Showing papers in "Critical Horizons in 2016"
TL;DR: The authors argue that the project of resignifying "vulnerability" by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who have already been injured.
Abstract: This paper raises several concerns about vulnerability as an alternative language to conceptualize injustice and politicize its attendant injuries. First, the project of resignifying “vulnerability” by emphasizing its universality and amplifying its generative capacity, I suggest, might dilute perceptions of inequality and muddle important distinctions among specific vulnerabilities, as well as differences between those who are injurable and those who are already injured. Vulnerability scholars, moreover, have yet to elaborate the path from acknowledging constitutive vulnerability to addressing concrete injustices. Second, vulnerability studies respond to, and have been shaped by, debates in the 1980s and 1990s over oppression, identity and agency. This genealogy needs to be acknowledged and evaluated. As I demonstrate, prominent theorists define vulnerability in contradistinction to victimization, adopting neo-liberal formulations of victims and victimhood. Finally, I turn to address the politics of vuln...
103 citations
TL;DR: Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories.
Abstract: Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, " mutilatable " and killable bodies, especially after Septem-ber 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations. In Europe, and particularly in France, current reflection on vulnerability has emerged from a thematics of precarity and exclusion. The term evokes, in the first place, lives that are dispensable, evictable and deportable, and the abandoning of individuals to naked forces of the market. It is probably to the sociology of Robert Castel, who died in 2013 – one of whose last papers we have had translated here – that we primarily owe the popularization of French scientific uses of the term vulnerability which occurred in the 1990s. For him, vulnerability consists of a " space of instability and of turbulences populated with individuals insecure in their relation to work and fragile in their relational integration.
35 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality, and they define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted, and interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability.
Abstract: This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted.
25 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors connect the ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein, and explore the connection between an ethics of justice and political liberalism.
Abstract: The ethics of care has contributed to modifying a dominant conception of ethics and changed the way we conceive vulnerability. It has introduced ethical stakes into politics, weakening, through its critique of theories of justice, the seemingly obvious link between an ethics of justice and political liberalism. However, care corresponds to a quite ordinary reality: the fact that people look after one another, take care of one another and thus are responsible. The aim of this paper is to connect the ethics of care to the idea of the vulnerability of the human as it is developed in the moral philosophy inspired by Wittgenstein (and explored by Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Veena Das).
24 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that cosmopolitanism must be political and its politics must be contestatory to be truly universalistic and inclusive, in order to avoid these perversions.
Abstract: Cosmopolitanism is attractive as a normative orientation, but the historical record of actual cosmopolitanisms, like that of practical universalisms more generally, is not encouraging. When they have not been merely empty, cosmopolitanisms' ostensibly universal values have too been often co-opted by dominant powers, making them into ideologies of domination. My question here is not whether but how to embrace cosmopolitanism so as to avoid these perversions. The key, I argue, is to focus on the processes through which their ostensibly universal values are challenged and appropriated from below, in struggles against exclusion, domination and exploitation. This means understanding cosmopolitanism not as a plan, project or design, but as a process and practice of contestation. In order to be truly universalistic and inclusive, cosmopolitanism must be political and its politics must be contestatory.
22 citations
TL;DR: In this article, critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power, and the political promise of accounts of racialized injury.
Abstract: Across contexts and time, subjects marked by racial difference have expressed public accounts of the multiple injuries of race. From the vantage point of critical race and black theory, this paper sheds light on both the heuristic and critical political values of such accounts. The first part critically reassesses conceptualizations of vulnerability as an ambivalent ontological condition within critical approaches to liberalism. A close reading of Fanon's account of injury in Black Skin, White Masks specifies how race exploits bodily and enunciative vulnerability and materializes subjects into a state of suspension and suspicion. The second part addresses the political promise of accounts of racialized injury. Departing from sceptical readings of “wounded attachment,” critical race and black analyses associate accounts of injury with citational practices that pertain to historically entrenched conventions of resistance to racial and colonial abusive power. Such accounts can be read as misappropriations of...
18 citations
TL;DR: The Rise of Uncertainties as discussed by the authors describes how a new regime of capitalism has weakened and sometimes destroyed forms of social organization that had been established at the end of industrial capitalism, and discloses three main ongoing transformations: (1) Labour market deregulations, in the sense of questioning both the right to work and the employment statute, and advances in insecurity; (2) the reconfiguration of protective measures, and (3) the paths of disaffiliation, or how it is that some categories of individuals find themselves destabilized and threatened with social invalidation.
Abstract: This paper provides an overview, prepared by Robert Castel himself, of his last book, La montee des incertitudes (The Rise of Uncertainties). It describes how a new regime of capitalism has weakened and sometimes destroyed forms of social organization that had been established at the end of industrial capitalism. It discloses three main ongoing transformations: (1) Labour market deregulations – in the sense of questioning both the right to work and the employment statute, and advances in insecurity; (2) The reconfiguration of protective measures – in the sense of the restriction of rights and a rapid rise in social insecurity; (3) The paths of disaffiliation – or how it is that some categories of individuals find themselves destabilized and threatened with social invalidation in this new conjuncture.
