In this article, we elaborate on various key ideas about consumption and consumer from a theoretical position that we have labeled "liberatory postmodernism." By unmasking the limitations of modernism that have to do with the onerous nature of its metanarratives and narrow conventionalism, we show that postmodern developments offer alternate visions of consumption processes that have an emancipatory potential. The analysis in our article begins with a discussion of the philosophical foundations of modernism and postmodernism followed by a cultural critique of modernism-exposing, for example, the modernist distinction between production and consumption and the privileging of production over consumption. We demonstrate how postmodernism is concerned with the reversing of the conditions of modernity and with a wide range of issues regarding the construction of the subject (i.e., the consumer), the role of the symbolic in consumption processes, the notion of the spectacularization of life, the creation of the hyperreal, and the cultural signification of fragmentation. We conclude the article with a proposal for an epistemology of consumption that subsumes scientific knowledge under a broader category of narrative knowledge and recognizes multivocality of consumption forms.

Liberatory Postmodernism and the Reenchantment of Consumption

This article interrogates the relationship between two apparently disjointed themes: the consensual presentation and mainstreaming of the global problem of climate change on the one hand and the debate in political theory/philosophy that centers around the emergence and consolidation of a post-political and post-democratic condition on the other. The argument advanced in this article attempts to tease out this apparently paradoxical condition. On the one hand, the climate is seemingly politicized as never before and has been propelled high on the policy agenda. On the other hand, a number of increasingly influential political philosophers insist on how the post-politicization (or de-politicization) of the public sphere (in parallel and intertwined with processes of neoliberalization) have been key markers of the political process over the past few decades. We proceed in four steps. First, we briefly outline the basic contours of the argument and its premises. Second, we explore the ways in which the present climate conundrum is predominantly staged through the mobilization of particular apocalyptic imaginaries. Third, we argue that this specific (re-)presentation of climate change and its associated policies is sustained by decidedly populist gestures. Finally, we discuss how this particular choreographing of climate change is one of the arenas through which a post-political frame and post-democratic political configuration have been mediated.

/pdf/apocalypse-forever-post-political-populism-and-the-spectre-qi582kaiju.pdf

Apocalypse Forever? Post-political Populism and the Spectre of Climate Change

In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno-political and socio-scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re-centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political-ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re-centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio-ecological urban assemblages.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2009.00859.x

The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production

Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces

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/pdf/odor-and-power-in-the-americas-olfactory-consciousness-from-24cl2s3nsz.pdf

Odor and Power in the Americas: Olfactory Consciousness from Columbus to Emancipation

title : The Literary Absolute : The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism Intersections (Albany, N.Y.) author : Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe.; Nancy, Jean-Luc. publisher : State University of New York Press isbn10 | asin : 0887066615 print isbn13 : 9780887066610 ebook isbn13 : 9780585091761 language : English subject Romanticism--Germany, German literature--18th century-History and criticism, German literature--19th century--History and criticism, German literature--History and criticism-Theory, etc, Criticism--Germany--History, Philosophy, German--18th century, Phi publication date : 1988 lcc : PT363.P6L3 1988eb ddc : 830/.9/145 subject : Romanticism--Germany, German literature--18th century-History and criticism, German literature--19th century--History and criticism, German literature--History and criticism-Theory, etc, Criticism--Germany--History, Philosophy, German--18th century, Phi

The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism.

The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism

Introduction: Desistance Jacques Derrida 1. Typography 2. The echo of the subject 3. The Caesura of the speculative 4. Holderlin and the Greeks 5. Diderot: paradox and mimesis 6. Transcendence ends in politics Index.

Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics

1. The following text was originally a relatively brief expose delivered on 7 May 1980, in Schiltigheim (Bas-Rhin, France), at a conference on "The Mechanisms of Fascism" organized by the Committee for Information about the Holocaust. In this context, we sought to present nothing more than an outline of analyses that demand further development.' If we have slightly modified our text in this new presentation, it remains nonetheless an outline. 2. We are not historians-much less historians specializing in the study of Nazism. Consequently, one should not expect from us a factual description of the myths or mythical elements of Nazism, nor a description of Nazism's exhumation and use of an ancient stock of mythic material, to be considered, perhaps, as specifically German in nature.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/jaro2013/SOC564/um/41394715/Lacoue_Labarthe_Nancy_The_Nazi_Myth.pdf

The Nazi Myth

This collection of essays presents, for the first time in English, some of the key essays on the political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Including several unpublished essays, Retreating the Political offers some highly original perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and the political. Through contemporary readings of the political in Freud, Heidegger and Marx, the authors ask if we can talk of an a priori link between the philosophical and the political; they investigate the significance of the 'figure' - the human being as political subject - in the history of metaphysics; and they inquire how we can 're-treat' the political today in the face of those who argue that philosophy is at an 'end'.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Papers

The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism.

The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism

Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics

The Nazi Myth

Retreating the political