Adorno's Contemplative Ethics

Abstract

This paper argues that there is an ethics of contemplation that is internal to Adorno's critique of modern functionalised and administered societies. It is argued here that ‘contemplation’ is Adorno's name for a praxis by which one is open to the other, and yet can let the other be. Adorno sees a kernel of experience in such contemplative practices, which, although increasingly being stripped bare by the modern world, is the basis for its possible critique.     

From Critique to Reconstruction: On Axel Honneth's Theory of Recognition and its Critical Potential

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse Axel Honneth's theory of recognition by focusing on two distinct methodological approaches present in it, namely, critique and reconstruction. The critical moment in Honneth's theory of recognition is articulated around two concepts: world-disclosing critique, which is based on the attempt to suggest new and provocative points of view on social reality through the usage of rhetorical devices; and misrecognition, as the empirical starting-point for the theoretical model. These two notions, which can be traced back to Adorno and the so called "first generation" of the Frankfurt School, are interpreted as the mainlines of the diagnostic moment in Honneth's critical theory, as they provide an effective analytical insight into the reality of social suffering. Furthermore, they represent the basic fundament upon which the second level, reconstruction, is articulated. By bringing to light the core aspects of social interaction, they provide the initial clues for the development of the normative framework of recognition, the formal idea of a "good life". The final part of the paper argues that such an interpretation of Honneth's theory of recognition helps to overcome some of its most problematic aspects and thus to deepen its critical potential.     

Deleuze and Guattari's Historiophilosophy: Philosophical Thought and its Historical Milieu

Abstract

This paper will examine the relation between philosophical thought and the various milieus in which such thought takes place using the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It will argue that Deleuze and Guattari's assessment of this relation involves a rearticulation of philosophy as an historiophilosophy. To claim that Deleuze and Guattari promote such a form of philosophy is contentious, as their work is often noted for implementing an ontological distinction between becoming and history, whereby the former is associated with the act of creation and the latter with retrospective representations of this creative process. Furthermore, when elaborating on the creative nature of philosophical thought, Deleuze and Guattari explicitly refer to philosophy as a geophilosophy that is in contrast to history. Nevertheless, this paper will demonstrate that far from abandoning the category of history, Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the relations between philosophical thought and relative milieus suggests to us an historical ontology and methodology that is a critical part of philosophy's nature.     

How to read Michelle Obama

ABSTRACT

Michelle Obama's role as the first African American First Lady is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation as a professional woman, mother and spouse is directed towards a wider representativeness that is new in American political discourse. As a descendant of slaves and slave owners whose American ancestry can be traced back to the 1850s, she can lay claim to an African American legacy that the President lacks. As a result, some of her more controversial statements during the presidential campaign about the black family, class mobility and national pride need to be read in the context of an African American literature and historiography that challenges the American creed of equality, liberty and unconditional love of one's country. Michelle Obama's family history, her Princeton undergraduate thesis and her own words in interviews are analysed here in the discursive context of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Richard Powers's The Time of Our Singing, and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave-girl, as well as the historiography of the civil rights movement. Such a reading reveals how Michelle Obama's background weaves the legacy of slavery into the American fabric, and shows that a redemptive construction of American history—in which the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Obama presidency are taken as fulfilment of the American creed (and of Martin Luther King's dream)—must be refused if a new national self-definition with African America at its heart is to take its place.     

Towards a Kantian Moral Psychology or the Practical Effects of Self-Predicating Judgements of Sublimity

Abstract

This essay develops an account of the link between Kant's aesthetics and his ethics. It does so by articulating a Kantian account of moral psychology by way of aesthetic reflective judgements of sublimity. Since judgements of sublimity enrich the picture of a Kantian subject by forcefully revealing the unbounded power of the faculty of reason, I investigate the possibility that judgements of this kind could serve as a basis for moral motivation. The paper first shows how judgements of sublimity help a subject recognize reason's unbounded nature, and proceeds to analyse the practical effects of a subject judging itself sublime. When judgements of sublimity have as their object the unbounded and unsythesizable power of reason, they may thereby serve as the basis for both the recognition of our moral vocation, and the grounds for determining the will to act from respect for it. Since a judgement of sublimity produces for Kant the experience of an enlivening emotion and an outflowing of vital forces, the paper then develops Kant's concept of “life” motivated by a recognition of its practical orientation. In this way sublimity rather than beauty can be interpreted as symbolic hypotyposis of morality. The paper then takes up less favourable interpretations of the practical effects of self-predicated judgements of sublimity, and constructs critical responses to such positions. I conclude, following Adorno, by stressing the historical and social dimension of the capacities for both making sublime judgements, and being morally enlivened by them.     

Images of Labour

Abstract

This paper looks at the continuities and changes in the nature of election campaigns in Britain since 1900 by focusing on the way campaigning has changed and become more professional and marketing driven. The piece discusses the ramifications of these developments in relation to the Labour Party's ideological response to mass communication and the role now played by external media in the internal affairs of this organisation. The paper also seeks to assess how campaigns have historically developed in a country with an almost continuous, century long cycle of elections.     