17 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a dialogue between the later works of Wittgenstein, those of Cavell and the novels of J. M. Coetzee concerning the problem of violence, authority and the authoritative voice is established.
Abstract: This paper establishes a dialogue between the later works of Wittgenstein, those of Cavell and the novels of J. M. Coetzee concerning the problem of violence, authority and the authoritative voice. By drawing on J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians and Diary of a Bad Year, the paper discusses lessons and insights on the nature of violence and the ways in which it can be accepted as “normal.” The term “normalization” is used in order to show how violence and cruelty can become a “form of life” (Ludwig Wittgenstein) that develops according to its own actors, cultural practices and legitimacies (Stanley Cavell and, by implication, Richard Rorty).
13 citations
TL;DR: The authors develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions, which is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models.
Abstract: There are two dominant schools of thought addressing problems of cosmopolitanism and (international) conflict: democratic national sovereigntism, inspired by Hegel, and global constitutionalism, inspired by Kant and reformulated by Habermas. This paper develops a third position by reading Adorno's critique of both theoretical traditions. Rather than compromising between these camps, Adorno triangulates between them. Critically illuminating their respective deficiencies in view of the changing conditions of a globalized modern world has critical implications for cosmopolitics. Although largely negative, Adorno's critique provides an important framework for a contestatory reformulation of cosmopolitanism, one that is better equipped to confront societal and political global conflicts insufficiently reflected in sovereigntist and global constitutionalist models.
11 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens.
Abstract: It is a distinctive feature of the global political order that democracy is no longer confined to nation-states, characterized by extensive and overlapping constituencies. It is important to think of the significance of these developments for individuals’ self-determination, which may be undermined in different ways. Here it is argued that democracy must serve to delegate power to complex units of decision making which favour self-determination. Contestability is part of this form of self-determination, allowing forms of politics to emerge based on the democratic rights and powers of self-determining, non-dominated citizens.
10 citations
TL;DR: Deleuze as discussed by the authors argued that the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration, and that it is related to poli...
Abstract: While Levinas famously claims that ethics precedes ontology and emanates from the concrete experience of the other's face, it is often forgotten that Deleuze also discusses the face in numerous writings. The purpose of this paper is to briefly outline Levinas's arguments regarding the constitution of the face to chart its ethical importance, before engaging with Deleuze's critique of Levinas's position. I show that, by distinguishing between two systems of signification – the head-body system and the face system – Deleuze agrees with Levinas that the face is an important signifier delineating the other, but destructs the notion of face to show that it: (1) is more complex and multi-dimensional than Levinas realizes; (2) emanates from a specific semiotic relationship; and (3) emanates from specific socio-historical circumstances. Showing the face is a semiotic construct based in and emanating from a specific socio-historical configuration allows Deleuze not only to conclude that the face is related to poli...
TL;DR: This paper argued that the standard cosmopolitan extension of democracy to international contexts risks reproducing the exclusion of "outsiders" by nation-states, even democratic ones, and argued that these issues do not necessarily revolve around the category of the citizen (however extended), but around the categories of stranger and outsider.
Abstract: This paper approaches the issue of cosmopolitanism from the vantage point of hospitality. The notion of hospitality throws into relief some issues that are at the heart of political cosmopolitanism, but cannot be addressed by it. This is because these issues do not necessarily revolve around the category of the citizen (however extended), but around the categories of stranger and outsider. The paper critiques the tendency to conflate the categories of the stranger and the outsider and goes on to argue that the standard cosmopolitan extension of democracy to international contexts risks reproducing the exclusion of “outsiders” by nation-states, even democratic ones.
TL;DR: The Total Work of Art in European Modernism as mentioned in this paper is an analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own preoccupation with secularization.
Abstract: David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism extends and deepens the analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own pre-occupation with secularization. It addresses the imbalance in social and critical theory whereby progressive secular rationalization has been elevated to the sole logic of modernity, and the romantic redemptive tradition has been reduced to a marginal counter-enlightenment. The total work of art paradigm allows Roberts to demonstrate how the programme of modernity has been constituted by internal tensions and antinomies from the very beginning.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse how the narratives associated with these three dimensions foster a way of understanding them that restricts the relationship which individuals build with their own lives, which may stem from experiencing a lifetime without significant time, decisions without real choice and particular forms of self-fulfilment that misappropriate the relationship with life.
