ABSTRACT This article provides a criticism of the apolitical starting point of social contract theories through the analysis of Rawls's original position and Habermas's idea of complex society, arguing that such depoliticized starting point leads to the refusal of the centrality of social struggles between classes as the basis of streamlining social evolution and institutional constitution. In order to achieve political agreement, it erases and even eliminates the struggles between social classes, the status quo and the social-political differences between (...) social groups as the core of societal and institutional configuration. Moreover, it leads to strong institutionalism-the centrality of the formal spheres and subjects in relation to informal spheres and subjects. Therefore, the political consequences of a depoliticized or apolitical starting point are threefold: the depoliticization of social struggles between opposed social classes, the strong institutionalism by the emphasis in the depoliticized institutions and in the rule of law, and the weakening of a democratic political praxis performed by social movements and citizen initiatives from a direct contraposition and even substitution of the institutions, their proceduralism and legal staff with the spontaneous politicalcultural praxis of these social movements and citizen initiatives. The great problem and challenge of contemporary democratic societies, namely the correlation between strong institutionalism, political parties and economic oligarchies, cannot be resolved from the juridical-political procedural paradigm's emphasis on institutionalism and the rule of law, but only by a reaffirmation of political praxis as the fundamental core of institutional and societal constitution, legitimation and evolution, which implies that democratic politics must be conceived of as a permanent struggle against strong institutionalism by the political subjects of civil society. Here a permanent and radical politicization of the informal public spheres and subjects is required. RESUMO Critico no artigo, a partir da análise da posição original de Rawls e da ideia de sociedade complexa de Habermas, o ponto de partida não político das teorias do contrato social, argumentando que este mesmo ponto de partida despolitizado leva - no momento em que apaga e mesmo elimina, com o objetivo de alcançar o acordo político, as lutas sociais entre classes, o status quo e as diferenças sociopolíticas entre os grupos sociais como a base da configuração institucional e societal - à recusa da centralidade das lutas sociais entre classes como a base de dinamização da evolução social e da constituição institucional. Ele leva, além disso, ao institucionalismo forte, isto é, à centralidade das esferas e dos sujeitos formais em relação às esferas e sujeitos informais. Portanto, as consequências políticas de um ponto de partida não político ou despolitizado são triplas: a despolitização das lutas sociais entre classes sociais opostas; o institucionalismo forte por meio da ênfase em instituições políticas e no Estado democrático de direito despolitizados; e o enfraquecimento de uma práxis política radical que é realizada por movimentos sociais e iniciativas cidadãs a partir de uma contraposição direta e mesmo de uma substituição das instituições, de seu procedimentalismo e elites pela práxis político-cultural espontânea dos movimentos sociais e das iniciativas cidadãs. O grande problema e o grande desafio das sociedades democráticas contemporâneas, ou seja, a correlação entre institucionalismo forte, partidos políticos e oligarquias econômicas, não podem ser resolvidos por meio da ênfase, por parte do paradigma jurídico-político procedimentalista, no institucionalismo e no Estado Democrático de Direito, senão que apenas por meio de uma reafirmação da práxis política como o verdadeiro núcleo da constituição, legitimação e evolução institucional e societal, o que implica que a política democrática seja concebida como luta permanente em relação ao institucionalismo forte por parte dos sujeitos políticos advenientes da sociedade civil, exigindo-se, aqui, uma politização permanente e radical das esferas públicas e dos sujeitos informais. (shrink)

This essay investigates the tradition of interwar German-Jewish political theology associated most of all with Leo Strauss and Franz Rosenzweig. It is suggested here that the Straussian notion of an eternal conflict between politics and religions may be derived, in part, from Rosenzweig's image of the depoliticized Jewish community. Furthermore, this "concept of the apolitical" represents something like a modernist reprisal of Stoic ideals, most especially the ancient ideal of ataraxia, or "freedom from disturbance." This apoliticism is distinguished most (...) of all by two interlocking principles; first, that politics is mere disorder if not a return to the state of unredeemed nature; and second, that religious peace must accordingly be found elsewhere than politics. This argument for the near-incommensurability of politics and religion represents the special if not altogether unique contribution of Weimar German-Jewish intellectuals to the enduring tradition of political theology. It is therefore worth posing the following question: Why does Hannah Arendt's political theory appear to bear almost no trace whatsoever of this political-theological tradition? By what logic did Arendt dissent from the political-theological principles that so captivated her German-Jewish contemporaries? And which tradition should command our allegiance today? (shrink)

Paulo Freire’s work is often characterized and used in terms that seek to produce widespread political and economic changes across societies. Peter Roberts, however, in his book Paulo Freire in the twenty-first Century, offers readers a much different way of approaching Freire’s work. Throughout his book, Roberts presents Freire as recognizing the limitations of educational initiatives, as not seeking specific macro-political objectives, and as emphasizing openness to alternative discourses. These themes weave throughout each chapter of the book, in which Roberts (...) examines a wide range of topics, from Freire and Dostoevsky to reason and emotion to political correctness to Freire and the Tao Te Ching. In this review essay, I engage a number of purposes. I elucidate and trace these three themes as they weave throughout and support the various topics that Roberts examines in his book. I illustrate how Roberts’s treatment of these themes challenges many of the interpretations of Freire’s work found within the critical literature, and, through this critique, it offers readers new ways of thinking about Freire’s thinking. Lastly, I discuss how Roberts’s thoughts suggest new ways that Freire’s work, and critical education in general, might begin to make more meaningful and practical inroads into public education and might develop new avenues of scholarship on Freire’s work. (shrink)

