In Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, Simon Critchley takes up three questions at the centre of contemporary theoretical debate: What is ethical experience? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? What, if any, is the relation of ethical experience to politics? Through spirited confrontations with major thinkers, such as Lacan, Nancy, Rorty, and, in particular, Levinas and Derrida, Critchley finds answers in a nuanced “ethics of finitude” and defends the political possibilities of deconstruction. Democracy, economics, friendship, and technology (...) are all considered anew in Critchley’s bold excursions on the meaning and value of recent French philosophy. (shrink)

How can a feminist subject that emerges in the moment of subjection to power discourses be in a position to generate transformative politics? How can we theorize a feminist political subject without such subject becoming exclusionary? This chapter draws on the combinatory theoretical framework of Jacques Derrida and Theodor W. Adorno to propose an alternative theoretical framework that finds answers to these divisive questions in feminist political theory. First, it shows that the feminist political (...) subject emerges within the limit of power when power fails to fully determine subjectivity. Second, it further theorizes the concept of a feminist political subject-in-outline, which defines the feminist political subject without becoming exclusionary. (shrink)

In a context of experiences in which events become apparent that encroach upon mainstream and reasonable good sense, this paper gives an account of the emergence of political subjects into public domains that make possible new knowledge and personal and institutional transformations. A statement by Simone de Beauvoir and engagement with Michel Foucault's interpretation of “limit experiences” help to orient the paper. The essay ends with a discussion of certain types of power and the birth of political subjects.

Politics appears to have a direct impact on the quality of our lives as citizens of states. We outline here the dependence between culture and its inherent mechanism of forgetting, and between a hero and a political subject. We employ the theory of Juri Lotman, who underlines the role of individuals and of single events in culture. The primary illustration given is the figure of Lech Wałęsa, politician, legendary co-founder of the Solidarity trade union, and Nobel Peace Prize (...) winner. He exemplifies Lotman’s notion of a mobile hero, one who powered the course of history, but whose present-day political and social activity is of an empty and querulous nature, lacking a goal and deeper meaning, while the actions he performs take place within a closed semantic field. He is an example of a paradoxical hero, whose actions no longer generate tensions or build a new semiotic quality. Wałęsa’s problem is the ossification of his discourse and failure to perceive that transformation has already taken place. (shrink)

Section one : Situations. Death and dialogue -- The impossibility of settled rule -- The singular subject -- Terror, politics, and the subject -- What is resistance? -- A rebel's vision -- Section two : positions. The labour of memory -- Towards a theory of the constituent power -- Possibilities of our trans-national citizenship -- Empire, globalisation, and the subject.

According to postmodern scholars, subjects are defined only through their relationship to power. However, if we are only political subjects insofar as we are subjected to existing power relations, there is little hope of political transformation. To instigate change, we need to draw on collective power, but appealing to a particular type of subject, whether "working class," "black," or "women," will always be exclusionary. Recent work in political and feminist thought has suggested that we can get (...) around these paradoxes by eliminating the idea of political subjects entirely or else thinking of political identities as constantly shifting. In this book, I argue that these are both failed ideas. Instead, I suggest a novel idea of a subject in outline as the agent of socio-political change. This subject moves within the tension of coherence necessary for an agency (the subject) and permanent openness necessary to counter the exclusionary character of a political collectivity based on identity (the outline). I also develop the idea of the moment of the limit, which refers to those moments when power structures fail to subject us, and transformative agency becomes a possibility. While I reject the idea of political autonomy, I show that there is always a moment in which subjects can contest the power relations that define them. Throughout the book, I ground these concepts in work by Adorno, Lacan, and Marx - the very theorists who are often seen as denying the subject's agency. (shrink)

I argue that in his commentary on Epictetus’ Encheiridion, Simplicius derives a method by which his students can enter into the process of self-constitution, which is only achieved through completion of the study of Plato’s dialogues. The result of following the method is the attainment of a perspective consonant with the level of political virtue, which I call ‘political subjectivity’. This is a speculative interpretation of the effect the student would. experience in following the method, accomplished through analyses (...) of Simplicius’ interpretation of Epictetus’ concept of to eph’ hēmīn and the related prohairesis. I complement this with an analysis of the metaphysical foundation Simplicius gives the method in light of Charles Taylor’s notion of ‘strong evaluation’. In this way, I show how Simplicius adapts these concepts to his Neoplatonic psychology and virtue theory to make the method serve as preparation for the development of virtue prior to study of Plato. (shrink)

A theory of the emergence of the subject of world politics.

