In this paper, I go back to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s influence on Claude Lefort’s theory of democracy in order to offer a revised understanding of political regimes as coexisting and competing horizons of politics. These horizons develop from differing positions regarding the political enigma of the institution of society—its staging, its shaping, and its making sense of itself. A theological understanding of such political institution of society will be described as fundamentally voluntaristic, while an epistemic understanding will be described (...) as, in its radical iteration, potentially totalitarian. This theorization is triggered by an interpretive perplexity: what happened to the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, in its War on Terror, in its committing of the supreme international crime of aggressive warfare, in its embracement of a massive policy of executive, global targeted assassinations and of a white nationalist, xenophobic politics? Is the theologico-political horizon becoming once again dominant in America? Is the epistemic, plutocratic regime taking over instead? Are they coordinated in their effort to undermine an egalitarian understanding of the American republic? These are the interrogative driving forces behind this investigation. (shrink)

The notions of “concepts of the political” and that of “political concepts” refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming (...) out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form. (shrink)

¿Como llegamos hasta este punto en que la democracia tal como la conocimos en las últimas cuatro décadas corre peligro? Las intervenciones de Martín Plot, recorriendo los conflictos centrales de los últimos 12 años de la política argentina, ofrecen una respuesta. En un nivel que podemos llamar discursivo con la condición de entender que el autor retiene en ese nivel todos los hechos económicos, sociales y políticos relevantes del período, podrán captarse, junto a la reaparición de la virulencia del (...) autoritarismo liberal, los efectos trágicos de la captura del progresismo y el peronismo en un faccionalismo excluyente escenificado como hostilidad a la renovación de figuras, ideas y repertorios políticos. Pero al mismo tiempo, bajo la argumentación precisa y al mismo tiempo poética de los textos, podremos discernir una arquitectura que funda un poderoso y poco discutido punto de mira sobre el proceso político: la concepción de éste como una disputa acerca del régimen político-constitucional – entendida como una disputa social por su interpretación – que se une al uso operativo de lo más actual de la filosofía política para entender la coyuntura. (shrink)

The goal of this dissertation is to generate a theoretical perspective and a political vocabulary capable of giving an account of political action proper in the context of modern democracy. The first step is that of tracing back to the origins of the theory and practice of modern democracy the appearance of the features that gave shape to the institutional constellation we now understand as democratic politics. This looking back from the perspective of the main institutions of contemporary democracy is (...) structured along the lines of the process that Lefort describes as a split of the theological and the political in early modern times. In Weber, this split takes the form of a multiplication and secularization of prophets, creating the need for a domesticated and democratized version of charismatic leadership that assumes normative standards in his idea of parliamentary democracy. Weber's solution is, of course, the opposite to that of Hobbes': the plurality of gods and demons manifested in the multiplication of prophets should be institutionalized, not eradicated. This dissertation shows that the breakdown of theological regimes and the birth of modern democracy is simply another way to describe the embracement of the fact of plurality. ;With Merleau-Ponty I thus give theoretical consistency to the emergence of modern democratic practices and institutions. In Habermas, on the other hand, I find the difficulties that a model that dismembers the strategic and communicative dimensions of human agency confronts when the task at hand is not that of a moral theory concerned with universal agreement but that of a political theory concerned with the socially enabled fact of plurality. Specifically, I show in my dissertation that Habermas's contempt for Austin's perlocutionary dimension of speech acts and his suggestion that Arendt's notions of action and speech are somehow parallel to his model spring from a still operating uneasiness with political speech and modern democracy in their phenomenal appearance. This dissertation concludes by showing that the theoretical consistency acquired with Merleau-Ponty does indeed provide a theoretical perspective and political vocabulary that puts in relief political action as a fundamental aspect of contemporary democratic politics. (shrink)

