This article offers a Derridean analysis of Barack Obama’s statement that, as president, he would be willing to negotiate with political actors dubbed ‘terrorists’, ‘rogues’, ‘enemies’, or members of the ‘axis of evil’. The article argues that the Derridean concept of the ‘parergonal’ is useful, as is the Derridean distinction between hospitality and tolerance. This is because a parergonal approach to politics, evidenced in a willingness to listen to those that others have ignored, and to include those left out, illustrates (...) hospitality’s commitment to allowing alterity to remain untranslated: the other is accepted as other. Undoubtedly, this deconstructive aspect of Obama’s political outlook proves threatening to traditional Americans, for its hospitality could potentially rewrite America’s hegemonic position in the world arena. (shrink)

Using the example of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and especially the writings of Sayyid Qutb, this article raises questions about discourse ethics as a mode of conflict resolution. It appears that discourse ethics is only relevant when all parties have already agreed to settle disputes deliberatively and already share the notions of rational deliberation and individual autonomy. This raises questions not only about the capability of discourse ethics to incorporate a deep plurality of worldviews, but also about its capability to successfully (...) solve disputes. When confronting situations where the willingness to deliberate is absent, discourse ethics is left standing empty handed. This, I argue, is due to both the conceptual distinction between communicative action and strategic action, as well as the abstracted nature of Habermas's discourse ethics. (shrink)

In contemporary discourses on cosmo-political hospitality, contributions of Derrida, and especially of Levinas, have special significance on account of the vision, scale and relevance of their discussions on the theme, in the context of an increasingly globalizing international scene, and the consequent global encounter with diversity. The article strives to read the Indian hospitality tradition and ethos, articulated in several of India's culturally significant texts, and available in some way as a cultural practice even to this day (propped up by (...) a heritage of tolerance and acceptance of difference, which, however, has not necessarily translated into egalitarian social structures), through the lenses of cosmo-political hospitality, found in the writings of Levinas and Derrida, as openness to the other, irrespective of social labels imposed on her/him. Although homely, ritualistic and hierarchical, Indian hospitality was always universalistic in intent. The article argues that an attempt to recapture the core of the Indian ethos of hospitality, should take into account this universalistic intent, revisited as genuine openness to the other person, in the light of contemporary concerns raised by Levinas and Derrida, and fully awake to India's and the world's transformed context. (shrink)

Inasmuch as Muslim governments all over the world dissociate themselves from despicable acts of terror, few can deny the brutality and violence perpetrated especially by those in authoritative positions like political governments against humanity. Poignant examples are the ongoing massacre of Muslim communities in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan by those government or rebel forces intent on eliminating the other whom they happen to find unworthy of living. This article attempts to map Islamic education’s response to violence and terror often (...) perpetrated against people considered to be in vehement disagreement with another, for instance, Muslim rebel forces assassinating Christians in Syria and destroying ancient monasteries, Muslim jihadist fighters kidnapping and assassinating people in revengeful acts of terror and Muslim government militia quelling resistant forces that oppose the government’s so-called reformist agenda. In arguing against any form of violence, we show how Islamic education cannot and should not be associated with any act of violence. Put differently, we take issue with any act of violence even if minimally applied to disrupt acts of violence. On the contrary, we argue that Islamic education is intimately connected to the practice of public deliberation that engenders a community of becoming that will always undermine violence. We develop our argument in the following way: firstly, we give an account of a maximalist view of Islamic education in relation to the notion of a Muslim community in becoming; secondly, in relation to Agamben’s seminal thoughts on potentiality and becoming, we show that a Muslim community in becoming is averse to violence; finally, we argue as to how forgiveness, risk-taking and civility as instances of deliberation can counteract terror, more specifically on the part of a Muslim community in potentiality and becoming. (shrink)

This article seeks to unravel the theoretical implications of Slavoj Žižek’s plea for a leftist Eurocentrism, focusing specifically on his defence of the ‘No’ vote in the French and Dutch referenda on the European Constitution (29 May and 1 June 2005, respectively). While most liberal commentators have read these results as a blow to the hopes of a United Europe against the overwhelming geopolitical power of the United States, Žižek argues that the French and Dutch ‘No’ votes express a deep-seated (...) desire for a radically changed idea of Europe - a desire disclosing the need to move beyond the very notion of liberal democracy in order to ‘reinvent that which is to be defended’: democracy itself. While exploring the theoretical background to Žižek’s argument on Europe through an in-depth analysis of its psychoanalytic foundations (Lacan), the article also contextualizes it within the Marxist tradition, looking particularly at Lenin’s 1915 pamphlet, ‘On the Slogan for a United States of Europe’. (shrink)

