The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society

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.     

Deleuze and the liberal tradition: normativity,freedom and judgement

This paper is a critical review article of Paul Patton's book, Deleuze and the Political , and analyzes the relationship between Deleuze and the 'liberal' tradition of political philosophy. It focuses on three concepts drawn from the liberal tradition - normativity, freedom and judgment - and in each case shows how these concepts are capable of being transformed in light of Deleuze's philosophy. For Deleuze, a truly 'normative' principle must be a principle of creation as well as critique: it must not only provide norms for condemning abuses of power, but also a means for transforming norms that have themselves become abuses of power. From a Deleuzian perspective, the normative is thus seen as the condition for the production of the new. The liberal notion of 'negative freedom' in turn finds itself transformed into the stronger notion of 'critical freedom' (Tully), which entails the freedom to critique and create, to transform (and not merely pursue) one's own interest and desires. This entails, finally, an exercise of a kind of judgement outside pre-existing rules or norms that would be truly creative of the new (e.g. the production of new rights). A concluding section of the concept of the 'social imaginary’ shows how Deleuze's work might contribute to a transformation and rejuvenation of the liberal tradition itself.     

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.     

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.     

Scar Literature reconsidered: Yan Geling's novels The Criminal Lu Yanshi and A Woman's Epic

This paper reconsiders the political dynamics, social disorder, and personal traumas endured during China's socialist revolutionary times by examining the Chinese American writer Yan Geling's (b. 1958) two Scar Literature novels, The Criminal Lu Yanshi (Lufan Yanshi, 2011) and A Woman's Epic (Yige nuren de shishi, 2006). Employing Hannah Arendt's theory on totalitarianism, this paper investigates how Mao's authoritarian rule transmutes Chinese society into an atomized and individualized society. It will reveal how this totalitarian rule over the Chinese intellectuals, by the brutal use of the re-education system, succeeded in isolating them, which then led to intense feelings of solitude. The objective of this paper is to undo and rectify the historical and cultural “memory loss” caused by the current trend of depoliticizing, commercializing, and sensualizing the socialist revolutionary memories as demonstrated by the televisual postmodern repackaging of the Maoist past to be found in the mediasphere of present-day China, which forgets the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as crimes against the Chinese people.     

The Daily Mail and the Stephen Lawrence Murder

The Daily Mail's coverage of the 1993 race murder of Stephen Lawrence has been held up as an example of newspaper journalism at its best. It is a cause of pride to the paper, which has asserted that its 1997 front page accusing five men of the murder, and the comment and reporting that followed, brought about significant social and policy changes and helped achieve justice. The coverage has also been cited by the paper to rebut critics who accuse it of intolerance. Examined in detail here and set in their context, the paper's claims about its role in the case prove to be either exaggerated or not supported by evidence. The Mail's engagement in the Lawrence case involved a famous instance of editorial brilliance, but insofar as its campaign brought about or contributed to changes, they were not usually changes sought by the paper and they were sometimes contrary to its aims.     

From Machenschaft to Biopolitics: A Genealogical Critique of Biopower

Abstract

This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault's ethical turn within biopolitical govern-mentality, along with Agamben's messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes.     

Sudpolitik: the political economy of Taiwan's trade with Southeast Asia

Abstract

In December 1993 the Taiwan government adopted a policy called nanjin zhengce or sudpolitik, a policy aimed at diverting part of Taiwan's trade and investment flows from China to Southeast Asia. This paper addresses the following questions: what is sudpolitik? why adopt such a policy? what are the economic, political, and strategic considerations in the pursuit of this policy? which countries are its specific targets? how do the countries directly affected by this policy respond to it? The paper also discusses the issue of Taiwan's aid in connection with sudpolitik. While the effectiveness of the policy is far from clear at present, the paper concludes with four observations: Taiwan's trade and aid are beginning to intertwine; Taiwan's diplomacy is largely economically or commercially led; Taiwan has achieved some positive results in improving its relations with Southeast Asian countries; and, Taiwan has reached a new stage in its economic development whereby it needs to invest overseas in order to sustain its economic growth. Overall, sudpolitik represents a novel step in Taiwan's diplomatic practice.     