Although Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology of perception and his essays on art, politics, and language already showed an affinity between the aesthetic phenomena of expression and style and the political and cultural dynamics of society at large, this paper specifically focuses on his late theorizing of the notion of flesh and its relevance to his late understanding of politics and democracy. The emergence of flesh as a concept was contemporary to Merleau-Ponty’s break with Marxism as a philosophical model and with revolutionary (...) dialectics as a political project. It is by showing that such a break was consistently grounded on his theorizing of the being flesh of both the body and of society that this paper shows Merleau-Ponty’s unique contribution to democratic theory and to contemporary political philosophy. In the course of this analysis, it will become clear that in philosophically breaking with the position of a “no that is a yes”—i.e. the model of the revolution, which implies a total negation of the given that becomes a total affirmation of the new order (dictatorship) once in power—he would politically embrace the Weberian “heroic liberalism”—or his “non-communist left”—of parliamentary democracy. (shrink)

Chaos and Cosmos offers a new and unique interpretation of Argentine essayist and fiction writer Jorge Luis Borges as a thinker of what continental twentieth century political theory called the political. While not a political writer in the traditional sense, Borges was indeed an author whose response to the advent of totalitarianism, in particular in its Nazi form, generated the most experimental, insightful, and rigorous short fiction and non-fiction political interrogation. -/- As is well known, Borges’ writing went beyond originality; (...) it created a genre of its own, and the Borgesian style is not limited to form. This Borgesian style fundamentally relates to how his response to the advent of totalitarianism led to sharp and philosophically sophisticated interrogations-in-fiction of the political, understood in this book as related to three main distinctive dimensions: that of the question of the forms of society, that of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and that of the relationship between the same and the other. -/- Chaos and Cosmos introduces the reader to Borges as an experimental writer, as an Argentine citizen, as a thinker of global political phenomena, and as a South American Pragmatist. The book also makes incursions in a political theorizing of its own, intertwining an interpretation of Borges’ essays and fiction pieces from the 1930s and 1940s with the central concerns of philosophers and political thinkers such as William James, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, Michael Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Judith Butler. (shrink)

Sections of the mass media report so closely on political decision-making that politicians cannot ignore the media when making decisions ; this book questions whether the decision-making process is now more important than any political action deriving from the decisions. Media appearances are no longer adjuncts to the political process ; they are the process.

En los capítulos que conforman este trabajo, me propuse analizar la relación entre los efectos de los atentados terroristas del 11 de sep- tiembre de 2001 y el funcionamiento de la democracia estadounidense. La estrategia seguida fue, en varias oportunidades, la de contrastar los acontecimientos y procesos ocurri- dos en los Estados Unidos con la experiencia de las dictaduras del Cono Sur sudamericano de los años setenta y comienzos de los ochenta; en particular con el caso argentino.

Released 3 years after the death of political philosopher Claude Lefort and contributing to the rectification of a “notoriously slow”Martín Plot, “Introduction”, Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1. release of English translations and secondary material regarding Lefort’s work, Claude Lefort: Thinker of the Political aims to both outline Lefort’s oeuvre, as well as to explore potential impacts of this thought on contemporary and future debates. Comprising essays written by Lefort’s closest contemporaries, it is (...) difficult to imagine a book that is more relevantly assembled; the contributors are not only some of the foremost experts on Lefort’s work, but many also knew him personally. This combination of social and theoretical familiarity contributes a type of intimacy to the book that goes beyond admiration for Lefort (although this is present), and is but one way in which the collection embodies a position of multiplicity. Even setting aside. (shrink)

Enlightening and entertaining, _Philosophical Tales_ examines a few of the fascinating biographical details of history’s greatest philosophers and highlights their contributions to the field. By applying the true philosophical approach to philosophy itself, the text provides us with a refreshing 'alternative history' of philosophy. Opens up new philosophical debate by applying the true philosophical approach to philosophy itself Provides summaries of the most celebrated and philosophically interesting tales, their backgrounds, and assessments of the leading players Explores philosophers and schools of (...) thought in one key philosophical text to supply a solid grounding in philosophical ideas and individuals Shakes some of the foundations of philosophy with the aim of encouraging the reinvigoration of philosophy itself. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

