The Grass-roots, Mass Power and BiopoliticsThe Politicized Pandemic in Shanghai's Covid Quarantine Jiyuan Ren In December 2019, a novel coronavirus outbroke in Wuhan. This new type of coronavirus soon developed into the Covid-19 pandemic and became one of the most disturbing global events in recent years. Since then, the Chinese government has been continuously practicing strict disease control upon the affected areas. However, the disease is more than pathological, and continues to gain a socio-political influence upon democracy and humanity. Under the regulation of the Covidcontrol policies, human life is supposed to be well-managed so as to be incorporated into a shifted governance which functions as a counter force against the paralyzing chaos brought by the pandemic. This inevitably raises the questions of how to understand the role of health policies from many angles, including how human life is perceived and modified under the governance restructured by the Covid crisis with a demand to rediscover a beyond-viral pandemic under the narrative of biopolitics. In China, the "zero-Covid" strategy has been promoted since the first outbreak in Wuhan. The consequent Covid-related health policies were issued to restrain the contagion and eventually to reach the elimination of any positive cases. The policies included mass testing, mandatory immunization, restriction and surveillance of population movement. In some areas rated by the Chinese central government as a high Covid-risk, local isolation and lockdown were enforced, which had deep influences on the everyday life of people. In Feb 2022, the Coronavirus Omicron variant struck Shanghai, a highly urbanized metropolitan city in China with a population of over twenty-eight million. Such a large-scale population magnified the pandemic's negative impact on the city's social, political, and economic system, and the consequent lockdown administered to the local population soon became a contentious topic from a global perspective. Drawing on Foucault's concept of biopolitics, this article analyzes how Shanghai's disease-control policies, instead of displacing a monopoly control from an oppressive Chinese central government, rather reveal a multifaced political regime that is mixed with heterogenous elements from both [End Page 363] the central and the mass level, in which the multiplication, intersection, confliction and resistance of power come into play in the form of diversified social relations. There are different voices on the Covid-era governance of the western countries. Agamben shows a deep concern regarding the executive power displaced in the sovereign governance, which he recognizes as an exemplary political model during the pandemic. The normal laws are suspended when the state enters the exceptional status, accompanied by the unleashing of mass terror towards the life-threatening virus and sovereignty's coercive biopower. Delanty invokes six political philosophies to discuss justice in the pandemic. He reviews the contestation between utilitarianism and libertarianism regarding their objectives of collective well-being and individual liberty respectively, reflected by self-isolation and mandatory separation from positive cases in the political fields (5–24). Responding to Delanty's discussion on social justice, Walby examines the social democracy based upon the society model of public health, thereby bringing attention to its contestation with neoliberalism during the pandemic (22–39). Despite there being different approaches to the pandemic-oriented politics, the quarantine in China nevertheless suggests a neglected aspect in the Western narrative. I argue that the mass phenomenon in the Chinese communist society, in the form of the grass-roots' involvement in the quarantine, is key to approach the functionality of the pandemic policies and its bio-power displaced in the Chinese society. Although Žižek in his new book Pandemic! briefly addresses the lockdown in China enforced by CCP, his objective nevertheless goes beyond the particular communism regime in China. He instead envisions an apocalyptic future, emerging from a reinvented communism that ends the era of global capitalism. Shifting to a different direction, Žižek does not delve into the specific cases of the Chinese governance, and largely ignored how the pandemic on the very realistic level might lead to further chaos on the human spirit that is eroded by fear, anxiety, and mistrust under the mandatory isolation, an effect even more dangerous than the damage of the...