RESUMO Neste artigo pretendemos refletir acerca da constituição do sujeito político a partir de dois conceitos específicos: rosto e cena de dissenso. Nosso argumento pretende evidenciar como, ao “aparecerem”, os indivíduos produzem uma cena polêmica de enunciação na qual se desencadeia um processo de subjetivação política e de criação de formas dissensuais de comunicação e performance que inventam modos de ser, ver e dizer, configurando outras interfaces entre experiência estética e política. Tal processo potencializa a invenção de novas visualidades e (...) interlocuções nas quais se inscreve o rosto, definido aqui como o vestígio de um lugar do outro que se transforma na promessa do meu próprio lugar, assumindo caráter político e comunicacional, num processo incessante de subjetivação política em que ética e estética se tangenciam. ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to ponder on the constitution of the political subject from two specific concepts: the face and the scene of dissensus, in order to show how the “appearance” of the individuals can produce a controversial scene of dissensus, trigger a process of political subjectivation and the creation of dissensual forms of expression and communication that invent new ways of being, seeing and saying, configuring new ways of collective enunciation and interconnections between aesthetic experience and politics. This is related to the invention of new visualities and interlocutions in which the face is inscribed. Face is defined here as the vestige of a place of the other that is transformed into the promise of my own place, assuming a political and communicational character, in an incessant process of political subjectivation where ethics and aesthetics are related. (shrink)

In this article I respond to James Martel’s generous review of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In particular, I respond to his suggestion that I may be too quick to suggest that Bulter wants to give up on the subject entirely. I reiterate that for Butler (which I discuss in Chapter six of my book), we must be recognized by an alienating Other to secure our existence. As a result, the moment of becoming a (...) class='Hi'>subject is always bound up with subordination that we can only escape through desubjectivation. However, my concept of the political subject-in-outline, which I develop in the book, shows that subject formation does not necessarily imply subordination if we employ limit concepts in our theorizing and break with the language of recognition. The moment of the limit points at the holes or gaps in the Other, the symbolic domain, and its signifiers. At this moment, the Other does not recognize or misrecognize me, but makes me question who I am, which allows me to transform oppressive social categories. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Laury Naranch’s and Mary Caputi’s discussion of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In response to Naranch, I clarify how the political subject-in-outline translates into collective political action through the figure of the Chicana working-class woman. I also explain why the proletariat, more so than the precariat, implies a radical political imaginary if we rethink this concept in the context of my idea of the political (...) class='Hi'>subject-in-outline. I also clarify that my chapters on Marx expose how Adorno and Marx have problematic imaginations of the working-class woman, which counter their otherwise radical imaginary. In response to Caputi, I clarify the meaning of capitalism in my book and underline that we need a rigorous critique of capitalism to counter the rise of the Far Right. I also explain why the fluid subject does not have agency and why the subject-in-outline is a better way to theorize transformative feminist agency. I also clarify that my conception of feminist political subjectivity does not assume a privileged vantage point outside power structures. (shrink)

Refugees can be formed as “subjects” as they navigate forced displacement in countries that are not their own. In particular, everyday life as the politicized Other, and as humanitarianism’s depoliticized beneficiary, can constitute them as political subjects. Understanding these produced subjects and subjectivities leads us to conceive of forced displacement – or “refugeedom” – as a human condition or experience of political (sub)alterity, within which inhere distinctive subjectivations and subjectivities. Drawing on fieldwork in Beirut, Lebanon, we use young (...) Syrian and Iraqi refugees’ experiences with everyday racism, violent bullying and racialized discrimination as heuristic lenses with which to see displacement’s political subjects and subjectivities. We argue that the young refugees emerge as both political and moral subjects through core and defining struggles within – and against – these politicizing constraints. We interpret their struggles as ambivalently and dynamically situated within humanitarianism’s and racism’s subjections and subjectivities. Yet we also found that occasionally the young refugees could eclipse these produced subjectivities to claim repoliticized subjecthoods distinct from those of humanitarianism and outside displacement’s normal politics. We interpret these in Rancièrian terms as “political subjectivation.” Abstracting our findings, we offer a simple theoretical architecture of refugeedom’s subjectivations, subjects, and subjectivities as comprising humanitarianism’s rights-bearing or juridical subject; the vulnerable and resilient, innocent and suffering subject; and the Othered or racialized subject, formed through the exclusions of displacement’s politicized spaces. But we also conceive refugeedom as a space of values, and so the ground on which moral meaning and significance attach to agency and subjectivity. (shrink)

