Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are two distinct political rationalities in the contemporary United States. They have few overlapping formal characteristics, and even appear contradictory in many respects. Yet they converge not only in the current presidential administration but also in their de-democratizing effects. Their respective devaluation of political liberty, equality, substantive citizenship, and the rule of law in favor of governance according to market criteria on the one side, and valorization of state power for putatively moral ends on the other, undermines both the culture and institutions of constitutional democracy. Above all, the two rationalities work symbiotically to produce a subject relatively indifferent to veracity and accountability in government and to political freedom and equality among the citizenry.

American Nightmare Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and De-Democratization

L'A. presente de maniere critique l'entreprise de B. M. Stafford de faire, en remontant au Siecle des Lumieres, la genealogie de l'esthetique post-moderne de la difformite corporelle

Two Body Criticism: A Genealogy of the Postmodern Anti-Aesthetic@@@Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine

The manipulation of time and the legitimacy of power during the American and French Revolutions, 1774-1815

Collective memory is an important source of social stability, allowing human beings and political communities to integrate new experiences into existing narrative frameworks. In addition to sustaining individual and group identities, remembrance can also maintain cycles of hatred. Building on Arendt's political theory, I present an alternative interpretation of memory as a resource for political change following historical ruptures. This constructive reading focuses on the ability of communities to create new futures out of the shattered pieces of the past. For Arendt, the experience of totalitarianism was a caesura that made nationalist histories, and the nation-state that came with these interpretations of the past, untenable. Following such breaks, communities must reconstruct the past into new narratives. Arendt's unexpected early support for European integration—despite its supranational, technocratic, and economistic qualities—is an example of how memory can function as a resource for political transformation in the aftermath of historical ruptures.

Unexpected Support for European Integration: Memory, Rupture, and Totalitarianism in Arendt's Political Theory

Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France

Foreword by Dick HowardPrefaceIntroduction: Constitutional Violence and Enlightenment Thought1. The Autonomous State and the Origin of the Political2. States of Reasoning: Modern Natural-Law Theory3. Locke's Natural History of the Political4. Systems of Sovereignty in Montesquieu5. Rousseau's Cybernetic Political BodyConclusion: From the Concept of the Political to the Rule of LawNotesIndex

States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political

The fundamental importance of theology in the work of Carl Schmitt has been the subject of much recent literature on this controversial figure. However, there has been little consensus on the precise nature of Schmitt's own political theology—that is, on what links there are between his religious or metaphysical concepts and his ideas concerning the nature of political organization and action. This is especially the case with his works of the Nazi era, which are now being studied with the same kind of critical attention given to his more influential Weimar works. In this essay I focus on the important turn Schmitt made in the early years of the Third Reich, from “decisionism” to what he called “institutional thinking,” in order to reveal the theological basis for his understanding of the new regime. I will then argue that Schmitt's institutional approach had in fact always been central to his earlier, better-known writings on law and the state. Schmitt's concept of the institution, which had roots in French legal theory, grounded a political theology that was in the end less a metaphysical approach to the state than one that drew on the concrete example of the legal institutional order of the Catholic Church.

Political theology and the nazi state: carl schmitt's concept of the institution

Jacques Derrida9s turn to the political took deconstruction in a new direction this past decade. Central to this later political writing was the concept of undecidability. This essay traces the use of undecidability in Derrida9s work, from its early appearance in textual theory to its redeployment in his political philosophy, before tracing out the origins of this idea in interwar thought. The argument is that this idea was already highly politicized in interwar discourse. Mathematical and logical concepts of undecidability were linked to other approaches to crisis and decision in the period. Unearthing this context shows that any evaluation of deconstruction9s impact will require a thorough historicization of twentieth-century thought, something that has been hindered by Derrida9s own lack of engagement with these broader intellectual currents.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/10.1525/rep.2005.90.1.1.pdf

Crisis Between the Wars: Derrida and the Origins of Undecidability

/pdf/plasticity-and-pathology-on-the-formation-of-the-neural-3c0jntxmm0.pdf

David Bates

Papers

Enlightenment Aberrations: Error and Revolution in France

States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political

Political theology and the nazi state: carl schmitt's concept of the institution

Crisis Between the Wars: Derrida and the Origins of Undecidability

Plasticity and Pathology: On the Formation of the Neural Subject