Over the past few years postmodernism has been gaining popularity. Because the works of writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari, for example, are now readily available to the English reader, a novel intellectual force is present that must be assessed (Hassan, 1985). Terms such as “mise en abîme”, “libido”, “schizo-analysis”, “undecidables”, and so forth must be explained and their relevance for social analysis deciphered. Furthermore, a conception of knowledge, a research methodology, and (...) an image of social order that are consistent with these somewhat odd ideas have been introduced, and thus must be evaluated with respect to their sociological importance. At first, due to the strange language that is adopted and the nature of the philosophy offered, postmodernism appears to the uninitiated as an attempt to subvert rational discussion. (shrink)

Scholars have long posited justice as a core value of public relations. However, that value has been criticized as being improbably idealistic. Philosopher David Hume locates the origins of justice within the need for property and the reliable exchange of resources. Hume thus embeds the origins of justice within a staple of public relations theory: resource dependency theory. Additionally, Hume believes a respect for justice to be the foundation of a positive reputation. This grounding of the quest for justice in (...) resource dependency and reputation helps establish a realistic basis for accepting justice as a core value of public relations. (shrink)

Debates between Habermas and the poststructuralists - specifically, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard - over the nature of critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity are investigated in order to argue for an agenda for critical theory beyond the 'French Fries and the Frankfurter'.1 Part I interrogates key elements of Habermas' theory of communicative rationality in his reconstruction of Enlightenment modernity and his critique of the poststructuralists. This orients the discussion toward an evaluation of Habermas' neo-Kantianism, theory of language (discourse ethics), and (...) the 'critique' he employs in his bid to defend and complete the project of modernity. Key Words: critical theory • Derrida • Enlightenment modernity • Foucault • Habermas • Lyotard • Marx • postmodernism debates. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related (...) to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related to the (...) modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This essay examines critically two related claims: first, that postmodernism and philosophy of science depend on each other in a manner similar to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, that is, they respond and dispute each other's claims; and second, that what underlies and emanates from both postmodernism and philosophy of science is a political perspective and commitment. These claims suggest not only the possibility of translating from one area to the other when they are critically engaged with each other but also (...) the potential for using both areas simultaneously to transform and possibly improve the human condition. By emphasizing the similarities between science/philosophy of science and postmodernism the essay explores the ways in which these two enterprises or groups of people can learn from one another and benefit from each other's insight. (shrink)

This essay examines critically two related claims: first, that postmodernism and philosophy of science depend on each other in a manner similar to the Enlightenment and Romanticism, that is, they respond and dispute each other's claims; and second, that what underlies and emanates from both postmodernism and philosophy of science is a political perspective and commitment. These claims suggest not only the possibility of translating from one area to the other when they are critically engaged with each other but also (...) the potential for using both areas simultaneously to transform and possibly improve the human condition. By emphasizing the similarities between science/philosophy of science and postmodernism the essay explores the ways in which these two enterprises or groups of people can learn from one another and benefit from each other's insight. (shrink)

Carl Schmitt's critique of liberal pluralism (of individuals and associations) was conducted in the name of a different pluralism, a truer pluralism, according to him, namely, the pluralism of equal and sovereign nation-states. His friend/enemy distinction dictates that conflict is the only legitimate model for politics, at least on the international level. By translating Schmitt's theory of politics as conflict into terms derived from the work of Lyotard and Luhmann, this article asks whether Schmitt's concept of the political has any (...) relevance for the contemporary world, especially considering that the liberal pluralism of associations (or social systems) seems to have carried the day. Such a transposition requires that the modern, horizontal structure of operationally closed (but internally bifurcated) social systems be thought of as sovereign states fiercely fighting to maintain their autonomy. Thus, the common battle fought by the anti-modernist, Schmitt, the ultra-modernist, Luhmann, and the post-modernist, Lyotard, is the one against de-differentiation and the expansion of a universalist morality and economy. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan concern for the whole world is often treated as oppositional to particular collectivities, to corresponding sensibilities and to the obligations that follow from them. Tensions revolve around demands made upon the self (depending on the emphasis on the local or the global) and infuse educational discourse accordingly. Culturalism approaches the self as a culturally or multiculturally shaped identity, monopolises the terrain of cosmopolitan debate and narrows the scope of cosmopolitan education only to encouraging hybridity of selfhood and to cultivating (...) respect and tolerance of global diversity. In this article, I discuss Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitan selfhood by drawing on the exemplary status attributed to specific manifestations of hybrid identity. What will gradually emerge from my discussion is, hopefully, a broadening of cosmopolitan demands upon the self and an emphasis on the transforming and reforming rather than the forming or informing significance of cosmopolitan education. This trans/re-forming significance is attached to a critical positioning of the subject regarding the ethico-political responsibilities of one’s home (-land, culture, commitments) that often go unnoticed. Doing one’s homework is shown to be a precondition for a cosmopolitanism understood within the order of treatment of, rather than agreement with, the Other. (shrink)

The article is an evaluation of the economic, organizational and social theory of Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism 15 years after its publication. The role of network capitalism, state capitalism, and aesthetic capitalism in French social life is analysed. The article concludes that flexible network capitalism was largely a chimera of the 1990s and that French political and economic life today is dominated by an ailing state capitalism.

The most important structural feature of the music of the New World is its often-time polyrhythmic and polymetrical character. This is also a key to unlocking the nature of social form and democratic persona in the diasporic and settler metropolises of the New World. In such settings, composers and musicians working with simultaneous temporalities, lines, groups, textures and characters offer intimations of a just totality for culturally fragmented societies.

