Imaginary Turns in Critical Theory: Imagining Subjects in Tension

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine two turns towards the idea of the creative imagination in contemporary critical theory in the works of Axel Honneth and Cornelius Castoriadis. Honneth's work subsumes the idea of the creative imagination under the paradigm of mutual recognition. Castoriadis constructs the idea of the creative imagination from an ontological perspective. However, Castoriadis' idea of the primary autism of the creative imagination can be thrown into relief by Hegel's Jena Lectures. Hegel's and Castoriadis' work opens onto a subjectivity in tension, that is, a subjectivity that is forged out of a combination of subjective interiority, as well as the patterns of interaction that are multidimensional in their scope and create social spaces that force the subject beyond an initial closure.     

The Absolute Stranger: Shakespeare and the Drama of Failed Assimilation

Abstract

While Shakespeare's historical and political imagination mainly centres on the traditional character of the stranger or exile, The Merchant of Venice and Othello stand out as dramas about a new figure, the absolute stranger. The absolute stranger belongs to a new situation Shakespeare found in cosmopolitan Venice. Through Shylock and Othello, Shakespeare encounters the drama of the outsider's failed assimilation into cosmopolitan life. For Shakespeare, the figure of the absolute stranger is a representative illusion, and these two plays are dramas about the modern world.     

Imagination and Tragic Democracy

Abstract

Cornelius Castoriadis is one of the very few social and political philosophers - modern and ancient - for whom a concept of imagination is truly central. In his work, however, the role of imagination is so overarching that it becomes difficult to grasp its workings and consequences in detail, in particular in its relation to democracy as the political form in which autonomy is the core imaginary signification. This article will proceed by first suggesting some clarifications about Castoriadis's employment of the concept. This preparatory exploration will allow us in a second step to discuss why the idea of democracy is closely linked to tragedy, and why this linkage in turn is dependent on the centrality of imagination for human action. In a third conceptual step, finally, we suggest that any concept of imagination will need to take into account the plurality and diversity of the outcomes of the power of imagination. Thus, the question of the nature of the novelty that imagination creates needs to be addressed as well as the one of the agon in the face of different imagined innovations in a given democratic political setting. As a consequence of this shift in emphasis, to be elaborated further, one will be able to say more about one question of which Castoriadis was well aware, which he never addressed himself in detail, though: the decline and end of polities and political forms, the question of political mortality.     

The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics

Abstract

The central claim of this essay is that Habermas' pro gram of discourse ethics fails to establish the necessary immanent connection between the universality of discourse ethics and the quasi-transcendentalism, which is supposed to provide its ground. Habermas' attempt to avoid the spectre of subjectivism leads him to develop an understanding of universalism that hinges on a critical error, the confusion of subjectivity with ethical sub stance. Using Castoriadis' theory of the imagination to illuminate this failure, I demonstrate the way in which Habermas' moral theory of discourse inadvertently harbours a moral-imaginary horizon, a pre-political kernel which undercuts its capacity to serve as a universalist ethic.     

Who Needs Leaders the Most? The Interactive Effect of Leadership and Core Self-Evaluations on Commitment to Change in the Public Sector

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to shed light on an understudied topic in public administration, namely, commitment to organizational change. Specifically, this study examines the extent to which the quality of the relationship between employees and their managers positively influences employees’ commitment to change. Further, it investigates whether this relationship varies as a function of a person's core self-evaluations, that is, the valence of a person's self-regard. Evidence from a multivariate regression analysis in a public sector organization at the local level in the UK revealed that individuals who have high-quality relationships with their managers are more likely to be accepting of change; this is especially true for individuals with lower levels of core self-evaluations. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Providence Lost: ‘September 11’ and the History of Evil

Abstract

This paper discusses the philosophical significance of ‘September 11’ by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori's dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate ‘September 11’ to Kant's versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism.     

Durkheim and the Reflexive Condition of Modernity

Abstract

In this essay, Durkheim's work is approached from a double vantage point. One vantage point looks at Durkheim's work with a post-classical attitude that inter sects the ontological recasting of the social in the work of Castoriadis. It is in the context of social opening that will concentrate on Durkheim's work as it presents a model of reflexivity that concentrates on the historical development of the modern period. Durkheim's model of reflexivity also opens onto the other vantage point of political modernity, which is viewed as a particular constellation of the circulation of power, especially in nation-states, open forms of reflexivity, and democracy, in contrast to another political modernity that revolves around closed socially reflexive forms of totalitarianism and terrorism. Durkheim's work can be a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of political modernity because his theorisation occurs in a way that opens onto the historical development of its mode of reflexivity.     

