous events of essentialist politics and versions of belonging that were central to the political vision of Hitler's National Socialism and to the events of the Second World War. The intention is to point to t…
The HauntedNomos
The article considers the role that contemporary visual art and activist-artists have played in transitional Argentina, beginning from the premise that they might be understood as involved in the staging of a wide-ranging shift implied by the term transition. We have chosen three points of entry into this exploration, discussed in three sections: first, the debates around the future of the building Escuela de Mechanica de la Armada (ESMA) in Buen…
On the Critique of Secular Ethics
Referring to Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Southern US fiction writer Flannery O'Connor expressed the effect of the revelations about the horrors of Nazi Germany as 'haunting'. Taking this comment and her admiration of Arendt as a cue, this article rereads Flannery O'Connor's fictional depiction of secular characters. Usually lauded or critiqued for her entanglement in 'otherworldly' concerns, here these concerns become comprehe…
Spectres of Peace
Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the …
Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence
This interview with Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appaddurai was conducted in the belief that these two thinkers, who stem from different disciplines but whose work meets at certain crucial junctures, would be able to present a discussion to a wider audience about the themes and issues that were currently motivating them in their work. Paul Gilroy's work is well known as a central reference point within the contemporary analysis of 'race' and racism. At …
Special Section
Between documentality and imagination
This article considers the notion that to document or inscribe our lives not only leaves a trace of our creaturely presence, but may also become a form of juris-writing, a writing that concerns and aims at Justice. Employing an expanded notion of Justice that takes it beyond the institutions of law, therefore, it asks about forms of documentality (Ferraris) that put us ‘before memory’ in Derrida’s sense. How is it possible to think curation in re…
The scenography of suicide
It is argued here that the politics of suicide bombings can be seen to operate through the aesthetic responses they produce, insofar as these responses are provoked and in that they necessarily mobilise further responses. The article considers the scene of devastation created by a Chechen suicide bomber in Moscow in 2003. Drawing upon a reading of the political theory of Hannah Arendt that ties her to the tradition of thinking the sublime, it sug…
Documenting Dictatorship
In Documentality (2013), Maurizio Ferraris argues that documents are at the heart of social institutions. Taking this notion as a cue, this piece considers a key organisation in the resistance to state violence and Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, and focuses on the remarkable document where the desperate stories of people detained, disappeared and murdered following the coup in 1973 were recorded. This process of …
Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina
Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dictatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute ‘candidates …
Out of Conflict
The Violence and the Appeal of Raciologies
On ethics and feminism
In this article I argue that, if one is persuaded by the arguments of Emmanuel Levinas, the pursuit of something called 'ethical feminism' is rendered difficult, for, according to Levinas, there is a hiatus between ethics and politics in so far as politics does not flow from ethics. Indeed, politics obliges one to engage in the non-ethical, so that the ethical cannot be understood as a basis for feminist politics. I contend that one can argue tha…
Show and Tell
Employing the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, this article suggests the possibility of theorizing racialization as a process involving lines of light and of enunciation, of power and subjectification, that entwine in the placing of people within racial categories. The argument is staged upon a reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz , especially because the novel begins to open up the question of how sight and discourse interrelate. Such an exploration…
Entwined Tellings and the Fragility of the Unique
This article considers how we put together stories about the (violent) past, emphasising how stories emerge through our selective attentions that are themselves necessarily dependent on the modes by which the past is sustained, whether those be traces or material supports that sign(post) the past, or through the care and words of human subjects. Taking as its focus the author’s experience of chasing stories from the Chacabuco ex-detention centre …
Two modes of power? Foucault, feminism and child sexual abuse
(1991). Two modes of power? Foucault, feminism and child sexual abuse. Journal of Gender Studies: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 168-185
Interrogating Incest
Winner of British Sociological Association Philip Abrams Memorial Prize 1993 Within feminism incest has often been subsumed under a discussion of sexual violence and abuse. Yet, important as this is, there has been little account of how feminist work itself relates to other ways of talking about and understanding incest. In Interrogating Incest Vikki Bell focuses on the issue of incest and its place in sociological theory, feminist theory and cri…
Interrogating incest
Governing childhood
Recent legal movies - stemming from the Gillick decision and incorporated into the Children Act 1989 - appear to champion the right of the mature child to autonomy. This article argues that these have been contradictory manoeuvres, both at the level of statute and in practice. Although (some) children's wishes are being listened to, the shift toward giving children independence in decision making about their lives has not been straigtforward. How…
Sounding the Siren
Dreaming and Time in Foucault's Philosophy
Travelling law
On metaphors of suffering
