François Debrix
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 282803 |
|---|---|
| NOME | François Debrix |
| PRENOMES | François |
| SOBRENOME | Debrix |
| ASSINATURA | DEBRIX F |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Florida International University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4932-3364 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 30 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 80 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1995 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2023 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Necropolitics and American Hype-Power
In a 2009 essay titled “Hyper-Power or Hype-Power,” Tim Luke prompted us to think about American foreign policy and national security as being in the process of transitioning from hyper-power to something Luke called “hype-power.” Luke sought to explore the extent to which post-Cold War American hyper-power was the product of and, in a way, becoming increasingly indistinguishable from hyped-up displays of might and prowess in the sphere of securi…
Biopolitics in the ‘Psychic Realm’
This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievemen…
Horror beyond Death
Biopolitics often enters the sphere of geopolitics in the form of a series of necropolitical or thanatopolitical interventions.1 From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life and bodies in configurations of (geo)political power has generally involved the putting to death of large swaths of populations, whether they are directly tar…
Topologies of vulnerability and the proliferation of camp life
An important theoretical insight in critical geography of late has been the conceptual reevaluation of space topologically, in a manner that moves us away from an insistence on topographical priority. Unlike topography that relies on fixity, placement, grounding, and mapping, topology approaches space as a matter of relationality, redistribution, layering, transformation, or virtuality. The camp has been a ubiquitous geographical figure of late-m…
Katechontic Sovereignty
At its core, security is obsessed with the survival of the sovereign order. Security tends to see the sovereign's existence as threatened by agents whose purpose is to challenge the life of the sovereign. In this article, I mobilize a theological language about the relationship between sovereignty and security to grasp the place that the question of life versus death, the fact of sovereign violence, and the problem of temporality occupy in past a…
Reading Daniel Deudney's Bounding Power
Beyond Biopolitics
'Beyond Biopolitics constitutes a truly serious attempt to think about the unthinkable.' Guy Lancaster, Political Studies Review: 2014 VOL 12, 93. Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11-War on Terror era. This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms…
Agonal sovereignty
The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and…
Rethinking Democracy's Emergence
We Other IR Foucaultians
When an interrogation whose purpose seems to be to assess the utility of Foucault's work and Foucault-inspired ideas in a particular domain of political analysis (IR) is initiated, one cannot help but wonder whether a logic of confession or justification is being mobilized. Such a confessional logic seems to interpellate “we other/us all” (nous autres) IR Foucaultians1 and demands to be addressed as a precondition for any discussion about what it…
The Geopolitics of American Insecurity
Tabloid Terror
Tabloid Imperialism
Over the past decade, influential American intellectuals of statecraft have adopted a style of presentation of global political, social, and economic realities that can be described as tabloid geopolitics. Using a discursive style directly borrowed from popular television talk-shows, news reporting, and punditry, tabloid geopolitics is designed to be highly entertaining, sensational, shocking, and overtly simplistic. Tabloid geopolitics combines …
The Sublime Spectatorship of War
In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in dist…
Kill Bill, Volume I and Volume II
US Ideology and the War in Iraq
Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has always been concerned with the meaning of ideology and its role in the constitution of political subjects (Žižek 1989, 1994). Yet, apart from a few incursions in matters of national identity, postcommunism, and postdemocratic transition (Žižek 1993), Žižek's philosophical reflections were never directly about international relations. To say that Žižek reverses this trend in Iraq: The Borr…
The Role of the Media in Monitoring International Humanitarian Law during Military Interventions
This article explores the gap between International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and its implementation by means of military interventions. We suggest that using states’ militaries to resolve humanitarian crises sometimes runs the risk of causing new forms of IHL violations that go unnoticed or are simply minimized because of the belief that a larger humanitarian goal has been served. Because so-called humanitarian forces in the past decade have often …
Discourses of war, geographies of abjection
This article critically details the strategies and ideologies that inform three key post-9/11 volumes on the politics of terror, war making and national security in the USA. These texts, by renowned American 'masters of statecraft' Robert Kaplan, Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Ledeen, encourage the USA's political and military leadership to embrace terror and violence and to be continuously at war against alleged American enemies. The article ar…