Religie wordt vaak opgevat als een illusionaire macht waarmee onderscheid wordt gemaakt tussen het seculiere en het sacrale en daarmee tussen mensen die wel en mensen die niet uitverkoren zijn. Macht en geweld vallen in een dergelijke opvatting vrijwel samen. Aan de hand van het werk van Pierre Bourdieu laat ik zien dat dit leidt, hetzij tot een positie waarin ieder onderscheidend vermogen tussen wat waar of niet waar is verdwijnt, hetzij tot een positie waarin de criteria zo hoog worden (...) opgeschroefd dat waarheidsvinding nauwelijks mogelijk meer is. Tot slot verdedig ik een positie waarin religie begrepen wordt als een normatieve praktijk, waarin ook aan de uitoefening van macht een eigen plaats toekomt. (shrink)

This paper seeks to contribute to the literature on political judgment by proposing that the faculty of judgment is essential for responsibly coping with the undeniable fact of distant suffering and the controversial duty of humanitarian intervention. To achieve this end, Mahmood Mamdani’s text ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ will be mobilized for a constructive dialogue about which specific conception of political judgment is at stake when we debate a situation like Darfur today. The main claim is (...) that political judgment in times of acute crisis requires the members of the public sphere to strike a precarious balance between two contradictory impulses: the deliberative impulse to enlarge the pool of particular standpoints, and the decisionist impulse to finally bring the conversation to a halt and adopt a normative stance. The theoretical framework for this balanced view of the faculty of judgment will be articulated through a hybridization of Hannah Arendt’s notion of an ‘enlarged mentality’ and Jacques Derrida’s concept of an ‘aporetic decision’. (shrink)

Desde hace unas décadas se ha manifestado un movimiento en la literatura relevante que busca la superación de la tolerancia, especialmente en casos como el de la diversidad sexual y otras diferencias atributivas. La idea subyacente es que la tolerancia es incompatible con el respeto que nos debemos como iguales en una democracia. En este artículo argumentamos que la noción de respeto que motiva tal movimiento es inadecuada políticamente, dados los profundos desacuerdos de nuestras sociedades. En su lugar proponemos una (...) alternativa que denominamos “respeto institucional”, que privilegia las posibilidades efectivas de participación política. (shrink)

This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is seen as, ultimately, unavoidable. In place of prevention, members of the general public speak of immunity as the means of coping with influenza infection. Such talk on corporeal life under microbial (...) threat is informed by self/not-self, network and ‘choice’ immunity, and therefore makes considerable allowance for cosmopolitan traffic with others, microbes, ‘dirt’ and immune-boosting consumer products. The immuno-political orientation of members of the general public, therefore, appears to trend towards a productive cosmopolitanism that contrasts with more orthodox bioscientific and governmental approaches to pandemic influenza. We reflect on the implications of the immuno-cosmopolitanism of everyday life for the advent of global public health emergency and for biopolitical rule in general. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, Jürgen Habermas has been at the forefront of debates involving religion in the public sphere. In the wake of 9/11 he has responded to the problems of terrorism, “radical Islam,” and the so-called Muslim question in Europe, attempting to align these issue with his broader theories of deliberative democracy and postsecularism. Although Habermas aims for an inclusive model of deliberation in the public sphere, I argue that his reliance on macro theories of secularization and modernization (...) reproduce an ideal of secular liberal democracy as the standard by which to think about various “Others,” including Muslims. As a result, I claim that he ends up reproducing a soft variety of the “clash of civilizations” thesis by failing to account for the complexity of Muslim identities. In conclusion, I look at alternative models that are better able to historicize and contextualize “Islam” in the past and present, and point to significant gaps that must be filled if his proposals are to be taken seriously. (shrink)

Albert Camus’s 1947 novel La Peste and 1948 drama L’État de Siège, allegories of totalitarian power using the figure of the plague, remarkably anticipate Foucault’s celebrated genealogical analyses of modern power. Indeed, reading Foucault after Camus highlights a fact little-remarked in Discipline and Punish: namely, that the famous chapter on the ‘Panopticon’ begins by analysing the measures taken in early modern Vincennes following the advent of plague. Part III argues that, although Camus was cited as an inspiration by the nouveaux (...) philosophes, he does not accept the reactionary motif of the total bankruptcy of the modern cultural and political worlds as hopelessly implicated in the totalitarian crimes. Indeed, Part IV highlights how Camus defends modern, descriptive scientific rationality against its totalitarian appropriations, alongside ‘the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention’ – positions which Part V suggests as Camus’s continuing poignancy and relevance in the period after post-structuralism. (shrink)