I review and reconsider some of the themes of ‘Two notions of necessity’ (Davies and Humberstone, 1980) and attempt to reach a deeper understanding and appreciation of Gareth Evans’s reflections (in ‘Reference and contingency’, 1979) on both modality and reference. My aim is to plot the relationships between the notions of necessity that Humberstone and I characterised in terms of operators in two-dimensional modal logic, the notions of superficial and deep necessity that Evans himself described, and the epistemic notion (...) of a priority. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 343 The Education of Desire: Plato and the Philosophy of Religion. By MICHEL DESPLAND. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Pp. xiv + 395. $45.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). Plato, in Professor Despland's considered estimate, is a " philosopher of religion" avant la lettre. Despite their remote antiquity, Despland finds the dialogues a plausible introduction to the admittedly "un-Platonic" twentieth-century philosophical discussion of religion. His premise (...) is that modern philosophy of religion shares, or ought to share, Plato's twin concern for inducing benign social dispositions and for arousing reverent intellectual contemplation-a combination which Despland's compendious yet for the most part plain-spoken scholarship calls "the education of desire." Despland accordingly aims to clarify " the demands for attention that the religious life of Greece presses upon Plato's mind 1and the sort of attention Plato pays to it" (xii). He begins with the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro, which raises but does not resolve the question "What is piety?" Socrates's question is posed during the late fifth-century twilight of Athenian religious traditions, amid the glare of competing practical claims about standards for evaluating right and wrong. Not surprisingly, neither Euthyphro nor Socrates quite embodies the traditional piety to which their conversation purportedly appeals. Euthyphro is one-sided and doctrinaire in his appropriation of the ancestral myths by which he would justify his highly irregular lawsuit against his father for impiety. Socrates, on the other hand, is consistently ironic and, claiming little more than knowledge of his own ignorance, is said to "stake everything on the, it is hoped, well-scrutinized conscience" (31). However this may be, Plato's unsettled and unsettling dialogue on piety indicates the need for philosophy of religion as Despland understands it. Plato (whom Despland would distinguish sharply from Socrates) aims "to rethink the opinions Greeks shared, or disputed, about t.he world or man's place in it" with a view to supplying more positive and lasting answers (57). He takes his bearings by the threefold theology implicit in the Laws. In Book X, Plato's Athenian Stranger asserts inter alia that the gods exist, that they care for human beings, and that they are incorruptible (cf. 907b). Despland attributes the Stranger's assertions to Plato himself, as Plato's innovative, rationally defensible " creed " by which he " seeks to change the minds of human beings with the help of the law and its penalties " (103f). He argues as follows. That the gods are incorruptible is seen to imply a " universal moral economy '' whereby " all souls in the end get their just deserts" (120)-as Socrates maintains in the myth which culminates Plato's Gorgias, whose plot Despland summarizes accordingly. That the gods exist at all suggests "an intelligible order con- 344 BOOK REVIEWS ducive to the human good" (126ff.), an order knowable not simply by analogy with the human cra£ts (as supposed by Socrates in the so-called " earlier " dialogues) but rather by " a sort of austere mystical submission to the Good" (141)-as Despiand shows by interpreting the Republic in the light of the cave image of Book VIL Finally, that the gods care for human beings means that, given " the presence of a cosmic pull that keeps the soul open to transcendent realities and helps it on its way towards them" (165), human desires are not inevitably selfish but are educable or convertible to the desire. for truth-;a doctrine which Despland ascribes to Plato by way of an analysis of Socrates's notion of "divine madness" in the Phaedrus and the adjacent myth comparing the soul to a pair of charioteer-driven winged horses (244e-255c). In Despland's reading, then, Socratic dialectics function above all to support or illustrate the accompanying myths. The dialogues.ther.eby produce "reasoned doctrines " (197). Socratic philosophizing is pressed into the service of a Platonic story-telling designed t.o reshape the popular mores. Plato's subsequent failure to bring about political reform during his own lifetime (whether in Athens or at Syracuse) evidently proved no obstacle to his posthumous influence (e.g., in the tradition of Christian Platonism). Therein lies his perennial interest for philosophers of religion... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: Ancients and More Ancients Medieval Philosophy Modern Philosophy Enlightened Philosophy The Idealists The Romantics Recent Philosophy.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Philosophical Tale.