This article is a philosophical analysis of escapism as a pedagogical possibility, with a particular focus on TV series. Taking my own, as well as students, experience of escapism into TV series as a starting point, that is, their ability take us somewhere far away, something which has become more acute during the pandemic time since we remain more or less self-isolated because of the corona virus Covid-19, the article discusses escapism in relation to distraction and attention in life as (...) well as within teaching, but also in relation to colportage, hope and social justice. According to Ernst Bloch, social justice cannot materialize without regarding things differently. Something that is often dismissed as mere escapism might be a seed for a new and more humane social order, as it can be seen as an “immature, but honest substitute for revolution”. Drawing on Bloch’s understanding of colportage and hope, as well as Walter Benjamin’s understanding of mass culture and cinema, the article treats escapism and TV series not as something simple, but rather as possible seeds for a new social order and thus as having pedagogical possibilities. (shrink)

In his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience. Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the (...) metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community. This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community. Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive uses to which it was put in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Most online platforms are becoming increasingly algorithmically personalized. The question is if these practices are simply satisfying users preferences or if something is lost in this process. This article focuses on how to reconcile the personalization with the importance of being able to share cultural objects - including fiction – with others. In analyzing two concrete personalization examples from the streaming giant Netflix, several tendencies are observed. One is to isolate users and sometimes entirely eliminate shared world aspects. Another tendency (...) is to blur the boundary between shared cultural objects and personalized content, which can be misleading and disorienting. A further tendency is for personalization algorithms to be optimized to deceptively prey on desires for content that mirrors one’s own lived experience. Some specific - often minority targeting -“clickbait” practices received public blowback. These practices show disregard both for honest labeling and for our desires to have access and representation in a shared world. The article concludes that personalization tendencies are moving towards increasingly isolating and disorienting interfaces, but that platforms could be redesigned to support better social world orientation. (shrink)

This paper investigates the compatibility of Hegel’s analyses of the mechanization of work in industrial society with Hegel’s notion of freedom as rational self-determination. Work as such is for Hegel a crucial moment on the way to a more complete realization of human freedom, but, as I maintain with Adorno, the technological developments of the last two centuries raise the question of whether the nature of work itself has changed since the industrial revolution. In his Jena lectures, Hegel recognized significant (...) problems that the mechanization of work poses for human freedom that—on my assessment—his later, mature thought does not sufficiently address. One finds, however, a more comprehensive depiction of the same worries that Hegel mentioned in his Jena lectures in Adorno’s critique of the dominant forms of labor in contemporary society and his understanding of technological rationality, which according to Adorno, dominates the contemporary world. I suggest, furthermore, that juxtaposing Hegel’s and Adorno’s thoughts on technology and the mechanization of work reveals Adorno’s philosophy of technology to be an extension, rather than a critique, of the spirit of Hegel’s own philosophical project as immanent critique of the necessary entailments of any given concept. (shrink)

Identity as traditionally conceived in mainstream Western thought is focused on theory, representation, knowledge, subjectivity and is centrally important in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. His critique of Western culture and corresponding notion of identity at its foundations typically raises the question of the other. Alterity in Levinas indicates existence of something on its own account, in itself independently of the subject’s will or consciousness. The objectivity of alterity tells of the impossible evasion of signs from their destiny, which is (...) the other. The implications involved in reading the signs of the other have contributed to reorienting semiotics in the direction of semioethics. In Levinas, the I-other relation is not reducible to abstract cognitive terms, to intellectual synthesis, to the subject-object relation, but rather tells of involvement among singularities whose distinctive feature is alterity, absolute alterity. Humanism of the other is a pivotal concept in Levinas overturning the sense of Western reason. It asserts human duties over human rights. Humanism of alterity privileges encounter with the other, responsibility for the other, over tendencies of the centripetal and egocentric orders that instead exclude the other. Responsibility allows for neither rest nor peace. The “properly human” is given in the capacity for absolute otherness, unlimited responsibility, dialogical intercorporeity among differences non-indifferent to each other, it tells of the condition of vulnerability before the other, exposition to the other. The State and its laws limit responsibility for the other. Levinas signals an essential contradiction between the primordial ethical orientation and the legal order. Justice involves comparing incomparables, comparison among singularities outside identity. Consequently, justice places limitations on responsibility, on unlimited responsibility which at the same time it presupposes as its very condition of possibility. The present essay is structured around the following themes: Premiss; Justice, uniqueness, and love; Sign and language; Dialogue and alterity; Semiotic materiality; Globalization and the trap of identity; Human rights and rights of the other: for a new humanism; Ethics; The World; Outside the subject; Responsibility and Substitution; The face; Fear of the other; Alterity and justice; Justice and proximity; Literary writing; Unjust justice; Caring for the other. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to situate Arendt’s account of labour as a critical response to humanisms of labour, or put otherwise, to situate it as an anti-humanism of labour. It compares Arendt’s account of labour with that of the most prominent humanist theorist of labour at the time of the composition of The Human Condition: Georges Friedmann. Arendt’s and Friedmann’s accounts of labour are compared specifically with respect to the range of capacities, social relations, and possibilities of fulfilment (...) at stake in the activity of labour. The comparison provides a previously unexplored context for understanding Arendt’s account of labour and her distinction between labour and work. The relevance of Arendt’s and Friedmann’s theories of labour for the contemporary debate about the meaning of work in an age of automation is also briefly discussed. (shrink)

