The first segment starts with a definition of two dimensions of the concept of rule of law; related to the notion of sovereignty and as a concept to control arbitrariness on the part of the ruler. The segment proceeds to give a historical account of the notion and the different stages of its epistemological configuration, from the ancient Greek notion of Eunomia and its incompatibility with the popular rule to the current notion, where the rule of law has become fused (...) with democracy and human rights. The first segment also focuses on the relation between the concept of the rule of law and other principles, such as proportionality, neutrality, and effectiveness. The second segment of the paper analyses the phenomenon of juridification of the rule of law in international treaties and domestic constitutions. It pays particular attention to the role that constitutional accommodation plays in the process of rationalization of the rule of law as a prerequisite to its idealization and mystification. It analyses the reason why this principle is an essential feature of the constitutionalism despite the inner plurality of legal systems. The next aspect, analysed in the third segment of this paper, is the messianic use of the concept of the rule of law. The paper performs a critical definition of messianic, covering a theological perspective and the different theories and concepts that go hand in hand with the idea of the Messiah, such as the “coming”, prophetical and apocalyptical messianism, the phenomena of eschatology, expiation and redemption pictured in Judaism. The segment also covers the secular transplantation of the messianic thought. The last segment is a conclusion returning to the themes identified in the paper and summarises how the messianic thought is applied in the realm of the rule of law. (shrink)

This paper argues that in Derrida’s writings twentieth-century philosophy of language takes a materialistic turn, whereby meaning is understood as sensible and material in its origin and not as ideas pre-given in the mind. The work of metaphysics, however, is one of erasing the originary material/metaphorical meaning of signifiers and turns it into abstract idealistic meaning. Derrida is often accused of linguistic idealism on the basis of a misrepresentation of his anthemic catchphrase “there is nothing outside the text,” which seems (...) to imply that he denies the existence of the real-world outside language. This distortion fails to understand the notion of the text and its materialistic underpinnings in the whole project of Derrida. His linguistic materialism is more realistic than idealistic, though he disavows such binary oppositions, and it is an improvement over all other forms of materialism on account of the notion of différance and his strategy of deconstructive reading. Derrida’s materialism is non-dialectical and non-predictive; it is centered on the notion of messianicity without a Messiah. The erasure of the permanent presence of the materiality of matter is as much important to this materialism as the subversion of the immutable solidity of the metaphysical conception of meaning. Post-metaphysical materialism understands body itself as text and text itself as embodied. (shrink)

One of the central questions of Jacques Derrida's later writings concerns the sources of religion. At times he gives explicit priority to the universal dimension of religion. In other places, however, he considers the primacy of faith in its concrete, historical context. This paper will clarify Derrida's relationship to universality and historicity by first comparing his notion of "messianicity without messianism" to that of Walter Benjamin's "weak Messianism." After drawing out these differences, I will focus on Derrida's later writings. I (...) will show that much of the ambiguity of Derrida's thinking on religion can be resolved by turning to his work on khōra, the Greek word for "space" or "matter." The rhetoric of khōra can allow us to think through a twofold logic, one that includes the universal/historical distinction and exceeds its alternatives. (shrink)

In Occasional Deconstructions, Julian Wolfreys challenges the notion that deconstruction is a critical methodology, offering instead a number of reintroductions or reorientations to the texts of Jacques Derrida and the idea or possibility of deconstructions. Proceeding from specific readings of various texts (both film and literary), as well as mobilizing a number of issues from Derrida's recent work surrounding questions of ethics, politics, and identity, Wolfreys considers the role of deconstruction in broader academic and institutional contexts, and questions whether, in (...) fact, deconstruction can be called upon to function as theory at all. In this book, Wolfreys suggests that the patient, necessary work of reading, in which response and responsibility to the other has a chance to manifest itself, is necessary to the always political and ethical tracing of the material and the historical. He also contends that reading should be an encounter that gives place to an acknowledgment of the other, and that this singular act by which one is introduced to the other can never be programmed. (shrink)

While the concept of secularization is traditionally used to define the nature of modern culture, and sometimes to uncover the theological origins of secular modernity, its validity is being questioned ever more radically today. Genealogies of the Secular returns to the historical, intellectual, and philosophical roots of this concept in the twentieth-century German debates on religion and modernity, and presents a wide range of strategies that German thinkers have applied to apprehend the connection between religion and secularism. In fundamentally heterogeneous (...) ways, these strategies all developed "genealogies of the secular" by tracing modern phenomena back to their religious or theological roots. This book aims to disclose the complex prehistory of the contemporary debates on political theology and postsecularism, and to show how prominent thinkers continue this German tradition today. It explores and assesses the classic theories of secularization that are epitomized in Carl Schmitt's writings on political theology, but also addresses German philosophers whose work has been rarely associated with secularization, including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Hannah Arendt. Attention is also paid to two thinkers whose role in these discourses has not been fully explored yet: Jacob Taubes and Jan Assmann. By introducing their thinking on religion, politics, and secularization, the book also makes two of their own key texts available to an English-language readership. (shrink)

