Concept and Politics in Derrida and Deleuze

Abstract

This paper points to significant similarities between the political orientations of Deleuze and Derrida. Derrida's appeal to a pure form of existing concepts (absolute hospitality, pure forgiveness, and so on) parallels Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between relative and absolute ‘deterritorialisation’. In each case, the absolute form of the concept is a condition of the possibility of change.     

Hannah Arendt on Kant, Truth and Politics

Hannah Arendt is right to give prominence to Kant's Critique of Judgment—for that work contains Kant's fullest treatment of 'ends' and purposes, and Kantian politics (embracing universal republicanism and eternal peace) is meant to be a 'legal' realization of moral ends (when 'good will' alone is too weak to produce what ought to be). But Arendt is wrong to try to extract a 'new' Kantian politics from Judgment's aesthetic ideas: Kantian politics is already 'there', and need not be squeezed out of his theory of art. She has chosen the right work, but given it a bizarre reading.     

德里达与逻各斯中心主义

德里达对西方思想提出了一个著名的诊断,认为西方哲学史是逻各斯中心主义的历史。本文主要从以下三个方面解读德里达的这一思想:第一,逻各斯中心主义实际上是以存在论问题为核心的形而上学;第二,海德格尔在存在论差异问题上的观点给了德里达走出逻各斯中心主义的契机;第三,结构主义语言学为德里达提供了反逻各斯中心主义的工具。     

Nancy and Kant on Inoperative Communities

Abstract

This essay argues that Kant's explanation of the purposiveness-without-a-purpose of beauty (in the third Critique) can help to make sense of Nancy's theory of the inoperative community.     

Question,ethos, event: Foucault on Kant and Enlightenment

The use of labour values as a basis for economic calculation in a socialist economy is defended. A resource allocation mechanism is outlined that uses a combination of labour value calculation with market clearing prices for consumer goods. Conditions for full employment are specified. A type theoretic analysis of economic calculation is presented. Information theory is used to estimate the information content of real price vectors. It is demonstrated that both price calculations and value calculations are type theory equivalent and that both involve information loss. It is shown that modern computer technology is capable of computing up to date labour values with comparative ease.     

Derrida on Identity and Difference: A Radical Democratic Reading of The Other Heading

Abstract

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.     

The Morality of Sex: Contra Kant

Abstract

While much that is admirable in romanticism stems from Kant's philosophy, a better account of how sexuality can be an ethical possibility exceeds the cramped parameters that he imposes. His conception of marriage and its dependence upon a contractual exchange of rights may well be irremediable because of its formal emptinesses. His idea of human love as good will and an interest in the welfare of the beloved is defensible as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough to explain the morality of love, either in sexuality or in marriage.     

Antinomies of race: diversity and destiny in Kant

ABSTRACT

Larrimore's essay reads Kant's pioneering work in the theory of race in the context of his thought as a whole. Kant wrote on race for most of his career; at different stages of his thinking, race assured meaning in human diversity, confirmed the value of a practical-reason-informed understanding of human destiny, and provided a model for the ‘pragmatic’ knowledge of what ‘man can and should make of himself’. ‘Race’ was invented in 1775 as an advertisement for the new disciplines of geography and anthropology that Kant inaugurated and promoted throughout his career. Giving new meaning to a foreign (French) term associated with animal husbandry, Kant presented the (supposedly) exceptionlessly hereditary traits of race as the first fruit of a truly scientific ‘natural history’ of humanity. His concerns were not merely classificatory; his four-race schema, modeled on the temperaments, allowed a special status for Whites as at once a race and the transcendence of race (Kant invented ‘whiteness’ as well as ‘race’). The notion of ‘race’ was refined in essays Kant published in the 1780s, in the same journal as his celebrated essays on Enlightenment and the philosophy of history. It was given a new status, rather than displaced, by the critical turn. Granted a sanction ‘similar’ to the postulates of pure practical reason, its empirical verification would confirm Kant's whole critical system. Kant's theory of race came into its own in the 1790s, gaining wide acceptance. He relied on familiarity with it (and its lingering association with animal husbandry) in explaining the larger project of the ‘pragmatic anthropology’ without which he thought human progress impossible. Understanding how the concept of race contributed to Kant's more familiar and still appealing intellectual and practical concerns, we gain a better sense of its fateful and enduring attractiveness in subsequent eras.     

On cosmopolitan humility and the arrogance of states

ABSTRACT

One of the potentially most significant objections to a cosmopolitan moral approach charges an essential arrogance: cosmopolitanism disdains particularist moral insights even while – in what is said to be its most coherent form – it seeks to bind all persons within global political institutions. It is argued here that adopting a form of institutional cosmopolitanism actually helps to meet this sort of objection. An appropriately configured such approach will have a conception of equal global citizenship at its core. It will seek to place individuals in relations of political humility, understood not as plain deference to competing moral claims, but as concrete recognition of the equal moral status of others. It will seek to progressively empower as actual citizen equals those whose interests are often ‘arrogantly’ neglected in the current system, and to multiply mechanisms of input and challenge for them over time.     

Assimilation and enlightenment

He is a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The Jewish Quarterly,and other journals. His most recent book is Modernity and the Holocaust.     

Putting Politics First: The Impact of Politics on American Religious and Secular Orientations

Nearly all research on the political impact of Americans’ religious and secular orientations assumes that such orientations are exogenous to politics. Using multiwave panel and experimental data, we find that religious and secular orientations are endogenous to political orientations. In other words, religion and secularism are a consequence as well as a cause of politics. In showing this, we make three major contributions. First, we conceptualize and measure secular orientations in a new way—not just as the absence of religion, but also as an affirmative secular identity and positive commitment to secular principles. Second, our panel and experimental data allow for the most definitive test to date of whether political orientations exert a causal effect on religious and secular orientations. Third, we isolate the conditions under which politics affects religious–secular perspectives, thus identifying the mechanism that underlies political orientations.     

Introduction: theorizing different forms of belonging in a cosmopolitan Malaysia

This article introduces this special issue on new ethnoscapes of a cosmopolitan Malaysia. It investigates questions of belonging and analyses the conditions that make possible cosmopolitan solidarity between citizens and sub- and non-citizens in a globalized world. I posit several critical frameworks on cosmopolitanism, citizenship and the public sphere to theorize the relationship between citizens and non-citizens in Malaysia: ‘zones of sovereignty’, the refugee as homo sacer and ‘acts of citizenship’ that constitute rights and subjecthood for non-citizens. In an attempt to outline a more detailed ethnography of everyday ways of belonging, I touch briefly on Conradson's ‘spaces of care’. Lastly, I focus on the public sphere, which can be a barometer for gauging whether cosmopolitan solidarity and transnational crossings can occur.