Lady Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine never refer to the concept of surprise. Having some pretension to ‘originate’ something—unlike the Analytical Engine—is neither necessary nor sufficient to being able to surprise someone. Turing nevertheless translates Lovelace’s ‘this machine is incapable of originating something’ in terms of a hypothetical ‘computers cannot take us by surprise’ objection to the idea that machines may be deemed capable of thinking. To understand the contemporary significance of what is missed in Turing’s ‘surprise’ translation of (...) Lovelace’s insight, one needs to distinguish between trivial surprises and those events, propositions or encounters that lead us to question our understanding of ourselves or what surrounds us. Only some of these non-trivial surprises are the product of originality endeavours. Not only is it uncommon for surprises to track such endeavours, the type of autonomy that would be required on the part of ‘digital computers’ for originality and surprise to intersect in that way goes far beyond the operational autonomy that can be achieved by ‘learning machines’. This paper argues that a salient translation of Lovelace’s originality insight—for contemporary and future ‘learning machines’—is an upside-down version of Turing’s surprise question: can computers be surprised by us in a non-trivial, ‘co-produced’ way? (shrink)

In this article I aim to bring to the fore a problematic trait of Polish philosopher Stanisław Brzozowski’s thinking, which is his insistence on the metaphysical importance of human domination of nature through work, technology, and maximization of production. The focal point of the article is Brzozowski’s interpretation of Georg Sorel, with an emphasis on Reflections on Violence and the concept of the social myth. I argue that Brzozowski considers the primary strength of the social myth to lie in its (...) contribution to such domination, because its principal trait is to provide man with a sublime feeling of elevation above nature. Furthermore, this feeling becomes a motive force for struggle against nature. In conclusion, I suggest that the perspective of the sublime is a fruitful path for future critical encounters with Brzozowski’s work. The first part of the article stresses the importance of the sublime in Reflections on Violence. Sorel uses this concept throughout his main work to describe the affective nature of the violence of the social myth, which coordinates the inclinations of the masses towards emancipation. The second part discusses how Brzozowski understands the social myth, law, and nationhood from the perspective of human domination of elemental nature. (shrink)

The paper investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, (...) and interrelational structures, and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, the paper points out an analytical tool and flexible framework of “spaces of meaning” that phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, the author sees the main task of phenomenology to reclaim experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and to demonstrate how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the technologizing of most things in our daily lives, from work and education to finance and leisure, can be seen to promote a loss of the tangible and a rootlessness for human societies, causing a disorientation in the knowledge and beliefs acquired over millennia. Arendt’s proposal that ‘the earth is the very quintessence of the human condition’ (1958, p. 2) appears to be challenged as digital interactions create new spaces that coax humans away from (...) a focus on their physical world. Instantaneity and simultaneity avoid the historic conditions of humanity in relation to time and place, while the hyperreal images and simulations of the virtual either distort reality or do not depict anything with a real existence. Stiegler goes so far as to suggest that human knowledge and memory is being confiscated by technology. The acceleration of reality, as a condition of the instant, erases the beginning as much as the end, and past, present and future are diminished as contemporary becomes simply temporary. My position, while not utopian, does not seek to be irrationally dystopian and accepts that there is much in technology that advances human physical well-being and thought. It is, however, cautionary in its concern that private technology corporations, having seconded science, actively seek to increase their market and control over hyperconnectivity, thinking, knowledge and the human condition. I draw on the writings of Stiegler and Virilio in particular, both of whom acknowledge a debt to Heidegger. (shrink)