In German-speaking countries, John Dewey came to be considered a school reformer, an advocate of the project method and as the propagator of a cognitivistic psychology of learning. His ideas on socio-political reform, on the other hand, were ignored, partly intentionally, partly due to a lack of familiarity with them in detail. His major pedagogical work,Democracy and Education received little attention. In what follows, this selective view of Dewey is discussed mainly on the basis of internal pedagogical theoretical positions.

The attraction between religion and politics is perennial. Sometimes, in its long and checkered history, it has led to an adulterous affair. I want to ask what lies at the heart of this attraction, and whether that can shed any light on the current religious/political scene. But the romance metaphor is at bottom not a good one. I shall argue that, in their originary condition, religion and politics are "closer," both ontologically and in their motivation, than woman and man, closer (...) than siblings. Perhaps the image of siamese identical twins would serve best as a figure for the union which binds together these domains, in spite of the peculiar political history which has, in the West and especially in this country, attempted to sunder them. Let me emphasize right here that my project is a descriptive one: I am seeking a deeper understanding of the phenomena, not attempting to develop a prescriptive or normative position concerning what is to be done. Indeed, I shall only be able to sketch the outlines of the descriptive position I shall propose. (shrink)

In Capitalism, Alienation and Critique, part of the development of Asger S?rensen?s overall argument is a disagreement with Georges Bataille. The crux of the argument is that Bataille?s thinking - especially his conception of subjectivity - is?apolitical?. The aim of this paper is to investigate the force of this claim. What does it mean for a position - albeit a philosophical one - to be?apolitical??

Restraint as a Source of Judicial ‘Apoliticality’: A Functional Reconstruction Few legal theorists today would argue that the domain of law exists in isolation from other normative spheres governing society, notably from the domain of ‘politics’. Nevertheless, the implicit norm that judges should not act ‘politically’ remains influential and widespread in the debates surrounding controversial court cases. This article aims to square these two observations. Taking the Miller v. Secretary of State and Urgenda cases as illustrative case studies, the article (...) demonstrates that what it means for judges to adjudicate cases ‘apolitically’ is itself a matter of controversy. In reflecting on their own constitutional role, courts are forced to take a stance on substantive questions of political philosophy. Nevertheless, that does not mean that the ‘norm of judicial apoliticality’ should therefore be rejected. The norm’s coherence lies in its intersocial function: its role in declaring certain modes of judicial interpretation and intervention legitimate (‘legal’/‘judicial’) or illegitimate (‘political’). (shrink)

I argue that bias can be reduced but never completely removed, owing to humanity’s incomplete knowledge. A proposal is thus made for research to have more than one paradigmatic approach in order ….

Analytic philosophy is the dominant form of philosophy in the English-speaking world. What explains its continued success? Christoph Schuringa argues that its enduring power can only be understood by examining its social history.

There is a consensus that post-war British analytic philosophy was politically neutral. This view has been affirmed by the post-war analysts themselves, and by their critics. This paper argues that this consensus-view is false. Many central analytic philosophers claimed that their empirical philosophy had liberal outcomes, either through cultivating liberal habits of mind, or by revealing truths about the world that supported liberal conclusions. These beliefs were not subject to significant scrutiny or attempts at justification, but they do help us (...) to explain the otherwise puzzling disinclination to engage with questions of political philosophy on the part of these politically active individuals. (shrink)

In this paper published in Slovenian, i argue that Jean-François Lyotard could probably not have written his groundbraking book Le Différend in the eighties of the 20th century without having had his Algerian experience as a young teacher there. Lyotard was member of the group of leftist intellectuals "Socialisme ou barbarie" (also name of a journal they issued) around Cornelius Castoriadis. Understanding the "Other" and the relationship between the subject and the "Other" is essential to the line of thought that (...) Lyotard developped in Le Différend. See his book La guerre des Algériens. (shrink)

Apolitical, amoral, an aesthete whose writings point toward some form of liberation: this is the figure who emerges from most recent scholarship on Friedrich ...

