ABSTRACTSocial constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with racism, (...) chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative. (shrink)

The philosophical idea of the death of God has had various semantic operations within dominant modern positions on human empowerment. Beginning with the significance of this, the article aims to discuss the half-life of a God who has become a metaphor. In other words, it explores the reverberation of God and God's death in secularized philosophy as well as the consequences of this for ethics and the conception of the Good. Then, the article illustrates the complex connection of this aim (...) with the Occidental delimitation of human potentialities through gleanings from Murdoch, Arendt and Badiou´s ideas about the constellation ‘worldlessness, rupture, human frailty and everydayness’. It shows that such delimitation, operative in theories that share most of the assumptions surrounding the above constellation, re-sacralizes the justification of ethics as humanist programme. Finally, it indicates how this particular delimitation of human potentialities can be revisited through the revival of the dead metaphor of the angelic and the kind of ethics it can animate. (shrink)