Our experiences with many sorts of evils yield debates about the role of forgiveness as a possible moral response. These debates include (1) the preliminary question whether evils are, by definition, unforgivable, (2) the contention that evils may be forgivable but that forgiveness cannot entail reconciliation with one’s evildoer, (3) the concern that only direct victims of evils are in a position to decide if forgiveness is appropriate, (4) the conceptual worry that forgiveness of evil may not be genuine or (...) complete if hard feelings recur, (5) the interest of many in holding that forgiveness is never required, and (6) the concern that analyses of evil ought to prioritize the suffering, and credit the perspectives, of victims of evils, in tension with the possibility that forgiveness concerns the well-being of offenders. In this paper, I critically evaluate these concerns from the perspective of nonideal theory. I conclude that crediting victims’ perspectives is importantly basic to empirically informed moral theory, and that objections to forgiveness including (1) evil’s unforgivability ignore victims’ differing accounts. When we take actualities and experiences to be informative and central, some of the usual debates become less pressing, perhaps even moot. (shrink)

What is the significance of Arendt considering the title Amor Mundi for what we now are familiar with as The Human Condition? Read alongside Native American philosophers, it is clear that The Human Condition does not explain what it is like to love the world. Instead, it is a powerful genealogy of world alienation and earth alienation in the Western tradition. In other words, The Human Condition shows how Western thought lost and/or undermines amor mundi. By comparing and contrasting Arendt (...) with Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat, we can better understand what Arendt means by the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ and see the limitations of her concept of world. My claim is that reading these thinkers together enriches our understanding of world alienation, earth alienation, and amor mundi. (shrink)

This special issue addresses the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological viewpoint, especially contemporary phenomenological research on selfhood. In the introduction, we first offer a brief survey of the various classic questions related to personal identity according to Locke’s initial proposal and sketch out key concepts and distinctions of the debate that came after Locke. We then characterize the types of approach represented by post-Hegelian, German and French philosophies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that whereas the (...) Anglophone debates on personal identity were initially formed by the persistence question and the characterization question, the “Continental” tradition included remarkably intense debates on the individual or the self as being unique or “concrete,” deeply temporal and—as claimed by some philosophers, like Sartre and Foucault—unable to have any identity, if not one externally imposed. We describe the Continental line of thinking about the “self” as a reply and an adjustment to the post-Lockean “personal identity” question. These observations constitute the backdrop for our presentation of phenomenological approaches to personal identity. These approaches run along three lines: debates on the layers of the self, starting from embodiment and the minimal self and running all the way to the full-fledged concept of person; questions of temporal becoming, change and stability, as illustrated, for instance, by aging or transformative life-experiences; and the constitution of identity in the social, institutional, and normative space. The introduction thus establishes a structure for locating and connecting the different contributions in our special issue, which, as an ensemble, represent a strong and differentiated contribution to the debate on personal identity from a phenomenological perspective. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

This article examines John Locke’s theory of subjectivity to challenge the recent critical tendency to associate biopolitics and empiricism. Michel Foucault, most notably among modern theorists of biopolitics, proposes that the Lockean man, or an interest-seeking animal, constitutes the paradigm of a person that remains subject to biopower. Such understanding of empiricism by biopolitical theorists is, however, reductive because Locke’s view of human subjectivity is fundamentally equivocal. As I demonstrate by analyzing his discussion of freedom, action, and desire in An (...) Essay Concerning Human Understanding and other writings, Locke admits the possibility for a human being to think and to act freely, although in the process of restricting the capacity for free action. Hence, the theorists’ simplistic view of Locke rather reflects the limits of their own conception of subjectivity, especially their behavioristic premises. As they consider a person as a mere machine of survival without agency and initiative, they preclude the possibility of overcoming biopower at the fundamental level. In demonstrating contradictions and tensions within Locke’s empiricism, this article then proposes the ways in which Locke can show a way beyond the critical impasse in political theory in elucidating the power of acting against the chain of causality. (shrink)