Institutions worldwide respond to the need to recognise the value of educating children and young people to handle or solve conflicts in communication. But how do they or we know that an event is correctly interpreted as a conflict? How can people analyse the quality of deliberation when handling or solving conflicts in communication in education? I discuss these questions and argue that the notion of conflict cannot be defined only in terms of incompatibility, clash, opposition and/or disagreement; it also (...) has to encompass negativity in the approach to the other. I also argue that the quality of deliberation can be analysed through a deliberative pedagogical approach, which takes into account structural features of deliberation and required dispositions of the participants, and that our knowledge of conflicts emerges holistically and is interpersonal and objective. I begin by giving an account of some institutional responses to conflicts. Then I discuss the notion of conflict and define it, inter alia, in terms of incompatibility, disagreement and negativity. Finally, I discuss ideas for analysing the quality of deliberation in communication when handling or solving conflicts in education. (shrink)

A TrajectoryIn an essay that is now a classic piece in understanding post-modern culture, Jean-François Lyotard wrote, “[e]clecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’ clothes in Hong Kong” (Lyotard 1989: 76). The boundaries have become blurred in both positive and negative senses. Geographical borders have loosened through ever-increasing mobility as cultural exchanges become more accessible (...) and are rapidly flowing through electronic exchanges in the cyberspace arena. Almost a quarter century after Lyotard described the present era as the time of eclecticism, the world has become more global, and the demand for cross-, inter-, and multi-cultural knowledge has become stronger than ever. In this context, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and world-citizenship have become some of the expressions with which the present time is defi. (shrink)

One of the reasons why critical discourse analysis calls itself critical is because its perspectives of discourse and society are derived largely from critical social theory. Transferring these perspectives to educational contexts requires that teachers develop workable pedagogic frameworks and procedures which apply CDA principles and practices to the reading and discussion of texts in the classroom. If these are to be considered ‘critical’, it seems useful that these are also derived from critical social theory. This type of critical theorisation (...) seems to be underdeveloped in a CDA which relies principally on systemic functional linguistics for its procedural attitude to the text. This paper suggests a possible development of this space in which exegetic procedure and discussion are theorised from critical perspectives in the thought of Adorno, Derrida and Habermas, and according to systemic perspectives in the work of Foucault. The paper also presents a framework of analysis for use by teachers and students which is based on these perspectives. (shrink)

This article investigates a significant problem in contemporary critical theory, namely its failure to address effectively the possibility that a campaign of political violence may be a legitimate means of fighting grave injustice. Having offered a working definition of 'political violence', I argue that critical theory should be focused on experiences of in justice rather than on ideals of justice. I then explore the reasons as to why, save for some intriguing remarks on retrospective legitimation, J rgen Habermas has not (...) addressed this issue directly. While Axel Honneth's recognition theory may have greater potential here, the absence of explicit consideration of the matter by him leaves considerable work to do. I introduce five questions in the concluding section that provide a starting point in setting out an appropriately stringent, normative test for claims that support violent action against injustice. (shrink)

The article addresses the implications of Prevent and Channel for epistemic justice. The first section outlines the background of Prevent. It draws upon Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd’s concept of the collective imaginary, alongside Lorraine Code’s concept of epistemologies of mastery, in order to outline some of the images and imaginaries that inform and orient contemporary counter-terrorist preventative initiatives, in particular those affecting education. Of interest here is the way in which vulnerability is conceptualised in Prevent and Channel, in particular (...) the way in which those deemed ‘at risk of radicalisation’ are constituted as vulnerable and requiring intervention. The imaginary underpinning such preventative initiatives is, I argue, a therapeutic/epidemiological one. If attention is paid to the language associated with these interventions, one finds reference to terms such as contagion, immunity, resilience, grooming, virus, susceptibility, therapy, autonomy, vulnerability and risk—a constellation of images/concepts resonant with therapeutic and epidemiological theories and practices. I outline some of the implications of this therapeutic/epidemiological imaginary for epistemic injustice. If people, in this case, students, teachers and parents, feel that their voice will not be given credence, this leads to testimonial injustice. If one group is constituted as a suspect community, this risks hermeneutical injustice for that group—a situation facing Muslims at present. Given the requirements for educators and educational institutions to enact this particular iteration of preventative counter-terrorist legislation, the way in which vulnerability is understood and operationalised has direct bearing upon education and the educational experience of all stakeholders, in particular in relation to the conditions for epistemic justice. (shrink)

