Nobel-price winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced in 2000 the concept of the Anthropocene as the name for the successor geological period to the Holocene. The Holocene started about 12,000 years ago and is characterized by the relatively stable and temperate climatic and environmental conditions that were conducive to the development of human societies. Until recently, human development had relatively little impact on the dynamics of geological time. Although disagreement exists over the exact birth date of the Anthropocene, it is (...) indisputable that the impact of human activity on the geo-climatic environment became more pronounced from the industrial revolution onwards, leading to a situation in which humans are now widely considered to have an eco-geologically critical impact on the earth's bio-physical system. The most obvious example is the accumulation of greenhouse gases like CO2and Methane (CH4) in the atmosphere and the changes this induces in climatic dynamics. Others are the growing homogenization of biodiversity as a result of human-induced species migration, mass extinction and bio-diversity loss, the manufacturing of new (sub-)species through genetic modification, or the geodetic consequences resulting from, for example, large dam construction, mining and changing sea-levels. (shrink)

This article interrogates the relationship between two apparently disjointed themes: the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other. The argument advanced in this article attempts to tease out this apparently paradoxical condition. On the one hand, the climate is seemingly politicized as never before and has been propelled high on the (...) policy agenda. On the other hand, a number of increasingly influential political philosophers insist on how the post-politicization of the public sphere have been key markers of the political process over the past few decades. We proceed in four steps. First, we briefly outline the basic contours of the argument and its premises. Second, we explore the ways in which the present climate conundrum is predominantly staged through the mobilization of particular apocalyptic imaginaries. Third, we argue that this specific presentation of climate change and its associated policies is sustained by decidedly populist gestures. Finally, we discuss how this particular choreographing of climate change is one of the arenas through which a post-political frame and post-democratic political configuration have been mediated. (shrink)

An exploration of the post-politics of global capitalism in theory and practice Our age is celebrated as the triumph of liberal democracy. Old ideological battles have been decisively resolved in favour of freedom and the market. We are told that we have moved 'beyond left and right'; that we are 'all in this together'. Any remaining differences are to be addressed through expert knowledge, consensual deliberation and participatory governance. Yet the 'end of history' has also been marked by widespread disillusion (...) with mainstream politics and a rise in nationalist and religious fundamentalisms. And now an explosion of popular protests is challenging technocratic regulation and the power of markets in the name of democracy itself. This collection makes sense of this situation by critically engaging with the influential theory of 'the post-political' developed by Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Ranciere, Slavoj Zizek and others. Through a multi-dimensional and fiercely contested assessment of contemporary depoliticisation, The Post-Political and Its Discontents urges us to confront the closure of our political horizons and re-imagine the possibility of emancipatory change. ". (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

This paper argues that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a deeply depoliticizing notion. This de-politicization unfolds through the creation of a set of narratives, what we refer to as ‘AnthropoScenes’, which broadly share the effect of off-staging certain voices and forms of acting. Our notion of the Anthropo-obScene is our tactic to both attest to and undermine the depoliticizing stories of ‘the Anthropocene’. We first examine how various AnthropoScenes, while internally fractured and heterogeneous, ranging from geo-engineering and earth system science to more-than-human (...) and object-oriented ontologies, place things and beings, human and non-human, within a particular relational straitjacket that does not allow for a remainder or constitutive outside. This risks deepening an immunological biopolitical fantasy that promises adaptive and resilient terraforming, an earth system management of sorts that permits life as we know it to continue for some, while turning into a necropolitics for others. Second, we develop a post-foundational political perspective in relation to our dramatically changing socio-ecological situation. This perspective understands the political in terms of performance and, in an Arendtian manner, re-opens the political as forms of public-acting in common that subtracts from or exceeds what is gestured to hold socio-ecological constellations together. We conclude that what is off-staged and rendered obscene in ‘the AnthropoScenes’ carries precisely the possibility of a return of the political. (shrink)