Societies evolve practices that reflect social norms of appropriateness in social interaction, for example when and to what extent one should respect the boundaries of another person’s private sphere. One such practice is what the sociologist Erving Goffman called civil inattention—the social norm of showing a proper amount of indifference to others—which functions as an almost unnoticed yet highly potent privacy-preserving mechanism. These practices can be disrupted by technologies that afford new forms of intrusions. In this paper, we show how (...) new networked technologies, such as facial recognition, challenge our ability to practice civil inattention. We argue for the need to revitalise, in academic and policy debates, the role of civil inattention and related practices in regulating behaviour in public space. Our analysis highlights the relational nature of privacy and the importance of social norms in accomplishing and preserving it. While our analysis goes some way in supporting current calls to ban FR technology, we also suggest that, pending a ban and in light of the power of norms to limit what is otherwise technically possible, cultivating new practices of civil inattention may help address the challenges raised by FR and other forms of digital surveillance in public. (shrink)

This paper examines the prevalence of the ideal of “independence” in intellectual disability care in the Netherlands. It responds to a number of scholars who have interrogated this ideal through the lens of Michel Foucault’s vocabulary of governmentality. Such analyses hold that the goal of “becoming independent” subjects people with intellectual disabilities to various constraints and limitations that ensure their continued oppression. As a result, these authors contend, the commitment to the ideal of “independence” – the “ethic of autonomy” – (...) actually threatens to become an obstacle to flourishing in the group home. This paper offers an alternative analysis. It does so by drawing on a case study taken from an ethnographic study on group home life in the Netherlands. Briefly put, the disagreement stems from differing conceptualizations of moral life. Put in the vocabulary of moral anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly, the authors propose to approach the group home more from a “first-person” perspective rather than chiefly from a “third-person” perspective. They then draw on Mattingly to cast the group home as a “moral laboratory” in which the ethic of autonomy is not just reproduced but also enacted, and in which the terms of (in)dependence constantly get renegotiated in practice. What emerges is not only a new perspective on the workings of the “ethic of autonomy” in the group home, but also an argument about the possible limitations of the vocabulary of governmentality for analysing care practices. (shrink)

This article examines why and how workers adhere and contribute to the perpetuation of the freedom fantasy induced by neoliberal ideology. We turn to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the human condition, which offers invaluable insights into the mechanisms that foster the erosion of human freedom in the workplace. Embracing an Arendtian lens, we demonstrate that individuals become entrapped in a libertarian fantasy—a condition enacted by the replacement of the freedom to act by the freedom to perform. The latter embodies the (...) survivalist modus operandi of animal laborans who renounces singularity, by focusing on the function of supervised labor, who renounces solidarity, by focusing on individualist and competitive labor, and who is deprived of spontaneity, by focusing on the measured productivity of labor. Therefore, we propose a new corporate governance perspective based on the rehabilitation of political action in organizations as the best way to preserve human capacity for singularity, solidarity, and spontaneity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relation between different models of ethics and their impact upon crises solution strategies. Here, it is important to consider knowledge and ethical theories from diffe...

This article analyzes the philosophical concept of dwelling from the perspective of a media pragmatics. Media pragmatics is presented here as a method that discloses the circular relation between rule-bound practices and the material and technological substrates that support them. This method is put into practice through a comparative philosophical interpretation of two “canonical” models of dwelling: the Greek oikos and the bourgeois home. Because dwelling, as Heidegger argued, is an interface mediating between the “lifeworld” and the “world” while also (...) organizing relations within the lifeworld, it serves here as a privileged object for articulating this method. (shrink)

This article examines the relation between two key, but seemingly opposed concepts in Jan Patočka’s thought: epoché and the concrete institutional polis. In doing so it attempts to elucidate the inextricable relation between phenomenology and politics in the work of the Czech philosopher, and illustrate more broadly the possibilities for approaching the political from a phenomenological perspective. The article provides a phenomenological interpretation of “care for the soul” as closely linked to Patočka’s reformulation of the core phenomenological notion of epoché. (...) It argues that in Patočka’s work, the epoché, traditionally conceived as a radical stepping back from the world must be rendered differently, not only as a negative freedom, but as the foundation of positive politics. Thus, the authors argue that there is a thematic and conceptual continuity between Patočka’s phenomenological studies and his political work. (shrink)

This article presents a brief argument for STS studies as grounded in fundamental historical transformations of the human condition, outlines seven distinct approaches to STS, and concludes with a brief for STS as the new form of a liberal education.

