PJRP - Interview with Arthur Kroker - Part 1
Channel: Relationalities
Date: 2011-09-21

Figures of abject bodies often appear in your work: from sexual bodies to capitalist bodies to religious bodies to coded bodies, your thought seems to be grounded in the notion of "abuse value." How is this concept significant for your understanding of power, provided that power is understood in Butler's sense as both social and psychic? That is, if power is a relationship that constitutes subjects, how do the specific concepts of "abjection" and "abuse value" nuance this conceptualization of power?

If abjection has a social and historical element despite a certain transhistorical element (as we might see in Nietzsche's ascetic ideal), do you think that recently - especially since you focus so heavily on questions of technology - there have been intensifications of this process of abjection?  Or is it just happening now in a slightly different technological way?

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