The main trust of this article unfolds around the impasse of democratic politics today, marked by the fading belief in the presumably superior architecture of liberal democratic institutions to nurture emancipation on the one hand, and the seemingly inexorable rise of a variety of populist political movements on the other. The first part of the article focuses on the lure of autocratic populism. The second part considers how transforming neoliberal governance arrangements pioneered post-truth autocratic politics/policies in articulation with the imposition (...) of market rule and, in doing so, cleared the way for contemporary illiberal populisms. The third part considers the institutional configuration through which the democratic has been fundamentally transformed over the past few decades in the direction of a post-democratic constellation. The article concludes by arguing for the need to re-script emancipation as a process of political subjectivation unfolding trough a political act. (shrink)

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

The exit-poll survey of May 21, 1995, the day of the national election, contained after the question of the actual voting behaviour for the Chamber, an open-ended question asking the motives of this voting behaviour. 3547 voters were questioned in the Flemish part of Belgium. Because the exit-poll questioning was done on election day, the voters could not be influenced by the election results and the explanations given by experts in the media. Categorisation of the answers was done by content (...) analysis. The categorisation scheme was developed on the basis of the existing theories of voting behaviour. On this basis an overview is given of the cognitive and affective spontaneous motives the voters are given for their voting behaviour. The inter rater reliability is very high. With a HlCLASS analysis a motive profile for every party is developed. The results indicate that party identification in a broad sense is still one of the most important explanations ofvoting behaviour. But they also make clear that the stability in voting behaviour is very unsure for an important group ofvoters. The two sources of instability are short term ad hoc motives and a-politic or anti-politie motives among a still growing group of voters. (shrink)

This article exposes comparable social mechanisms that have generated the social construction of threatening immigrants in Europe in the thirties and in the eighties. The analysis is building on Bourdieu 's theory of the construction of social space and the genesis of social groups. This semiotic-praxiological approach is used to explain why the specific historical and socio-economical conditions in the thirties and eighties have lead to the construction of Jews and Muslims as threatening immigrants. Our discussion focuses on the exemplary (...) caseof the 'migrant problem' in historical and actual political discourse in Flanders. Where at the end of the thirties the notion 'immigrant' referred exclusively to Jews, in the eighties it is used for Turkish and Maroccan 'guestworkers'. In spite of the specific historical and social situation of Jewish and Muslim immigrants parallel social mechanisms and discourses emerge in the redrawing of the social space by creating 'theatening' immigrants/strangers. These mechanisms are a religious anti Judaism/anti-Islamism, rapid social economie change fueling an economical argumented antiJew/anti-muslim and racism legitimized by an internationally disseminated ethno-nationalism. (shrink)

Taking into account the limits of such data, this study analyses the shifts in voting behaviour from the national elections in 1985 to those in 1987 in Flanders, using log-linear modelling. The use of data from poll surveys for estimating shifts between subsequent elections poses some methodological problems.The second part presents the results of the analysis. About 13,51 % of -the 1985-voters switched. Although there are significant shifts between all the political parties, the Christian Democratic Party loses on all fronts. (...) A log-linear analysis of party-reference by sex, age and occupational status shows the strength and weakness of each party in different societal categories. In conclusion, an interpretation of the shifts is proposed. The following factors can account for the major shifts : the desintegration of the catholic pillar, the emergence of a dual society, the affinity between neo-liberalism and yuppie-culture and the conflict between the language communities. (shrink)

This article is based on a quantitative evaluation of the shifts in voting behaviour of the Flemish population, from the national elections in 1981 to those in 1985. Using the variables sex, age and occupational status a further analysis is made of the voting behaviour of the different subgroups.Firstly the article describes the methodology by which the mobility tables were calculated using statistica! information from poll surveys and the results of the elections. In the second part the results of the (...) analysis, using log-linear modelling, correspondence analysis and cluster analysis,are presented.The results indicate significant shifts between the different parties. Furthermore they indicate that the sex of the voter has no significant influence on his voting behaviour. Finally, the odds ratios are calculated for the different subgroups with regard to the likehood of a voter moving or staying. (shrink)

