Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

Despite frequent valorizations of music in the west, the art has also been perceived as a threat to philosophy and theology, ostensibly on the grounds of its potential for danger to the polis (Plato and Aristotle), temptation to impiety (Augustine and Calvin), coercion (Kant), or lack of objective content (Hegel). Accompanying these doubts is a longstanding anxiety concerning music's relation with inarticulation or silence. Debates over the definition and ontology of music persist today in both analytic and continental traditions, with (...) neither approach succeeding in forging consensus. Musical Platonism (Kivy, Norris) is today's uneasy default position in the academy. However, recent reassessments of speech acts (Miller) and of the Derridean world as phantasm (Naas) can return music to its structural constitution in différance – to an alternation between sound and silence. This redefinition of music and its parallel with language can contextualize Derrida's most extended engagement with the topic, his interview with Ornette Coleman. (shrink)

The acknowledgement that something is complex, it is argued, implies that our knowledge of it will always be limited. We cannot make complete, absolute or final claims about complex systems. Post-structuralism, and specifically deconstruction, make similar claims about knowledge in general. Arguments against deconstruction can, therefore, also be held against a critical form of complexity thinking and a defence of the view from complexity (as presented here) should take account of them. Three of these arguments are investigated: that deconstruction and (...) complexity-thinking lead to relativism, that they are subject to the performative contradiction and that their claims are vague. It is shown that these critiques are not really effective and it is suggested that a responsible approach to complexity has to be provisional, i.e. modest, without being vague or relativistic. (shrink)

_Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action._.

Law’s claim of mastery over past political violence is frequently undermined by reversals of that relationship of mastery, so that the violence of the law, and especially its symbolic violence, becomes easily incorporated into longues durées of political violence, rather than mastering them, settling them, or providing closure. Doing justice to the past, therefore, requires a political and theoretical attunement to the ways in which law, in purportedly attempting to address past political violence, inscribes itself into contemporary contexts of violence. (...) While this may be limited to an analysis of how law is an effect of and affects the political, theoretically this attunement can be further refined by means of a critique of dynamics that are internal to law itself and that have to do with how law understands its own historicity, as well as its relationship to history and historiography. This article aims to pursue such a critique, taking as its immediate focus the ECHR case of Perinçek v Switzerland, with occasional forays into debates around the criminalisation of Armenian genocide denialism in France. The Perinçek case concerned Switzerland’s criminalisation of the denial of the Armenian genocide, and concluded in 2015 after producing two judgments, first by the Second Chamber, and then by the Grand Chamber of the ECHR. However, although they both found for the applicant, the two benches had very different lines of reasoning, and notably different conceptions regarding the relationship between law and history. I proceed by tracing the shifting status of ‘history’ and ‘historians’ in these two judgments, and paying attention to the deferrals, disclaimers and ellipses that structure law’s relation to history. This close reading offers the opportunity for a critical reappraisal of the relationship between law, denial and violence: I propose that the symbolic violence of the law operative in memory laws is a product of that which remains unresolved in law’s understanding of historicity (including its own), its self-understanding vis-à-vis the task of historiography, and its inability to respond to historical violence without inscribing itself into a history of violence, a process regarding which it remains in denial. (shrink)

Investigates, through a critical exploration of Derrida's political thought, the foundations of modern secular discourse in relation to issues of race and colonialism.