The articles considers how the "death of the subject" influences ways in which we understand the aestheticization of the political." It explores how Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" can contribute to a conception of the political implications of thinking the subject. It also turns to Solon's conception of subjectivity as a way of mediating the current discussion on the subject.

The article discusses the status and role of politics — in its various facets — in the pragmatic sociology of critique. We focus on a number of different dimensions of politics — politics-as-justification, politics-as-distribution, politics-as-constitution, and politics-as-defiance — that can said to be of importance for a pragmatic sociology of critique, but that have not all been taken up equally in this approach. We situate pragmatic sociology in a tradition of thought that views politics as emerging in the settlement of (...) disputes over differences without resorting to violence. However, we argue that pragmatic sociology tends to ignore questions of the constitution of politics, and suggest that one way of bringing the foundational aspect upfront is by conceptualizing and studying defiance, including forms of explicit (dissent) and implicit critique (resistance) of the existing order. (shrink)

In liberal modernity, the democratic collective will of society was understood to emerge through the public and deliberative freedoms of associational life. Today, however, democratic discourse is much more focused on the formation of plural and diverse publics in the private and social sphere. In these ‘non-linear’ approaches, democracy is no longer seen to operate to constitute a collective will standing above society but as a mechanism to distribute power more evenly through the social empowerment of individuals and communities as (...) the ultimate decision-makers. Government is brought back ‘to the people’ and democracy is seen to circulate through the personal decisions made in everyday life. This article seeks to analyse the development of non-linear approaches to the political sphere, which seek to overcome the rationalist assumptions of the public/private divide, paying particular attention to the work of two key liberal theorists, John Dewey and Friedrich von Hayek. (shrink)

In this article it is argued that social power can be created based upon either the reproduction of social order or coercively but that in complex societies the former is the more important. Building upon the ideas of a number of authors - including Arendt, Parsons, Barnes, Bachrach and Baratz, Lukes, Giddens, Foucault and Clegg - a typology of seven forms of power creation is developed in a manner which allows for diverse phenomena from previously divergent perspectives to be woven (...) together into a theoretical whole which renders them commensurable. At the foundational level, social order presupposes the recreation of shared meanings which enable actors to act in collaboration in a way which they could not otherwise do. This observation is used as the basic premise from which to re-examine the reproduction of social order and the relationship between power, structure and knowledge. Among other things, this allows the author to render Lukes' `false consciousness' argument commensurable with Foucault's power/knowledge hypothesis. (shrink)

Since 1989, social change in Europe has moved between two stories. The first being a politics of memory emphasizing the specificity of culture in national narratives, and the other extolling the virtues of the Enlightenment heritage of reason and humanity. While the Holocaust forms a central part of West European collective memory, national victimhood of former Communist countries tends to occlude the centrality of the Holocaust. Highlighting examples from the Estonian experience, this article asks whether attempts to find one single (...) European memory of trauma ignore the complexity of history and are thus potentially disrespectful to those who suffered under both Communism and National Socialism. Pluralism in the sense of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin is presented as a way in which to move beyond the settling of scores in the past and towards a respectful recognition and acknowledgement of historical difference. (shrink)

The concepts of nature and nation are both rooted in the notion of birth. Thus both can be conceived anew if the underlying vision of natality is conceptualized, following Hannah Arendt, not as a set of inexorable biological processes, but as the fundamental human capacity for political action. This reconceptualization of natality allows proposing an alternative to the prevalent commonsensical ethno-nationalist definitions of nation-hood, and also allows a view of the realm of nature itself as inherently political. Arendt's theory finds (...) an interesting referential point in modern developments in biotechnology that threaten to undermine the `naturalness' of existing notions of ethnically conceived nations. Similarly, nature might be revealed to have a polis working at the very heart of what seemed to be a set of inexorable processes, independent from human beings. (shrink)

The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves (...) engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot. (shrink)