Studies about the Flemish voter's perceptions and attitudes revealed that the ecologist party "Agalev" and the radical right-wingparty "Vlaams Blok" were each other's antipodes. These two parties were perceived by the voters as extreme poles on dimensions that were mainly formed by the parties' viewpoint about the rights of immigrants, about Flemish political autonomy, and about materialistic versus postmaterialistic policy alternatives. According to the voters' attitudes, the two electorates were polarized by their attitudes towards immigrants, materialism, economic conservatism, and Flemish (...) nationalism. The electorates of these two 'extreme' parties were very similar in age composition, urban/rural environment, and church involvement. The voters of the ecologist party were more likely to have finished higher education and to have a high occupational status. Blue collar workers with little educational formation were over-represented among the electorate of the right-wing party.Using the data collected among 2,691 Flemisch voters after the 1991 General Elections, this study analyses relevant attitudes and socio-demographic characteristics within one global logistic-regression model. The focus is on the Vlaams Blok versus Agalev with the other electorates as reference category. Controlled for social characteristics, four attitudinal variables still show significant net effects on the likelihood of votingfor Agalev or for the Vlaams Blok and not for the other parties: the attitude towards immigrants, Belgian/Flemish nationalism, materialism, and readiness to make efforts for the preservation of the physical environment. This findings support Swyngedouw's thesis about the emergence of two new cleavages: the so called universalistic/particularistic and postmaterialistic/materialistic cleavages that are capable tocatch about 20% of the Belgian-Flemish voters in the early 90s. (shrink)

In 1995, the Flemish Government commissioned a two wave panel study on the citizens knowledge about the Flemish institutions, structures, and policy, and on the effect of an intensive information campaign held between the first and the second wave. 710 respondents co-operated in thefirst wave. In 1996 the study was repeated, following a simulated test-re-test design with 532 panel respondents and 455 new respondents. This study is based on the 987 respondents in the 1996 survey. After a discussion of the (...) theoretical models for political knowledge, a model with eight latent variables and with a number of social-background variables is introduced and tested, using a structural modeling approach. The model has a strong predictive power for political knowledge. The most important explanatory variables are education, and reading political news in newspapers. Other explanatory factors for the variation in political knowledge are generation, and membership of voluntary associations, gender, individualism, and reading local news. The 'consumption' of local news or sensational news about crimes or calamities has a negative effect on political knowledge.The lack of political knowledge clearly affects both trust in polities and the experience of a complex incomprehensible society. The less the knowledge the more distrust and feelings of uncertainty. These relationships clearly show the importance ofknowledge about politics for the quality of democracy. (shrink)

The General Elections of November 24 1991 will secure a place in Belgian political history. On this 'Black Sunday' one third of the electorate changed party. The traditional parties were heavy losers and the swing was wholly to the advantage of 'Vlaams Blok' and 'Rossem'. Since the election a never ending stream of explanations has appeared. Immediately after the elections the Interuniversity Center of Political Opinion research, located at the Catholic University of Leuven, began a national survey of political attitudes (...) and beliefs among 2,691 Flemish voters. This article explores the reasons for voting for the winning parties. Is it appropriated to speak of protest, disappointment and apathy?The authors expect stable, traditional voting behaviour to continue to decrease in future as a result of loosening ties with the "pillars", the decline of church involvement and the process of individualisation. The article ends with some critical comments on the role of the media as a producer of explanations andlegitimations. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...

This volume provides a philosophical introduction to and analysis of the study of metaphor. By proceeding from the concrete analysis of complex metaphors, White is able to identify a range of features which are incompatible with standard accounts of the way words function in metaphor.

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)