How a thinker comes to adopt or change a view may be regarded as either a strictly theoretical or biographical issue. First, looking backward at my completed philosophical-political profile of Habermas, I elucidate how biographical methodology can yield a coherent yet dynamically evolving profile rather than a static portrait. Second, examining Habermas’ thinking after 2000, the year my published biography of him ends, I venture a biographical-philosophical hypothesis that in what appears to be Habermas’ turn after 11 September 2001, or (...) in his decisive self-choice, he is faithful to the basic motives and core intuitions that brought him to critical theory. (shrink)

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must (...) read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God. (shrink)

While the notion of risk remains under-theorised in moral philosophy, risk aversion and moralist self-protection appear as dominant cultural tendencies saturating educational orientation and practice. Philosophy of education has responded to the educational emphasis on risk management by exposing the unavoidable and positive presence of risk in any endeavour to learn and teach. Taking such responses into account, I discuss how the theoretical connection of risk and education could be radicalised through an ethical approach combined with epistemological and existential concerns. (...) My aim is to propose an ethics that is sensitive to the difference between risks taken and risks imposed and to the cultural variations of what counts as danger. Finally, I explain how the educational relevance of such an ethics requires a prior questioning of the western understanding of self and world that has functioned as a subtext of the dominant view of risk. (shrink)

Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between «legal rules», «moral claims» and «democratic principles» which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an «acultural» experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visée of a plausible reinvention of Law’s autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law’s constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a «limit-situation» such as our (...) own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism—namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)—this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as «obstacles» to recognising Law’s demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law’s project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality). (shrink)

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue (...) that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality. (shrink)

In the wake of the Iraq war of 2003, and in response to the European reaction to the war, a number of prominent European intellectuals launched a new debate on Europe's identity, and in particular the extent to which it differed from American identity. The debate was sparked by a newspaper article by Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, which was circulated to several other intellectuals for comment. The Europe-wide debate which ensued — in which several Americans joined — provides a (...) revealing snap-shot of European opinion on the question of Europe's identity. It illustrates in particular the dangers as well as the seductions of seeing that identity mainly in terms of a contrast with America, putatively to the advantage of the Europeans. This article argues that such a contrast fuels an anti-Americanism that is disabling to Europe and conceals many significant — and less selfflattering — aspects of the European inheritance. (shrink)

Generally, regulation is thought of as a constant that carries with it both a formative and conservative power, a power that standardises, demarcates and forms an order, through procedures, rules and precedents. It is dominantly thought that the singularity and formalisation of structures like rules is what enables regulation to achieve its aim of identifying, apprehending, sanctioning and forestalling/pre-empting threats and crime or harm. From this point of view, regulation serves to firmly establish fixed and stable categories of what norms, (...) customs, morals and behaviours are applicable to a particular territory, society or community in a given time. These fixed categories are then transmitted onto individuals by convention, ritual and enforcement through imperatives of law (and technology) that mark certain behaviours as permissible and others as forbidden, off bounds. In this manner, regulation serves a programming (i.e., a calculable or determinable) purpose. It functions as a pro-active management or as a mastery of threats, risks, crimes and harms that affect a society and its security both in the future and in the present. Regulation for instance, will inscribe and codify what it determines to constitute crime or harm such as pornography, incitement of terrorism, extremist speech, racial hatred etc. These determined or calculated/calculable categories will then be enforced and regulated (e.g. through automated filtering) in order to ensure a preservation of public order within society. Drawing mainly from deconstruction, this article situates law and technologies within a wider ecological process of texts, speech and writing i.e., communication. In placing regulation within disseminatory and iterable processes of communication, this article complicates, destabilises and critiques the dominant position of determinability and calculability within the regulatory operations of law. (shrink)