Abstract: Modernity seems to bring a type of relationship with life whereby life appears to be distant. Individuals may mitigate this distance by attaining a meaningful life, but this requires time, decisions and a purpose. In the late modern context, these dimensions – time, decisions and vital purposes – appear to be shaped in a way that further increases this remoteness. This paper analyses how the narratives associated with these three dimensions foster a way of understanding them that restricts the relationship which individuals build with their own lives. The late-modern remoteness from life may stem from experiencing a lifetime without significant time, decisions without real choice and particular forms of self-fulfilment that misappropriate the relationship with life.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that cosmopolitanism is better conceived not as invoking an independent sense of global community that supersedes and constrains state sovereignty, but as an immanent, contingent and creative development of statist criminal law itself, rooted in its principles of state sovereignty.
Abstract: This paper argues that cosmopolitan law has been more successfully achieved not by appeal to a supra-state authority or community, but by the development of features of existing treaty law. Specifically, it shows how the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction over serious human rights violations has been extended to the citizens and territories of non-member states – and even to otherwise immune state officials – not by challenging the sovereignty of non-member states directly, but on the basis of member states’ own territorial sovereignty and the universal jurisdiction which they delegate to the Court and to the United Nations Security Council. In light of this, the authors argue that cosmopolitanism is better conceived not as invoking an independent sense of global community that supersedes and constrains state sovereignty, but as an immanent, contingent and creative development of statist criminal law itself, rooted in its principles of state sovereignty.
TL;DR: This article argued that Merleau-Ponty saw Hegel as providing a model for the conception of rationality and meaning that must underpin the existentialist response to the problems bequeathed him by Husserlian phenomenology: namely, the problems of embodiment, perception and the constitution of the world.
Abstract: Although the fact that Merleau-Ponty has a dialectical approach in Phenomenology of Perception has been discussed in recent Anglophone readings, there has not been an explicit clarification as to how his varying usages of the term hang together. Given his repeated references to Hegel and to dialectics, coupled with the fact that dialectics are not part of the Husserlian phenomenology or Heideggerean existentialism from which Merleau-Ponty draws so much, the question of just what he does with the idea of dialectics presents itself. In this paper I argue that, in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty saw Hegel as providing a model for the conception of rationality and meaning that must underpin the existentialist response to the problems bequeathed him by Husserlian phenomenology: namely, the problems of embodiment, perception and the constitution of the world. In connection with this, I suggest an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's “existential dialectics” that focuses on his three principal uses of th...
TL;DR: This paper reviewed the contribution of Hannah Arendt's 1963 monograph, On Revolution, to the theme of this collection: "contestatory cosmopolitanism" and argued that it is more productive for our own purposes and more faithful to arendt own approach to read the book as an exploration of the developmental forms of the modern revolutionary tradition.
Abstract: This paper reviews the contribution of Hannah Arendt's 1963 monograph, On Revolution, to the theme of this collection: “contestatory cosmopolitanism.” I am critical of normative interpretations of the text that treat it as a wholesale rejection of the French revolutionary tradition and as a tribute either to American constitutionalism, in more liberal readings, or to the council system of direct democracy, in more radical readings. I read it against this doctrinal grain as a dialectical analysis of the modern revolutionary tradition as a whole. I argue that it is more productive for our own purposes and more faithful to Arendt's own approach to read the book as an exploration of the developmental forms of the modern revolutionary tradition, beginning with the “perplexities” present in the modern concept of revolution and then moving on to the more applied and practical “perplexities” involved in the realization of the concept: first in the French Revolution, then in the American Revolution and finally in ...
TL;DR: The authors reconstructs Albert Camus's notion of the absurd in order to elucidate his critique of historical teleology and suggest that these two themes productively unsettle contemporary cosmopolitanism as a teleological orthodoxy of human progress.
Abstract: This paper reconstructs Albert Camus's notion of the absurd in order to elucidate his critique of historical teleology. In his life and work, Camus endeavoured to develop a fallibilist historical sensibility suitable for a cosmos shorn of meaning, which led him to reject ideas of progress and their traces of messianism when elaborating his treatment of rebellion. By making use of Camus's ideas about the absurd and rebellion, I suggest that these two themes productively unsettle contemporary cosmopolitanism as a teleological orthodoxy of human progress and fruitfully, if paradoxically, lie at the heart of a concept of cosmopolitanism “without hope.”
TL;DR: In this article, the potential for a theory of cosmopolitanism in Chantal Mouffe's agonistic theory is revealed, based on the transformation from "enemy" into "adversary" through conversion.