Mexican Democracy and Its Discontents

This article describes the first stage of a major research project on public opinion and democratic consolidation in Mexico. That project, the Mexico 2006 Panel Study, comprises approximately 7,000 in‐depth interviews with ordinary Mexicans over the course of the upcoming presidential campaign. Its purpose is two‐fold: (1) to assess the degree to which Mexican political attitudes are supportive of democratic governance, and (2) to understand the role played by voters, politicians, party leaders, and the mass media in shaping Mexico's political agenda. Ultimately, the project aims to assess how faithfully Mexico's new political system can be expected to respond to the desires and beliefs of ordinary citizens.     

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.     

Compromising liberty: Friedrich Hayek's The road to serfdom in practice

Abstract

This paper examines a rare and unstudied piece of consultancy work undertaken in 1944 by Friedrich Hayek for the British Colonial Office and for the Government of Gibraltar. Hayek's subsequent reports suggested the reorganization of the state-regulated Gibraltar housing market in line with free market principles designed to relocate the colony's working-class population into neighbouring Spain. However, rather than freeing Gibraltarians from the evils of state planning, as identified in The road to serfdom (also 1944), this proposal would have delivered them into the dictatorship of General Franco. Not only was Franco's regime brutal, but it also practised autarkic economic policies virtually identical to those which Hayek maligned in The road to serfdom. In sum, Hayek's proposals would have benefited Gibraltar's landlords at the expense of the liberty of the majority of the civilian population.     

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.     

Keywords revisited: The present as history

The Partition of India (1947) is commonly understood as a violent territorial and political separation of peoples, their forced evictions and migration as well as communal upheavals. But India's Partition can be seen as something more than separation of communities and the creation of distinct national identities. This paper suggests that refugee rehabilitation, one of the important processes of the post-Partition years, formed the rubric through which we remember 1947. Rehabilitation and resettlement of refugees formed the narrativizing principle of a number of novels that were written in the 1960s and 1970s in Bengal that deliberately looked at the fall-outs of the Partition other than communal tensions and migrations. Rehabilitation created a different experiential reality for a large number of refugees, and issues of home, settlement, livelihood, and work created a new body of literature that re-looked at Partition in important ways. In the course of this paper I examine some such novels in Bangla; one of which, Shaktipada Rajguru's Dandak Theke Marichjhapi (From Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi), is the story of a group of refugees’ journey to Dandakarnaya and then onto Marichjhapi in the Sunderbans that probes the circumstances behind one of Partition's most forgotten histories.     

Bridging between Myanmar and international society – Japan's self-identity and kakehashi policy

Abstract

Numerous academic works have critiqued Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) programme for being mercantilist and failing to promote democratization and human rights (Orr 1990; Rix 1993; Arase 1995, 2005). Such accounts assess Japan's ODA policy from Western theoretical perspectives that advocate Western approaches, such as military and economic interventions to contain repressive states. While receptive to these criticisms, Japanese policy-makers have perceived their country's international role in ‘bridging’ (kakehashi) terms and structured their ODA accordingly, as this paper details in the case of Japan's ODA policy towards Myanmar. ¹ 1. Myanmar is used throughout this paper in place of Burma in line with the preference of the Japanese government. Burma is employed when referring to events prior to 1989. The rationale behind Japan's kakehashi approach lies in the construction of Japan's self-identity as a state able to reenter international society after World War II through focusing on economic development rather than military and coercive action. Proponents of the kakehashi approach construct Japan both as a model of successful democratization through development which other states can learn from, as well as the means through ODA to ‘bridge’ the divide between repressive regimes and liberal democratic capitalism. This critical approach examines Japan's kakehashi or bridging strategy in terms of Japan's response to the anti-government protests in September 2007, Cyclone Nargis in May 2008, and in the build up to parliamentary elections in November 2010 in Myanmar to demonstrate the permanence of this approach in spite of a change of government in Japan. In so doing, the kakehashi approach reveals opportunities to engage with, rather than contain, repressive regimes, thereby raising the possibility of enticing such states back into international society though economic incentives.     