Governments and majoritarian political formations often present police violence as nationalist media spectacles, which marginalize the rights of the accused and normalize the discourse of majoritarian nationalism. In this study, we explore the public discourse of how the State and political actors repeatedly labeled a college-going student Ishrat Jahan, who died in a stage-managed police killing in India in 2004, as a terrorist. We draw from Derrida’s ethics of unconditional hospitality to show that while police violence is aimed at constructing (...) safety for the cultural majority, in reality, it reveals discourses of anxiety and precariousness. The unethicality of police violence lies in the enlargement of recognition in vicariously blaming the person who has been killed for being involved in several terror attacks. We show that police violence is premised on the temporal structure of majoritarian nationalism, the prevalence of gender inequity, and the call to breach the secular framework of law. (shrink)

I argue that the exception must be a legitimate possibility within law as a revolutionary project, in much the same way that civil disobedience is. In this sense, the exception is not outside law if by "law" we mean not positive law as defined by extant legal documents (statutes, legislative committee reports, written judgments, etc.) but law as a living tradition consisting of both abstract norms and a concrete historical understanding of them. So construed, the exception is what can be (...) exemplary - a law unto itself that best interprets and creatively extends (and transcends) the law that already exists, in order to make it inclusive of the other. In the final analysis, immigration law forces us to consider both the concrete individuality and abstract humanity of refugees, asylum seekers and other homeless persons who have been displaced by global economic underdevelopment. When combined with the "statelessness" of desperate classes of immigrants, this fact about immigration law reveals a revolutionary possibility for future development and perfection leading to its own transcendence: from an inhospitable immigration law that is administered exclusively by the nation state to a cosmopolitan law of universal citizenship under the auspices of a global human rights regime. (shrink)

After integrating the main lines of argumentation developed in the special issue, this paper makes a balance of the question on the public role of the university. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the discussion underlying the articles collected in the issue. A distinction is made between “comprehending” the past and present of the university on the one hand and “justifying” the university and its public role on the other hand. In view of this distinction, it is argued that the question (...) concerning the value of a idea of the university and its public role is related to the question of democracy. The question is, however, not only whether we live in a democracy, but whether we may still speak of a “commitment to democracy”. An inquiry into the meaningfulness of a “idea” of the university arises directly from this question. At this point, the viewpoint of Derrida is introduced to discuss the question of the democracy and university of the future. (shrink)

A critical theory of controversy would require the integration ofthe normative study of argumentation with critical studies of practices. Jiirgen Habermas has made a substantial contribution to such a project by embedding argumentation in a theory of communication, while critically engaging academic and public debates. This essay explicates core concepts in Habermas's theory of argumentation, including his distinction between theory and practice, the different validity requirements for argumentation in general, the norms of moral and ethical-political argumentation and of bargaining. Argument (...) predicaments are posited as ways to discover and assess different types of validity claims competing as "the force ofthe better argument". Habermas's criticism of "administrative power" and "communicative power" illustrates a potential yield of critical inquiry into social controversy. (shrink)

If the legitimacy of international humanitarian and human rights law lies, in part at least, in its capacity to confront dehumanising actions in the modern world, we may speak of the limits of this achievement. It is well known that people who commit genocide or crimes against humanity typically dehumanise those against whom their crimes are committed and that the humanitarian and human rights dimensions of international law were developed in response to the radicalisation of this phenomenon. The expanded scope (...) of international criminal justice caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore an idea of humanity in the face of organised attempts to eradicate the very idea of universal humanity. It also caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore the humanity of the perpetrators as well. They were no longer to be treated as beasts liable to the 'punishment' of the victors but to be brought to trial, held accountable for their deeds and converted back into responsible human beings. Today, however, I suggest that we face a double temptation: in confronting those who commit crimes against humanity to represent them as inhuman monsters rather than responsible human beings; in our compassion for victims of crimes against humanity, it is to represent them merely as victims and not as moral and political subjects. In either case, there can arise a reversal of the problem we are trying to address. I do not suggest this tendency is inevitable but where it is present it indicates an insufficiently reflective relation to international law. I address the problem of reversal through a discussion of three authors (Rawls, Habermas and Arendt) and three issues ('pariah peoples', 'criminal states' and 'monstrous perpetrators'). (shrink)

