Showing papers in "Constellations in 2012"

The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in Habermas’ Political Theory

Abstract: This chapter focuses on Jurgen Habermas’ most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront the tension between reason and power, an attempt found in his magnum opus of legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms (BFN). It offers the conceptual framework of BFN, the core of which is the internal tension between facticity and validity, between power and reason. Habermas claims that the tension between facticity and validity is fundamental to the theory of communicative action. The core of Habermas’ distinctive account of power in BFN is his distinction between communicative and administrative power, with positive law functioning as the mediator and translator between the two. Following Max Weber, however, Habermas argues that modern, complex social orders cannot be based solely on this intrapsychic mechanism of internalized norms. The social integration that Habermas views as necessary for stability in complex, postconventional societies depends upon a double repression.

Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: Constitutional Courts as Guardians of the Constitution?

Abstract: A great number of petitions reached the Hungarian Constitutional Court concerning the November 2010 constitutional amendments that sought to curtail the Court‟s powers and allow for the possibility of implementing a tax measure with retroactive effect. In their decision 61/2011. (VII. 13.), which was accompanied by three dissenting and three concurring opinions, the judges of the Court refused to perform a review of the substance of these amendments. At the same time, however – and this was a first in the Court‟s judicial practice –, they undertook an investigation concerning the question whether these amendments were valid constitutionally in terms of the procedure that led to their adoption, even if they did not find that the petition was well-grounded in this regard. The three dissenting judges, however, believed that an examination of the merits was also necessary, and two of them would have nullified the impugned constitutional amendments, which they thought – albeit to differing degrees – unconstitutional.

Representation through Deliberation – The European Case

Abstract: This paper shows that the main pattern of European democratisation has unfolded along the lines of an EU organised as a multilevel system of representative parliamentary government and not as a system of deliberative governance as the transnationalists propound. But the multilevel EU has developed a structure of representation that is theoretically challenging. In order to come to grips with this we present an institutional variant of deliberative theory, which understands democracy as the combination of a principle of justification and an organisational form. It comes with the following explanatory mechanisms: claimsmaking, justification and learning which in the EU also program institutional copying and emulation mechanisms. We show that the EU has established an incomplete system of representative democracy steeped in a distinct representation-deliberation interface, which has emerged through a particular and distinct configuration of democratisation mechanisms. This article is forthcoming in Constellations. It is pre-printed here by permission of the journal.

Claude Lefort, Political Anthropology, and Symbolic Division

Abstract: Among the highlights of French thought in the 20th century, its anthropological tradition surely ranks as one of the most important, thanks to its vanguard role in the reshaping of theoretical assumptions across all of the human sciences. Claude Lefort’s encounter with that tradition, which has not figured significantly in the reception of his work, is crucial to grasping the shape of his career and the contours of some of his main theoretical commitments. As a broad illustration of this contention, this essay surveys Lefort’s relationship with his friend Pierre Clastres. But it also uses their relationship to address the relationship of the symbolic and the imaginary in his thought.

The Test of the Political: A Conversation with Claude Lefort

Abstract: Claude Lefort was one of the great figures of the renewal of political and social theory in the second half of the 20th century. His thinking—very different from that of Rawls, Dworkin, or even Habermas—was tied to events, to the attempt to elucidate them, and with them the conditions of our emancipation. In a conversation with Pierre Ronsavallon, he retraces his intellectual trajectory and the great themes of his work.

Lefort and the Symbolic Dimension

Abstract: Is a symbol created or found? Does it reveal the freedom of human creation or does it disclose the form of the world? This was a perennial question for the Romantics of the early 19th century. While some denied the instituted character of symbols in order to assert their correspondence with reality, others defended the autopoietic power of the human creator. In his theory of the radical imagination and his insistence on society’s instituting creativity, Cornelius Castoriadis was an emphatic heir of the latter camp. Yet, it is important to recall a point that Paul Benichou once made in his great work The Consecration of the Writer. In Romanticism, Benichou urges us to recognize “the ambiguity that is characteristic to this intellectual theme, and make of the symbol both a human invention and a characteristic of being itself.”1 Claude Lefort, the theorist of the “symbolic dimension” of the political, remained within this ambiguity. Indeed, many of the issues that came to divide Castoriadis and Lefort in the years after their intensive collaboration as the cofounders of Socialisme ou Barbarie could be encapsulated in the contrast evoked by Benichou. Where Castoriadis held that democracy emerged out of the exercise of human autonomy, and further insisted that autonomy has the potential to become more and more lucid about its self-creating activity, Lefort came to believe that, even as democracy opens new circuits for the articulation and realization of autonomy, democratic power, indeed, the political domain as such, remains unmasterable.

On Europe's functional constitutionalism Towards a constitutional theory of specialized international regimes

Abstract: Constitutionalism is enjoying yet another renaissance, this time in the context of supernational institutions. 1 Barring a few holdouts, most observers believe that the answer to the question popular during the late 1990s—is constitutionalism possible beyond the nation-state?— ought to be in the affirmative. At the very least, it has become de rigueur to reach for constitutional language when considering post-national legal entities so long as they bear some resemblance to formal features we associate with constitutionalism. Never mind that these entities (variously taxonomized as regimes, systems, institutions, orders, processes, and so on) have little in common with each other. International institutions ranging from the UN to the WTO, IMF, and ICSID, human rights regimes including the UDHR and the ECHR, juridical constructs such as jus cogens, transnational contract law, and treaties from the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties to the New York Convention on the Enforcement of Foreign

Guarding the Perimeter: Militant Democracy and Religious Freedom in Europe

Abstract: This essay tracks the concept of militant democracy in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights, where it has migrated from a principle that authorizes a state to act in a militant manner to preserve democratic processes to one that entitles a state to establish perimeters and guard against threats of a different kind. Militant democracy now authorizes a state to assume a militant stance toward the exercise of religious freedom that threatens substantive conceptions of democracy instantiated in its constitutional order. The essay identifies four substantive conceptions of democracy – liberal democracy, secular democracy, republican democracy, and conservative democracy – to which militant democracy has migrated in recent years. It argues that militant democracy’s migration signals an ominous shift in the way in which the European Court of Human Rights comprehends the relationship between religion and state power.