In this study, we discuss the colonial project as an eliminatory structure of indigenous ways of knowing and doing that is built into Canadian social and health institutions. We elaborate on the role nursing plays in maintaining systemic racism, marginalization and discrimination of Indigenous Peoples. Based on historical practices and present‐day circumstances, we argue that changing language in research and school curriculums turns decolonization into what Tuck and Yang call a ‘metaphor’. Rather, we propose decolonization as a political project where (...) nurses acknowledge their involvement in colonial harms and disrupt the assumptions that continue to shape how nurses interact with Indigenous people, including knowledge systems that perpetuate colonial interests and privilege. Decolonization requires nurses to understand the colonial practices that led to dispossession of land, erasure of knowledge, culture and identity, while upholding indigenous ways of knowing and doing in health, healing and living. As a political manifesto that liberates indigenous life from oppressive structures of colonialism and capitalism, The Red Deal is presented as a visionary platform for decolonization. The aim of this study is to articulate three dimensions of caretaking within The Red Deal as a framework to decolonize nursing knowledge development and practice. Based on the philosophical dimension embedded in The Red Deal that revoke norms and knowledge assumptions of capitalism that destroy indigenous ways of knowing and doing, we underscore an approach toward decolonizing nursing. Our approach rejects the apolitical nature of nursing as well as the unilateral western scientific knowledge approach to knowledge development and recognition. A critical emancipatory approach that addresses the socio‐political and historical context of health care, recognizes dispossession of land and adopts a ‘multilogical’ vision of knowledge that gives space for representation and voice is needed for true decolonization of nursing. (shrink)

“For what tomorrow will be, no one knows,” writes Victor Hugo. This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as “post-structuralist.” Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past (...) forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and “political correctness”; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the “subject” over and against “scientism”; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida’s own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter “in praise of psychoanalysis.” These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility—for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future. (shrink)

The legal corpus linguistics movement is one of the most exciting recent developments in legal theory. Justice Thomas R. Lee and Stephen C. Mouritsen are its pioneers, and their new article thoughtfully responds to critics. Here, Part I applauds their response as a cautious account of how those methods might, in some circumstances, provide relevant evidence about ordinary meaning in legal interpretation. Some disagreements persist, but The Corpus and the Critics makes significant progress in academic debates about legal interpretation. Part (...) II turns from theory to practice: Judges are increasingly discussing corpus linguistics and conducting sua sponte analyses in their opinions, and this Essay collects and analyzes these cases. Corpus linguistics is theorized as apolitical, neutral, and objective. But in practice, it has been used largely by Republican-appointed judges, often inconsistently with standards that Lee and Mouritsen recently endorse. This Essay identifies a set of best practices, endorsed both by Lee and Mouritsen’s new cautious account and by many critics of the movement. It elaborates those commitments and evaluates whether they are met by courts citing or conducting legal corpus linguistics. If courts continue to employ legal corpus linguistics methods, the practice should be guided by these shared standards. (shrink)

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled: 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy. -/- (...) Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. 'Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.' The book also includes a hugely illuminating annotated text of the Hoax itself, and a reflection on the furore it provoked. (shrink)

A remarkable feature of the philosophical work on conspiracy theory theory has been that most philosophers agree there is nothing inherently problematic about conspiracy theories (AKA the thesis of particularism). Recent work, however, has challenged this consensus view, arguing that there really is something epistemically wrong with conspiracy theorising (AKA generalism). Are particularism and generalism incompatible? By looking at just how much particularists and generalists might have to give away to make their theoretical viewpoints compatible, I will argue that particularists (...) can accept many of the concerns that motivate generalism because generalism can never be about ‘all’ conspiracy theories without being either ahistorical or apolitical. In the end generalist critiques are best seen as useful guidelines or considerations for the appraising of particular conspiracy theories. (shrink)

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, (...) and as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’, and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler’s work does. (shrink)

The dramatic rise in inequality in the United States over the past generation has occasioned considerable attention from economists, but strikingly little from students of American politics. This has started to change: in recent years, a small but growing body of political science research on rising inequality has challenged standard economic accounts that emphasize apolitical processes of economic change. For all the sophistication of this new scholarship, however, it too fails to provide a compelling account of the political sources (...) and effects of rising inequality. In particular, these studies share with dominant economic accounts three weaknesses: they downplay the distinctive feature of American inequality —namely, the extreme concentration of income gains at the top of the economic ladder; they miss the profound role of government policy in creating this “winner-take-all” pattern; and they give little attention or weight to the dramatic long-term transformation of the organizational landscape of American politics that lies behind these changes in policy. These weaknesses are interrelated, stemming ultimately from a conception of politics that emphasizes the sway of the “median voter” in electoral politics, rather than the influence of organized interests in the process of policy making. A perspective centered on organizational and policy change —one that identifies the major policy shifts that have bolstered the economic standing of those at the top and then links those shifts to concrete organizational efforts by resourceful private interests —fares much better at explaining why the American political economy has become distinctively winner-take-all. (shrink)