Post-racial paradoxes: rethinking European racism and anti-racism

ABSTRACT

The advent of a post-racial understanding of racism has changed the way in which Europe sees itself and its ethnic minorities. The concept of the post-racial emerged in the United States to describe a belief that America was no longer a racist society and the election of Barack Obama to the highest office in the land was a public and highly visible confirmation of that state of affairs. A global post-racial culture has taken hold of western plutocracies in which racism is universally denounced but increasingly difficult to pin down. Sayyid's study, by using a decolonial analytics, examines the different ways in which racism is imagined and how this imagination shapes the way in which the post-racial appears. The paper goes on to sketch out an alternative account of the post-racial as an aspect of the various trends that have been described as being post-political.     

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.     

The age of apology: evidence from the Israeli public discourse

At the time of its presentation, Derrida's 'Force of law' represented deconstruction's perhaps most direct statement on the possibility of justice and its most explicit engagement with law. The ensuing responses to that paper have typically focused on deconstruction's position regarding the force and authority of law, and especially on what is taken as Derrida's theory of justice. As such, 'Force of law' is often discussed in isolation to mainstream legal philosophy or is otherwise understood to represent a radical counter to that tradition. It is possible to take a different direction, however, by considering the event of that paper's presentation and reception in relation not only to the existing disciplines of legal studies, but also to the problematic of discipline itself. Re-reading some of the work of contemporary legal philosophy in the light of that problematic may thus enable a certain questioning of the disciplinary divisions whose very institution underscores the 'radical' nature of deconstruction's 'critique' of traditional understandings of law. Such a re-reading may even allow a speculation upon a certain (trans)disciplinarity of deconstruction, reconsidering the latter's relation to traditions.     

Lavascape: legal spectacle at Kīlauea

ABSTRACT

In considering the theme “Exploring Legal Discourse: A Sociosemiotic (Re)Construction,” this paper examines the symbolic relationship between law and chaos in the changing landscape of Kīlauea Volcano on Hawai’i Island. The socio-legal dimensions of this relationship provide insight into law’s project of governance in the dynamic natural environment. Most recently, in the summer of 2018, lava spouted and then flowed from Kīlauea in over twenty-four fissures which opened up within two heavily populated residential subdivisions. Law's response to the ensuing chaos provides keen insight into the epistemological positionality of law toward nature. In an attempt to tame this enlivened lavascape of persons and lava, law asserts authority over the spectacle in the areas of sightseeing, access, and mapping. In other words, the legal spectacle of lava eruption is an attempt to jurisdictionally frame the legal imagination of human risk in this dynamic landscape through legal semiotics, legal materiality, and legal topology. However, as this paper will explore, the source of chaos is actually law itself. Attempts to manage chaos are actually attempts to manage human nature as visitation to the erupting volcanic environment is ultimately beyond law's complete control. In a larger sense, this study of Kīlauea's lavascape as a constructed legal spectacle illustrates the phenomenological framing of law's incomplete jurisdiction over kinetic environments.     

Constraining Political Transformation: The Two Faces of Activist Religious Organizations in the Search for a New Constitution in Kenya

Abstract

Religious organizations are key structural components of Kenyan civil society that have played or continue to play a critical role in socio-political developments. In the last two and half decades especially, religious institutions have been among the principal actors shaping the mechanics and trajectories of Kenya's political order. But religious organizations’ political behaviour, especially in the country's search for a new constitution, was contentious and remarkably inconsistent. There were moments of progressive actions but also behaviour that imperilled progress. This article probes this ambivalence of Kenyan faith groups in the struggles for a new constitution. It is argued that their political behavioural inconsistencies largely reflect an ethnic, class and, to a lesser extent, instrumentalized doctrinal or denominational schism that is ever present in the wider Kenyan society. By analysing how religious leaders and their organizations challenged political elite domination while remaining amenable to its influence, this article illustrates the contradictions of elite pacts in these struggles and how they constrained progressive transformation.     

Developmental states in transition: adapting,dismantling, innovating,not ‘normalizing’

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasingly vigorous debate by a wide range of participants over the past, present and future of Japanese security and the national defence policy. Ever since the end of the Cold War, international relations theorists have cast their gaze to Japan, and have been given to re-examining ‘comprehensive security’ with a particular eye for the meaning of ‘security’. The 1990s were a particularly interesting time for this scholarly revisionism, while events of September 2001 have cast an entirely different spectre on the nature and expectations of Japanese security, both domestically and internationally. This article is particularly concerned with the developments in the 1990s as scholars sought to reassert the ‘defence’ component of the comprehensive security policy hitherto pursued by Japan. This re-examination has elevated former Japanese Defence Agency (JDA) bureaucrat Kubo Takuya as the key architect in crafting Japan's security policy. Tsuyoshi Kawasaki's contributions to the debate are especially interesting on this point. He rightly challenges the short-comings of the so-called ‘domestic-constructivists’, especially Berger and Katzenstein. However, in attempting to demolish their cases for ‘selective biases’ he then proceeds to selectively argue a similarly biased case in asserting the superiority of yet another derivation of the realist cause – ‘postclassical realism’. His key premises are based on his interpretations of the architect of Japan's National Defence Program Outline, Kubo, and in doing so ‘proves’ the military aspect of Japan's security policy and its ‘inherent superiority’ as an explanatory framework. Equally, one can mount a case for the ‘comprehensive security’ proponents by citing the work and presence of the late Okita Saburo in his contributions to understanding post-war security policy. This article will demonstrate a similar argument to that of Kawasaki's based on an analogous analytical framework which grounds Japanese security consciousness in a deeper historical context. It is part of a larger project which seeks to give empirical substance to constructivist interpretations of Japanese security.     