This book aims to re-think the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political, and does so by exploring the potentiality of Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal existence, by focusing on questions such as _how to think alternative notions of political existence_ and _what kind of political, social and legal order do these come to create. _ This investigation into political (...) appearance of subjects through concepts of law, body and life is led and influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, as well as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Žižek. The book takes on various conceptualisations of life, explores the relationship between law and life and develops an alternative notion of legal and political existence in particular in the context of rights. On the back of Guantánamo’s legal and political discourses this work aims to show why and how the problems of world politics or the limitations of rights discourse require an engagement with questions such as what it means to exist as a human being, what forms of life are politically recognised, which are not, and why this distinction. By pointing to a different ontology for thinking and understanding global politics and demonstrating how a trans-disciplinary and philosophical approaches can foster the debates in world politics, this book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies. (shrink)

This article traces the consequences for Badiou’s political subjectivity if his understanding of the Cartesian subject is incorrect. For Badiou, the faithful subject, political and otherwise, is formed through fidelity to the appearance of an event of truth, and the process of this fidelity creates a world. These truths are immanent to the worlds in which they appear. An obscure subject, however, is faithful to a negation, while a reactive subject denies the appearance of (...) a truth’s event. Badiou’s subject radicalizes Lacan’s radicalization of the Cartesian subject, but for him both Descartes and Lacan consider the subject stable since they are caused by truth rather than by the event of a truth. However, immanent to Descartes’s philosophy is an unstable subject, thanks to the role of the imagination in the discovery of the cogito. Fidelity to this immanent Cartesian subject shows Lacan as an obscure subject and Badiou as reactive. (shrink)

This book contributes to the feminist reconstruction of political theory. Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property-holding. This book synthesises political theory from liberal, Marxist, Kantian and Hegelian traditions, applying these ideas to history and social policy.

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight (...) of subjecthood. Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period. Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

The article explores the historicity of political subjecthood, making the case that through a process of subjectification “subjects of the king” gradually became the political subjects of the state. This in turn contributed to reconstitute the state as an abstract notion that nevertheless was real through the allegiance owed to it by its subjects. Addressing the making of subjecthood in relation to state formation helps fill an important lacuna in the literature on state formation, namely the double oversight (...) of subjecthood. Either studies of state formation have taken both territory and subjecthood—the two objects of state power—for granted, or, more recently, they have assumed that changes in subjecthood were a function of changes in territoriality. I propose to address this by inquiring into early modern subjecthood in its own right, through a historical exploration of the emergence of political subjecthood in English statutes during the Tudor period (1485–1602). Through gradual yet incremental changes in the relation between subject/king and subject/state, the political subject’s allegiance to the state changed and acquired a “taken-for-grantedness”—maintained and reinforced through constant legal reiteration. (shrink)

The article focuses on the narratives of women secretaries regarding their work experiences in private business in Latvia, and aims at understanding the barriers that prevent the formation of women’s political subjectivity in Latvia, by looking at why sexual harassment does not become a political issue for working women in Latvia. Using Hayden White’s theory of trope analysis, the article analyses the dominant tropes and the political results of their use in secretaries’ articulations and narratives about their (...) experiences of sexual harassment. Additionally, the article provides a critical trope analysis of Western feminist theories of sexual harassment, thus pointing out their usefulness for women’s politics in Latvia. Finally, the article outlines the discursive strategies that women in Latvia could use in order to claim their own distinct and transformative political subjectivity in the newly independent, capitalist and highly nationalist post-Soviet Latvia. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to Laury Naranch’s and Mary Caputi’s discussion of my book Power and Feminist Agency in Capitalism (2017). In response to Naranch, I clarify how the political subject-in-outline translates into collective political action through the figure of the Chicana working-class woman. I also explain why the proletariat, more so than the precariat, implies a radical political imaginary if we rethink this concept in the context of my idea of the political (...) class='Hi'>subject-in-outline. I also clarify that my chapters on Marx expose how Adorno and Marx have problematic imaginations of the working-class woman, which counter their otherwise radical imaginary. In response to Caputi, I clarify the meaning of capitalism in my book and underline that we need a rigorous critique of capitalism to counter the rise of the Far Right. I also explain why the fluid subject does not have agency and why the subject-in-outline is a better way to theorize transformative feminist agency. I also clarify that my conception of feminist political subjectivity does not assume a privileged vantage point outside power structures. (shrink)

Against the Personification of Democracy, however, takes its cue from classical philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and Plato, who consider establishing the ...