For years business ethics has limited the moral duties of enterprises to negative duties. Over the last decade it has been argued that positive duties also befall commercial agents, at least when confronted with large scale public problems and when governments fail. The argument that enterprises have positive duties is often grounded in the political nature of commercial life. It is argued that agents must sometimes take over governmental responsibilities. The German republican tradition argues along these lines as does Nien-Hé (...) Hsieh. Agents in commercial life are bound by positive duties because at some point they become citizens that must take on the responsibilities of the state. In this paper we leave undisputed the claim that corporations must acknowledge positive duties. However, we demonstrate that the political grounding fails, at least in the sense that this theory insufficiently acknowledges a long standing liberal tradition that vindicates apolitical markets and clear borderlines between politics and economics. We carve out an alternative route to the grounding of one specific positive duty—the duty to further justice. Our argument is based on the moral nature of commercial agents and tries to demonstrate that the duty to further justice ensues from liberalism. Taking a Kantian perspective, it conceptualizes the duty to further justice as a moral duty, orientated toward the political domain. It is grounded in the obligation to attain moral autonomy in the civil condition. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that conventional reasoning on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is based on the assumption of a liberal market economy in the context of a nation state. I build on the study of Scherer and Palazzo (Acad Manage Rev 32(4):1096-1120, 2007), developing a number of criteria to identify elements of liberal philosophy in the ongoing CSR debate. I discuss their occurrence in the CSR literature in detail and reflect on the implications, taking into account the emerging political (...) reading of the firm. I conclude that the apolitical framework in the mainstream CSR literature has to be overcome since it does not reflect recent changes in the socio-economic conditions for economic actors in a globalizing world. (shrink)

Hyperpolitics and Political Commitment in the Twenty-First Century What do the January 6th invasion of the Capitol and the anti-racist demonstrations of mid-2020 have in common? Both birthed some of the largest protest movements in American history, but also diminished rapidly after their initial, pre-revolutionary peak. This article reads the recent political sequence through the concept of ‘hyperpolitics’. In contrast to previous types of post-politics or mass politics, ‘hyperpolitics’ stands for a distinctly novel mode of political commitment characteristic of the (...) 2010s, in which a formerly apolitical public sphere finds itself intensely repoliticized, imposing itself on other domains such as the private, cultural, or economic. The return in question yet also runs across parameters that are more low-cost, low-entry, and low-duration than previous twentieth-century types, in stark contrast Max Weber’s typology of politics as the ‘slow boring of hard boards.’. (shrink)

Mourning, especially melancholic mourning, has recently emerged as a significant site of expressing and addressing loss in feminism. While feminism’s hard-won successes in achieving institutional power globally have brought exuberance over achievement, they have also come with an acute sense of despondency and loss; one that is not easily mourned or relinquished. The institutionalization of feminism in governmental, non-governmental and academic sites has precipitated this sense of loss in India, wherein the discussion of this article is located. In exploring the (...) politics of loss in contemporary feminist discourse in India, feminist melancholia is seen to condition a fetishized attachment to the past, and to past modes of knowledge, action and consciousness in ways that demand the generational reproduction of feminism rather than its renewal in times of perceived crisis. Present-day anxieties over the ‘co-option’ and resultant depoliticization of the Indian women’s movement constitute a narrative of loss in which a politically more ‘authentic’ past functions as a normative standard for feminist politics in the present, and as a prescriptive model of feminism’s future. Advancements in Women’s Studies and activist (now ‘NGOized’) practice that are seen to be deviating from the redemption of such an idealized past are thus deemed apolitical. In interrogating contemporary anxieties about feminism’s present and impending future (that resonate beyond the bounds of India), the article demonstrates how melancholic loss can inform a potentially conservative politics that seeks to contain feminism in a once loved but now lost ‘home’. (shrink)

Public or stakeholder participation in environmental governance has been strongly advocated within the United Nations (UN) since the early 1990s. A relatively new mechanism for global climate finance that emphasises stakeholder engagement is the Green Climate Fund (GCF), a UN strategy for channelling funds from the Global North to the Global South. Drawing on previous critical approaches to multi-stakeholder involvement in global governance, this article explores stakeholder involvement within the GCF. The study combines ideas from institutional logics and resource dependency (...) to provide a better understanding of how stakeholder arrangements are shaped in climate organisations. Results show that the GCF stakeholder arrangement favours private sector stakeholders – stakeholders that take a technical and apolitical approach to climate finance – and disfavours smaller, less resourceful stakeholders as well as those who perform a politicised watchdog function. (shrink)

Against "political philosophy" -- Politics as thought -- Althusser -- Politics unbound -- A speculative disquisition on the concept of democracy -- Truths and justice -- Rancière and the community of equals -- Rancière and apolitics -- What is a thermidorean? -- Politics as truth procedure.

The dominant framing of the political corporate social responsibility discussion challenges the traditional economic conception of the firm and aims to produce a paradigm shift in CSR studies wherein the traditional, apolitical view of corporations’ roles in society is replaced by the political conception of CSR. In this paper, we show how the major framing of the political CSR discussion calls for a redirection to take international hard legal and moral regulations, as well as the need for the boundaries (...) between business and politics into account. (shrink)