Tabloid realism and the revival of American security culture
At a time when notions like globalisation and cultural fragmentation are being used to describe the changing nature of international politics, a persistently conservative discourse of national security (re)surfaces in foreign policy literatures. The purpose of this essay is to analyse this ‘new’ discourse and sketch out some of its ideological intents. Referred to as ‘tabloid realism’, this discourse can be found in texts authored by American sch…
Language as Criticism
Much has been written of late about language as a critical tool of research in international relations. Among critical international relations scholars, constructivists and poststructuralists have been the main proponents of using of language as a challenge to structural realist assumptions about world politics. Yet, it is not always clear why these critical scholars decide to turn to linguistic methodologies. This article reveals that there are …
Cyberterror and Media-Induced Fears
Post-Mortem Photography
Post-Mortem Photography: Gilles Peress and the Taxonomy of Death François Debrix Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia. New York: Scalo, 1994; and The Silence. New York: Scalo, 1995. Gilles Peress and Eric Stover, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. New York: Scalo, 1998. You’re like a living tentacle that’s lifting, reaching around all this death, trying to pull it out. —William Haglund, forensic anthropologist (1998) The postmortem condition descri…
The Elusive Search for Normative Order in International Relations
Books reviewed: Communicating Democracy: The Media and Political Transitions,Patrick H. O'Neil, ed. Broken Chain of Being: James Brown Scott and theOrigins of Modern International Law, Christopher R. Rossi
Space Quest
An omnivoyant eye, a power from above, capable of encompassing by its penetrating gaze all life on earth and of simultaneously controlling and regulating with a most detailed perfection the existence of individuals, animals, plants, machines, and institutions placed under its inspection: such a scenario has been imagined many times, from the Christian mystics of the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century liberal utilitarians, from technocrati…
Specters of postmodernism
In Specters of Marx, Derrida proposes a return to the spirit of Marxism as a way of dealing with the ‘repoliticization’ of contemporary realities. I suggest that Derrida’s rediscovery of Marx allows one to map out what I call the end(s) of postmodernism, that is to say, the point(s) where the cultural free-play characteristic of the postmodern mood is confronted with renewed questions of politics, ideology and technology. Through a micro-reading …
Topologies of vulnerability and the proliferation of camp life
An important theoretical insight in critical geography of late has been the conceptual reevaluation of space topologically, in a manner that moves us away from an insistence on topographical priority. Unlike topography that relies on fixity, placement, grounding, and mapping, topology approaches space as a matter of relationality, redistribution, layering, transformation, or virtuality. The camp has been a ubiquitous geographical figure of late-m…
Deterritorialised territories, borderless borders
This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisatio…
The Sublime Spectatorship of War
In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in dist…
Tabloid realism and the revival of American security culture
At a time when notions like globalisation and cultural fragmentation are being used to describe the changing nature of international politics, a persistently conservative discourse of national security (re)surfaces in foreign policy literatures. The purpose of this essay is to analyse this ‘new’ discourse and sketch out some of its ideological intents. Referred to as ‘tabloid realism’, this discourse can be found in texts authored by American sch…
Tabloid Imperialism
Over the past decade, influential American intellectuals of statecraft have adopted a style of presentation of global political, social, and economic realities that can be described as tabloid geopolitics. Using a discursive style directly borrowed from popular television talk-shows, news reporting, and punditry, tabloid geopolitics is designed to be highly entertaining, sensational, shocking, and overtly simplistic. Tabloid geopolitics combines …
Discourses of war, geographies of abjection
This article critically details the strategies and ideologies that inform three key post-9/11 volumes on the politics of terror, war making and national security in the USA. These texts, by renowned American 'masters of statecraft' Robert Kaplan, Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Ledeen, encourage the USA's political and military leadership to embrace terror and violence and to be continuously at war against alleged American enemies. The article ar…
Language as Criticism
Much has been written of late about language as a critical tool of research in international relations. Among critical international relations scholars, constructivists and poststructuralists have been the main proponents of using of language as a challenge to structural realist assumptions about world politics. Yet, it is not always clear why these critical scholars decide to turn to linguistic methodologies. This article reveals that there are …
Horror beyond Death