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본 연구의 목적은 시대적 변화에 따른 새로운 정치적 주체의 가능성을 ‘포스트데모스’라는 개념을 통해 분석하는 것이다. 이를 위해 우선 인공지능을 핵심으로 하는 포스트데모스가 공적 영역에서 존재하며 정치적 행위자로 인식될 수 있는지 알아보고, 포스트데모스가 정치적 행위자일 뿐만 아니라 정치적 주체가 될 수 있는 조건을 검토한 뒤, 정치적 주체로 발전할 수 있는 가능성을 민(民)의 역사적 발전 경험을 통해서 조망한다. 포스트데모스가 새로운 정치적 주체로 탄생할 수 있는 가능성을 당위적이 아니라 현실적인 차원에서 검토하는 본 연구는 정치 영역에 4차 산업 혁명이 가져올 변화를 직시하고 그 대응책을 (...) 정치철학적으로 모색하는 첫 번째 시도이다. (shrink)

Starting with Richard Wright’s controversial address to the Paris Congress of Black Writers and Authors of 1956, this article explores Wright’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s focus on existential freedom as key to an emancipatory political subjectivity. Both Wright and Beauvoir reject the content of identity formed via oppression, seeking to move beyond categories of culture, religion, femininity and blackness. They argue that solidarity can be better forged across identity groups by nurturing a political subjectivity that recognizes the historical (...) and political impact of embodied identities but is driven by ontological freedom expressed in collective action and dissociation with normative categories. Putting Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in conversation with Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, we can more fully appreciate Wright’s political writing after he left the United States. Here we see the potential for solidarity across borders, and with women and other oppressed peoples. Most important, we witness these two thinkers imagining political invocations that do not reinforce political meanings given to bodies, thus allowing new forms of solidarity and collective action to emerge. (shrink)

This article argues that Alain Badiou's theory of the subject offers conceptual resources that help make sense of ordinary life-experiences of ‘evental moments’ and enable the critique of hypertrophic forms of political or corporate agency. The article identifies a set of ideas through which Badiou's philosophy contributes to much-needed emancipatory thinking today. As it investigates the notions of horlieu and the event, the article stresses that true political change requires the emancipation of the ‘quasi-totality’, something that ‘reactive’ (...) political or corporate subjects would not be able to deliver. The piece emphasises that, for Badiou, universalist equality is the indispensable game-changer of politics, and that every single person can contribute to genuinely egalitarian projects. In Badiou's view, there are no meta-subjects and meta-events. Everyone can experience truth in their lives. (shrink)

ExcerptModernity has been identified with progress and with the idea of progress.1 The identification of progress as fact and idea conceal a two-fold problematic: the nature of time and the subject being characterized. If progress is its characteristic, the subject cannot in turn be said to be in fact progressing, and if it is not, it will be indiscernible from regression. This is not unrelated to modernity construing itself as distinct, distinguishing itself from the past while, at the (...) same time, defining such distinction only in the possibility of (self-)cancellation, i.e., opening an unanticipated future. In this lies the impasse…. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo se analizan las ideas contrapuestas de Domingo Faustino Sarmiento y José Martí sobre el binomio "civilización-barbarie", categoría medular de los discursos políticos e intelectuales del siglo XIX, con el fin de explorar sus concepciones sobre el nuevo sujeto político. Se exploran los "contextos de enunciación" desde los cuales desarrollaron sus posiciones ético-políticas; la opción por el hombre natural (Martí) frente al sujeto político ideal (Sarmiento); y la apelación y desmontaje de las categorías raciales en ambos autores. (...) El estudio de estas categorías revela una dialéctica de persistencia y abandono de imaginarios coloniales. ABSTRACT This article analyzes the conflicting ideas of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and José Martí about the binomial "civilization-barbarism", a core category of political and intellectual discourses of the 19th century, to explore their conceptions of the new political subject. The "enunciation contexts" from which they developed their ethical-political positions; the option for the "natural man" (Martí) versus the ideal political subject (Sarmiento); and the appeal and dismantling of racial categories in both authors. The study of these categories reveals a dialectic of persistence and abandonment of colonial imaginaries. (shrink)

José Ortega y Gasset not only expressed his views on subjects such as art or mass culture but he was also one of the promoters and founders of a United Europe which he considered a cultural unity. However, his view on the proper functioning of multicultural societies was as skeptical as his attitude towards the possibility of constructing an unified world that could be based on cultural coexistence of the Western World societies.

