One-way conversation with Philippe Van Parijs

This essay reacts to Philippe Van Parijs’s arguments in favor of English as the global lingua franca and in favor of the territorial protection of the languages of minority nations. I agree with both arguments. But I see the case for the lingua franca as a matter of convenience rather than justice. And I don’t link territorial protection to the emergence of English, but instead ground it as a fundamental right of national self-determination.     

Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.