Roberts notes that -
India's Right to Information Act (RTIA), adopted in 2005, is among dozens of national laws recently adopted that are modeled on the United States' Freedom of Information Act. A large number of studies completed in 2007-2009 have examined challenges in implementing the law. Indian citizens filed about two million requests for information under the RTIA in its first two and half years. However, use of the law has been constrained by uneven public awareness, poor planning by public authorities, and bureaucratic indifference or hostility. Requirements for proactive disclosure of information are often ignored, and mechanisms for enforcing the new law are strained by a growing number of complaints and appeals.Roberts goes on to comment that -
Nonetheless, RTIA advocates have demonstrated the transformative potential of the new law, and continue to press energetically for proper implementation. Public authorities and civil society organizations have developed innovations in practice that may be useful to other developing countries adopting similar laws.Meanwhile I've been looking at The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Prahran: re.press 2009), a collection edited by Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano. It is promoted as bringing together -
essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present — against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls 'the Italian desert'.Definitely not the Italian dessert! It will presumably appeal to some cultural studies postgrads and the occasional legal academic, especially the sort for whom no article is complete unless decorated with terms such as jouissance and decussation. Overall it strikes me as true believers squabbling with other true believers about the 'liberating' effects of nihilism nd generating treats such as -
In passing, we could note that the theme of a biopolitics of exception,dear to Agamben, is here so grossly embodied that its Heideggerian gravitas seems to implode. The Italian exception in the epoch of the alleged generalisation of the state of exception comes in the guise of a radical 'desacralisation' of the very figure of homo sacer. Here the spontaneous generation of mass-mediamatic biopolitical pseudo-concepts, such as the recently coined fine-vita (end of life) appears to be inextricable from the vulgar spectacularisation of the phenomena they attempt to describe.A commitment to liberation might be better expressed through some Rawlsian kindness such as helping the occasional little old lady across the road, refraining from kicking the cat (bourgeois or otherwise) and providing pro bono legal aid instead of attending the Virilio seminar.
There's somewhat more bite in The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Zizek [PDF] by Geoff Boucher, also available from the unrepressed folk at re.press.