Paul Gilroy: Race and culture in postmodernity

Abstract

Using archival evidence, this paper tries to use Callon's idea of ‘embeddedness of the economy in economics’ in order to understand the process of economization of India under the East India Company. The Company's state self-consciously tried to construct an economic terrain by using their coercive power, but the rise of the market did not lead to the proliferation of ‘calculative agencies’. The paper seeks to explore the reasons behind this by delving deeper into the history and politics of marketization in colonial India and by reflecting on some unexamined presuppositions of the process of economization.     

Mahmud Muhammad Taha and the Rise and Demise of the Jumhuri Movement

Mahmud Muhammad Taha founded the Jumhuri (Republican) Party in 1945 in the context of the fight for Sudan's independence. The nature of the party's ideology went through a radical change after Taha emerged from a mystical retreat in 1951. In the light of this ideology, the party advocated a "neo-Islamist" position committed to a reconciliation of Islam and modernity. Some of Taha's social and political stances are critically examined. Particular attention is paid to the reasons at the root of the demise of the Jumhuri movement after Taha's execution in January of 1985.     

A Semiotics of the Proxy

This paper approaches the stand-for relationship that is fundamental to semiotics from the point of view of a specific semiotic situation: that of relationships of proxy whereby a person is authorised to act for an absent party. I hope to open up the question of what a semiotics of the proxy might look like, but also make some observations about semiotics-in-general as a discipline reliant on proxy relationships. The paper makes special use of Derrida's writings on communication and Peirce's theory of signs. My reading of Derrida and Peirce is not exhaustive, but rather seeks to highlight the way that both thinkers provide useful frameworks for discussing the example of the proxy, and the challenges it represents.     

Critical Theory and the Two-Level Account of Recognition - Towards a New Foundation?

Abstract

Axel Honneth makes initial and promising steps towards what could be called a two-level account of recognition, according to which the normatively substantial forms of recognition represent various manners in which the primordial acquaintedness with others is expressed. It will be argued that Honneth's promising approach must be revised in regard to the issue of intentionality, which may be achieved by reference to earlier critical theorists such as Adorno and Arendt. With such a foundation, critical theory can enter into new fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue.     

Political Theory,Critical Theory,and the Place of the Frankfurt School

Abstract

This paper explores the paradox of the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory where the notion of "critical theory" became identified with aesthetics and asks whether the disappearance of the political dimension of critical theory was necessary. This disappearance of the political also presents some uncomfortable affinities between it and postmodernism. But in the more sober world after 1989, post-communism poses more relevant questions than post-modernism for an assessment of the history of the Frankfurt School. The political project of the old Frankfurt School has to be revivified - or at least given a decent burial.     

China and the world: Perception and analysis

Abstract

This paper considers whether China's images of itself may have influenced analyses of China from the outside, and thereby skewed understanding. A sense of Chineseness, of a culture and civilization which is somehow very different from any other, is a recurrent theme in China's history and in the history of Europe's direct contacts with China. Acceptance by Europeans of such images as true representations of China is itself a tradition which stretches back many centuries, and the sentiment of China's uniqueness often seems to have been drawn into contemporary studies of China.     

Deleuze and literature: Metaphor and indirect discourse

This paper deals primarily with Deleuze's work on literature? but also looks briefly at related ideas in the books on cinema. Deleuze has often concentrated on what he calls ‘American‘ literature, particularly in Critique and clinlque. The first part of the paper seeks to outline some of the main elements of this particular literary field for Deleuze. The paper then goes on to show how the general rejection of metaphor that informs Deleuze's work on literature can be more precisely defined as a theory of free indirect discourse. The concept of free indirect discourse is? as Frangois Zourabichvili has shown, at the heart of Deleuze's work? aesthetic or otherwise. For example, the idea of the percept functions as an aesthetic application of free indirect discourse, and Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 suggest that this form of enunciation represents a new aesthetic cogito to which cinema is ideally suited.     

Back to Mangu Zambiri: Art,Politics and Identity in Northern Sudan

This paper is an attempt in cultural criticism from a certain aesthetic standpoint to investigate how the arts can give insight into the identity problem of Northern Sudanese. Given the archaeological and historical refutation of migration theory and the consolidation of the notion of the ethnic continuity of the central riverain inhabitants (the Ja'liyyin) as Nubians, the paper disputes the other characterization of them as a "culturally" Arabized Sudanese. To prove this, the long neglected aesthetic dimension as an essential component of culture is underlined. Challenging certain Arabocentric musical and literary discourses, the "Sudanese" nature of some aspects of Northern music and poetry is stressed. The concept "Sudanization" is adopted to define a historically ongoing key process which manifests itself in the arts. Also the term "specification" is used to describe alternative political and aesthetic discourses to define Sudanese identity such as the discourse of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and other forces.     