Towards a neo-Polanyian approach to money: integrating the concept of debt

Abstract

This paper aims to reconsider Polanyi's approach to money. His best-known writing on money uses is deeply original and presents strong insights that dissociate money from the concept of the market. Polanyi also developed an interesting non-dichotomous understanding of money in his The great transformation. However, taken together, these two contributions lead to some unresolved questions: his critique of the orthodox approach to money is ambivalent; his argument to separate payment from account is weak; and, most important, he ultimately makes an incomplete break with the classical real/monetary dichotomy. This paper proposes a distinction between money as a set of instruments and practices and money as a concept, through the integration of John Commons's concept of debt into Polanyi's framework. This reformulation allows us to resolve Polanyi's unresolved questions while preserving his major contributions, and leads to a more complex understanding of money.     

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.     

A Policy Delphi study in the socialist Middle East

The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English-speaking consultants in an Arabic-speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran-Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.     

Public enterprise reform: Managerial autonomy,accountability and performance contracts

The underlying assumption in this paper is that autonomy and accountability are both fundamental prerequisites for the effective functioning of state-owned enterprises. The paper first examines the traditional, dichotomous approach to the autonomy-accountability conundrum. This approach posits the relationship as process oriented, pervasive, quantitative and based on a priori controls. A more recent view of control and accountability as a posteriori, qualitative, strategic, results-oriented and non-zero sum is then briefly analysed. The paper presents a review of the theory and practice of performance contracts (PC) as tools to implement the latter approach. Three basic models of PCs—Senegal's contrat plan, Pakistan's signalling system and India's memorandum of understanding—have been analysed, comparing the negotiating process, major players, substantive elements and results. The contrat plan is more of a legal document, at least in formal terms, than the other two. None of the three models, however, provides any sanctions in case of a violation of the contract by the governments. Although the Indian and Pakistani PCs appeared to be more successful than the Senegalese contracts, the relationship between financial performance and performance contracts remains far from conclusive. In all the three countries, the contracts have failed to provide a single window through which government-enterprise interface can be effectively managed. Thus the problem of multiple principals and single agents remains unresolved.     

Withdrawing (from) waste,and the end of law: reflections on DeLillo’s prophecies in Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997)

ABSTRACT

An often heard phrase these days is “There is something about this chaotic 21st century of ours ...”. This “something”, it is argued here, lies at the heart of a new form of life which has become predominant in recent decades in globalizing culture: the life of aspiring, radicalizing sovereigns. This “something”, then, could the called the end of Law. In an age of aspiring and radicalizing sovereigns the Law, indeed law in all its forms and shapes, has become not just an irrelevance, but a nuisance and embarrassment as well. One of the manifestations of this irreverent sovereign attitude is the growing inability to accept waste, that is, an inability to live with all that generates waste (i.e. Law), and an inability to live with all that is waste. Waste, i.e. the accumulation of spent potential, is not what the aspiring, radicalizing sovereign wants. The sovereign's desires are all about conserving all potential. Although this new form of life has become manifest only very recently, it had been predicted by the novelist Don DeLillo in his novels Mao II and Underworld. The themes and images in both these novels are the focus of this contribution.     

Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction

Michel Foucault's ‘archaeology’ and Erving Goffman's interpersonal sociology are complementary. Both are essential for understanding how classifications of people interact with the people classified, and hence for the author's studies of ‘making up people’. The paper begins by explaining how that project is rooted in an ‘existentialist’ conception of the person. It then uses Goffman's Asylums and Foucault's Folie et déraison - both published in 1961 - to illustrate how these methodologies reinforce each other.