Reviewed by: Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought by Catherine Malabou Tyler M. Williams Malabou, Catherine. Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought Trans. Carolyn Shread. Hoboken, NJ: Polity, 2022. 150 pages. The word appears in a French text for the first time in 1575 and disappears by 1585. Freud famously theorizes it as a castrated penis. Lacan reduces its significance by asserting the primacy of the phallus. Derrida is silent on it despite his elaboration of the phallogocentrism of philosophical discourse. Foucault never mentions it in The History of Sexuality except to describe a monstrosity. Clitoridectomies and other forms of so-called "genital mutilation" persist around the world. Symbolic clitoridectomies persist in patriarchal cultures that confine female sexuality to the law of reproductive utility. As the "only organ whose sole purpose is pleasure," the clitoris exists as a site of material and symbolic erasure. But, as Catherine Malabou argues, this erasure also shapes a revolutionary potential (1). Pleasure Erased tracks the various modes of domination that leave the clitoris unthought in western philosophy, spanning from ancient Greece through psychoanalysis, biopolitics, deconstruction, feminism, and queer theory. By rendering the clitoris philosophically visible, Malabou's short book serves as a provocation against the phallocracy that excises clitoral pleasure from the philosophical domain. However, to bring the clitoris to light cannot amount to showcasing it as a docile object fully rendered on an essentialized pedestal. Nor can it amount to negotiating a conciliatory space for it within philosophy's phallocentric language. Consequently, one of the most impactful contributions Pleasure Erased makes to contemporary thought is Malabou's call to think the clitoris as unthought, that is, as caesurae in which the production of conceptual visibility in one area simultaneously produces darkness elsewhere: "Stroking with one hand, rubbing out with the other" (6). As human mammals evolved to ovulate spontaneously and cyclically rather than strictly via copulation, the clitoris slowly migrated away from the entrance to the vagina (28–29). Malabou argues that this anatomical space between clitoris and vagina, which gives form to the distance between pleasure and reproduction, also forms a variety of symbolic caesurae—including "patriarchal authority, psychoanalytic diktat, moral imperatives, the weight of custom or ancestral ballast" (121)—that work to dismiss the autonomy of a properly feminine mode of pleasure outside phallic predominance. The clitoral and its corresponding pleasure, Malabou argues, refuses the paradigms of penetration and verticality upon which masculine forms of domination and their concomitant binarisms are predicated (118). Clitoral pleasure, clitoral thinking, and the clitoris itself assert material forms of pleasure that [End Page 465] disobey "phallic power," that remain indifferent to hierarchical binarisms, that remain, in a sense, horizontal in their allegiances (65). As a result, Malabou describes these "clitoridian zones" as denaturalized and nonbinary (115). That is, the "feminine" elaborated throughout Pleasure Erased does not refer to a specific gender but to a kind of mutable positioning. Just as "the phallus is not the penis, since […] sexuality infinitely exceeds the genitals" (50), Malabou rejects the insinuation that the clitoral materially reconstitutes an "essence" of "woman." By engaging second-wave feminism alongside recent trans-feminism (cf. chapters 6–9 and 12, which are devoted to Beauvoir, Irigaray, Lonzi, and Preciado, among others), Malabou articulates a concept of "the feminine" as a "new becoming-subject," as a form of consciousness and subjectivization that, as clitoral, retains a sense of "sexual difference" but sheds all alliances with difference's complicity in rigidified schemas of binarism, teleology, and hierarchy (62). Some readers might feel unpersuaded by the brevity of Malabou's book, wishing instead that detailed exposition and penetrating depth replace its open constellations and insinuated connections. But this is a demand for an altogether different (vertical) book, indeed an altogether different pleasure. One of the most compelling features of Pleasure Erased is, in fact, its horizontal style, which excites rather than commands. Malabou closes her opening chapter by claiming that she does not expect to "prove" anything (12). Instead, the book's small chapters, its little clitorises, position and reposition themselves as provocations to bring this organ of pleasure to thought. If the clitoris is and has always been that "scruple" or "secret nub," that "piece of grit lodged...

Psychoanalytic Reason and the Non-Governable of Modern Subjectivity Carin Franzén There is a revolutionary-becoming which is not the same as the future of the revolution, and which does not necessarily happen through the militants. There is a philosophy-becoming which has nothing to do with the history of philosophy and which happens through those whom the history of philosophy does not manage to classify. —Deleuze and Parnet The modern subject seems to be in crisis for many reasons. Not least in relation to neoliberalism and global capitalism provoking a modification of a previous notion of the subject as autonomous. With the neoliberal subject, whose docility and ability to bend constitute a new norm that excludes the ones who are not flexible enough, as Catherine Malabou puts it, the standard humanist narrative based on the idea of the subject's sovereignty seems to be contradicted (Our Brain 46). Malabou refers to sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello who at the end of the 1990s described how the contemporary subject's critical capacity had become incorporated in and subordinated to a new spirit of capitalism. In the wake of this new spirit, we witness today a polarization between neoliberal demands of flexibility and performance resulting in an increasing rate of anxiety and depression on the one hand, and different forms of neoconservativism and authoritarianism on the other. Against this social and political backdrop, Malabou has called for a materialist philosophy that can make room for the "non-governable" (non-gouvernable)—a force in every individual that cannot be dominated (Au voleur! 