I show how a notion of the political as emerging reality which does not derive from any other logic — as a phenomenon devoid of foundations, of predetermined elements — features in Habermas’s theory of society. There is certainly nothing obvious about such a claim, insofar as the political is conceived, across his entire oeuvre, in relation to the public sphere, which is presented as a social space in which the functions and properties he attributes to language in general are (...) made explicit and catalysed. It appears the public sphere coincides with the constitutive rules of universal pragmatics. More generally, the motif of the public sphere is bound up with topics which all curb the political “mode” — i.e., the validity attributed to political statements (1), the weight given, in myriad ways, to morality in the public sphere (2), and the concern to preserve science and complexity no matter what (3). I examine each one in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, through the limits imposed on them, they enable us to grasp the specificity of the public sphere as political instance and, from this basis, identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the impacts of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy. The conclusion is reached that violence may be being promoted rather than prevented by government attempts to counter ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’. The motivation for this paper is the author's experience of the PREVENT Counter-Terrorism Strategy in a school in east London; and its main recommendation is that counter-extremism strategies can and should be contested. This conclusion, and the explanation for it, is reached by using a critical realist approach to Critical (...) Discourse Analysis, supported by the framework of the semiotic triangle in the context of Bhaskar's transformational model of social activity. This brings in a time dimension that, it is argued, has previously been neglected in critical realist versions of Critical Discourse Analysis. (shrink)

Kant’s 1795 essay on perpetual peace has been lauded as one of his most important and influential political texts as well as one of the most important texts on peace. Kant’s text was largely forgotten until the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous commentaries appearing around the time of its 200 years existence. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s interest in Kant’s text appears to have arisen around the same time, and his analyses of this text continued after the turn of the (...) century. The references to Kant’s essay in Derrida’s texts appear mostly in the context of a discussion of the concept of hospitality. The latter concept is understood by Derrida as including both a demand for absolute hospitality, that is, hospitality without the imposition of any limitations, as well as a demand, in the interests of survival, for such limitations or conditions. A negotiation between these dimensions of hospitality is ultimately required. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s essay, specifically his recasting of the concept of peace as absolute hospitality, as well as to briefly outline its implications for international and cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, became one of the highest grossing films of all time. It also received a lot of critical attention for its direct engagement with black experience and black politics. It speaks to the legacy of slavery and the exploitation of African-Americans and the ongoing post-colonial struggle represented most starkly by the Black Lives Matter Movement. However, the film was also criticised for supposedly leaving that radical black politics behind, even demonising it in its lead antagonist, (...) Killmonger, and instead proposing a liberal, reformist agenda very much in keeping with current forms of sovereign power, bolstered under the current neoliberal regime by the charity of billionaires. To some extent this is understandable, but it is also a very limited reading of what happens in the film and does a disservice to the radical dissent that the character of Killmonger represents. To address this, the paper uses the concept of sovereignty and asks how superheroes can help us unpack this concept. It argues that rather than seeing superheroes as vigilantes, thinking of them as sovereigns helps us unpack the complex knot of law, authority and violence that is key to understanding it. In particular it draws on Agamben’s discussion of sovereignty and the politics of the exception, and how this might be relevant to Fanon’s work on counter-colonial violence to show how the film remains true to radical protest throughout. On the way it also addresses the important cultural politics of the original comic. (shrink)

Despite the growth in research in philosophy of religion over the past several decades, recent years have seen a number of critical studies of this subfield in an effort to redirect the methods and topics of inquiry. This article argues that in addition to problems of religious parochialism described by critics such as Wesley Wildman, the subfield is facing a problem of relevance. In responding to this problem, it suggests that philosophers of religion should do three things: first, be critically (...) self-aware about their aims of inquiry; second, investigate concepts used by other philosophers, scientists, and religious studies scholars to identify and dispel confusion about religions; and third, following the model of applied ethics, work to clarify concepts and advance arguments of contemporary practical urgency. (shrink)

This article focuses on Michel Foucault’s concepts of authorship and power. Jacques Derrida has often been accused of being more of a literary author than a philosopher or political theorist. Richard Rorty complains that Derrida’s views on politics are not pragmatic enough; he sees Derrida’s later work, including his political work, more as a “private self-fashioning” than concrete political thinking aimed at devising short-term solutions to problems here and now. Employing Foucault’s work around authorship and the origins of power, I (...) show that Derrida is indeed fashioning himself. This self-fashioning is not merely private or fanciful. Rather, I argue that Derrida can be read as employing what Foucault would call “technologies of the self” to not only show the play of possibility and impossibility at work in all politics and thought, but also to use his savoir to create two important and potentially constructive power structures. First, there is the power of deconstruction itself as a “militant critique” that calls for a forceful and irreducible justice. Second, there is the power of Derrida himself, understood as leaving behind a legacy of himself as the “originator” of deconstruction and as a public intellectual. (shrink)

