by
At a time when the world seems to be rejecting the universalist neo-liberal logic of governance to embrace various modes of cultural, political, socio-economical, and juridical nationalisms, an engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of stasis becomes all the more urgent. If there is indeed one message to be taken from Agamben’s study of the modern variant of stasis, it is that such an entity as a territorially-framed, culturally-bounded, and ontologically self-defining ‘people’ has never been posited and is politically insignificant.[1] Current aspirations to return to idealised forms of nationalisms, then, might not only be impossible to realise; more fundamentally, they might be voided of historical content and legitimation.
