Papers by Alastair Morgan
Law and Critique, 2009
In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relati... more In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s account of gesture given in his work on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet non-intentional figure of a generalised destruction of experience. However, in their respective accounts of an emphatic possibility that can be located in the loss of gesture, Agamben and Adorno move in fundamentally different philosophical directions. For Agamben, the loss of gesture opens up the possibility of a space of existing within the pure possibility of speaking itself. For Adorno, the loss of gesture returns us to a reified embodiment that can nevertheless image the possibility of a different way of relating to materiality. I argue that, in the attempt to immanently construct forms of resistance within a generalised destruction of experience, Agamben’s articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms ‘objectless inwardness’. Although Adorno’s account of gesture and its relation to metaphysics and politics is equally problematic in many ways, I argue that his account of a metaphysical experience that appears within alienated gestures offers the possibility for moving beyond the destruction of experience.
History of The Human Sciences, 2010
Recent debates concerning the abolition of the schizophrenia label in psychiatry have focused upo... more Recent debates concerning the abolition of the schizophrenia label in psychiatry have focused upon problems with the scientific status of the concept. In this article, I argue that rather than attacking schizophrenia for its lack of scientific validity, we should focus on the conceptual history of this label. I reconstruct a specific tradition when exploring the conceptual history of schizophrenia. This is the concern with the question of the sense of life itself, conducted through the confrontation with schizophrenia as a form of life that does not live, or as Robert Jay Lifton termed it "lifeless life" (1979: 222-39). I conclude by arguing that the contemporary attempt to deconstruct or abolish the schizophrenia concept involves a fundamental shift in concern. The attempt both to normalize psychotic experiences, and to conceive them purely in terms of cognitive processes that can be mapped onto brain function, results in a fundamental move away from the attempt to understand the experience of madness.
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Papers by Alastair Morgan