Abstract: By assuming the permanence of conflict, agonistic theories of politics are apparently incompatible with cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless, this paper aims to reveal the potential for a theory of cosmopolitanism in Chantal Mouffe's agonistic theory. In the first section, I present Mouffe's own critique of cosmopolitanism, pointing to its inconsistencies. The second section examines four aspects of Mouffe's agonism and explores their cosmopolitan potential. First, I argue that Mouffe's account of pluralism reveals the interconnectedness of political practices at different levels. Second, Mouffe's sense of the transformation from “enemy” into “adversary” through “conversion” can be extended to cosmopolitanism. Third, the “conflictual consensus” which Mouffe attributes to adversaries is adequate for a cosmopolitanism that lacks a global consensus, but nonetheless is based on a minimal commonality of all human beings. Fourth, contestation, as conflict in the “tamed” mode, has a cosmopolitan potential to contest an...
TL;DR: The authors demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy.
Abstract: Consumer society has negated Freud's thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society's members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. I demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy.
TL;DR: The authors argue that Kracauer's dismissal of Collingwood illuminates a misunderstanding of the latter's philosophical project, and takes no account of a certain affinity between the two thinkers.
Abstract: Siegfried Kracauer's reading of the work of R.G. Collingwood illuminates the crisis point in the relation between philosophy, history and how the present is thought. In this paper I argue that Kracauer's dismissal of Collingwood illuminates a misunderstanding of the latter's philosophical project, and takes no account of a certain affinity between the two thinkers. Collingwood not only shared Kracauer's view that a philosophically oriented historical investigation of the past might offer some hope for the present, but also had a fuller grasp of the philosophical implications of the ambivalent relation between historical time and the present than Kracauer gave him credit for.
TL;DR: The authors presented Lyotard's first major work not as two separable or opposed parts, but as a coherent trajectory responding to a specific philosophical problem, namely the Hegelian account of sense-perception and signification as outlined in Hyppolite's Logic and Existence.
Abstract: This review essay critically maps the Anglophone reception of Lyotard's Discourse, Figure onto the text's own two-part organization. Earlier deconstructive readings tended to focus on the critique of structuralism presented in Discourse, Figure’s first half, under-emphasizing (and even criticizing) the post-Freudian philosophy of desire developed by Lyotard in the text's latter stages. This essay instead presents Lyotard's first major work not as two separable or opposed parts, but as a coherent trajectory responding to a specific philosophical problem, namely, the Hegelian account of sense-perception and signification as outlined in Hyppolite's Logic and Existence. In so doing, this review essay seeks to isolate key references and clarify the stakes for future readings of Lyotard's text.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that policing within a cosmopolitan legal order should be conceptualized as a form of societal peacekeeping, which functions to maintain the conditions necessary for the enjoyment of human rights.
Abstract: Cosmopolitans call for the creation of a global legal order based around the principle of universal human rights. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that cosmopolitans have not adequately addressed the issue of how such a global order would be policed. The emergence of stable legal systems has generally coincided with the development of formal and informal methods of policing that function to enforce legal entitlements and maintain societal order. This suggests that the issue of policing should be addressed if cosmopolitanism is to be defended as a desirable and realistic project for reforming the global order. This paper proposes that policing within a cosmopolitan legal order should be conceptualized as a form of societal peacekeeping, which functions to maintain the conditions necessary for the enjoyment of human rights. It rejects the idea of a unitary global police force modelled on the professional agencies established by the modern state, in favour of a plural approach that calls for cosmopolita...
TL;DR: The photograph of Ai Weiwei's middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art as discussed by the authors. But can we see beyond the middle finger?
Abstract: The photograph of Ai Weiwei’s middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art. But can we see beyond the middle finger? Here I argue that...
TL;DR: The authors investigates the possibility of an account of cosmopolitan thought inspired by Hegel's treatment of Kant's ethical theory and his associated social concept of recognition, and shows that it is possible to extrapolate Hegel's outline of the state in the Philosophy of Right to describe a global community coherent with such a subject.
Abstract: The following paper investigates the possibility of an account of cosmopolitan thought inspired by Hegel's treatment of Kant's ethical theory and his associated social concept of recognition. Cosmopolitanism requires the agent to recognize themself as a global agent participating in a shared community, but conventional political strategies do not possess the resources to satisfy this demand for self-understanding. Such a self-understanding is enabled by the objective freedom of a common shared humanity grounded in rational self-determination. The paper shows that it is possible to extrapolate Hegel's outline of the state in the Philosophy of Right (perhaps contrary to Hegel's own intuitions) to describe a global community coherent with such a subject.
TL;DR: The authors consider the use of the resources made available by philosopher Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein as an alternative for the analysis of everyday violence and suggest that the articulation of biopolitics and its forms of indirect murder as a general phenomenon fail to describe the prior or framing conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others to becoming d...
Abstract: Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist Veena Das's work on sexual violence, this paper considers the surprising use by a number of contemporary post-Foucauldian theorists of the resources made available by philosopher Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein as an alternative for the analysis of everyday violence. Having discussed a further tenor of criticism of Foucault – suggestions that the articulation of biopolitics and its forms of indirect murder as a general phenomenon fail to describe the prior or framing conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others to becoming d...