The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

The Law of Peoples John Rawls Harvard 1999 John Rawls, the great political philosopher, has turned his reflections to questions of international justice, much as his philosophical ancestor Kant did toward the end of his career. Indeed, Kant's conception of a "pacific federation" of states in Perpetual Peace is Rawls's acknowledged model for the "realistic utopia" sketched in The Law of Peoples, which expands upon his 1993 essay by the same title (without, however, revising its basic argument). Despite differing philosophical constraints and geopolitical conditions, both Kant and Rawls aim to develop an ideal normative framework for international law that accommodates a measure of realism and rejects the idea of a world-state. Unfortunately, in its uncritical acceptance of so-called "decent hierarchical societies" even at the level of ideal theory, the normative claim of Rawls's Law of Peoples is undermined. This philosophical appeasement, meant to secure perpetual peace in our time through a moderately demanding Law of Peoples that liberal and "decent" hierarchical societies alike can endorse, departs fundamentally from Kant's cosmopolitanism. For Kant, the "First Definitive Article of a Perpetual Peace-as opposed to a temporary interruption of hostilities-is that each member state of the foedus pacif cum must have a republican form of government, which is partly founded upon "the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens)." By contrast, Rawls weakens his ideal of international justice to buy the assent of hierarchical societies, which by definition lack equality among citizens, at the price of sacrificing a theoretical basis for justifying reforms of the practices and institutions of these hierarchical societies above a minimal level of decency. Rawls's complex argument begins by extending the original position, in which principles of justice for the basic structure of society are chosen under epistemic constraints that ensure fairness, from a single liberal society to what he calls the Society of Liberal Peoples. In a second step, though still within ideal theory, he argues that the substantive principles comprising the Law of Peoples are also acceptable to decent hierarchical societies, which possess decent consultation hierarchies and common good conceptions of justice. Despite being inegalitarian, decent hierarchical societies do respect basic human rights, allow some dissent, and at least consult with representatives of groups whose members are denied full citizenship rights. …

The Law of Peoples

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Europe and the People without History

/pdf/silencing-the-past-power-and-the-production-of-history-1uvybflqsn.pdf

Silencing the past: power and the production of history

VER the past decade, that is, since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, emphasis in the analysis of the European Union has shifted from understanding the process of European integration towards exploration of the specific features of the emerging European polity. 1 In terms of scholarly approaches, this shift has entailed a move from the field of international relations, with its focus on intergovernmentalism, towards institutional analysis, policy analysis and political theory, thus expressing the by now largely consensual view that the European Union (EU) can be analyzed as a polity in its own right, certainly a very complex one and possibly even one of an entirely new kind, but no longer merely a set of treaties between sovereign states. Within this rapidly increasing literature, questions of political theory have acquired salience, not least as a consequence of the widely debated theorem of the ‘democratic deficit’ of the European Union, that is, as an issue of normative political theory. 2 However, the increased awareness that the available register for conceptualizing polities by means of political theory and philosophy is largely inadequate for understanding the emerging European polity has hardly yet led to a full exploration of the two central questions that, in our view, need to be explicitly addressed: What is the contribution that political theory and philosophy have to make in understanding the European Union, and— possibly—in investigating the normative underpinning for that specific polity? And, inversely, what is the challenge for political theory and philosophy that the creation of a novel kind of polity such as the European Union entails? Most of the discussion in what follows will be devoted to the first of these questions. But since that discussion will be based on our own view about the answer to the second question, we need to give that answer, at least in broad terms. The creation of a

/pdf/survey-article-the-nascent-political-philosophy-of-the-3mv5zqj2fd.pdf

Survey Article: The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity

How to hospitably welcome refugees and migrants presents urgent questions for social and political thought. Current debates can be attributed to three discursive fields. Liberal versions hold that there are good reasons for political and legal limits of hospitality, critical perspectives advocate a renewed cosmopolitanism and, finally, deconstructive perspectives focus on the demand of unconditional hospitality as an absolute ethical requirement. These concepts trouble the conventional congruence of citizenship and bounded territory that make up modern nation states, on the one hand. On the other hand, they affirm the rights of political communities to decide on the contents and the extent of the universal duty to host those endangered. Taking the Mediterranean and the local arena (Lampedusa) as the example, the article, which is based on extensive, multi-sited anthropological field research, engages with the tensions and limits inherent in current notions of hospitality.

The Limits of Hospitality: Political Philosophy, Undocumented Migration and the Local Arena

“‘Surveyor,’ he said, ‘you cannot stay here. Forgive the impoliteness.’ ‘I didn’t want to stay,' said K., ‘I simply wanted a little rest. Now that I have had it, I am leaving.’ ‘This lack of hospit...

Spaces of hospitality

The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity

Part I: Perspectives and Concepts * Part II: Representation and Translation * Part III: Women and Alterity * Part IV: Boundaries and Ethnicity

Heidrun Friese

Papers

Survey Article: The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity

The Limits of Hospitality: Political Philosophy, Undocumented Migration and the Local Arena

Spaces of hospitality

The Nascent Political Philosophy of the European Polity

Identities : time, difference, and boundaries