Session Information
13 SES 05, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
The global restructuring of child care constitutes a paradigmatic example of what Zygmunt Bauman refers to as “liquid modernity”. A philosophical analysis of this biopolitical restructuring of child care illustrates at best what Arendt exposes in the Human Condition as the encroachment of the social over the political. This takes place in a variety of ways, which include: (a) the privatization of the trouble for care (b) the intrusion against the family’s intimacy by a foreigner; (c) the persistent division of educational labour between pedagogy (provided by qualified teachers) and care (provided by para-educational personnel either at school or at home).
Arendt’s rigid distinction between the private and the public and her attack against the politicization of schools aims to defend the school against the demands of the social and the ideological infiltration of education. Education, properly understood by Arendt, is only a mediating space between the private life of the family and the public world. The infiltration of both the family and the public world, however, by the biopolitics of life maintenance, renders politically imperative the reconsideration the relation between pedagogy and care, between the representation of the world and life of the world, between natality and birth. Most theorists who have addressed the limitations of Arendt’s classification of the world have searched for theoretical and political tools in Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach”, the feminist literature on “intimate citizenship” and theorizations of a global justice of care. In my paper I argue that the effort to frame issues of care labour as integral to a politics of global justice or a feminist politics of “intimate citizenship” often becomes complicit with biopolitics and particularly kinds of thinking that articulate the “preservation of life” as a normative framework. While agreeing with several feminist theorists’ criticisms of Arendt’s definition of the private and her, occasionally, dismissive references to the activities “related to the maintenance of life”, I argue that her concept of “the encroachment of the social on the political and the private spheres” remains crucial for exposing how the global restructuring of the ‘private nursery’ and the flexible exemption of care from the realm of education (intimate of public) renders care, carers and cared-for not only susceptible to but also actively engaged in biopolitical control. At the same time, however, I argue that Arendt’s rigid distinction between the public and the private hypostasizes the public and the private as distinct and spatially discreet spaces and fails to account for the inbetweeness of care and intimacy. It is towards an investigation of the inbetweeness of intimacy that o turn to Irigaray’s notion of the "interval". Irigaray creates an aporetic passage between nursing and teaching. Intimacy as interval can be reduced neither to the closed envelopes of the maternal, neither to the encroaching demands of the economy of care. Learning how to preserve and allow for the interval in relations of intimacy, is an art that preserves life but at the same time allows spacing for multiplicity of places and perspectives, thus nurturing what from Arendt’s viewpoint would constitute only a performative contradiction, i.e., a nursery of the political.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Arendt, Hannah. 1961. “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future. New York: Viking. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Foucault, M. 2003. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College De France Picador. Foucault, M. 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the College De France Palgrave Macmillan. Foucault, M. 2010. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the College De France Picador. Foucault, M. 1993. “About the beginning of the hermeneutics of the self” (transcription of two lectures in Dartmouth on 17 and 24 November 1980), ed. Mark Blasius, Political Theory 21(2): 198–227. Irigaray, Luce. 1998. Democracy Begins Between Two. The Atholone Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca: Cornell University Press-Continuum.
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