In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall, as representative of both the politics of oppression as well as the politics of reconciliation. The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that (...) comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy. (shrink)

It is a background assumption of much of social science - here called modernist social science - that, in principle, there are neither questions that it cannot decline nor answers that cannot be found. Modernist social science does not accept the issues of inescapability and of attainability; they are names for adversaries that need to be fought against. In contrast to modernism in social theory, this article argues that social theory not only cannot succeed in suppressing the questions of the (...) inescapable and the attainable but indeed needs to be reconceptualized such that an understanding of inescapability and attainability becomes one of its organizing elements. The argument is developed by discussing three central problematics of social theory - the continuity of self, the certainty of knowledge and the viability of the polity - and by showing that an irreducible pluralism of modes of social theorizing exists which includes positions that emphasize the questions of inescapability and attainability. The various perspectives on self, knowledge and polity can be related to each other by reasonings that link a philosophy of the social sciences to a historical sociology of modernity. (shrink)