The Detective’s Bare Life and the State of Exception in Christopher G. Moore’s Vincent Calvino Crime Series
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Abstract
This is a study of Christopher G. Moore’s crime series, featuring Vincent Calvino, a lawyer-turned-detective from New York City, who has relocated to Bangkok. The series is examined as an example of the hard-boiled tradition, which emerged between the two World Wars in response to the particular social, economic and political conditions in the United States. The study places an emphasis on the detective character in Moore’s crime series of seventeen novels, suggesting that he is regarded as “bare life” or “homo sacer,” which cannot be sacrificed, but may be killed with impunity. This character, as Giorgio Agamben postulates, is confined in a zone of indistinction between zoè, (the biological fact of having life) and bios (political or qualified life), between life and law. This zone is termed “state of exception” and is inhabited by the sovereign power, where the efficacy of law is suspended while the force of law is enacted. Eventually, Agamben’s concept of the use-of-self is proposed to epistemologically liberate bare life from the conundrum of its existence. This suggests that in order to release oneself from wretched conditions, one needs to abandon physical activity and resort to contemplation and inactivity, which constitutes the use of the soul according to the logos.
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บทความที่ได้รับการตีพิมพ์เป็นลิขสิทธิ์ของวารสารมนุษยศาสตร์และสังคมศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยอุบลราชธานี
ข้อความที่ปรากฏในบทความแต่ละเรื่องในวารสารวิชาการเล่มนี้เป็นความคิดเห็นส่วนตัวของผู้เขียนแต่ละท่านไม่เกี่ยวข้องกับมหาวิทยาลัยอุบลราชธานี และคณาจารย์ท่านอื่นๆในมหาวิทยาลัยฯ แต่อย่างใด ความรับผิดชอบองค์ประกอบทั้งหมดของบทความแต่ละเรื่องเป็นของผู้เขียนแต่ละท่าน หากมีความผิดพลาดใดๆ ผู้เขียนแต่ละท่านจะรับผิดชอบบทความของตนเองแต่ผู้เดียว
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