What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

Introduction Part I. The Logic of Sovereignty: 1. The paradox of sovereignty 2. 'Nomos Basileus' 3. Potentiality and law 4. Form of law Threshold Part II. Homo Sacer: 1. Homo sacer 2. The ambivalence of the sacred 3. Sacred life 4. 'Vitae Necisque Potestas' 5. Sovereign body and sacred body 6. The ban and the wolf Threshold Part III. The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern: 1. The politicization of life 2. Biopolitics and the rights of man 3. Life that does not deserve to live 4. 'Politics, or giving form to the life of a people' 5. VP 6. Politicizing death 7. The camp as the 'Nomos' of the modern Threshold Bibliography Index of names.

Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

This article discusses the conduct and evaluatoin of interpretive research in information systems. While the conventions for evaluating information systems case studies conducted according to the natural science model of social science are now widely accepted, this is not the case for interpretive field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from the IS research literature. The intention of the paper is to further reflect and debate on the important subject of grounding interpretive research methodology.

A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems

The aim of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) is to explore in detail how participants are making sense of their personal and social world, and the main currency for an IPA study is the meanings particular experiences, events, states hold for participants. The approach is phenomenological (see Chapter 3) in that it involves detailed examination of the participant’s lifeworld; it attempts to explore personal experience and is concerned with an individual’s personal perception or account of an object or event, as opposed to an attempt to produce an objective statement of the object or event itself. At the same time, IPA also emphasizes that the research exercise is a dynamic process with an active role for the researcher in that process. One is trying to get close to the participant’s personal world, to take, in Conrad’s (1987) words, an ‘insider’s perspective’, but one cannot do this directly or completely. Access depends on, and is complicated by, the researcher’s own conceptions; indeed, these are required in order to make sense of that other personal world through a process of interpretative activity. Thus, a two-stage interpretation process, or a double hermeneutic, is involved. The participants are trying to make sense of their world; the researcher is trying to make sense of the participants trying to make sense of their world. IPA is therefore intellectually connected to hermeneutics and theories of interpretation (Packer and Addison, 1989; Palmer, 1969; Smith, in press; see also Chapter 2 this volume). Different interpretative stances are possible, and IPA combines an empathic hermeneutics with a questioning hermeneutics. Thus, consistent with its phenomenological origins, IPA is concerned with trying to understand what it is like, from the point of view of the participants, to take their side. At the same time, a detailed IPA analysis can also involve asking critical questions of the texts from participants, such as the following: What is the person trying to achieve here? Is something leaking out here that wasn’t intended? Do I have a sense of something going on here that maybe the participants themselves are less aware of?

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Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis

Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’ gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this subject of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy, and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo-political determinations.’ The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a Subject. . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denega­ tions, belongs to the exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. It is impossible for contemporary French intellectuals to imagine the kind of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the debate of the production of that Other, supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. ... In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intel­ lectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure,’ to see the economic factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the tran­ scendental signified. The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial

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Can the Subaltern Speak

In metaphysics reflection is accomplished concerning the essence of what is and a decision takes place regarding the essence of truth.1 Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed.2 This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended in them. Reflection is the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in question.3

The Age of the World Picture

In this volume Martin Heidegger confronts the philosophical problems of language and begins to unfold the meaning begind his famous and little understood phrase "Language is the House of Being." The "Dialogue on Language," between Heidegger and a Japanese friend, together with the four lectures that follow, present Heidegger's central ideas on the origin, nature, and significance of language. These essays reveal how one of the most profound philosophers of our century relates language to his earlier and continuing preoccupation with the nature of Being and himan being. One the Way to Language enable readers to understand how central language became to Heidegger's analysis of the nature of Being. On the Way to Language demonstrates that an interest in the meaning of language is one of the strongest bonds between analytic philosophy and Heidegger. It is an ideal source for studying his sustained interest in the problems and possibilities of human language and brilliantly underscores the originality and range of his thinking.

On the Way to Language

First published in German in 1938 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics" includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behaviour, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, "Being and Time", to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history.

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude

On Time and Being charts the so-called "turn" in Martin Heidegger's philosophy away from his earlier metaphysics in Being and Time to his later thoughts after "the end of philosophy" The title lecture, "Time and Being," shows how Heidegger reconceived both "Being" and "time," introducing the new concept of "the event of Appropriation" to help give his metaphysical ideas nonmetaphysical meanings On Time and Being also contains a summary of six seminar sessions that Heidegger conducted on "Time and Being," a lecture called "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking," and an autobiographical sketch of Heidegger's intellectual history in "My Way of Phenomenology"

On time and being

A solution to get the problem off, have you found it? Really? What kind of solution do you resolve the problem? From what sources? Well, there are so many questions that we utter every day. No matter how you will get the solution, it will mean better. You can take the reference from some books. And the discourse on thinking is one book that we really recommend you to read, to get more solutions in solving this problem.

Martin Heidegger

Papers

The Age of the World Picture

On the Way to Language

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude

On time and being

Discourse on thinking