51–52). The term is suggestive but difficult to grasp. Malabou uses it in order to re-elaborate an anarchism that she wants to appropriate from the "belief in the fundamental character of the Good, of Human Nature or the sacredness of the Individual" (Politics 26).1 Instead, her purpose is to actualize anarchistic resistance to political hegemonies and contemporary subjugations of sorts through the "non-governable," which she connects to a "resisting potential of life" (27). In this essay I would like to follow up on the urgent question of how contemporary subjectivity can be unchained from the present order, through a reflection on what the notion of the "non-governable" [End Page 32] could bring to an understanding of psychoanalytic reason in light of a genealogy of the modern subject. Admittedly, Malabou has criticized psychoanalysis—at least in the frame of poststructuralist theory—for maintaining a gap between symbolic and biological life.2 Nevertheless, I think that psychoanalysis points to a path where another reason than the subjugated and calculating rationality of the neoliberal and neoconservative subjectivity can be discerned. A reason that is forged not by the arche of capitalism—profit—but by forces that are precisely non-governable aspects of life. psychoanalytic oxymorons Psychoanalytic reason could be described as an oxymoron. For what happens with one of the foundations of modern reason, namely the certainty of René Descartes's I am, his cogito ergo sum, when it becomes anchored in the unconscious—that is, when Jacques Lacan returns to Descartes and his philosophical affirmation of the cogito, insisting that "the subject of the unconscious manifests itself, that it thinks before it attains certainty" (The Seminar 37)? I suggest, simply put, that what happens is the emergence of psychoanalytic reason in the sense that it becomes anchored in the unconscious. This means that uncertainty is never separated from certainty, and that the unconscious is the lack of arche,3 or a grounding principle of the subject's identity. If the unconscious is anarchic in this sense, then psychoanalytic reason can be said to be governed by the non-governable, and accordingly that it never can totally dominate itself. And if the subject of the unconscious is characterized by such a lack of domination it can't dominate the other unless it represses uncertainty in the name of an affirmation of the cogito. Psychoanalytic reason is a resistance to such a repression. In the following I will try to clarify these suggestions by following a path in the formation of modern subjectivity that undermines the standard set of humanist beliefs in a sovereign subject. The main...

The Reception of Jack Kerouac in ChinaA Proxy for Chinese Culture and Politics Yu Min and Paul Allen Miller I was a young writer and I wanted to take off. Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me. on the road by jack kerouac Much is said in the West today about a return to totalitarianism or Maoism in China. This is seen in the press and among politicians.1 But this is clearly loose and imprecise. Whatever one may think of current policy in China, it is clear that the culture remains open to world literature, that the work of dissident, foreign writers like Kerouac are not only available, but are in fact promoted. As we will show in this paper, this was not always the case. The cultural policy of today's China is nothing like that of post-revolutionary China or the China of the Cultural Revolution. The present case study demonstrates this concretely. The name Jack Kerouac first appears in China in 1959, two years after the publication of On the Road (1957) in America. The Digest of Foreign Philosophy and Social Sciences, a Chinese internal monthly journal, which was not issued openly, published two translated excerpts from two American publications in its 1959 issue. One is from the preface of The Beat Generation and The Angry Young Man (1958) edited by Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (Feldman, 1959), the other is from Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation (1957) by Kenneth Rexroth (1959). Jack Kerouac was mentioned in the former and Allen Ginsberg in the latter. Both were praised by the writers in the translated articles while in the editor's notes in the journal, they were classified as members of the "declining class" (Feldman, 1959), which referred to capitalists, the enemy of the Chinese proletariat. They were regarded as representatives of decadent youth in the West. In the articles, "Beat" was translated as "垮掉" (kua diao), a derogatory word meaning "collapse or break down," embodying the basic attitude of Chinese criticism towards the Beats. The Beat Generation was mentioned again the same year in an article about the British Angry Young Men. Here it was translated as "激动的一代" (ji dong de [End Page 166] yi dai). "激动" (ji dong), with the meaning "exciting," is a neutral word and less derogatory than "垮掉" (kua diao). But due to the hostile political atmosphere at that time, "垮掉" (kua diao) was chosen as the official translation and is still in use today. Since the first complete critical article on the Beat Generation, written by Ge Ha (pseudonym), in 1960, criticism of the Beats in Chinese academic circles has moved from ideological condemnation, to initial acceptance, and now direct promotion. This is striking because Kerouac, while certainly critical of 1950s American bourgeois culture, is hardly an emblem of revolutionary Marxism or traditional Chinese values. Kerouac is the first "beatnik" known to the Chinese people and his On the Road is also the first beat novel read by most Chinese readers. He is for many the emblem of the Beat Generation in China. These changes in the reception of Kerouac reflect developments in Chinese politics, cultural policies, and youth culture in different periods. As such, we propose Kerouac stands as a proxy for understanding not only the reception of the Beats but also the development of Chinese culture and politics writ large. In today's environment, when many in the West have stepped up criticism of China on human rights and cultural issues, it is important to recognize that Kerouac and the Beat generation are as popular and as available as they have ever been. The reception of Kerouac can be divided into three phases: repudiation from the end of 1950s to the first half of 1960s, as illustrated by five papers2; co-existence of repudiation and affirmation in 1980s and 1990s as shown by the somewhat greater attention illustrated by seventeen published papers; and general affirmation and a boom in the research from 2000 to the present with more than 400 published papers. The gap years from the second half of 1960s to the end...