Biopolitics often enters the sphere of geopolitics in the form of a series of necropolitical or thanatopolitical interventions.1 From territorial conquests or wars of attrition to the concentration camps or policies of control of displaced populations, the biopolitical capture of human life and bodies in configurations of (geo)political power has generally involved the putting to death of large swaths of populations, whether they are directly tar…
Katechontic Sovereignty
At its core, security is obsessed with the survival of the sovereign order. Security tends to see the sovereign's existence as threatened by agents whose purpose is to challenge the life of the sovereign. In this article, I mobilize a theological language about the relationship between sovereignty and security to grasp the place that the question of life versus death, the fact of sovereign violence, and the problem of temporality occupy in past a…
Deterritorialised territories, borderless borders
This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisatio…
Space Quest
An omnivoyant eye, a power from above, capable of encompassing by its penetrating gaze all life on earth and of simultaneously controlling and regulating with a most detailed perfection the existence of individuals, animals, plants, machines, and institutions placed under its inspection: such a scenario has been imagined many times, from the Christian mystics of the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century liberal utilitarians, from technocrati…
Deploying Vision, Simulating Action
Agonal sovereignty
The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and…
Rethinking Democracy's Emergence
Biopolitics in the ‘Psychic Realm’
This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievemen…
Reading Daniel Deudney's Bounding Power
We Other IR Foucaultians
When an interrogation whose purpose seems to be to assess the utility of Foucault's work and Foucault-inspired ideas in a particular domain of political analysis (IR) is initiated, one cannot help but wonder whether a logic of confession or justification is being mobilized. Such a confessional logic seems to interpellate “we other/us all” (nous autres) IR Foucaultians1 and demands to be addressed as a precondition for any discussion about what it…
Specters of postmodernism
In Specters of Marx, Derrida proposes a return to the spirit of Marxism as a way of dealing with the ‘repoliticization’ of contemporary realities. I suggest that Derrida’s rediscovery of Marx allows one to map out what I call the end(s) of postmodernism, that is to say, the point(s) where the cultural free-play characteristic of the postmodern mood is confronted with renewed questions of politics, ideology and technology. Through a micro-reading …
Simulated terrorism
What role does “fear” play in international relations and international terrorism? By examining the recent escalation of terrorist violence in incidents such as the bombings at Lockerbie, the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City, we can better understand the logic of group terrorism in what appears to be an emerging post‐Cold War panic. Beyond terrorism's physical violence, its excessively visual representations present an additional challenge. T…
Deploying Vision, Simulating Action
Impassable passages
Impassable Passages: Derrida, Aporia, and the Question of Politics François Debrix Richard Beardsworth, Derrida & the Political New York: Routledge, 1996, 174 pp. The impact of Jacques Derrida’s thought on contemporary politics has often been treated as an accidental, at best marginal, phenomenon. Unlike other French thinkers representative of what is generally understood as the postmodern moment (Foucault, Deleuze, or Baudrillard for instance), …
Deterritorialised territories, borderless borders
This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisatio…
Deterritorialised territories, borderless borders
This article examines the phenomenon of international medical assistance to populations in distress from the perspective of the new spatial strategies deployed by medical humanitarian organisations. Taking seriously the ‘borderlessness’ of movements such as Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders, or MSF), the article argues that transnational medical organisations participate in the practice of deterritorialisation. Deterritorialisatio…
Post-Mortem Photography
Post-Mortem Photography: Gilles Peress and the Taxonomy of Death François Debrix Gilles Peress, Farewell to Bosnia. New York: Scalo, 1994; and The Silence. New York: Scalo, 1995. Gilles Peress and Eric Stover, The Graves: Srebrenica and Vukovar. New York: Scalo, 1998. You’re like a living tentacle that’s lifting, reaching around all this death, trying to pull it out. —William Haglund, forensic anthropologist (1998) The postmortem condition descri…
The Elusive Search for Normative Order in International Relations
Books reviewed: Communicating Democracy: The Media and Political Transitions,Patrick H. O'Neil, ed. Broken Chain of Being: James Brown Scott and theOrigins of Modern International Law, Christopher R. Rossi
Space Quest
An omnivoyant eye, a power from above, capable of encompassing by its penetrating gaze all life on earth and of simultaneously controlling and regulating with a most detailed perfection the existence of individuals, animals, plants, machines, and institutions placed under its inspection: such a scenario has been imagined many times, from the Christian mystics of the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century liberal utilitarians, from technocrati…
Specters of postmodernism