Alienation and Belonging - Women's Citizenship and Emancipation: Visions for Sudan's Post-Islamist Future

This essay examines Sudanese Islamist debates about the position of women within an Islamic framework, oppositional groups' stances on the nature of a post-Islamist Sudan and women's role in the nation. The author critiques oppositional groups for a lack of vision for a post-Islamist gender egalitarian Sudan and feminism for its lack of clarity about the concept of women's emancipation. The author argues that all groups in Sudan have not extended a visionary approach to women, but have been limited to expressions about "women's rights." Using the concepts of "emancipation," "gender egalitarianism," "citizenship," "alienation," "belonging," and "subject," the author deconstructs segments of crucial political documents such as Islamic decrees, the new Sudanese Constitution (1998), the "Asmara Declaration" of the National Democratic Alliance, and various statements by political parties in exile. Using excerpts from women's narratives, the author attempts to illuminate Sudanese women's self-identification, belonging, and citizenship.     

Pandora's Box: Reflections on a Myth

Abstract

The article seeks to consider the relationship between hope and utopianism by looking at the ancient Greek myth of Pandora's Box, with its enigmatic figure of hope. It begins by considering Hesiod's influential formulation of the myth, before examining a range of modern interpretations in which diverse conceptions of hope are to be found. Using the work of Spinoza, Hume and Day an alternative conception of hope is proposed that conjoins hope with fear. This is followed by an exploration of the utopian, using this time another figure associated with the myth, Prometheus. An attempt is then made to differentiate the frequently conflated concepts of hope and the utopian. Finally, in the spirit of recent post-secularism, the two concepts are brought to bear on the nature of religion.     

Patterns within prejudice: antisemitism in the United States in the 1940s

ABSTRACT

Ziege compares two field studies on ethnocentrism, racism and antisemitism among American workers during the Second World War: ‘Antisemitism among American Labor’ (1945) by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research (ISR) in exile and Wartime Shipyard (1947) by Katherine Archibald at the University of California at Berkeley. The former was a large-scale team project headed by Friedrich Pollock, Theodor W. Adorno and Paul Massing, who had at their disposal a large number of fieldworkers as well as the support of the trade unions. Archibald worked in complete isolation. Yet, in spite of this and major differences in design and theory, the European Marxists and the American liberal came to similar conclusions: hostility towards Jews at that time had to be analysed in connection with hostility towards other groups (including women, Blacks, labourers from the American South and other ethnic and social minorities) and within the context of the war and the Holocaust. While aware of the innovations achieved in research by means of public opinion polls, both studies were pioneering in their ambition to improve on quantitative research by means of non-quantitative procedures and qualitative-participatory observation. Ziege links these studies to a third study, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), conducted by the ISR, particularly Adorno, which poses the question of how relevant the ISR's critical theory was for the innovations achieved in studies of prejudice, when Archibald's study, which eschewed social theory, arrived at similar conclusions regarding antisemitism.     

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.     

Beyond religious affinity: Malaysia's relations with countries in the Arab Gulf

Abstract

Economic and political changes at the global level have simultaneously shifted Malaysia's interests in the Arab Gulf countries. The economic liberalisation and transformation agenda that emerged in these economies are argued to be contributing factors to Malaysia's interest in expanding its economic relationships with the countries. Although the current cooperation between Malaysia and the Arab Gulf countries is aimed at reaping economic benefits, religious values also constitute an important foundation for these relationships. This article seeks to understand why politics, economics and religion remain the key drivers in determining Malaysia's relations with the Arab Gulf countries. The paper also suggests a future direction for engagement between Malaysia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries.     

Autonomy and Authenticity. On the Aporetic Nature of Time and History: Castoriadis—Heidegger

Abstract

This paper explores the aporetic nature of social and historical being as it emerges from a juxtaposition of the philosophies of Castoriadis and Heidegger with specific emphasis on their meditations on history, individuality and collective being. It is argued that any current attempts to grasp the problems posed by historical time should not overlook the conceptual space opened up by contrasting Castoriadis' theorisation of social-historical praxis as the enactment of autonomy expressed through the emergence of the ‘radically new’ with Heidegger's treatment of authentic historicity as fate and repetition. The attempt of both thinkers to break with the philosophical tradition of the West is examined from the perspective of their conceptions on time and history, while their opposing accounts serve to revaluate the traditional dichotomy between allegedly linear' and ‘cyclical’ conceptions of time. Additionally, it is argued that instead of treating Phenomenological-Hermeneutic and Marxist accounts as adverse and incompatible, our reflections on history and society are enriched by their juxtaposition. Castoriadis and Heidegger present us with the most promising individual cases of thinkers representing these philosophical schools mainly due to their emphasis on the historical dimension of human life and to their overall groundbreaking philosophical elaborations that resist labelling and defy confinement to specific philosophical or epistemic traditions.