This article suggest that the contemporary feminist imagination is informed by the ways in which feminist argumentation has drawn upon notions of race, blackness and slavery as approximations of the condition of womanhood. The moral weight that islent by such analyses might be rendered as inaccurate, opportunistic or even racist. However, rathe than a rejection of such arguments as simply 'wrong' (which would involve some mode of evaluation) it i…
Show and Tell
Employing the Foucauldian notion of dispositif, this article suggests the possibility of theorizing racialization as a process involving lines of light and of enunciation, of power and subjectification, that entwine in the placing of people within racial categories. The argument is staged upon a reading of Toni Morrison's Jazz , especially because the novel begins to open up the question of how sight and discourse interrelate. Such an exploration…
On Speech, Race and Melancholia
Performativity and Belonging
On Speech, Race and Melancholia
In this interview, Judith Butler speaks about her most recent work, especially Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), in terms of how it represents a continuation of certain themes and how it represents moves into new terrains of debate. In particular, she addresses both possible critiques of her work, expecially around the issue of the possibility of political visions and the attention to speech when theorizing subjectification, and responds to que…
Mimesis as Cultural Survival
Focusing on Judith Butler's highly influential work on gender, this article draws attention to a certain feminist inheritance of an emphasis on mimesis and imitation that resonates with the ways in which theoreticians responded to the calamitous events of essentialist politics and versions of belonging that were central to the political vision of Hitler's National Socialism and to the events of the Second World War. The intention is to point to t…
Historical Memory, Global Movements and Violence
This interview with Paul Gilroy and Arjun Appaddurai was conducted in the belief that these two thinkers, who stem from different disciplines but whose work meets at certain crucial junctures, would be able to present a discussion to a wider audience about the themes and issues that were currently motivating them in their work. Paul Gilroy's work is well known as a central reference point within the contemporary analysis of 'race' and racism. At …
Performativity and Belonging
This short piece introduces the Special Issue, giving both a general sense of the terms 'belonging' and 'performativity', and discussing key related concepts that unite the articles of the issue: difference and their differences; the politics of visuality; embodiment; and the idea of routes. The predominant themes as they appear in the different articles are discussed under these headings
On ethics and feminism
In this article I argue that, if one is persuaded by the arguments of Emmanuel Levinas, the pursuit of something called 'ethical feminism' is rendered difficult, for, according to Levinas, there is a hiatus between ethics and politics in so far as politics does not flow from ethics. Indeed, politics obliges one to engage in the non-ethical, so that the ethical cannot be understood as a basis for feminist politics. I contend that one can argue tha…
On ethics and feminism
In this article I argue that, if one is persuaded by the arguments of Emmanuel Levinas, the pursuit of something called ‘ethical feminism’ is rendered difficult, for, according to Levinas, there is a hiatus between ethics and politics in so far as politics does not flow from ethics. Indeed, politics obliges one to engage in the non-ethical, so that the ethical cannot be understood as a basis for feminist politics. I contend that one can argue tha…
Memória histórica, movimentos globais e violência
Esta entrevista foi feita a fim de dar uma oportunidade para que esses dois pensadores, oriundos de diferentes disciplinas, mas cujas obras convergem em certas tematicas centrais, apresentassem uma discussao para uma audiencia mais ampla sobre os temas e indagacoes que motivam seu trabalho atual. A obra de Paul Gilroy e conhecida como referencia central da analise contemporânea da “raca” e do racismo. Em termos amplos, ele escreve sobre a constit…
Generation and Genealogy
The vigilant(e) parent and the paedophile
Between 1821 and 1824 Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) attempted to capture on canvas the faces of various ' monomanias' , including a portrait of a ' man with the ' monomania' of child kidnapping(1822-3) which was recently exhibited in London as part of the Spectacular Bodies exhibition (Hayward Gallery, 2000). The exhibition traced, inter alia, the development of the aestheticisation of insanity through technologies of knowledge production. To th…
The Violence and the Appeal of Raciologies
Feminist thought and the totalitarian interloper
Starting from the premise that thinking in itself cannot be dangerous, but that the presentation of thought as public communication can be an occasion to debate the potentialities of an intervention, this article addresses feminist theoretical disputes as rhetorical exchange. The focus is the now well-known critique that Martha Nussbaum made of Judith Butler’s work, a critique to which some have responded by questioning in turn Nussbaum’s certain…
Out of Conflict
Spectres of Peace
Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This ‘subject’, moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the …
In Pursuit of Civic Participation
Northern Ireland's Civic Forum is a key civic participation mechanism agreed as part of the Belfast Agreement and established under the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It brings together representatives from various sectors to act as a ‘consultative forum’ on ‘social, economic, and cultural issues’. This article argues that ‘civic society’ has to be understood as a ‘transactional reality’ in the Foucauldian sense, such that the task of the Civic Forum…
Sociology (39 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Law (26 obras) · Politics (23 obras) · Epistemology (21 obras) · Philosophy (21 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Aesthetics (19 obras) · Art (17 obras)