ABSTRACT While populism is commonly considered antagonistic to democratic liberalism, recent research demonstrates how populist rhetoric may highjack traditional liberal discourses and opportunistically refashion them against the plight of minorities. Drawing on the concept of media populism, this research investigates how notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ were contested in debates on racism in New Zealand regional newspaper, The Taranaki Daily News, and further deployed to promote a populist agenda, against the representation of the Indigenous minority, Māori, in the local government. (...) The analysis of letters to the Editor shows the prevalence of anti-Māori sentiment, articulated through such populist rhetoric as ‘majority’, ‘whole community’ and ‘togetherness’; while the appeal for Māori representation was framed as ‘special treatment’, ‘positive discrimination’, ‘separatism’ and ‘reverse racism’. Hence, by endorsing the populist discourse, media provide their audiences with the moral affinity to support racist and anti-minority policies; ultimately producing the political phenomenon of media populism. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 8, July 2020, Page 824-824.

This paper undertakes to reconstruct the idea of Europe in the writings of Jan Patočka and Paul Ricœur alongside those of their common inspiration, Husserl. In doing so, it shows that one of the main originalities of this standpoint is to characterize Europe’s crisis as being a spiritual crisis, and its potential overcoming as being rooted in a specific attitude. With this ideal description in mind, the paper proceeds to descriptively assess the present day political situation in the European Union (...) and the several challenges it faces, from the deep divisions between debtors and creditors following the 2008–2009 sovereign debt crisis, to the possibility of unraveling initiated by the Brexit process and the so-called populist threat lingering in different countries. Finally, it contends, following some insights by Patočka, Ricœur and Richard Kearney, that in order to avoid the decay or even death of the E.U. a rekindling of Europe’s ideal is needed, one that is not based in a de facto dominance of some countries over others, or even in a totally homogenous and all-imposing narrative, but rather on mutual understanding through the sharing of stories that can perhaps refocus Europe’s different peoples towards the reconstruction of common goals. (shrink)

In this dissertation I explore the conceptual relationship between equality and resistance in political philosophy. Through examination of the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and Jacques Rancière, I formulate a position called Fractured Social Holism. This is a problematic that attempts to articulate core issues at stake in the debates surrounding the purposes, meanings, and possibilities for politics. Through Fractured Social Holism I articulate a theory of equality that emphasizes the communities upon which societys institutions intend to (...) distribute equality, arguing that resistance on the part of a populationgroup opposition, formal or informal, to some element of the societal status quoconceptually grounds equality and its distribution by articulating its very possibilities. My central questionHow is equality constituted?focuses on the community itself in order to shift agency from institutions that distribute equality to those who demand it. It emphasizes the active role of the people in the constitution of a community of equals, as well as the fact that the very notion of the people is what is at stake in that constitution; popular resistance challenges the very meaning and content of any given people. I understand equality in the broadest possible sense, in terms of the opportunity of each and all within society to participate in dictating the terms of their public engagement with that society and with others within it. I argue for the possibility of resistance within egalitarian community in Rousseau, the limits of what that resistance in egalitarian society looks like in Marx, how egalitarian communities can organize themselves in Dewey, and how subjectivity relates to mechanisms of resistance and political action within society in Rancière. These historical interpretations and the conceptual framework they engender provide a novel means of thinking about issues of paramount importance in contemporary political philosophy, including pluralism, oppression and domination, and the purposes and meaning of politics, remaining true to a normative vision of equality while insisting on the necessity of the peoples resistance to the status quo in the name of a re-imagined vision of social harmony. (shrink)

Universalism and particularism have become poles of modern social thought and lead to distinct definitions of democracy, citizenship, and social policy. Challenging Habermas and the Habermasians, this article argues that democracy can never be identified with domination. Meanwhile, contesting Chatterjee and Foucault, the author reaffirms citizenship and law in their various forms in relation to both bounded and unbounded serialities as the basis for democracy, beyond and despite governmentality. Latin America, and especially Brazil, with processes that check state domination and (...) have implied democratizing changes, provide the empirical focus for the discussion, albeit mediated by other countries, particularly India. (shrink)

Narrative construction is a discursive practice: storytellers draw on the language, signs and symbols of their culture to provide meaning through stories. Stories that reflect the values, ideals an...

Discourse theory posits capitalism as a radically contingent discursive system constituted through hegemonic practice. This paper asks what this discursive conception means for the critical analysis of capitalism. To answer this question, the paper first outlines the ways by which this discursive conceptualization enables a critical political economy of capitalist systems: namely by enabling a theorization of how such systems are hegemonically constituted, are ideologically maintained, become prone to crises, and may be contested. The paper then examines how this discursive (...) conceptualization might account for the workings and dynamics, including cause–effect relations, of capitalism. That is, the paper examines if and how discourse theory can contribute to a critical political economy of capitalist systems. This examination draws upon and develops the concept of social logics. The paper concludes by suggesting that discourse theory can ‘supplement’ the critique of capitalist systems. (shrink)

