For some years now, the significance of truth for politics has been intensely debated under the buzzword “post-truth.” However, this cannot hide the fact that political theory and philosophy have systematically neglected the relationship between truth and politics throughout their history. This article intends to remedy this desideratum by differentiating the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political field. To this end, the main strands of the post-truth debate are reconstructed and their shortcomings are (...) pointed out. Second, based on a contrasting reading of Habermas and Foucault, possible starting points for systematizing the relationship between truth and politics are discussed. Third, and as a prolegomenon to such a systematization, the article proposes a cartography of political truth forms and relations along five fault lines: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secret and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice. (shrink)

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and sexual violence (...) support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) (...) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political. (shrink)

How do social movements respond to the ecological crisis? In this paper, we reframe social movements as 'more-than-social movements' to highlight the fact that many contemporary mobilisations do much more than target recognised social institutions and political governance; indeed, they are practically transforming eco-societies with and within both the human and the nonhuman world. What constitutes the core of more-than-social movements' action is the capacity to set up alternative ecologies of existence, or 'alterontologies', as we call them in the paper. (...) In what follows, we engage with the imaginaries and practices of agroecology, AIDS treatment activism and permaculture in order to rethink what autonomy and justice might look like in the context of today's ecological crisis. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been pivotal in critical theory in recent years. This paper discusses how two goals of a critical theory of recognition – to explain and to morally evaluate social change – are interrelated. In doing so, this paper draws the limits of the concept of struggles for recognition. It is argued that if a social movement can be deemed illegitimate, this movement can no longer be understood as struggling for recognition. This implies that the two goals (...) of a critical theory of recognition cannot be fulfilled simultaneously: a moral standard that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate social struggles cannot distinguish between different types of struggles for recognition, but only between struggles for recognition and other types of social struggles. Drawing the limits of the concept of struggles for recognition in this way helps to better distinguish between different types of social struggle and contributes to a more precise understanding of what struggles for recognition entail. (shrink)

The modern outlook on emancipation has made its quest inseparable from a quest for endless enhancement, based on an ever-more intensive exploitation of the biophysical world. This accounts for how unsustainable ways of living are reiterated worldwide, in spite of evidence of their deleterious effects. The underpinnings of unsustainability, and a major impediment to conceiving alternatives, come from an account of the human as ontologically indeterminate, crushed on doing, both vulnerable and powerful towards the world. The impasse of such ambivalence (...) hampers social theory critique, from post-humanist ontologies to the case for degrowth and lifestyle politics. The article outlines a different take on emancipation. An account is provided of form-of-life as a doing tailored to being – not as a self-enclosed monad but as a result of the encounter between own ‘inclination’ and the world. This theoretical perspective discloses a research program on emergent mobilisations. (shrink)

One of the main contributions of A Feminist Theory of Refusal is its connection of everyday action and prefigurative practices with an explicit commitment to structural change. But how such change happens, and what kind of relations it implies between ‘the city’ (as the existing political community) and feminist heterotopias of refusal, remains unclear. Reading Honig’s work as a prefigurative theory, I argue that it links moments of doing-otherwise with moments of institutional politics, sparking questions about the conditions of a (...) successful return to the city. I then develop these conditions through a case study of the feminist activism of Women on Waves; and argue that feminist refusal can lead to political transformation if it durably connects practices inside and outside the city. (shrink)