As opposed to the intelligentsia, a historically specific group, and the professions, those who perform intellectual labor, the intellectual is here understood as the performance of a social role, one which involves the articulation of ideas communicated to a broad audience. This implies at least two distinct ways of speaking about and studying the intellectual. The first is to look at the way various social actors take on the task of articulating ideas in public discourses. The second is to study (...) how particular persons aspire to the intellectual, a role whose meaning they inherit as part of a tradition which must be interpreted and reinvented. Through an analysis of six assassinations, the article shows how intellectuals can act as carrier groups in what is called a cultural trauma, a public discourse in which the foundations of collective identity are brought up for reflection. The six assassinations are Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the United States, Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands and Olof Palme and Anna Lindh in Sweden. The article concludes with reflections on the changing nature and position of the intellectual in contemporary society, especially in the light of the prevalence of the media and the new digital age. (shrink)

The institution of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg in 1945 was an event which marked the birth of cosmopolitan law as a social reality. Cosmopolitan law has existed as an abstract idea at least since the writings of Kant in the late eighteenth century, but Nuremberg turned the notion of humanity from a merely regulative idea into a substantial entity. Crimes against humanity differ significantly from the traditional categories of international law: war crimes and crimes against peace. While the latter (...) generally treats states as subjects of right and upholds the principle of national sovereignty, the former treats individuals as subjects of right and encroaches on national sovereignty. I focus here on the writings of Hannah Arendt on the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial and the actuality of crimes against humanity perpetrated in totalitarian regimes. I explore her relation to the optimistic and naive cosmopolitanism of Karl Jaspers, as well as to the two prevailing forms of critical thought: the cynical realism towards the law adopted by many of the defendants, including Carl Schmitt, and the deconstructive attitude to humanism and technology adopted by Martin Heidegger. I maintain that Arendt's rugged cosmopolitanism, tested against its critics, remains exceptionally revealing on the issue of crimes against humanity now that this issue has re-emerged, after many years of silence, as arguably the most important question of our own day. (shrink)

This article provides a general, theoretical reflection on the decline of the normative dimension in postmodern societies. Modern societies were the first to recognize themselves as societies, that is, to reflect explicitly on the normative basis of their constitution. With the decline of modernity, societal integration, which was based in part on the collective solidarity borne of an idea of Justice, has dissolved into merely `social' forms of integration, legitimized in terms of a claim to operational perfection. At a purely (...) epistemological level, this results in a profound misunderstanding of the subjective and unitary character of society and social action. The article ends in a plea for the recovery of a reflection on values, understood not just as a change in values, but as a change in the relation to values, necessary to confront the irreducible plurality of the world. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship of pragmatism to the theory of deliberative democracy. It elaborates a dilemma in the latter theory, between its deliberative or epistemic and democratic or inclusive components, and distinguishes responses to this dilemma that are internal to the conception of deliberation employed from those that are external. The article goes on to identify two models of pragmatism and critically examines how well each one deals with the tension identified in deliberative democracy.

This article presents the moral and political sociology developed by the research group around Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot from its gradual dissociation from the tradition of critical sociology during the 1980s to the present. Taking the major presentation of this approach, De la justification, as the point of departure, the key items of criticism to which this book was exposed are discussed, both in terms of their intellectual merit and in light of the ongoing debates in French social and (...) political theory. The work of this group was often rather erroneously taken to have provided both a new theory of society and a new normative political philosophy. What it aimed at achieving in the first place, in contrast, was a questioning of the assumptions on which reasonings in social theory and political philosophy are based and how those reasonings relate to social actors' own engagement with the world. Not least in response to the criticism received, however, the approach has been further elaborated in recent years, and it works now towards a new representation of the contemporary state of social relations and towards a comprehensive analysis of the practical political philosophies employed in political disputes. (shrink)

The key theme in this essay is the rethinking of the human, as inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The human here is not a model or concept to be realised, just as community to which the human is linked is not an ideal, but a ‘community to come’. This is revealed only by paying close attention to modes of bearing witness to the human, as instanced, for example, by Agamben’s text, Remnants of Auschwitz. Current notions (...) of political community and the human thus need to be reassessed. Only by doing this will it be possible to address the crucial issues that currently confront human rights—issues such as the tension between the principle of universal human rights and that of state sovereignty, the growing problem of statelessness, and the reduction of human rights to biopolitical humanitarianism. (shrink)