The Sacred,Social Creativity and the State

Abstract

This paper explores the specific contribution of a strand of contemporary French social theory founded by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort to the under standing of human power. It formulates a conception of power that transcends its definitions in terms of physical coercion or institutionalised violence to reveal the way power is creative and institutes the social. Its reflection on the cultural nature of political power and it role in society is shown to extend the pioneering reflection of Durkheim's sociology, especially as regards the homology that exists between religion and politics. The social role performed by the state explored by Durkheim prefigures Gauchet's theory of the state, which builds on Lefort's work. Gauchet's theory can be said to elaborate a critical synthesis of the two stands of Durkheim's work: the sociology of religion and the sociology of the modern state. This synthesis raises questions on the role played by the European state in the development of individualism, in both its political and economic manifestations.     

Regional arrangements for providing liquidity in a financial crisis: developments in East Asia

Abstract

During the last decade three books have had a disproportionate impact on China Studies because of their controversial interpretations: Jenner's The Tyranny of History, which predicts the disintegration of the Chinese state; Menzies' 1421: The Year China Discovered the World, which describes how Chinese sailors circumnavigated the globe well before any Europeans; and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography Mao: The Unknown Story. All are revisionist histories that amongst other (usually controversial) conclusions suggest there has been a conspiracy to keep the information they convey hidden. Considering their arguments and the manner of their enquiry and expression is interesting in more general ways about the construction of narrative and the nature of conspiracy, as well as about the lessons for academic research.     

Powerhouses or pretenders? Debating China's and India's emergence as technological powers

Abstract

Are China and India emerging as innovative technological powerhouses in the twenty-first century? This essay reviews the interdisciplinary debate that has been inspired by this question in recent years. It begins by considering recent studies that are relatively impressed with China's and India's recent accomplishments and potential in this regard. Next, it reviews works that are less impressed with their track records and prospects. It then considers a series of more equivocal studies that remain more or less undecided about China's and India's technological trajectories. The final section evaluates the debate as a whole and proposes new directions for scholarship in this field.     

The North Korean factor in the improvement of Japanese intelligence capability

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, human rights have been a contentious issue for relations between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the European Union (EU), especially in the Asia–Europe Meeting (ASEM). It is an issue that has constantly led to tensions in interregional cooperation. However, the ASEAN–EU dialogue on human rights has, in fact, had a significant impact on regional dynamics by stimulating the process of regional identity formation, especially in Southeast Asia. The core mechanism through which this development takes place is that of interaction, the process in which the two regional groupings engage while negotiating human rights policy. It can be argued, therefore, that interregional and intraregional human rights interactions are mutually dependent. ASEAN's rather confrontational mode of interaction with the European Union in relation to human rights has served as a catalyst for the dynamic growth of a collective definition of self in ASEAN. It has led to an ‘essentialization’ of ASEAN's idea of self as opposed to a common other, something which has undermined the possibility of maintaining an interregional dialogue that is not confrontational. However, it has also contributed to the development of a regional space for communicating about human rights and has thus played a central role in the gradual transformation of ASEAN's collective identity formation.     

Reason and the Restlessness of the Speculative: Jean-Luc Nancy's Reading of Hegel

Abstract

This paper examines Jean-Luc Nancy's interpretation of Hegel, focusing in particular on The Restlessness of the Negative. It is argued that Nancy's reading represents a significant break with other post-structuralist readings of Hegel by taking his thought to be non-metaphysical. The paper focuses in particular on the role Nancy gives to the negative in Hegel's thought. Ultimately Nancy's reading is limited as an interpretation of Hegel, since he gives no sustained explanation of the self-correcting function of reason.     

Structure and Strategies: Two Faces of Civic Activism in India

Abstract

This paper explains the success of civic actors in achieving their aims by reference to their organizational structure. Based on a comparison of a religious nationalist movement and a women's movement in South Asia, I argue that organizational structure is closely linked to the success of a social movement. The lack of coordination and collaboration among women's groups in terms of mission and strategy has led to a perception of the overall movement as weak and marginal. The superior coordination of strategy and mission within the religious nationalist movement have allowed it to effectively use its resources to cause great changes in Indian society.