'Politics' tag archive

What, then, should the new relationship between society and individual consist of? First, it involves a new concept of citizenship, in which rights and responsibilities go together.… As is so clear the more you examine the rise in crime and social disorder in Britain, the problem has been that the Left has tended to undervalue […]

Philosophy is popular in Britain at the moment, if the media be the measure; albeit mainly in the guise of a ʻguide to happinessʼ – a television guide and a happiness of a rather minimal sort. [1] Radicalism is not so popular, Ken Livingstoneʼs victory in the London mayoral contest notwithstanding (although we may be […]

Commentary Dictators and democrats in Latin America But can the poor tell the difference? Madeleine davis The recent Chilean Supreme Court decision to strip General Augusto Pinochet of his self-granted immunity from criminal prosecution has been widely welcomed, not only because it keeps alive the possibility that Pinochet, having escaped Spanish justice, may yet face […]

Levinas’s political judgement The Esprit articles 1934–1983 Howard caygill Lebanon, Levinas revealed a capacity for political judgement that at first glance seems remote from the prevailing picture of Levinasian ethics. While refusing the synthesis of realpolitik and mysticism that to some extent characterized the Likud era in Israeli politics, Levinas was nevertheless forthright in making […]

Augusto Pinochetʼs defenders are not entirely wrong. They realized what was at stake in the judicial battle over the ex-dictatorʼs extradition to Spain, and as such they have been often less distracted than his accusers. At stake was not so much the guilt or innocence of one individual as, rather, the very constitution of Chilean […]

Commentary Art, politics and provincialism John roberts The Sunday afternoon I visited the recent ʻProtest & Surviveʼ exhibition at Londonʼs Whitechapel Gallery, I was witness within a period of twenty minutes to four different demonstrations outside the gallery. A single demonstration outside a gallery these days is pretty rare; four is a miracle. That they […]

An end can be a goal or a terminus. The end in question here is both, as a matter of logic if not intention or accomplished fact. [1] The historical form I have in mind, in so far as it mediates expressly political claims, is paradoxical, implying the dissolution of politics in its central modern […]

What is living and what is dead in Swedish social democracy? Magnus ryner Seeming to confirm that politics proceeds through contradiction, the essentials of a neoliberal project – the subordination of the social to market discipline – has been consolidated in Europe by social-democratic governments. As yet another political project which is referred to as […]

Bruce Robbinsʼs excellent article in RP 116 points up the paradox of cosmopolitanism – that it seems ʻperpetually torn between an empirical dimension and a normative dimensionʼ. [1] For Robbins, the paradox of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the limited empirical sense of political community. For genuine democracy people need to belong to the same ʻcommunity […]

The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but […]

Dossier Spheres of action Art and politicsIn the anglophone context of the last thirty years, the phrase ʻcritical theoryʼ has been used in two quite different ways. On the one hand it refers to the project of the Frankfurt School, in its various formulations, over a fifty-year period from the early 1930s (from early Horkheimer […]

Whatever happened to martial law? Detainees and the logic of emergency Mark neocleous Began teaching the detainee lessons such as stay, come, and bark to elevate his social status up to that of a dog. Detainee became very agitated. Guantánamo guard diary entry, 20 December 2002What is a detainee? The term has been given a […]

Counterterrorism legislation and the US state form Authoritarian statism, phase 3 Christos boukalas The counterterrorism legislation introduced in the USA after 11 September 2001 (hereafter S11) has been mainly conceptualized – by both critics and supporters – as an ‘internal’ legal development. Seen as an ‘encroachment on liberty’, as part of a ‘state of emergency’, […]

Introduction to Rozitchner León Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categories […]

One of the forms in which the waves of protests against the ‘new world order’ in the 1990s and, particularly, the varied political and social movements of the new millennium have been registered in political philosophy has been in a renewed interest in the nature of ‘the political’ and its relationship with ‘politics’. Even and […]

Theatre and the public Badiou, Rancière, Virno Simon bayly and ‘relational’ turn in contemporary art practice. The claim restaged here is that the theatrical is still what makes a political problem of something like ‘the public’, which in many contemporary philosophical understandings no longer appears at all. Making public The lack of the appearance of […]

Notes 1. ^ www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/12/steve-wozniak-to-the-fcc-keep-the-internetfree/68294/. [archive] 2. ^ Except for John Naughton in the Guardian: ‘the first really sustained confrontation between the established order and the culture of the internet. There have been skirmishes before, but this is the real thing.’ See www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks. [archive] 3. ^ Johan Söderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software […]