Replacing the Leviathan with the Cyborg
by Aryan Ashraf
“…Haraway’s Cyborg, on the other hand, is less a symbol of the transformation from nature to society but rather a transformation of one society to another. The Cyborg is an embodiment of transgressing boundaries… While Hobbes’s Leviathan is a symbol of the interactions of power and play that result in the creation of a commonwealth from the abstraction of nature and natural life, Haraway’s Cyborg is a symbol of moving from one political and social mode of life, our current one defined by boundaries like gender, race, sexuality, technology, biology, etc., to one where those boundaries are transgressed not only frequently but happily.”
Schmitt, Haraway, and Hobbes
by J. Doe
“One of Hobbes’s most infamous interlocutors was the German lawyer and political theorist Carl Schmitt… while Schmitt might have defended the Nazis from when he joined the party in 1933 to when he fell out of favor in 1936, I maintain, following Schmitt scholars like George Schwab, that Schmitt’s thought in the Weimar Republic and after 1936 do not align with National Socialism.… I will briefly lay out Schmitt’s views and interpretation of the Leviathan, explore how the Leviathan embodies Schmitt’s disdain for technology, and then turn to Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” to potentially resolve the issues Schmitt raises.”
Untitled
by Christopher Rodes
“The essential feature of every cyborg — every man-made creature — including the Leviathan, is that we are the authors of its power, and we are therefore responsible for the deployment of that power. In view of the ethical and relational insights of Leopold and Lakitsch, we must ensure that in submitting our will and our judgment to the collective embodied in the Leviathan, we also endow him with our ethics.”
The Cyborg Leviathan
by Walter Ben Rosin
“According to Benjamin, the government controls us by convincing us we are always in need of their protection. In describing the violence of mythic times, he notes how a power hierarchy is made present through the use of violence to subjugate individuals.… The crucial difference between Hobbes’s basis for sovereignty and Benjamin’s analysis of its application is that while Leviathan prescribed the use of the government to prevent interpersonal violence, Critique of Violence views the state’s control as a form of violence itself. Ironically, this violence is excused by the government as a necessity to escape the violence of war—a form of violence caused by the same government we are bound to obey. This is a twisted application of Leviathan’s study of power—instead of representing the people’s desire for peace, sovereigns manufacture violence between morally superior and inferior demographics to justify more lawmaking violence.”
On Divine Violence and Radical Action
by Emily Lathers
“Divine violence may be one of the only tools granted to marginalized people to enact tangible, systemic change. I posit that any grassroots form of political organizing for people whom the United States political system is built against is a form of divine violence… it ultimately seeks to dismantle systems of power and remind those in privilege of the continued existence of those they seek to destroy. Walter Benjamin writing “Critique of Violence” as a gay Jewish man in Weimar Germany may have been an act of divine violence itself. These acts are calls from those labeled as an “Other” that the settler colonial project to erase their voices has not yet succeeded and should not succeed. Divine violence may thus be seen in people taking action directly against the political system while facing systemic oppression from that same system.”
Norming the Cyborg
by Nina Zhuo
“As Boucher writes, it is the erotic that drives human passion and the philosophic that allows physical and intellectual pleasure to merge. The cyborg, however, cannot be truly erotic in the same way that a completely human entity can because, for Hobbes, the erotic is at least somewhat biologically functional, whether that be reproductive or otherwise. Because parts of the cyborg cannot adapt to natural bodily functions, it will always be grounded in the material, its eroticism diluted by the presence of something unnatural and Other. “