This paper contends that Ananda Abeysekara’s notion of un-inheritance, developed via a Derridean analysis of contemporary Sri Lankan politics and society, can act as a helpful supplement to the concept of justice. What one finds in Abeysekara’s analysis is an interpretation of justice as ultimately aporetic: justice both opens up to the possibility of its ever greater concrete realization and continually defers its completion. This paper begins by examining the aporetic character of justice as articulated by Derrida. It then proceeds (...) to Abeysekara’s account, situated as it is within a largely political consideration of Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage and the recent conflicts that have arisen there. Abeysekara offers the notion of un-heritance as a way of thinking the possibility of justice precisely when political—and also religious—traditions come to an impasse, thus recognizing the inescapably aporetic structure of justice itself. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with three overlapping expressions of the increasingly postsecular cast of social and cultural theory. These currents — guided, respectively, by genealogical critique, neo-vitalist social philosophy and postcolonial anti-historicism — seek to problematize the frame of previous radical theorizing by exposing definite connections between the epistemological and political levels of secular understanding, and by assuming that the nature of those linkages counts heavily against secularism. As well as offering an interpretive overview of these contributions, I suggest (...) that they are traversed by a number of conceptual flaws and inconsistencies. The tensions, I argue, stem from the fact that in spite of appearing to be driven by a strong anti-secular thrust, these positionings remain thoroughly intra-secular in character. This needs to be more emphatically acknowledged if the ‘postsecular turn’ is to be productive. (shrink)

Naturalist philosopher Robert Corrington begins his chapter in Frontiers in American Philosophy, volume 1, by asserting that "the current obsession with language and with written texts has blunted the generic drive of hermeneutics and its more legitimate quest for a categorical structure that is truly responsive to the various dimensions of meaning manifest in the ongoing human process. . . . The deeper emancipatory forces of nature and history remain bereft of a proper location for their appearance in nondestructive social (...) orders."1 This critique is presumably directed at poststructuralist theories in which language and text are all there is, the world is made up of a play of signs, and reliance on ontology or .. (shrink)

There is a wide spectrum in reading Michael Ondaatje’s novel Anil’s Ghost, ranging from thinkers who explore literary, historical, to ethico-ontological and political aspects. I confine the study by strictly retrieving the subjectivity of the human rights victim as not rested in its being a subject and victim, hence as a specter that haunts or ‘retaliates’ into exposing its victimization. This article attempts to read the spectral nature of this victim using Derrida and Žižek. The Derridean reading grounds the central (...) spectrality on his hauntology and what it says about the victim’s ghostly character. Later, I expound on the act of haunting from a Žižekean standpoint by hinging on the notion of ‘drive’ that exposes the nature of victimization as depoliticizing the subject. (shrink)