In philosophy and political theory, the term paradox is often used synonymously with antinomy, contradiction and aporia. This article clarifies the meaning of these terms through tracing their respective etymology. We see that antinomy denotes a deep-seated conceptual opposition, whereas contradiction and aporia represent alternative responses to antinomy. The former presents the antinomy as potentially resolvable at some future time, and the latter sees the antinomy instead as a constitutive impasse. By way of contrast, para doxa originally referred to a (...) statement that is ‘contrary to received opinion’, but this idea has generally been subsumed – both in philosophy and more common place understandings – under the notion of aporia. This conceptual recovery enables a better understanding of key traditions in social and political theory, notably post-structuralism and Habermasian critical theory, which can be demarcated through their respective responses to the emergence of ‘paradoxes’. However, the article also demonstrates the material significance of these philosophical categories through their application to contemporary democratic politics. I analyse the constitutive tension between liberalism and democracy as well as the emergence of populism and show how these conceptual tools provide new insights for understanding these most pressing political developments of our time. (shrink)

In many Western European countries, gender equality and sexual tolerance have increasingly become markers of national cultures and European values that face an insistent threat from Muslims. Gender equality and sexual tolerance are increasingly framed in cultural terms and they play an important role in the construction of a social imaginary based on a cultural antagonism between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This article argues that a new ‘culturalized’ social imaginary has been established by turning ‘immigrant workers’ into ‘Muslim immigrants’ over the (...) last three decades. The unending moral panics around Muslim immigrants’ cultural practices such as honor killings, forced marriages, headscarves, female circumcision and homophobia create a sense of imminent threat and force progressive movements to forge unlikely alliances with right-wing groups against the insidious threat. These alliances are not, however, ephemeral mobilizations in defense of ‘common achievements’; the notion of common achievements creates a sense of cultural sameness vis-a-vis Muslims. Thus, what we see is the displacement of the internal frontiers and the creation of a new ‘hegemonic bloc’ around ‘common cultural values’. And this hegemonic displacement creates unresolvable tensions within feminist and queer movements. (shrink)

If the cliché about garbage – ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ – is true, its inverse, unfortunately, is not. Heaps and masses of garbage brought into direct view still somehow manage to escape acute recognition, let alone social responsibility or global political activism. This article investigates this trend as a growing problem between the human world and representation. Focusing on historical and contemporary landscape photography, the article questions whether data visualization trends, particularly those that attempt to visualize the post-industrial (...) consumer landscape, help or hinder our capacity to understand our environment, and possibly even ecological endeavors. The article charts the history of photography’s landscape genre, mapping the contours of a shift from the classical ‘nature’ aesthetic, to an industrial, post-industrial, and eventually a mathematical aesthetic contingent on emergent techniques and data visualization in the attempt to depict ever amassing magnitudes of environmental despoliation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for two claims. The first is that all social and political thinking lies along a continuum and that the structure of each thought along the continuum is that of a basic desire for self-determination. Self-determination, I argued, occurs in a variety of ways including, importantly, at a variety of levels of intention. On the one hand, there are the relatively unreflective ways of understanding oneself as autonomous. I attributed this way of thinking of the Neo-Aristotelian (...) conception of practical reason which is characteristic of conservatism. On the other side of the continuum, there is a rigoristic version of Kantian moral philosophy in which, to be autonomous, one must act exclusively from duty or from purely economic motivation. The second claims is that populism can be understood as a clash between different practical conceptions of autonomy which are brought into conflict as a result of the process of modern rationalization. This clash can, I argued, be clarified and also alleviated by appreciating that what the values which stand opposed in the “us vs. them” of populism and liberalism are based on a fundamentally similar conception of the value of autonomy but have come into conflict by sometime contingent historical processes which can be undone or steered in a different direction. (shrink)

Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory analyzes political ideas and action from a Marxist direction. However, while classic Marxian sociology is rooted in economic processes that “structure” society and ideas, Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory emphasizes the absence of any determinative principle. Thus, it radicalizes an ongoing shift in Marxism away from economic essentialism towards indeterminacy, contingency, and openness. The ideological superstructure becomes ever more important at the expense of the economic base; class struggle and relations of production lose analytical and strategic purchase in favor (...) of a complex and integral form of politics; there are no deeper, natural foundations determining how society is organized and structured. Post-Structuralist Discourse Theorists argue that this orientation leads to a more satisfactory analysis of political practice than is possible through positivist research. Assessing this claim requires a survey of the hermetic terminology in which Post-Structuralist Discourse Theorists express their ideas—the discourse, as it were, of Discourse Theorists—exploring their use of sociology, structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis, and the political theory of populism. (shrink)

This review-essay analyses John Beverley’s post-subalternist perspective on the intertwinement of theoretical discourse and politics – so-called Latinamericanism – in the Latin American context. This conjuncture is characterised by themarea rosada, or pink tide, of moderate leftist governments. I contend that Beverley grasps the change introduced by this trend and lucidly criticises the neoconservative, moderate, and deficient political implications of different theoretical views. This contribution notwithstanding, I argue that Beverley’s theoretical project fails effectively to conceptualise this political tide as an (...) object of theoretical inquiry: namely, to grapple with themarea rosada’s Latinamericanism as a populist political logic that simultaneously neutralises and drives socialist transformation. (shrink)