This article compares notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect (...) the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what extent they have an impact on both the practice of the humanities and on their self-representation. Is humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as posthuman theory? (shrink)

This paper rethinks the fostering task of the teacher in a time when it, paradoxically, has tended to become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. Following post-holocaust thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman, the position explored here is radical in the sense that it takes ‘the crisis of traditions’ and the erosion of a common moral ground or value basis seriously, and it is conservative in the sense that it insists on responding educationally to the call from (...) the past by returning to the moral character of our existence and our own embeddedness in the incompleteness of living traditions. The argument is that there is a difference between educating for common values—which entails a belief in pre-existing commonalities—and making values common in and through education. The latter, we argue, entails an aspiration for continuously creating new commonalities and for cultivating the ability to act and judge as a thinking moral agent in specific, lived and worldly cases. In this sense, the fostering task of the teacher is to create commonality of what is not common, turning the liberal democratic values of the past into contested objects of study. (shrink)

Amy Allen presents Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as a productive movement between a commitment to the project of reason and a sensitivity to the effects on reason of power and domination. Agreeing with the thrust of her paper, my response considers two questions that Allen’s paper opens up. The first asks how individuals might seek emancipation through reason, knowing that their reason cannot transcend contexts of power. The second asks how best to practise critical theory, given that its (...) analyses and categories cannot rid themselves of contexts of domination. To the first, I answer that Allen’s account of creative individual effort needs to be supplemented by the cultivation of an accommodating and welcoming culture, marked by the sorts of civic attitudes that Derrida and Habermas bring to their maturing relationship. Regarding the second, I extend Allen’s hopes for a post-Habermasian phase of critical theory, indicating four resources in contemporary French philosophy for its further development. (shrink)

The article seeks to advance the debate on Islam and secularism, not by thinking of secularism in terms of whether there is or should be state neutrality toward religion, but rather by proposing that we think in terms of a state neutrality that is anchored in pluralism to-come. The latter is not a future pluralism that will one day arrive but is rather characterized by a structural promise of openness to futurity which thus exposes us to absolute surprise simultaneously of (...) the best and the worst in plurality, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other. The analysis is developed via a critical examination of the presuppositions of Abdullahi A. An-Na‘im’s book, Islam and the Secular State, supplemented with key ideas from Jacques Derrida’s political philosophy. I specifically propose to shift the debate on the question of Islam and state neutrality in two ways. First, I propose that instead of thinking in terms of secularism and its mechanism – civic reason – for sustaining pluralism in heterogeneous societies, we think in terms of a secularity and a civic reason, both of which presuppose a pluralism to-come. Second, I propose that we think not simply in terms of actual pluralism but rather in terms of an autoimmune pluralism. (shrink)

The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main argument will (...) state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long-term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of theories of performativity in order to analyse Max Weber’s sovereignty–legitimacy paradigm. First, I highlight an essential articulation between legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty, as the autopositioned power-to-be-oneself). Second, I identify a more originary force of legitimation, which remains foreign to the order of performative ipseity because it is the condition for both its position and its deconstruction. This suggests an essential fallibility of the (...) performative, which implies a ‘mystical’ legitimacy and a paradoxical, divisible and self-differential representation of sovereignty. The structural differentiality of legitimacy and sovereignty signifies an irreducible coloniality of law and language, but also suggests the possibility of an unconditional resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond determined representations of powers, dominations, sovereignties or resistances. This reflection is triggered by a reading of Cynthia Weber’s theory of ‘performative states’, describing sovereignty under the form of an impossible ontology, which leads me to elaborate the notion of legitimation-to-come as a non-ontological ‘concept’: this notion of unconditional legitimacy, beyond sovereignty, binds beliefs and phantasms to the unpresentable force of the event. Pursuing the efforts of scholars such as Rob Walker and Cynthia Weber, I sketch the implications of this archi-performative legitimacy regarding the methodological protocols of International Relations and sociology, in view of elucidating the persistent ontological presuppositions of these disciplines. (shrink)