Lefort, the Philosopher of 1989

Abstract: Let us leave behind the journalistic commonplace, the revolutions of 1989. The actors themselves, as we know, spoke of self-limiting, peaceful, velvet, and negotiated revolutions, terms all indicating distance from the revolutionary tradition they knew all too well. Even in South Africa in the 1990s, few spoke of revolution during what was indeed the radical transformation of the system of apartheid. The analysts, if they did not adopt the terms of the actors, spoke of regime change, democratic transition, or even revolution.

Agamben's Political Paradigm of the Camp: Its Features and Reasons

Abstract: In this paper I would like to give critical consideration to the political claim Giorgio Agamben makes in his contention that the camp is the “fundamental political paradigm of the West.”1 In particular, I would like to treat this contention in relation to the requirements that, I think, render “political theory” a coherent intellectual discipline. Reduced to its most basic form, political theory deals with institutional mechanisms of governance, or, more prosaically, with the rules and authority used to govern collectivities. Every time a part of a collectivity wants to rule over the whole, to use Pierre Clastres’ definition, we must deal with politics.2 As a general point, one would like to see by means of theory behaviors, events, and mechanisms explained, which otherwise would remain obscure. At the very least one expects of theoretical work this contribution to lucidity. Thus there must be an ever-repeated going back to those things that a theory purports to illuminate. I do appreciate fine objections or warnings against naı̈ve realism. Nonetheless, I think this so-called “test of reality” must be accepted in however refined a version one would care to make it, and of course the more refined the better. As an example I can cite Michel Foucault who sets up a dual test for political theory. He asks that political theory be able to speak across “a population of dispersed events,” that it not impose a reductive explanatory principle on complex phenomena; and, further, that alongside its explanatory capacity to render legible a field of “dispersed events,” it must add a willingness to test its hypotheses against real situations.3 This dual test comes out of Foucault’s longstanding concern with methodology. In “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle,” he identifies as the key obstacle to understanding complex social practices the prior commitment to models of explanation unsuited to what they intend to explain.4 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault follows this insight when he notes that the study of “the juridical structure of society alone” does not get at “the concrete systems of punishment.”5 Similarly, in his Lecture of January 14, 1976, he states that the problems and topics that are central to the canon of political philosophy cannot offer adequate resources for studying the shifts that occurred in the age of disciplinary power. This is because the approach the canon recommends specifically eschews the analysis of how institutions work in favor of the question of defining what constitutes sovereign power.6 I would like to examine Agamben’s propositions about the camp from this perspective; I wish to focus on the explanatory capacity of his political theory. It is a striking feature of Agamben’s approach to politics that his reasoning typically proceeds from extreme cases or threshold states, such as the position of a concentration camp inmate or the juridical aporia of the state of emergency. Such extreme examples provide far more than illustrations of Agamben’s theses about the biopolitical determination of the West. They are, in his view, both the provocation to an explanation for contemporary theory and the definitive test against which the explanatory claims of other political theories are found wanting. In this respect, Agamben uses “limit” cases that are said to test the explanatory adequacy of “traditional” political theory and defends his procedure as more adequate to the requirements of explanation. He takes the rationale for this position from Kierkegaard’s view that the

The Vanguard of Colonialism: Missionaries and the Frontier in Southern Africa in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: In this essay, I undertake an examination of how Christian missionary societies facilitated the spread of European ideals and belief systems within an African community, and how this spread both prepared and weakened the African polities for increasing contact with colonial authorities. I specifically explore the role missionaries took in everyday functioning of African chiefdoms and kingdoms through their roles as interpreters and diplomats. Missionaries played a role in shaping the day-to-day existence of the polities in which they were based, as they saw themselves fighting in the “war for souls” in Africa. I examine the effects of this contact in syncretising African and European beliefs, focusing on the especially tragic example of the Xhosa cattle killing. Life on the frontier shaped a deterministic “Christian” identity amongst white settlers along the fringes of colonial life, a distance which in turn led to these fringe groups being seen as un-Christian by their own churches.

Gender and Sexuality in Nazi Germany

Abstract: In this paper, I survey Nazi ideals on gender and sexuality and illustrate how these ideals affected both German men and women. I also discuss how Nazi views on gender and sexuality were developed and enforced by the regime. I highlight the general contradictions apparent in Nazi policy on gender and sexuality. Ultimately, the purpose of my paper is to show that the non-Jewish German population was also impacted by Nazi policies.

Lefort as Phenomenologist of the Political

Abstract: I propose to view Lefort’s work from within the phenomenological tradition, whose watchword, as you know, is back to the things themselves and whose “principle of all principles” is to accept the given to the extent that it is given. I ask myself what is the phenomenon that Lefort spent his life describing and interpreting. I will claim that it was the becoming anonymous of political power, the process by which power comes to be disjoined from the person, the body, of the prince. There are three moments within Lefort’s reflection, each associated with a philosophical interlocutor: first, there is Marx, then there is Machiavelli, and finally there is Merleau-Ponty. Later in the chapter I will evoke the process by which a society attempts to reconnect power to a determinate element of the real; this, according to Lefort, is totalitarianism. I will end the paper with a few more personal reflections on Lefort.