Activism is defined in this paper as involving local instigations of new series of elements intersecting the actual, generating new collective enunciations, experimentations and investigations, which erode good and common sense and cause structures to swing away from their sedimented identities. By appealing to Spinozism, the paper describes the microphysics of the activist encounter with stable structures and the ways in which activism imposes new regimes of succession of ideas and affective variations in the power of action. Rather than understanding (...) activism as supporting or leading social struggles, the definition of activism pursued here conceives it as an open-ended process and stresses the role of investigation in relation to practices within the social situations to which activism addresses itself. (shrink)

This paper examines the relation or, more precisely, tension between postmodern deconstruction and ethics by elaborating upon the ethico-political dimensions of deconstructionism. It embarks on a critical assessment of postmodern discourse on ethics in view of its political implications by analyzing Jacques Derrida''s and Richard Rorty''s arguments with an assumption that their positions represent a certain logic in the postmodern discourse on ethics. Postmodern ethics is based on incredulity with regard to traditional metanarratives, and it defines ethics in terms of (...) sensitivity or responsibility to otherness and difference. Its proponents believe that the negation of modern metanarratives opens a way to the Other which has been marginalized and suppressed both in thought and in social practice. Derrida and Rorty represent this position with their emphasis on the ethical nature of deconstruction and the need to elaborate new languages for ethics. Despite postmodern appeal to ethics of this sort, however, postmodern thinking shows its limits in dealing with most ethical-political matters in the contemporary world. The postmodern approach to ethics, being restricted within the perspective of the individual, does not provide any determinate framework for deciding how to adjudicate conflicting ethical claims or how to link the unconditional affirmation of emancipatory ideals, enlightened social criticism, and democratic accountability in determinate political terms. In the main, this paper contends that philosophical deconstruction and responsibility to otherness undermine each other in the public sphere. (shrink)

This article focuses on the politics of memory and forgetting after Auschwitz and apartheid. In the first two sections Habermas' critical contribution to the German Historikerstreit is discussed. Important in this regard is the moral dimension of our relation to the past. In the next two sections the emphasis shifts to South Africa and more specifically the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The article ends with a general discussion of the dilemma of historical 'truth' and representation in (...) contemporary societies. Key Words: apartheid • Habermas • Historikerstreit • history • South Africa. (shrink)

This essay explores Jacques Derrida’s nonteleological conception of postracism, which he elucidated in his unpublished response to Ètienne Balibar’s keynote address at the tRACEs conference held at...

Derrida's early reluctance to spell out political implications of deconstruction gave way during the course of the 1980s to a series of analyses of political concepts and issues. This article identifies the principal intellectual strategies of Derrida's political engagements and provides a detailed account of his concept of ‘democracy to come’. Finally, it suggests several points of contact between Derrida and recent liberal political philosophy, as well as some areas in which deconstructive analyses require further refinement if fruitful exchange is (...) to occur. (shrink)

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over (...) constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Genocide is a political catastrophe. Yet it has not received much academic attention. A few social scientists have studied it. Philosophers have largely ignored it. There is a large literature on the Holocaust, but there is little agreement as to how this should be related to other genocides. Some have argued that the Holocaust represented a crisis of Western culture, but that Western culture has not responded adequately for the lack of the appropriate self‐understanding. This crisis has been attributed (...) to the predominance of scientistic models of rationality in our culture. Social‐scientific approaches to genocide have been criticised because of their commitment to logical empiricism, which is held to be epistemologically and ethically inadequate. Ethical approaches based on liberal humanism have been criticised by post‐Nietzschean philosophers for their attachment to allegedly outworn metaphysical assumptions. However, the deconstruction of social science and liberal ethics leads in the direction of relativism and nihilism, which are either useless or dangerous in the face of evils such as genocide. The arguments against conventional social science and ethics are examined, and a counter‐critique made of post‐modern philosophy in order to clear the ground for constructive thinking about genocide. (shrink)

The Right has a long history of questioning the importance of race analysis. Recently, the conceptual and political status of race has come under increased scrutiny from the Left. Bracketing the language of ‘race’ has meant that the discourse of skin groups remains at the level of abstraction and does not speak to real groups as such. As a descriptor, race essentializes identity as if skin color were a reliable way to perceive one's self and group as well as others, (...) and questions the viability of a social struggle based on race. In other words, race is not real and discourses that insist on its objective status are ensnared in reification. The response—equally from the Left—has been to reassert the centrality and changing dynamics of race in education and society. They argue that we need to develop more, rather than less, complex discourses on race. Orientations that attempt to discredit race analysis are therefore unable to dismantle the racial system because they refuse its significance as an autonomous system of interpellations. In other words, race is real. This essay appraises the debate within the Left about the status of race, their projections about the future of race, and the kind of struggle they promote in order to realize a society freed from the chains of racism. (shrink)

Revolutions often retain more characteristics of the pre-revolutionary state than their makers like to admit. Characterizing the pre-revolutionary state as bad , and wishing to accentuate the greatness of their doings, revolutionaries like to stress the differences between the previous state of affairs and the new one, and prefer to see the similarities as few and insignificant. They are frequently wrong. 1.

Two major developments of the last two decades have radically undermined traditional justifications of leftist politics: the failure of 20th-century `socialist' experiments, and what might be termed the deessentializing movement in contemporary philosophy. However, the social injustices that animated revolutionary thinkers in many respects remain, and some have arguably worsened in the era of globalized capitalism. This article investigates whether it is possible to articulate a new theoretical underpinning for progressive politics that nevertheless avoids the essentialist moves of Marxism. Ethico-political (...) readings of Derrida — one of the most influential anti-essentialist thinkers — are compared to Ernesto Laclau's attempts at formulating a post-Marxist progressive politics built around the notions of `hegemony' and `radical democracy'. Laclau's intervention in the Marxist tradition is to deconstruct its traditional categories so as to take account of contingency; his intervention in deconstruction is to introduce what in this article is described as `contestation', so as to provide a more coherent account of the political. The article concludes that neither deconstruction nor radical democracy provides an adequate basis for poltical action, but that the latter's account of the political is a meaningful development of the theoretical schema articulated by the former and does point to the possibility of a non-essentialist progressive politics. Key Words: aporia • contestation • contingency • deconstruction • Jacques Derrida • hegemony • justice • Ernesto Laclau • Emmanuel Levinas • responsibility. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

Both in his earliest debates with thinkers such as Foucault and Levinas, and in later critiques of political immediacy, Derrida invoked the inescapable burden of a necessary but impossible universalism. By raising the stakes so high it would seem that deconstruction generates hyperbolic conceptions of ethics and justice, but also precludes any form of day to day political positivity. In this essay I pursue the seemingly less ‘ethical’ conception of play in Derrida's work to argue for a multiple universalism.

This article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

This paper explores the incongruence between white South Africans’ pre- and post-apartheid experiences of home and identity, of which a wave of emigration is arguably a result. Among the commonest reasons given for emigrating are crime and affirmative action; however, this paper uncovers a deeper motivation for emigration using Charles Taylor’s concept of the social imaginary and Martin Heidegger’s concept of dwelling. The skewed social imaginary maintained by apartheid created an unrealistic sense of dwelling for most white South Africans. After (...) 1994, the conditions supporting this imaginary disintegrated. Many white South Africans feel so strong a sense of unease they can no longer dwell in the country. Many try to escape through emigration, but carry unresolved questions of identity and belonging to their new “homes.”. (shrink)