Iris Därmann

Labor is both punishment and curse.At least this is what the mythical scenes of division and exclusion in Hesiod and in the Old Testament dramatise.At the same time they can be regarded as symptoms of misogyny.Without doubt, those two mythical scenes and the divine power to curse and sentence have held their spell over the economic tractates from antiquity to the modern period. How do the ancient writings of economic theory—and specifically Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics—regulate female Pleonexia on the one hand, and the limitless penal labor imposed on men on the other? How in turn do the economic tractates of the modern period—and here specifically John Locke’s famous essays on the economy of labor—respond to the problem of female hybris on the one hand and the characteristical burden and suffering associated with labor on the other? What role does the differentiation and separation between free and unfree, productive and reproductive labor and, not least, the economic marginalisation of reproductive labor, play in this? And finally: In what way do »King Bee« and Queen Bee, Nurse Bee and Drone appear in this context as figures of an at once mythical and economic zoology, whose emblematic efficacy extends up to Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees? mehr

Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and the question of zoology«. This paper deals with the frontier between nature and culture, whose clearest form is seen is the designation of the border between animals and human beings. It has the character of a not yet established divide which can, as in Heidegger, be broken down to a hermeneutic abyss or, as in Derrida, be pluralised in asymmetrical standpoints and chiastic convolutions. mehr

This is a plea to interlink Resistance Studies and Violence Studies. Instead of invastigating the efficiency of violence alone and declaring violence absolutely and completely in and on its own, it is necessary to look at resistance practices (escape lines, fighting back), body politics and passivations (selfinjury, abortion, suicide) at the same time. For their part, resistance practices and passivations can not be measured by success but by the fact that they actually happened. People cannot be completely reducedto bare bodies without resistance. Resistance to violence has to be considered in its inconspicuous, lowthreshold and „flat“ forms. In this elementary political sense resistance is understood as a punctually weakening violence and as seperation of powers in statu nascendi. mehr