In this article, it is argued that cosmopolitans should elucidate the qualities and dispositions, or ‘virtues’, associated with the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Bryan Turner's suggestion that cosmopolitan virtue should be identified as a type of ‘Socratic irony’, which enables individuals to achieve distance from their homeland or way of life, is explored. While acknowledging the attractions of his account, certain limitations which indicate the need to generate a richer theory of cosmopolitan virtue are identified. To that end, an alternative (...) picture of cosmopolitan virtue is presented by drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas of ‘world’ and ‘worldliness’. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue involves the adoption of a self-reflexive mode of being in the world, the cultivation of a heightened care or feeling for the world, and the ability to adopt certain skills in the manner of our disclosures to the world. (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the lofty term of cosmopolitanism from people's historical experience. It attempts to find a bridge between theory and life. Many writers now maintain that cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream, but rather the substance of social reality - and that it is increasingly the nation-state and our particular identities that are figments of our imagination, clung to by our memories. The aim of this article is to concretize this argument and demonstrate how some of the Jewish intellectuals (...) who emerged from World War II and the Holocaust argued passionately about the status of their Jewishness and how this related to abstract and universal ideals of modernity and human rights. The article focuses on Hannah Arendt's responses to her critics instead of her vast theoretical work to illustrate this point. In responding to her critics, Arendt came closest to providing a formula for a concept of cosmopolitanism, which attempts to square the circle between the universal and the particular. (shrink)

This article searches for a way of theorizing the interconnectedness of processes of individuation, relationality and affect, with the aim of clearing the ground for an approach that establishes the basis of this interconnectedness by reference to mechanisms common to all living things. It establishes a number of shifts that enable us to think the categories and concepts like the individual, the subject, the group, the threshold, relationality, co-implication and so on according to a fundamental decentring, finally breaking with both (...) subject-centredness and its privilege of the individual as model or starting point; the same epistemological shift implies the rejection of the anthropocentric divide between humans and animals, while avoiding species of sociobiologism, pre-formationism, geneticism and other monocausal paradigms. What the new problematic of life enjoins us to rethink are the standpoint of singularity rather than that of the individual, coupled to the standpoint of relationality as a principle enabling us to think the self—other, human—animal, nature—culture and human—world in terms of compossibility and complex becoming. This view about the co-constitution of all life has major implications regarding responsibility for the other and responsibility for the world, grounded in the standpoint of the temporality and historicity of being as existential condition circumscribing the relation to the other. This shift at the level of ontology is explored via an engagement with the work of Simondon and his conceptual apparatus, particularly ideas of psychic and collective individuation, the pre-and transindividual, the associated milieu; this perspective is re-articulated by way of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Haraway’s notion of ‘companion species’, Ettinger’s concept of the ‘I—other plurality’, and cognate concepts that point to a new terrain for theorizing affect. (shrink)

The article explores the place of affect in community relations with respect to trauma following the closure of a steelworks for a working-class community in the South Wales valleys in 2002. A review of sociological approaches to community demonstrates the poor handling of relational and affective aspects which, it is argued, are central to the way in which community relations were formed and provided a safe and containing skin against the uncertainty of industrial production. Using psychoanalytic approaches to affect which (...) stress the importance of skin, particularly the work of Bick, Tustin, Winnicott and Anzieu, the article explores how a sense of a containing skin provides a feeling of ontological security for a community beset by uncertainty and insecurity. It is argued that, following the closure of the steelworks in 2002, this skin is ruptured and that it is difficult for the members of the community to find a way forward. Using examples taken from psychosocial interviews with community members, the case is made for a range of affective relations and practices through which the skin is created. The absence of these practices and relations creates a profound sense of lack of safety and fear of death within the inhabitants, which needs to be addressed, but is rarely discussed in approaches to community or regeneration. (shrink)

Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes of their (...) own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today. (shrink)