Milton Friedman's article, The Social Responsibility of Business Is To Increase Its Profits, owes its appeal to the rhetorical devices of simplicity, authority, and finality. More careful consideration reveals oversimplification and ambiguity that conceals empirical errors and logical fallacies. It is false that business does, or would, operate exclusively in economic terms, that managers concentrate obsessively on profitability, and that ethics can be marginalized. These errors reflect basic contradictions: an apolitical political base, altruistic agents of selfishness, and good deriving (...) from greed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Judith Butler’s “New Humanism”A Thing or Not a Thing, and So What?Sina KramerA few thinkers in the last few years, such as Stefan Dolgert and Miriam Leonard, but especially political theorist Bonnie Honig, have argued that Judith Butler’s most recent work (Antigone’s Claim, 2000; Undoing Gender, 2004; Precarious Life, 2005; Frames of War, 2009) institutes a new form of humanism, based on the universality of grief, mourning, vulnerability, and (...) precariousness that Butler describes in these texts. These critiques call into question an incipient foundationalism in the feminist political theory Butler produces in these texts, one seemingly at odds with her previous antifoundationalist commitments. In this article I will argue that, while these critiques oversimplify the relationship between politics and ethics or politics and ontology in their critique of Butler’s new mortalist humanism, the problem of the relation of politics to ethics or ontology—or, more exactly, the problem of the relation of politics to its outside, or to its conditions—remains nevertheless a real problem in Butler’s work. This is because, without a clear account of a method of rendering foundations contingent, or of rendering ontologies provisional, we tend to repeat the political move to establish an apolitical ground on which we can found a politic. This foundationalist move thus shields that ground from political critique and transformation—a move that Butler herself has done so much work to expose and displace.In this article, I ask whether feminist theory must repeat a recourse to foundations by examining the charge that Butler does so her in most recent work. The article will proceed as follows: in the first section, I examine the [End Page 25] charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism. In the second section, I look at some of Butler’s discussion of humanism, and look more closely at the relation between ethics and politics the question of humanism opens up in her work. In the third, I explore whether or not the charge that Butler is instituting a new humanism is correct. And in the fourth, I question what is at stake in this charge. Essentially, the article asks of this new humanist charge: Is this a thing or not a thing, and so what? I argue that, while the charge is somewhat overdetermined, it does point to a larger problem in Butler’s work, and that is the recourse to foundations, or to gesturing to an outside of or beyond of politics as the condition for altering political conditions. I will conclude by arguing that a greater attention to method can help to avoid the reification of the distinction between politics and its conditions that leads to the recourse of foundations.Butler’s New Mortalist HumanismIn her 2010 article “Antigone’s Two Laws: Tragedy and the Politics of Humanism”—as well as in her 2013 book Antigone, Interrupted—Bonnie Honig argues that Butler’s ethical turn institutes a new mortalist humanism, predicated on the “ontological fact of mortality, not the capacity to reason but the vulnerability to suffering” (Honig 2010, 1). She differentiates this new mortalist humanism, which she also diagnoses in the work of Nicole Loraux and Stephen White, from earlier rationalist forms of humanism that are based on the universal principle of human rationality, and from forms of antihumanism based on the “signs of a monstrous, dehumanizing animality” (Honig 2010, 3). Either form is problematic, Honig argues, insofar as they both seek to settle essentially political questions by recourse to a position beyond politics: through a stable and recognizably human figure who either secures its belonging to the polity by means of its rationality, or an exclusion rendered through the dehumanization of otherwise ostensibly human figures.This new mortalist humanism Honig diagnoses in Butler’s recent work falls into the same problem: in this version, Butler settles political questions by recourse to a principle of mortality, or the universal experience of mourning. This would seem to be contrary to Butler’s earlier commitments to a radical critique of foundationalism, especially in her famous critique of the naturalization of sex as the grounds for a political understanding of gender. This is... (shrink)

Alain Badiou argues in “Rancière and Apolitics” that Rancière has appropriated his central idea of equality from Badiou’s own work. We argue that Badiou’s characterisation of Rancière’s project is correct, but that his self-characterisation is mistaken. What Badiou’s ontology of events opens out onto is not necessarily equality, but instead universality. Equality is only one form of universality, but there is nothing in Badiou’s thought that prohibits the (multiple) universality he positsfrom being hierarchical. In the end, then, Badiou’s thought moves (...) in a Maoist direction while Rancière’s in an anarchist one. (shrink)

Henry David Thoreau, though often characterised as individualist or apolitical, is in fact an important link between Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism and environmentalism. Like the Jeffersonians, Thoreau espouses a political economy of citizenship, criticises modern capitalism, and celebrates simplicity and personal independence. However, Thoreau rejects the Jeffersonians' focus on conquest of the wilderness and economic industriousness, both of which were meant to promote virtue. Thoreau advocates preservation of wild nature as essential for cultivating virtue and regards nature as a community (...) deserving respect and protection. He criticises an emphasis on economic industriousness as promoting overwork, environmental destruction and greed. Thoreau emerges as a complex figure whose legacy points in two contrasting directions: toward a more ecologically responsible or sustainable republicanism embracing preservation of a spectrum of landscapes from wilderness to agrarian, and also toward a problematic, depoliticising separation between human beings and nature. (shrink)