Postcolonialism stands today in flagrant contradiction with its mission. This assertion should scarcely come as a surprise. Come to think of it: what has postcolonialism done to colonization in the past few decades, save passively reflecting on it and its realities that often do not fit the reality of things? How much leeway does postcolonialism give its critic in expressing opposition to colonization? And how does it rate as a field for serious decolonization? As a start toward answering these questions, (...) or coming close to answering them, the following pages offer a commentary on how I feel about postcolonialism. I will confine myself to one particular reason I consider postcolonialism a dismal failure, which is incontestable and will hopefully startle the dull reader into alertness. I prefer here simple words with a direct message and no opaque subtleties. (shrink)

This essay focuses on political implications of Derrida’s messianicité as a form of Marrano messianism: a universal vision of community “out of joints” which, despite its disjointedness and inner separation, nonetheless addresses itself as “we”. By referring to the generalized “Marrano experience” – the fate of those Sephardic Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity and, in consequence, became neither Jewish nor Christian – Derrida takes the Marrano as his paradigmatic political figure of a “rogue” who escapes every identity (...) politics. In Derrida’s project of “living together”, the Marrano stands for the non-participatory remnant of otherness which is not just the other of this or that particular tradition, but becomes a bearer of a new universalism, based not on the abstract notion of human nature but on the non-identity, a distance-from-identity or what Yirmijahu Yovel calls the “non-integral identity.”. (shrink)

This paper explains the genealogical method as it is understood and employed in contemporary Continental philosophy. Using a pair of terms from Bernard Williams, genealogy is contrasted with phenomenology as an `unmasking' as opposed to a `vindicatory' method. The genealogical method is also compared with the method of Ideologiekritik and recent critical theory. Although genealogy is usually thought to be allergic to universals, in fact Foucault, Derrida, and Bourdieu do not shun universals, even if they approach them with caution. The (...) conclusion is that genealogy is a viable and productive approach to social criticism and self-transformation. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Jacques Derrida’s account of “religion” and “life” in his seminal essay “Faith and Knowledge.” Applying Derrida’s aporetic structure of “X without X” to his remarks on religion and life in “Faith and Knowledge,” this article suggests that underlying Derrida’s endeavor to “think religion abstractly” is a radical re-conception not only of religion as “religion without religion” but moreover a re-imagination of life as “life without life” that breaks away from the traditional metaphysical understandings of (...) life and religion. (shrink)

This essay explores Werner Hamacher’s suggestion that the realm of “philology” lies epékeina tes ousías. I suggest that for him “philology” is concerned with what, according to Plato, generates meaning without itself being generated, and that in his work this “beyond being” is often mediated in terms of caesura. After a brief engagement with a conversation of sorts between Hamacher and Jacques Derrida, in which the view of his “philology” as mostly derivative of Derrida’s work is rejected, the essay returns (...) to Hamacher’s discussion of caesura as what constitutes the very possibility of language. The final section focuses on Hamacher’s engagement with Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan and his suggestion that Dichtung (poetry) is the first philology. The essay concludes by arguing that Hamacher’s philology opens up new ways of thinking about thinking, as well as about the relationship between literature and philosophy. (shrink)

Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously problematic, and yet despite its alleged passing into irrelevance, utopia still remains a household word. Why is this so?Utopia has been reduced to a category. We place a solution in the category of the utopian or, conversely, the not-utopian. Without fail, discussions involving utopia will eventually veer toward debates on whether a book, project, or building is utopian or not.Utopia reduced to such a (...) category invokes both a problematic universality and a convoluted end of history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the field of architecture. However, if we begin with the problem to which the solution is a response rather than the solution being proposed, we soon realize that utopia is more complicated than a simple image of a perfect future.The study at hand re-interrogates the utopian concept. The question is not what architecture is utopian, but how and why architecture is utopian. Utopia is reinterpreted as a concept predicated on survival and a desire for a better way of living, rather than on immortality and perfection. Utopia in this sense is monstrous; its function is to challenge the presuppositions that define the horizons of our imagination, and to show us that the future is not predetermined: the future is fundamentally open.What assumptions, then, are formative of how architects relate to the future and utopia when projections of that future perfect have become irrelevant?If the projection of a perfect future is impossible, yet intimately associated with the architect, utopia becomes paradoxical for architects. Utopian desire is instead expressed in other ways, consciously or unconsciously. The study argues that the present worldview is dominated by what is here dubbed the Network-image; we think of everything in terms of networks, privileging connections over form, and the architect is again assuming a new role for herself as a manager, rather than an expert.Networks offer different ways of working with architecture. Rather than specifying the forms of the future, architects can and do work by defining and elaborating protocols that enable and cultivate connections which, according to the prevalent narrative, build transversal collectives that can potentially transform the world.However, there are other implications linked to these new opportunities. Any network is governed by multiple protocols, and the architect as manager becomes inscribed in a logic of control. There is an implicit notion that architects can produce architecture that is self-governing, participatory, and implicitly egalitarian through designing protocols. This assumption urgently needs to be interrogated.The discussion in this study centers on the need to challenge the Network-image itself, and not only to take our role in it as given. The dissertation is an argument for considering the how of imagining the future with more scrutiny, and it offers a set of principles and a terminology for discussion to enable further research on the subject. (shrink)

