Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-wzw2p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T20:28:40.142Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Giorgio Agamben, J. G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, and the Colonial Dispositif

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2016

Victor Li
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In his Afterword to The Singapore Grip, J. G. Farrell thanks Giorgio and Ginevra Agamben for suggesting the phrase that became the title of his novel. What can we make of this surprising and unexpected connection between an Anglo-Irish author’s novel about colonial Singapore on the eve of its fall to the Japanese army during World War II and Agamben’s writings on biopolitics? Despite the serendipitous nature of the encounter between the two writers and the lack of any causal relation between their works, my paper argues that there is an unacknowledged affinity that allows us to open them up to what Agamben calls their Entwicklungsfähigkeit, “the locus and the moment wherein they are susceptible to development,” thereby bringing out the biopolitical elements in Farrell’s novel and turning Agamben’s insights into dispositifs or biopolitical apparatuses in the direction of the analysis of colonial rule.

Keywords

Giorgio AgambenJ. G. FarrellThe Singapore GripcolonialismbiopoliticsdispositifdeactivationEntwicklungsfähigkeit
Type
General Article
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue: African Science Fiction , September 2016 , pp. 361 - 378
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Farrell, J. G., The Singapore Grip (New York: New York Review Books, 2005 [1978]), 569 Google Scholar.

2 Greacen, Lavinia, J. G. Farrell: The Making of a Writer (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 330 Google Scholar.

3 Durantaye, Leland de la, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), xviii Google Scholar.

4 See Binns, Ronald, J. G. Farrell (London: Methuen, 1986)Google Scholar; Crane, Ralph and Livett, Jennifer, Troubled Pleasures: The Fiction J. G. Farrell (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Goodman, Sam, “‘Skeletons of Solid Objects’: Imperial Violence in J. G. Farrell’s Empire Trilogy ,” Violence and the Limits of Representation, eds. Graham Matthews and Sam Goodman (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2013), 112–128 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McLeod, John, J. G. Farrell (Devon: Northcote, 2007)Google Scholar; Prusse, Michael C., “Tomorrow is Another Day”: The Fictions of James Gordon Farrell (Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1997)Google Scholar. Sam Goodman mentions Agamben and Foucault in passing, but he is more interested in applying Martin Coward’s theory of Urbicide and architectural violence to Farrell’s novels.

5 Agamben, Giorgio, Language and Death: The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen Pinkus and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1991)Google Scholar.

6 Agamben, Giorgio, What Is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik and Stephan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 12–13 Google Scholar.

7 Svirsky, Marcelo and Bignall, Simone, eds., Agamben and Colonialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

8 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1 Google Scholar.

9 Ibid., 2.

10 Ibid., 7.

11 Agamben, Giorgio, “What Is a Destituent Power?,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32.1 (2014): 65 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Ibid., 66.

13 Ibid., 65.

14 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 8 Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 13.

16 Ibid., 14.

17 Ibid., 14.

18 Ibid., 14.

19 Heron, Nicholas, “The Ungovernable,” Angelaki 16.2 (2011): 169 Google Scholar.

20 Ibid.:169

21 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 15 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., 14.

23 Ibid., 15 and 17.

24 Ibid., 23.

25 Ibid., 24.

26 Agamben, Giorgio, The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto and Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

27 Benjamin, Walter, “ Theses on the Philosophy of History ,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 263 Google Scholar.

28 Agamben, , The Signature of All Things, 9 Google Scholar.

29 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 13 Google Scholar.

30 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 42 Google Scholar.

31 Ibid., 42.

32 Ibid., 156.

33 Ibid., 158.

34 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 14 Google Scholar.

35 Agamben, , Homo Sacer, ix Google Scholar.

36 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 156 Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 41.

38 Ibid., 42.

39 Ibid., 46–47.

40 Ibid., 12.

41 Ibid., 10.

42 Ibid., 11.

43 Ibid., 391.

44 Ibid., 391.

45 Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Contesting Space in Colonial Singapore: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment (Singapore: NUS Press, 2003), 100–101 Google Scholar.

46 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 217 Google Scholar.

47 Ibid., 78.

48 Ibid., 78.

49 Ibid., 79.

50 Ibid., 79.

51 Ibid., 347.

52 Ibid., 438.

53 Ibid., 438.

54 Ibid., 101.

55 Ibid., 198.

56 Ibid., 206.

57 Ibid., 200.

58 Ibid., 200.

59 Ibid., 389.

60 Ibid., 498.

61 Ibid., 498.

62 Ibid., 499.

63 Ibid., 216.

64 Ibid., 216–17.

65 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 14 Google Scholar.

66 Agamben, Giorgio, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2000), 94 Google Scholar.

67 Ibid., 141.

68 Prozorov, Sergei, Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 37–38 Google Scholar.

69 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 181 Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., 182.

71 Ibid., 271.

72 Ibid., 271.

73 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 36 Google Scholar.

74 Ibid., 36.

75 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 272 Google Scholar.

76 Ibid., 553.

77 Ibid., 553–54.

78 Prozorov, , Agamben and Politics: A Critical Introduction, 144 Google Scholar.

79 Ibid., 144–45.

80 Agamben, , What is an Apparatus?, 23 Google Scholar.

81 Farrell, , The Singapore Grip, 567 Google Scholar.

82 Ibid., 568.

83 Agamben, Giorgio, Nudities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 114 Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., 114.

85 Agamben, , What Is an Apparatus?, 24 Google Scholar.