This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (i.e. the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory (...) that emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

One of the more poignant claims Badiou makes is that the subject develops an understanding of itself as a political subject only by executing decisive political actions or making decisive political interventions. In this article I will argue that in order to have a fuller philosophical conception of political subjectivity, and therefore political agency, one must also hold that, first, political interventions do not necessarily lead to a definition or a further way (...) of referring to and understanding the subject. In fact, political events and interventions may consciously aim at and result in the de-politicizing, de-subjectivating or dehumanizing of the subject. Second, political agency need not result in an event or an intervention in order to be political. In other words, failed or non-interventions may still be considered political. Third, despite Badiou's call for an ethics rooted in truth and fidelity, his political philosophy results in a relativism that can easily lapse into violence and injustice. (shrink)

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. This Collision examines photographs of Santiago Sierra’s “Line” installations, discovering in these works a unique formulation of the tension between the social and formal aspects of contemporary art. Developing the philosophical implications of this formulation, this essay connects divergent trajectories embodied by the work (i.e. trajectories initiated by the material elements of the works, the body and the line) to divergent trajectories in contemporary aesthetic theory (i.e. (...) the trajectory that emphasises the socio-political possibilities of artistic representation versus the trajectory that emphasises a distinction between the formal aspects of art and the political effects of art). Developing the socio-political approach, I draw on recent work by Claire Bishop who, emphasizing the distinction between consensus and antagonism, argues that Sierra’s work enacts a democratic politics more rigorous than that of “relational art.” Developing a specifically aesthetic understanding of Sierra’s installations, I understand the works in relation to the constructivist interrogation of the nature of the line. Drawing in part on the philosophies of Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, I suggest that, whereas a social aesthetic tends to limit art to a didactic function, a geometric aesthetic enables a more rigorously materialist experience of the work without reducing the potential political force of the work. (shrink)

_Disputed Subjects_ analyzes some of the assumptions behind the contemporary attraction to rationalistic notions of justice and knowledge and discusses why modernity cannot be emancipatory. The effects of gender relations in constituting modern political ideas and theories of knowledge are explored, while at the same time the author identifies problematic aspects of discourses such as psychoanalysis, postmodernism and feminist theorizing. Flax pays special attention to recurrent difficulties concerning maternity, sexuality and race within feminist theorizing, and she addresses the inadequacies (...) of postmodernist accounts of subjectivity and gender. She analyzes psychoanalysis as a discursive formation to identify its particular organization of knowledge and power. (shrink)

閉塞した現在の政治を担う主体を構想できるのか。世界秩序が揺れ動き、従来の国民概念・市民概念が変革を迫られる今、新たな理論的地平を切り開く。.

This article examines the notion of vulnerable political subjectivity in Judith Butler’s theory of vulnerability. The paper aims to contribute to critical discussions of Butler’s political theory by offering an account of how the ontological, ethical, and political aspects of vulnerability shape political subjectivity in her work. The first part of the paper analyzes the features of vulnerable political subjects. The second part critically assesses to what extent Butler offers an alternative to the association of (...) vulnerability with a damaged capability to act politically. The third part argues that Butler offers only a partial account of vulnerability as a transformative desire, which is crucial to explaining how and under what conditions vulnerability inspires subjects to engage politically with the conditions that shape their precarity or the precarity of others. (shrink)

Despite, or quite possibly because of, the structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist critiques of subjectivity, master signifiers, and political foundations, contemporary philosophy has been marked by a resurgence in interest in questions of subjectivity and the political. Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are, at least _implicitly_, committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, this collection brings together an international selection of scholars to explore these (...) notions and their connection. Rather than privilege one approach or conception of the subjectivity-political relationship, this volume emphasizes the nature and status of the _and _in the ‘subjectivity’ _and _‘the political’ schema. By thinking from the place _between _subjectivity and the political, it is able to explore this relationship from a multitude of perspectives, directions, and thinkers to show the heterogeneity, openness, and contested nature of it. While the contributions deal with different themes or thinkers, the themes/thinkers are linked historically and/or conceptually, thereby providing coherence to the volume. Thinkers addressed include Arendt, Butler, Levinas, Agamben, Derrida, Kristeva, Adorno, Gramsci, Mill, Hegel, and Heidegger, while the subjectivity-political relation is engaged with through the mediation of the law-political, ethics-politics, theological-political, inside-outside, subject-person, and individual-institution relationships, as well as through concepts such as genius, happiness, abjection, and ugliness. The original essays in this volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, cultural studies, history of ideas, psychology, and sociology. (shrink)