New entrant policy, literature, and research offers an important angle for exploring where dominant agrarianism is reproduced and contested. As new entrants seek access to land, finance, and expertise, their credibility is filtered through a cultural and policy environment that favors some farming models over others. Thus, seemingly apolitical policy tools geared at getting new people into farming may carry implicit norms of who these individuals should be, how they should farm, and what their values should entail. A normative (...) gaze of farming often masks the financial, cultural, labor relation, and land tenure dimensions that are the underlying drivers of agrarian change. This paper applies social reproduction theory to explore a diversity of social labor processes that new entrant farmers practice to arrive at the point of agricultural production. Interviews with new entrant and successor farmers in Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) are presented first, followed by an analysis of new entrant policy instruments over the last two decades in Scotland. We find that new entrant policy fails to engage with a crisis of social reproduction in the food system because of a commitment to agrarian ideals of the self-sufficient and entrepreneurial farmer. By inviting newcomers into a dynamic of increasing precarious and uncompensated labor, very often by way of family relations, new entrant policy may act as a form of “predatory inclusion.” We argue that to be successful in reproducing the agricultural sector, new entrant farmer policy must be first a policy at attending to relations in the social sphere. Recognizing and supporting the diversified strategies farmers take on to assemble land for production would not only drive more just policy, but set the conditions for a more adaptive food system. (shrink)

The specific arrangements of power/knowledge that characterize nurse interactions with the electronic health record form a panopticon. As health care moves into the 21st century, sophisticated technologies like the electronic health record shape the terrain of professional possibilities. The longer it is in use, the more it is possible to excavate the inherent disciplinary function of electronic health record. A panopticon is a generalizable, replicable apparatus of power that cultivates discipline when similar behaviours are desired from a group of people. (...) This paper traces the arrangements of power/knowledge that characterize nurse interactions with the electronic health record rooted in a trauma critical care setting. Examining the apparatuses of power/knowledge enforced through panopticism in nursing makes the invisible visible. This in turn enables nurses to address the intended and unintended consequences of the electronic health record. If nurses are to effectively shape the direction of their own futures and the future of health care, nurses will need to unpack the invisible techniques of power such as the electronic health record as a panopticon. In the process of building a visible identity, contextualizing nursing knowledge to better care for patients on the one hand and understand the relationships of power that limit us on the other, nurses are neither apolitical nor powerless. Considering the dialectic of power/knowledge in the healthcare setting helps to illuminate spaces to recharacterize nursing, reveal the contributions and knowledge of nurses, and consolidate the professional power of nurses to affect meaningful change and self‐governance in the healthcare setting. (shrink)

_The National Park to Come_ examines the sense of "the national" that our national parks construct and the kind of citizen they produce in the process. Who is the visitor in these spaces? Who is the national and who the foreigner? To whose children is the ostensibly unpeopled wilderness of the future owed? At what cost, and to whom? Grebowicz explores how such politicized modes of being-in-nature are maintained on the emotional level, shaping our basic sense of coherence, futurity, collectivity, (...) and having a life. Wilderness-as-spectacle, she argues, functions as a form of social relation even as we imagine the true experience of nature to be solitary and apolitical. The book's most pressing concern is the relationship between the foreigner and the future in the democratization of wilderness. For the questions explored here, contends Grebowicz, are precisely those that will shape the future of our entire park system. (shrink)

According to Husserl’s self-description, his phenomenological project was “completely apolitical.” Husserl’s phenomenology did not provide a political philosophy in the classical sense, a normative description of a functioning social order and its respective institutional structures. Nor did Husserl have much to say about the day-to-day politics of his time. Yet his reflections on community and culture were not completely without political implications. This article deals with an often-neglected strand of Husserl’s philosophy, namely his critique of liberalism. In this article, (...) liberalism is understood in the manner of Leo Strauss, as a tradition of individualist philosophy emerging from Hobbes’s political thought. As the article shows, Husserl followed many of his contemporaries in criticizing Hobbes’s abstract individualism, which could provide only a preventative function for political institutions. More importantly, Husserl’s engagement with Hobbes can be understood as a kind of ethical counterpart to his analysis of Galileo in the Crisis, as a critique of formal apriorism in the political domain. What Galileo did for physical nature with his “garb of ideas,” Hobbes did for human nature, reducing human sociality to interactions between atomistic individuals. In doing so, Hobbes ended up presenting a “mathematics of sociality” in an empirical garb. Going against the liberal view of the human person, Husserl presented his theory of social ethics founded on an original co-existence of subjects and a theory of human renewal. (shrink)

This article examines three textual moments that might plausibly have found their way into Derrida’s late Beast and Sovereign seminars, but that Derrida appears to avoid or overlook. Aristotle’s discussion in the Politics of the “One Best Man” scenario is placed in the context of his earlier characterizations of the naturally apolitical man as akin either to a beast or to a god; Bataille’s late descriptions of sovereignty as a kind of self-perverting hyperbolic structure are juxtaposed with some of (...) Derrida’s own formulations about sovereign autoimmunity; Heidegger’s discussion, in a seminar nominally about Hölderlin, of a striking formula from Sophocles is shown to capture something of the “outlaw” status of the sovereign as Derrida describes it. (shrink)