The systematic philosophical foundation for Jean-François Lyotard's postmodern and post-Marxist politics is described. The central principle of the right to create different "phrases" is uncovered and examined. The political consequences of this philosophical system are explored, leading to the conclusion that Lyotard's commitment to difference leads to political indifference. The philosophical roots of this indifference are detailed in Lyotard's Cartesian starting point and his analysis of Holocaust revisionism. This analysis reveals an idealist basis to Lyotard's philosophy of difference. Lyotard's concept (...) of difference is compared to that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. (shrink)

: Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint requires that we figure the political as itself a contested site, and incorporate this into our theorizing about the role of dissent in the production of knowledges. This essay contrasts Lyotard's notion of the differend with Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model.

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time , and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of (...) the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Addressing Alterity:Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and the Nonappropriative RelationDiane DavisTeaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.—Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and InfinityThere is always the matter of a surplus that comes from an elsewhere and that can no more be assimilated by me, than it can domesticate itself in me. A teaching that may part ways with Heidegger's motif of our being (...) able to learn only what we already understand—when does learning take place? what do we already understand?—the Conversation belongs, as ethical relation, to the effort of thinking the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger. None of this amounts to thinking an object.—Avital Ronell, DictationsFrom Rhetorical Power to Reception Histories Steven Mailloux has brilliantly performed and explicated a "rhetorical hermeneutics" that demonstrates the "practical inseparability of interpretation and language use and thus of the discourses that theorize those practices, hermeneutics and rhetoric" (1998, 3). Many rhetoricians have challenged the specifics of Mailloux's various arguments and have more generally objected that "rhetorical hermeneutics" leans too far toward the hermeneutical, reducing rhetoric to an analytic or critical art and giving its productive (political) function the squeeze.1 Yet within these lively debates, very few have challenged his basic premise that rhetoric and hermeneutics are inextricably intertwined: the question has not been whether they are indissociable but which side of the production-reception coin rhetorical studies ought to emphasize.2 Michael Leff, for example, flipped Mailloux's adjective-noun relation to spotlight production, promoting a "hermeneutical rhetoric" that focuses more on political than literary texts; nonetheless, he agrees that "all interpretive work involves participation in a rhetorical exchange, and that every rhetorical exchange involves some interpretive work" (1997, 197-98). [End Page 191] Rosa Eberly goes further in Citizen Critics, offering a hermeneutical rhetoric that is less interested in "already-written discourses" than in spotlighting "rhetoric's power as an art productive of discourses and subjectivities for the present and the future" (2000, 34). Yet Eberly, too, affirms Mailloux's basic premise, which was nudged in the direction of conflation in the introduction to the 1997 collection Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time, in which the editors, Walter Jost and Michael Hyde note in passing that their title can "be understood as virtually tautological."And there is of course no doubt that rhetoric has a hermeneutic dimension; or, more carefully, that rhetoric constitutes the hermeneutic dimension. If "hermeneutics" indicates "the art of understanding," as Friedrich Schleirmacher wanted, then interpretation clearly depends upon production.3 "Rhetoric not only has its place within the sphere of objects surveyed by hermeneutics," as Werner Hamacher puts it, "but also constitutes an integral component of every hermeneutic operation. Every step in an interpretation corresponds to a rhetorical—or grammatical—figure" (1996, 70). Put more bluntly: intelligibility, including self-intelligibility, is a tropological product; cognition itself is a trope that can in no way be secured. Hermeneutics—as it's being used here—is completely dependent on, even absorbed by, rhetoric.4 I have no problem with this. Nor with Mailloux's suggestion that the reverse is also true:In some ways rhetoric and interpretation are practical forms of the same extended human activity: Rhetoric is based on interpretation; interpretation is communicated through rhetoric. Furthermore, as a reflection on practice, hermeneutics and rhetorical theory are mutually defining fields: hermeneutics is the rhetoric of establishing meaning, and rhetoric the hermeneutics of problematic linguistic situations.(Mailloux 1998, 4)I don't disagree: As the production and appropriation of meaning, rhetoric and hermeneutics are an indissociable team; together, they complete understanding's circle. I take this as a given.However, I want to suggest that there is also a non-hermeneutical dimension of rhetoric that has nothing to do with meaning-making, with offering up significations to comprehension. This dimension is reducible neither to figuration nor to what typically goes by the name persuasion; it is devoted to a certain reception, but not to the appropriation of meaning. Preceding and exceeding all hermeneutic interpretation, it deals not in signified meaning but in the address itself, in the exposure to the other; it deals not... (shrink)

AbstarctBoth the superhero and the supervillain operate outside the law. The former replaces law with a form of substantive justice while the latter seeks to invert or overturn the law in favour of a new grundnorm that best serves their vision for how society should operate. In this paper I consider what this prefix “super” really means in relation to these two classes, drawing on Nietzsche’s original definition of the ubermensch and its relationship to legal concepts such as the state (...) of exception, sovereign power and substantive justice. These relationships will be mapped across a number of examples from the Marvel Studios films—paying particular attention to the antagonists in these movies, both the state and the supervillains, arguing that it is these antagonists who are most illustrative of these concepts in play. (shrink)

Two studies of women in philosophy, Michéle Le Doeuff's biography of Simone de Beauvoir Hipparchia's Choice (1991) and Fritz Mauthner's historical novel Hypatia (1892), question what kind of power and authority are available to philosophers. Mauthner's philosophy of language expands on Le Doeuff to outline how philosophy acts parallel to other sociohistorical discourses, relying on public consensus and on the negotiation of stereotypes to create a viable speaking subject for the female philosopher.

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.