> I'm glad you posted this Eric because now I understand your comment about
> people being effects or artifacts.
Just to clarify: only the last sentence of the Necrosocial piece is from Agamben. The rest was written by some unnamed people at UC, I think.
But yeah, though I was thinking more of Deleuze and Althusser when I said that, Agamben is relevant too. I'm not crazy about his "bare life" thesis, which he's most famous for, but his notions of subjectivity are right on, methinks.
This might be relevant, from The Coming Community:
"IF WE had once again to conceive of the fortunes of humanity in terms of class, then today we would have to say that there are no longer social classes, but just a single planetary petty bourgeoisie, in which all the old social classes are dissolved: The petty bourgeoisie has inherited the world and is the form in which humanity has survived nihilism. [...]
This means that the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeoisie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip away. Because if instead of continuing to search for a proper identity in the already improper and senseless form of individuality, humans were to succeed in belonging to this impropriety as such, in making of the proper being-thus not an identity and an individual property but a singularity without identity, a common and absolutely exposed singularity--if humans could, that is, not be-thus in this or that particular biography, but be only *the* thus, their singular exteriority and their face, then they would for the first time enter into a community without presuppositions and without subjects, into a communication without the incommunicable."