In Specters of Marx, Derrida proposes a return to the spirit of Marxism as a way of dealing with the ‘repoliticization’ of contemporary realities. I suggest that Derrida’s rediscovery of Marx allows one to map out what I call the end(s) of postmodernism, that is to say, the point(s) where the cultural free-play characteristic of the postmodern mood is confronted with renewed questions of politics, ideology and technology. Through a micro-reading …
Cyberterror and Media-Induced Fears
Language as Criticism
Much has been written of late about language as a critical tool of research in international relations. Among critical international relations scholars, constructivists and poststructuralists have been the main proponents of using of language as a challenge to structural realist assumptions about world politics. Yet, it is not always clear why these critical scholars decide to turn to linguistic methodologies. This article reveals that there are …
Tabloid realism and the revival of American security culture
At a time when notions like globalisation and cultural fragmentation are being used to describe the changing nature of international politics, a persistently conservative discourse of national security (re)surfaces in foreign policy literatures. The purpose of this essay is to analyse this ‘new’ discourse and sketch out some of its ideological intents. Referred to as ‘tabloid realism’, this discourse can be found in texts authored by American sch…
US Ideology and the War in Iraq
Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has always been concerned with the meaning of ideology and its role in the constitution of political subjects (Žižek 1989, 1994). Yet, apart from a few incursions in matters of national identity, postcommunism, and postdemocratic transition (Žižek 1993), Žižek's philosophical reflections were never directly about international relations. To say that Žižek reverses this trend in Iraq: The Borr…
The Role of the Media in Monitoring International Humanitarian Law during Military Interventions
This article explores the gap between International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and its implementation by means of military interventions. We suggest that using states’ militaries to resolve humanitarian crises sometimes runs the risk of causing new forms of IHL violations that go unnoticed or are simply minimized because of the belief that a larger humanitarian goal has been served. Because so-called humanitarian forces in the past decade have often …
Discourses of war, geographies of abjection
This article critically details the strategies and ideologies that inform three key post-9/11 volumes on the politics of terror, war making and national security in the USA. These texts, by renowned American 'masters of statecraft' Robert Kaplan, Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Ledeen, encourage the USA's political and military leadership to embrace terror and violence and to be continuously at war against alleged American enemies. The article ar…
The Sublime Spectatorship of War
In order that the war which the United States is fighting in Iraq be presented as acceptable, successful and perhaps pleasurable to the American public, an aesthetic imagination that relies on the sublime has been mobilised. This sublime aesthetic of war, relayed by contemporary media and popular cultural forms (photo-journalism and television shows in particular), consists of producing spectacular, violent and shocking images of `others' in dist…
Kill Bill, Volume I and Volume II
Tabloid Terror
Tabloid Imperialism
Over the past decade, influential American intellectuals of statecraft have adopted a style of presentation of global political, social, and economic realities that can be described as tabloid geopolitics. Using a discursive style directly borrowed from popular television talk-shows, news reporting, and punditry, tabloid geopolitics is designed to be highly entertaining, sensational, shocking, and overtly simplistic. Tabloid geopolitics combines …
The Geopolitics of American Insecurity
We Other IR Foucaultians
When an interrogation whose purpose seems to be to assess the utility of Foucault's work and Foucault-inspired ideas in a particular domain of political analysis (IR) is initiated, one cannot help but wonder whether a logic of confession or justification is being mobilized. Such a confessional logic seems to interpellate “we other/us all” (nous autres) IR Foucaultians1 and demands to be addressed as a precondition for any discussion about what it…
Beyond Biopolitics
'Beyond Biopolitics constitutes a truly serious attempt to think about the unthinkable.' Guy Lancaster, Political Studies Review: 2014 VOL 12, 93. Beyond Biopolitics exposes the conceptual limits of critical biopolitical approaches to violence, war, and terror in the post-9/11-War on Terror era. This volume shows that such popular international political theories rely upon frames of representation that leave out of focus a series of extreme forms…
Agonal sovereignty
The notion of biopolitical sovereignty and the theory of the state of exception are perspectives derived from Carl Schmitt’s thought and Michel Foucault’s writings that have been popularized by critical political theorists like Giorgio Agamben and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri of late. This article argues that these perspectives are not sufficient analytical points of departure for a critique of the contemporary politics of terror, violence and…
Rethinking Democracy's Emergence
Reading Daniel Deudney's Bounding Power
Political science (25 obras) · Law (22 obras) · Sociology (22 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Epistemology (9 obras) · Global Security and Public Health (9 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras) · Aesthetics (7 obras)