'Freedom' tag archive

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

‘Radical evil’ revived Hitler, Kant, Luther, neo-Lacanianism Henry staten By a terrible coincidence, I revise this paper for publication in the shadow of the mass murder at Colombine High School in Littleton, Colorado. From all sides come the anguished questions: ʻWhy?ʼ ʻHow could such a thing happen?ʼ ʻWhat sort of people could do it?ʼ The […]

Oedipus as figure Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe It is probable, or at the very least plausible, that Western humanity now models itself on two figures or types – two ʻexamplesʼ, if you like. They appear to be antagonistic (or are at least supported by antagonistic discourses), but their antagonism also binds together, and founds, their kinship, as […]

If the ʻturn to ethicsʼ has shaped much recent continental philosophy, the ʻturn to religionʼ has not been far behind. The reappearance of various religious categories and concepts in recent political philosophy and philosophical ethics is unmistakable. Moreover, given that much of this writing emerges from the vicinity of Marx, if not directly from Marxism […]

Ruptured formalism The challenge of bioethics and the limits of moral formalism Konstantinos kavoulakos When one of the most famous living philosophers takes a stand on certain moral dilemmas that arise from the current boom in developments in the biosciences, it is natural that it should provoke great interest – all the more so as […]

Agonized liberalism The liberal theory of William E. Connolly Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo ʻDemocracyʼ in the discourse of the ʻFree Westʼ does not carry the same meaning as it does when we speak of ʻpopular-democraticʼ struggle or of deepening the democratic content of political life. We cannot allow the term to be wholly expropriated.… Instead, we […]

A salutary shock for bien pensant Europe To judge the significance of the French and Dutch rejections of the so-called EU Constitution, we need some assessment of what the nature of the current EU project actually is. Mainstream academic answers to this question take for granted two ideas about the EU: first, that there has […]

Nihilism and faith Rose, Bernstein and the future of Critical Theory Tony gorman In a succession of books the late Gillian Rose and Jay Bernstein have sought to defend and elaborate upon the Adornian inheritance both within Critical Theory, contra Habermas, [1] and beyond Critical Theory, contra post-structuralist and postmodernist thought. [2] In these works, […]

An aesthetic education against aesthetic education Stewart martin Documenta 12ʼs commitment to the question of what is to be done in education is to be welcomed from an institution that has sought to sustain itself as an autonomous cultural realm, a public sphere, in the face of its fabulous state sponsorship and relations to the […]

Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security Maurizio Lazzarato According to Michel Foucault, for some time we have been leaving disciplinary societies in order to enter into societies of security that, unlike the former, ‘tolerate a whole host of behaviours that are different, varied, or even deviant and antagonistic toward one another’. […]

Who was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysis in Argentina Philip derbyshire As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’. [1] ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and […]

Imaginative mislocation Hiroshima’s Genbaku Dome, ground zero of the twentieth century Matthew charles The average Westerner … was wont to regard Japan as barbarous while she indulged in the gentle arts of peace: he calls her civilized since she began to commit wholesale slaughter on Manchurian battlefields. Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea, 1906The controversy […]