La recepción durante el siglo XX se preguntó si la filosofía nietzscheana era a-, im- o anti-política, es decir, si podía ser asimilada por la democracia, o si era antimoderna, elitista y reaccionaria. El italiano Roberto Esposito ha propuesto leerla como formando e informando el paradigma de la biopolítica. Se discuten cuatro lecturas de esa biopolítica: como formadora del paradigma de la inmunidad, como tanatopolítica, como liberal y neoliberal, y como biopolítica afirmativa. Twentieth-century readers wondered if Nietzschean philosophy was (...) class='Hi'>apolitical, impolitic, or anti-political; that is, if it could be assimilated by democracy or if it was antimodern, elitist, and reactionary. The Italian philosopher Robert Esposito has proposed reading Nietzsche's philosophy as forming and informing the biopolitical paradigm. Four readings of these biopolitics are discussed: as part of the paradigm of immunity, as thanatopolitics, as liberal and neoliberal, and as affirmative biopolitics. (shrink)

This article deals with the problems of abortion as a political issue, in the form represented in the two reports of the Belgian «National Commission for Ethical Problems». Both the «translation» of the political problem into a question to be handled by an «apolitical» commission on the level of scientific expertness, and the delivery of two mutually dissenting reports, are studied as a typical stage of the development of the political decision-making process in this matter and compared with similar (...) evolutions in the neighbour countries. From a view point of political theory the main problem is the following : how a parliamentary democracy solves such a deap-seated confiict concerning the «basic values» of ethical order of society? Elements of an answer can be gathered from a comparative analysis of the different positions and arguments in the two reports of the Ethical Commission. (shrink)

Michel de Montaigne is principally known today as a literary figure--the inventor of the modern essay and the pioneer of autobiographical self-exploration who retired from politics in midlife to write his private, philosophical, and apolitical Essais. But, as Biancamaria Fontana argues in Montaigne's Politics, a novel, vivid account of the political meaning of the Essais in the context of Montaigne's life and times, his retirement from the Bordeaux parliament in 1570 "could be said to have marked the beginning, rather (...) than the end, of his public career." He later served as mayor of Bordeaux and advisor to King Henry of Navarre, and, as Fontana argues, Montaigne's Essais very much reflect his ongoing involvement and preoccupation with contemporary politics--particularly the politics of France's civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. Fontana shows that the Essais, although written as a record of Montaigne's personal experiences, do nothing less than set forth the first major critique of France's ancien régime, anticipating the main themes of Enlightenment writers such as Voltaire and Diderot. Challenging the views that Montaigne was politically aloof or evasive, or that he was a conservative skeptic and supporter of absolute monarchy, Fontana explores many of the central political issues in Montaigne's work--the reform of legal institutions, the prospects of religious toleration, the role of public opinion, and the legitimacy of political regimes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.4 (2002) 645-648 [Access article in PDF] Thomas N. Habinek. The Politics of Latin Literature: Writing, Identity, and Empire in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. x + 234 pp. Cloth, $39.50. This is an important book, one that has in its brief life (a paperback edition appeared in 2001) spawned many scholarly debates in both written and spoken form. Many have disagreed—and will (...) disagree—with Habinek's ideas, and I certainly have many questions about his methodology, his use of sources and evidence, and his sometimes conflicting claims. Nonetheless, he takes on one of the most serious issues in Classics: how we read classical texts, what the reader's involvement with the text should be, and what part ideology plays (and did play) in both the formation and the reception of a text.Habinek's task, as he states it, is to study literature as a representation of society and an intervention in it (3). His overall aim is to assess the social function of Latin literature, a literature that was produced within a traditional aristocratic empire "by and for an elite that sought to maintain and expand its dominance over other sectors of the population through reference to an authorizing past" (3). As his title indicates (with "Politics" coming before "Literature"), he sets out to "politicize and historicize the reading of texts of classical Latin literature that are still too frequently regarded in purely formalistic and aesthetic terms" (4-5) by examining, chapter by chapter, a series of test cases or scenarios that embed Roman literature in its social, economic, and cultural context. This book is meant to offer the reader, then, a "historically engaged mode of reading" (5) by looking at intertexts of many sorts.Such an approach to literature belongs to the school of cultural-materialist studies, those critics who read and analyze literature as "ideological discourse and social institution" (5), and it draws from many schools of thought and disciplines, including Marxism, feminist theory, anthropology, political science, deconstruction, literary criticism, New Historicism, and Foucauldian theory. The genesis of Habinek's book was the close philological study of the "meaning and usage of specific Latin words and phrases in specific discursive contexts" (6). Thus he began with a close examination of the political basis of words but then broadened his lens to analyze textual systems and the construction of political identity. Habinek distinguishes himself from the semioticians and the formalists in his focus on the "interestedness" of textual utterances and the historical and political dynamics of the text. The particular kind of interestedness that Habinek zeroes in on is the Roman aristocratic elite and its anxieties about strategies for sustaining a moral and political hegemony.Habinek enters into a fray that has long simmered in the discipline of Classics but that boiled up into a full-scale battle with the publication of Martin Bernal's Black Athena. Habinek contends that Classical scholars' idealizing view of the ancient world (more Greece than Rome) and their isolation of Latin literature from Roman culture has allowed them to ignore "the social implications of their own practice" (10), a comfortable, ahistoricized position that militates [End Page 645] against reading Latin literature in a sociopolitical framework. If, for example, we read Ovid's exile poetry without acknowledging Ovid's contribution to Roman colonialism and his authorly assistance in constructing and disseminating an imperial discourse of domination, we risk imitating some famous scholarly forebears who "avoided the historical reality of Rome in order to actualize their own fantasies of the apolitical innocence of literature and literary studies" (14). Thus, Habinek sympathizes with Bernal's idea that "scholarship... is influenced by the scholar's sociopolitical background" (173, n. 2), and he urges us to follow Giambattista Vico, who privileged Roman literature and culture (over Greek), saw society and culture as something changing not fixed, and regarded language and cultural institutions as social constructs. Habinek contrasts Vico with figures like Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, who, in the German Romantic tradition, idealized Greece and firmly separated... (shrink)