Arguing that the fruitful approach to a reworking of the social depends upon forging an alliance between sociological theory and feminist theory, the paper analyses strands in sociological thinking which are responsible for renewed interest in the ‘social’. The first perspective, as developed by Touraine, Urry, Bauman and Castells, formulates a new agenda for ‘sociology beyond the social’ and emphasizes the limitations of the concept of ‘the social as society’. The second orientation, represented here by Richard Sennett, tracks the shifting (...) relationships between public and private. The third strand, illustrated by the recent work of Robert Putnam, focuses on the notion of social capital. A comparison between these perspectives introduces my argument that we should search for a new balance not only between local and global, and private and public, but also between formality and informality as only such an approach has the potential to capture the complexity of and the interdependence between conditions responsible for the production of demands for trust and ways of generating trust. The paper argues that how actors strike the optimal balance between formality and informality in interactions depends on the specific characteristics of different realms of interaction. Therefore, in conclusion, I describe three styles of interaction: civility, sociability and intimacy, which represent the essential basis for an enhanced quality of social and personal life. (shrink)

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within (...) a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. (shrink)

Open science hardware (OSH) are prototypes of laboratory instruments that use open source hardware to extend the purely epistemic (improving knowledge about nature) and normative (improving society) ideals of science and emphasize the importance of technology. They remind us of Zilsel’s 1942 thesis about the artisanal origins of science and instrument making that bridged disciplinary and social barriers in the 16th century. The emphasis on making, tinkering, and design transcends research, reproducibility, and corroboration in science and pushes to the forefront (...) educational, emancipatory, and aesthetic and exploratory uses. I will use two recent projects, OpenDrop electrowetting platform and Open Source Estrogen that make but also reflect OSH’s playful, expressive, and performative strategies and define the present practices as “artisanal science.” These hybrid and ambiguous practices bridge divides between present disciplines and skills but they also define science as an everyday activity directly connected to the private and public interests of the citizens. To describe this epistemic and normative ambiguity of artisanal science, I employ Hannah Arendt’s 1958 critique of homo laborans and homo faber and claim that science artisans (citizen scientists, geeks, makers, and hackers) offer an alternative to professionalization of science as practiced in the university and R&D laboratories. Science artisans design and build instruments to engage in civic “vita activa” over instruments but also leisurely “otium” outside of the work and science labor. OSH in this sense empowers individuals and communities to explore new connections between scientific practices, public actions, and private interests (leisure). The science artisans strive for and explore sovereignty, dignity, and freedom in an age immersed in science and technology controversies by bridging the divides between art, science, engineering, and humanities. (shrink)

In this paper, I look into personal and political entanglements in Rosa Luxemburg's letters and essays revolving around questions and problems of the revolution. The analysis is informed by Hannah Arendt's theorisation of revolutions in modernity, as well as her reading of narratives within the political. What is intriguing about the Luxemburg/ Arendt encounter is the fact that although both theorists consciously refused to connect themselves with feminist ideas and movements of their times and geographies, their writings have inspired a (...) rich body of feminist theorisations of the political. What I argue is that Luxemburg's ideas and lived experiences of the revolution largely inspired Arendt's theorisation of the revolution as a political phenomenon in the pursuit of freedom, and are opening up new vistas in our understanding of gendered dynamics in historical and contemporary revolutionary events. (shrink)

Conceptions of citizenship which rest on an abstract and universal notion of the individual founder on their inability to recognize the political relevance of gender. Such conceptions, because their ‘gender-neutrality’ has the effect of excluding women, are not helpful to the project of promoting the full citizenship of women. The question of citizenship is often reduced to either political citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of political participation, or social citizenship, in terms of an instrumental notion of economic (in)dependence. (...) The paper argues for the recognition of citizenship as gendered, and as an ethical, that is non-instrumental, social status which is distinct from both political participation and economic (in)dependence. What unites us as citizens, in our equal membership of the political community, need not rely on a conception of us as ‘neutral’ (abstract, universalized, genderless) individuals undertaking one specific activity located in the public realm, but can take account of the diverse ways in which we engage in ethically-grounded activities on the basis of our different genders, ethnic and cultural backgrounds and other differences, in both the public and private realms. A convincing feminist conception of citizenship necessarily involves a radical redefinition of the public/private distinction to accommodate the recognition of citizenship practices in the private realm. The paper builds on the observation that the concept of ‘citizenship’ is broader than the concept of ‘the political’ (or ‘the social/economic’), and contends that feminism provides us with the emancipatory potential of gendered subjectivity, which applies to both men and women. The recognition of gendered subjectivity opens the way to the recognition of the diversity of citizenship practices. It is not that women need to be liberated from the private realm, in order to take part in the public realm as equal citizens, but that women – and men – already undertake responsibilities of citizenship in both the public and the private realms. (shrink)