Showing papers in "Critical Horizons in 2002"

Moderate Machiavelli? Contrasting The Prince with the Arthashastra of Kautilya

Abstract: Max Weber was the first to see that the writings of Machiavelli, when contrasted with the brutal realism of other cultural and political traditions, were not so extreme as they appear to some critics. "Truly radical ‘Machiavellianism,’ in the popular sense of that word," Weber said in his famous lecture "Politics as a Vocation," "is classically expressed in Indian literature in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (written long before the birth of Christ, ostensibly in the time of Chandragupta [Maurya]): compared to it, Machiavelli's The Prince is harmless." In this article, contrast Machiavelli's writings to those of Kautilya (c. 300 B.C.E.) and question why Machiavelli omitted the harsher aspects of political domination such as spies, assassination of enemies, and torture. Could it be that he was afraid to tell a prince about the harsher characteristics of tyrannical rule? If so, why?

Landscape as Symbolic Form: Remembering Thick Place in Deep Time

Abstract: The current intense concern with landscape in the arts and social theory is seen as a response to the shaking of the Modern world-view, which has attended the growing awareness of the ecology crisis. The dilemmas associated with developing a new conception of the relationship between humans and the natural world is explored through a critical engagement with the work of Heidegger and Habermas. The article develops a symbolic conception of landscape as a place where the human world and the earth meet and a new sense of the human condition set within ecological constraints can be articulated and reflected upon.

Strangers and Others: From Deconstruction to Hermeneutics

Abstract: This paper argues that what is needed to properly engage the human obsession with strangers and enemies is a critical hermeneutic capable of addressing the dialectic of others and aliens, that is, a hermeneutic that can solicit ethical decisions without succumbing to over hasty acts of binary exclusion. It is argued that we need to be able to critically differentiate between different kinds of otherness, while remaining alert to the deconstructive challenge to black-and-white judgements of us-versus-them. We need, at critical moments, to expose the other in the alien and the alien in the other.

Postcolonial Interventions: Gayatri Spivak, Three Wise Men and the Native Informant

Abstract: This article responds to Terry Eagleton's claim that Spivak's latest book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, works against the intent of postcolonial criticism. Reading the work as a search for a just representational strategy, we explore the implications of Spivak's engagement with philosophy - Kant, Hegel, and Marx. As a disciplinary machine, philosophy produces Western subjects who are engendered by simultaneously including and excluding the other. Working through this production of the double location of the ‘other’ we suggest that systematic thought is inhabited by an absence that is present within, a disturbing otherness that ultimately questions authority and stability, and opens up the question of politics and representation. Drawing Spivak into the representational problematic opened up by Lyotard, we suggest that a responsible postcolonial intervention can be performed in the difficult exergue between representability and unrepresentability. In this account, representation is open to in...

The Accursed Share: Bataille as Historical Thinker

Abstract: This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his master-work. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading. The aim of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole.

Critical Theory of Society or Self-Critical Society

Abstract: This paper presents a critical comparative reading of Ulrich Beck and Herbert Marcuse. Beck's thesis on ‘self-critical society’ and the concept of ‘sub-politics’ are evaluated within the framework of Marcusian critical theory. We argue for the continued relevance of Marcuse for the project of emancipatory politics. We recognise that a focus upon the imminent and spontaneous possibilities for radical social change within the ‘sub-political’ is a useful provocation to the high abstractionism of much critical theory, but suggest that such possibilities are better captured in a Marcusian theoretical frame than they are in Beck's account.

Theories of State Formation and Civilisation in Johann P. Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt's Comparative Sociologies of Japan

Abstract: Johann Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt's social theories have remarkably different origins. Yet each has moved onto common ground with the other over a period of time. They meet in historical sociology in dialogue over theories of state formation and images of civilisation. Each is engaged in a project of revising civilisations sociology that reaches an apex with the comparative study of Japan. Their groundbreaking contributions can be read critically against a wider background of debates about postcolonialism, the reputation of the notion of civilisation and the state of area studies in the humanities and social sciences.

Autonomy, Reflexivity, Tragedy: Notions of Democracy in Camus and Castoriadis

Abstract: This paper looks at two 20th century theories of tragedy: those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Albert Camus. The theories that each proffer of this ancient cultural form are striking. Against more standard views, both theorists stress that tragedy is a cultural form that has only arisen historically in cultures whose forms of religious thought have been laid open to question. In this way, both argue that tragedy is an important democratic cultural form, which stages the confrontation between a no longer unquestionable divine order, and human autonomy. The intent of the paper, from the start, is a political one. It wants to place Camus alongside Castoriadis as a ‘post-Marxist’ thinker, who belongs meaningfully to what Dick Howard has called ‘the Marxian legacy’. More than this, it aims to do this by staging Camus' theorisation of tragedy, with Castoriadis', as a powerful riposte to the conservative criticism of democracy as a modern political form, that is, that it cannot muster sacral cultural forms...

Rousseau's Dream: Nature and Artifice

Abstract: Nature,' can never be for us an objective reality. In one form or another, we must represent the natural world to ourselves, and these representations are both cultural and ideational. It is through them that we respond to nature: intervening by our absences or presence, by our scientific curiosity and artistic expression, by classificatory passion and economic calculus, by practical measures to harness the powers of natural forces and by prayer and magic.

Parsis and Public Space in 19th Century Bombay: a Different Formulation of ‘the Political’ in a Non-European Context

Abstract: This paper looks at the Parsi community in 19th century India and its role as an agent in the formation of public cultural space in Bombay. The Parsis provide a unique example of an indigenous community under colonial rule, who through acceptance of the values of modernity and enterprise culture, manage to negotiate a position of prominence within one of the power centres of the then dominant British empire. The notion of the public sphere thus employed, provides an interesting contrast with the Habermasian theory of the bourgeois public sphere. Furthermore, it provides a model that directly challenges the somewhat simplistic subject-object relations that are often implicit within post-colonial theory. Indeed, there is a particular kind of desire for modernity that is reflected in the active participation of Parsis in the construction of imperial public space in Bombay. This leads to a reconsideration of the fluidity of the notion of the ‘political’ within the discussion of post-colonialism.

Editorial: Others as Strangers

Abstract: One of the ways in which Critical Horizons was first conceived was to provide a forum in which debates between protagonists with diverse views might occur across a range of intellectual and political positions. This issue of Critical Horizons can be imagined as a critical roundtable discussion that brings together a number of diverse essays that seek to conceptualise Ôthe otherÕ from various positions which draw on recent continental philosophy, critical and postcolonial theories.