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)

Jacques Derrida is known for his attempt at including the perspective of woman in his philosophical work. His efforts received the acclaim of women philosophers, despite the fact that his philosophy remains marked by the omission of any mention to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. The topic of this paper shall not be woman, as in Derrida’s 1972 conference Spurs, but phallogocentrism. That is, the economy, dynamic and limits of this concept as a critique of history, or rather, as (...) the history of the lie, the term by which Derrida seems to conceive of the possibility of any history whatsoever. We agree that phallogocentrism in Derrida’s hands enabled anti-philosophical forays by which to include woman as singularity in the male-dominated French philosophy of the 1970s. However, we also argue that the specter of man was maintained untouched throughout Derrida’s work, thereby suggestion that deconstruction overlooked what may very well be the primary prohibition in Western thought. (shrink)