This study is an intervention in postcolonial theorising through a critique of technologies of representation. It examines the effects of technologically-mediated representation in a postcolonial condition that the Philippines has exemplified. New media technologies are mechanisms of representations that embody the logic of spectrality presented in Jacques Derrida’s later work. Spectrality, which brings doubts, ephemerality, and instability to dominant discourses and modes of representation, provides a chance for change.Spectres are effects of technologically-mediated representation that articulate the infinite demand for justice (...) under conditions of enduring inequality. As quasi-transcendental elements of deconstruction, spectres are not reducible to either human or technical intervention; they express the relation of humans to technologies, in which representation is central to the mediation of political authority. This technological representation is the condition of what Derrida calls “iteration,” or the transformation of hegemonic authority through the very repetition of its fundamental terms of identification. The examination of emancipatory new media technologies in a postcolonial condition is inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres. However, the writings of Habermas and Adorno have offered an implicit appraisal of the ontology of spectres. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Adorno’s negative dialectics are discourses that unwittingly solicit spectres. The account of the postcolonial condition in the Philippines works through the questions of universality, subalternity, and the right to theory that are raised by the project of Western critical theory. (shrink)

This thesis examines the desire and efforts to ‘do something’ about what is variously called ‘modern slavery’ or ‘human trafficking’. Neoabolitionist efforts to fight such phenomena are typically wedded to a simplistic and essentialist ontology, unaware of or rejecting their own performativity. The thesis is not about slavery: it is about the ethico-political problem of responsibility and hospitality toward the other in the context of contemporary anti-slavery. What constitutes an ethical response to modern slavery? I explore the often violent effects (...) of particular answers to this question but ultimately argue that the focus on doing something threatens the very possibility of hospitality – of an ethical response. Through a conceptual vocabulary of ‘scenes’ I explore the performative interrelation of ontology and ethics. It is intended to help resist the metaphysical seductions of ontology and moral urgency. Scenes bundle specific ontologies, frames, conjured histories and futures, roles and narrative structures, distributions of concern, desire and enjoyment. Response begins with the discursive and affective co-constitution of the self, the one to whom we respond, and the scene in which it takes place. Scene-specific forms of responsibility can operate as a defence against the full force of responsibility to the other. Chapters 1 and 2 develop the notion of scenes and explore how neoabolitionism sets its scenes and locates favoured solutions. The remaining chapters explore those solution areas. Chapter 3 looks at how a US movement against ‘sex trafficking’ in internet advertising reproduces a Manichean world of simplicity by a game of Whac-A-Mole™ with websites, ritualistic repetition of baseless ‘facts’, silencing of sex workers, and aggressive demonization of those who disagree or argue for greater complexity; Chapters 4 and 5 draw on time I spent in San Francisco with two very different organisations. One, Not For Sale, makes a product of experiencing neoabolitionism, joining together charity, capitalism, consumer enjoyment, technology and the excitement of a movement of ‘true believers’, producing innovative approaches but in the process reinforcing problematic gendered and colonial stereotypes. The other, Anti-trafficking Collaborative of the Bay Area, works quietly and tactically in a messy immigration system, aware of the political and performative nature of their work. They actively take responsibility for their own preconceptions and desires to ground a profoundly hospitable client-centred approach avoiding many pitfalls identified in earlier chapters. The thesis has a performative element woven through it – the ethos of the work is one of unsettling both existing practices and literatures, and the writer and reader. The concluding chapter explores the impossibility of hospitality, its interrelation with juridical subjectivity and the ethics demanding and giving accounts in light of the preceding chapters, suggesting a performative approach toward the other is possible. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge claims "that, by shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause the monumental suffering of global poverty, we are harming the global poor ... or, to put it more descriptively, we are active participants in the largest, though not the gravest, crime against humanity ever committed." In other words, he claims that by upholding certain international arrangements we are violating our strong negative duties not to harm, and not just some positive duties to help. I (...) shall argue that even if Pogge were correct in claiming that certain rich states or at least the rich states collectively violate certain negative duties towards the poor and harm the poor, he is far too hasty in concluding that "we," the citizens of those states, are thus harming the global poor or violating our negative duties towards them. In fact, his conclusion can be shown to be wrong not least of all in the light of some of his own assumptions about collective responsibility, the enforceability of human rights, and terrorism. In addition, I will also argue that his view that we share responsibility for the acts of our political "representatives," who allegedly act "on our behalf," is unwarranted. (shrink)

This paper offers a deep futures analysis of "race" and the many racisms that compete to colonize the future. Using poststructuralism it challenges the frames that shape our thinking on race and the "Other". Cultural narrative and boundary drawing are explored as sources of racist frames. Three distinct possible scenarios along with their defining myths and metaphors are also examined. The hidden economy of racism is also addressed as it underpins economic affluence and cultural hegemony. Finally, questions of integrity and (...) identity are considered from the transformative logic of neohumanism. (shrink)