The law of the future faces fundamental challenges that it cannot overcome by means of ‘tried and trusted’ dogmatics alone. Nor can it, from a methodological standpoint, take refuge in a purportedly apolitical hermeneutics or a one-sided application of empirical methods. Its responsibilities are not exhausted in mere steering, innovation or stimulating operations, but also encompass critical-emancipatory functions. Methodological reflection and legal critique - understood as social theory in the ‘interior’ of law - enable legal doctrine to meet the (...) particular demands that arise from the simultaneous affiliation of jurisprudence to the systems of law and science. The future development of legal studies thus requires a foundational research approach that preserves the interdisciplinary connection to neighbouring disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and provides impetus for enlightened self-critique and self-reflection. Only in this way - through the emergence of jurisprudence from its self-incurred ignorance regarding its social function - might legal practice assert itself in everyday legal life and confront the injustices of the legal world with its own thinking. Such critical legal thinking demands more than just the perpetuation of traditions based on the history of ideas. Nor can it be satisfied through the mere cultivation of empirical approaches to reality. It must aim to develop and unfold a normative concept of law, and write this forward into the future. It derives its essential reflective potential from social-theoretical modelling and methodological development. In the process, the reciprocal confrontation and translation of rival theoretical models opens new learning possibilities not to solve legal conflicts, but to treat them more judiciously. Here, it is above all the foundational legal subjects that, through their discrete approaches and perspectives, open diverse and flexible entryways to the potentialities and actualities of law and, particularly in light of new cases, ensure the necessary variance of options for perception and action. The future of law resides in experimental testing and innovative discovery, in the creative quest for alternative possibilities and possible realities, in the critical and constructive struggle for the law of the future - as the ecological law of future life in the next bio-digital society. (shrink)

The emergence of Abstract Expressionism as a predominant artistic style in the early 1950s was accompanied by a new critical image of the artist as a heroic individualist. This myth, according to which the artist created great works primarily by looking into the profound depths of his own soul rather than by responding to the world and society around him, has become the standard description of the Abstract-Expressionist artistic process. By such an account, the Abstract-Expressionist artist was an apolitical (...) being, unconcerned with the conflicts in society due to his overriding concern with the explorations of the self. This treatment of Abstract Expressionism began with the writing of two critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. (shrink)

The author starts from the thesis that there is no such thing as a "natural" or "apolitical" economy. The economy is always already political, as it is the economy’s material core of power, control, and its main mechanisms, i.e. exploitation and oppression. It is no less so in the era of neoliberalism, a time in which we witness the divorce between capitalism and democracy. In order to lay the foundations of a different economy, one that is not based on (...) wage labor and the exploitation of human life and nature based on their auto-alienation, but rather on action in accordance with their resources, we need – according the author – to rethink the concept of the state in a non-philosophical and post-capitalist fashion, structurally different from the modern bourgeois state. If the structure originating in the bourgeois state, as conceived by modern humanism, is preserved, it will mean that the determination in the last instance is still the same. In order to arrive at a determination in the last instance of a non-exploitative, non-wage-labor-based social order where the determination is affected by the real, we must first arrive at the generic core of the notion of the modern state. As soon as we determine the generic term of "the state," we can radicalize it by letting it be determined by the effects of the real. The generic notion, isolated from the chôra of the transcendental material that is offered by modern philosophies originating in the Enlightenment, should be used as the minimal transcendental description for the determining effect of the real. (shrink)

Though the film does not have as its goal reestablishing authentic temporality asHeidegger understands it, Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener nonethelesstakes Heidegger’s exploration of the link between ideology and temporality as its point ofdeparture. The film depicts the politicisation of Justin Quayle through anarrative structure that breaks from an everyday or ideological conception of time.Politicisation occurs, the film implies, through an encounter with feminine enjoyment, anencounter that transforms the subject’s relationship to time and facilitates the subject’sentrance into a non-ideological temporality (...) or what one might call a temporality of the real.Justin’s romance with Tessa entails navigating her enjoyment, and the processof doing so alters his sense of time andtransforms him into a political being. This is the transformation that the film, through itstemporal structure and narrative form, attempts to effect on the spectator as well. Romancethus becomes the vehicle for political awakening rather than the path, as we see in itstraditional cinematic deployment, to an apolitical retreat. (shrink)