Notes on the Illegal Condition in the State of Extraction. How Not To Be an Informant

Authors

  • Alberto Moreiras Texas A & M University

Keywords:

surveillance, state extraction, information, domination, border

Abstract

We live, increasingly, in a state of extraction. My thesis is that we have not yet figured out the implications of a primary or fundamental logic of state extraction. We have not figured out its implications for our own predicament—for the predicament, that is, not of state functionaries as such, not of extractors and surveyors, which is a predicament of domination, but the predicament of those who would rather not be dominated, and who understand that giving up on domination is the logical price to be paid. These latter figures, those who refuse domination, those who prefer not to be dominated, hence not to dominate, they might in fact constitute the “borders of the border,” that fantastic fringe territory of the human this conference has decided to thematize and, in some sense, to honor. Let me then reserve that theoretical position, the position of border or hyperborder dwellers, to develop what follows. I will claim that the border of the border is today the site where information will not be shared—an opaque site of silence and secrecy, a place of radical reticence concerning unconcealment.

Author Biography

Alberto Moreiras, Texas A & M University

Alberto Moreiras is professor of Hispanic studies at Texas A&M University, where he has had an appointment since 2010. Before that he was the Sixth Century Chair in Modern Thought and Hispanic Studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland (2006–2010), the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Romance Studies and Literature at Duke University, where he taught from 1992 to 2006, and an assistant professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1987–92). At Duke Moreiras directed a program in Latin American Cultural Studies, the Center for European Studies, and an Interdisciplinary Seminar in Race in the Americas; in Aberdeen, he directed the program Literature in the World Context. He has been a visiting professor at Emory University, Giessen University in Germany, Johns Hopkins University, Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, University of Chile, and University of Buffalo. His work focuses on contemporary political thought, Latin American cultural history, and subaltern studies. He has published over 110 essays, and his books include Interpretación y diferencia (1992); Tercer espacio: Literatura y duelo en América Latina (1999), The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2001); Pensar en la postdictadura (2001), Línea de sombra: El no sujeto de lo político (2007). He has also published about ten edited monographic collections of essays in journals or multivolume works. He is coeditor of the Latin American section of a multivolume Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Moreiras has been involved over the years in the creation of three journals, namely Nepantla: Views from South, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, and Política común. He is coeditor of the last two. He is also coeditor of Res publica: Revista de pensamiento político, and coeditor of a new University of Texas Press book series entitled “Border Hispanisms.” He created and runs the Facebook group Crítica y Teoría, and is a founder of the Texas Research Group on Luso-Hispanic, Caribbean, and Latino/a Thought. He is or has been a member of the editorial boards of an additional 20 publishing ventures, from Diacritics and Cultural Studies to Traces and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. He is a frequent reader of manuscripts for five major US academic presses and routinely reads essays for a dozen journals beyond the ones already mentioned.

References

Ahmed, Azam. “Spyware Trailed Investigators in Mexico.” New York Times, July 10, 2017, A1.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken, 2004.

Calvillo, Ana Luisa. Me decían mexicano frijolero. (El caso Rangel) . Ficticia, 2015.

Greenwald, Glenn. No Place to Hide. Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State. Picador, 2014.

Hamacher, Werner. “On the Right to Have Rights.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 14, no. 2, 2014, pp. 169-214.

Harcourt, Bernard. Exposed. Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, translated and edited by Theodore Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, Harper One, 2008.

Martínez, Oscar. A History of Violence. Living and Dying in Central America. Verso, 2016.

Mastrogiovanni, Federico. La desaparición forzada en México como estrategia de terror. Penguin Random House, 2016.

Mazur, Robert. The Infiltrator. The True Story of One Man Against the Biggest Drug Cartel in History. Back Bay, 2016.

Perry, Thomas. The Informant. Butcher’s Boy, Book 3. Mariner, 2012.

Winslow, Don. The Force. Harper Collins, 2017.

The Borders of the Border

Downloads

Published

2018-12-30

How to Cite

Moreiras, A. (2018). Notes on the Illegal Condition in the State of Extraction. How Not To Be an Informant. Review of International American Studies, 11(2). Retrieved from https://trrest.vot.pl/ojsus/index.php/RIAS/article/view/7409

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2018): The Borders of the Border—RIAS Vol. 11, Fall–Winter (2/2018)

Section

FEATURES

License

The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.

  1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.

  1. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

  1. User Rights

Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

  1. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.