The link between force, violence and events in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida is explored, arguing that this relationship is at the very heart of the problem of meaning and its performativity. This thesis is based on the analysis of Derrida’s reading of both Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, as well as Austin’s linguistic performative theory, which allows, at first, to link the question of signification with that of force or violence. Subsequently, we use the analysis of W. Hamacher about Benjamin (...) in order to strengthen that connection and propose a new reading of the question of the event in Derrida. We obtain a philosophy of the event that moves between ethics, politics and linguistics that allows new approaches to the “critique” of violence. (shrink)

In an age where diversity is increasingly accepted as a value as well as a fact, ethico-political cosmopolitanism should propose a notion of global unity that is composed of rather than imposed on difference. Jacques Derrida and Walter Mignolo offer different versions of this view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s version is based on his notion of “democracy to come”. He characterizes this notion as an “unconditional” or “quasi-transcendental” injunction. Mignolo castigates this injunction as an “abstract universal”. He offers instead “a critical (...) and dialogic” view of cosmopolitanism that is based more speci cally on the “colonial difference” or “border thinking” of Latin American subaltern groups. I argue that Derrida’s many implicit and explicit references to “voices” suggest a third alternative. This contender avoids certain problems in Derrida’s and Mignolo’s otherwise compelling views of cosmopolitanism. It also retains the universality of Derrida’s unconditional injunction but on the basis of the sort of worldly immanency urged by Mignolo’s border thinking. (shrink)

The relationship between history and justice traditionally has been dominated by the idea of the past as distant or absent . This ambiguous ontological status makes it very difficult to situate the often-felt “duty to remember” or obligation to “do justice to the past” in that past itself, and this has led philosophers from Friedrich Nietzsche to Keith Jenkins to plead against an “obsession” with history in favor of an ethics aimed at the present. History’s ability to contribute to the (...) quest for justice, as a result, often seems very restricted or even nonexistent. The introduction of the “presence”-paradigm in historiography can potentially alter this relation between history and justice. However, to do so it should be conceived in such a way that it offers a fundamental critique of the metaphysical dichotomy between the present and the absent and the underlying concept of time that supports this dichotomy. The “presence”-paradigm can be emancipatory and productive only if presence and absence are not perceived as absolute dichotomies. In the first part of this article I elaborate on the influence that the present/absent dichotomy has on the notion of justice by introducing a conceptual contrast between what I will call the “time of jurisdiction” and the “time of history.” The second part of the article focuses on the way certain aspects of the dominant Western chronosophy reinforce the present/absent dichotomy and thereby prevent us from thoroughly exploring the ambiguous but often very problematic presence of the past. Throughout the article I refer to the relatively recent phenomenon of truth commissions and the context of transitional justice to discuss some challenges for the “presence”-paradigm. (shrink)

Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between (...) modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression. (shrink)

Organized across national boundaries and with millions of supporters worldwide, transnational environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and Friends of the Earth play a central role in the way the world addresses environmental issues. This book provides the most systematic and theoretically informed study to date of the strategies these organizations use to advance global environmental protection. Based on case studies of three transnational groups, it argues that in addition to lobbying governments, activists operate within and (...) across societies to effect widespread change. They work through transnational social, economic, and cultural networks to alter corporate practices, educate vast numbers of people, pressure multilateral development banks, and shift standards of good conduct. Wapner argues that because this activity takes place outside the formal arena of inter-state politics, environmental activists practice "world civic politics"; they politicize global civil society. The theoretical import of this book is to bring the practice of world civic politics into sharp relief and generalize its significance beyond environmental affairs to explain the efforts of all NGOs in world politics. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)