Discussione di "Alienazione", di Rahel Jaeggi, Roma: 2105.

Introduzione alla raccolta di saggi di Rahel Jaeggi "Forme di vita e capitalismo", curata e tradotta da Marco Solinas. L'introduzione presenta una breve panoramica del pensiero dell'autrice e si sofferma sul suo progetto incentrato sulla critica immanente del capitalismo come forma di vita.

"Introduzione" alla raccolta di articoli di Rahel Jaeggi "Forme di vita e capitalismo", curata e tradotta da Marco Solinas, e uscita per Rosenberg & Sellier nel 20016.

El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar el diagnóstico crítico que Rahel Jaeggi realiza de la sociedad. El trabajo comienza desarrollando el análisis que lleva a cabo de la crítica de la ideología. Luego mostraremos los elementos centrales de su teoría crítica desplegados en Alienación y Crítica de las formas de vida. La conclusión es que la teoría crítica de Jaeggi es una crítica inmanente y una crítica de la ideología de la sociedad contemporánea.

n this paper, I analyse Rahel Jaeggi’s socio-ontological account of forms of life. I show that her framework is a two-sided one, since it involves an understanding of forms of life both as inert bundles of practices and as having a normative structure. Here I argue that this approach is based on an a priori argument which assumes normativity as the condition of intelligibility of social criticism. I show that the intimate tension between these two sides is reflected (...) in the socio-ontological model of the constitution of social phenomena, which on the one side is understood in terms of habituation and materialization, and on the other side in terms of constitution through norms. The second side in the end prevails and leads to some sort of normative essentialism which involves a prescriptive meta-theoretical understanding of normativity combined with a socio-ontological model of constitutive rules. I then analyse two arguments that Jaeggi offers in support of her assumption that normative constitution is the deep structure of social practices. I name these the functional- teleological argument, and the crisis developmental argument, and argue that neither succeeds in proving that practices are not normatively underdetermined. (shrink)

In this paper, following Rahel Jaeggi’s critique of forms of life, I contend that to identify genuine critical thinking we should start from an analysis of the normative nature of forms of life as the basic constituents of the social world. In this view, critical thinking can be seen as a critical behaviour. While genuine forms of life can recognize and consider the variety of concrete and diverse situations, on the contrary non-functioning forms of life’s critical rationality understands (...) the norm as applied from outside of the form of life. In this case the norm, erroneously understood as a neutral and universally applicable principle, such as economic rationality, is not able to consider the particularity of forms of life as goods in themselves. I defend the meaning that an education in critical thinking must have, as a genuine and functional rationality characterising human beings in a social world. -/- . (shrink)

Há atualmente um debate interdisciplinar profícuo sobre a noção de sofrimento social (social suffering). Pensadores e pensadoras como Barrington Moore Jr., Emmanuel Renault e Rahel Jaeggi desenvolvem o assunto a partir de um pressuposto elementar: sofrimento social diferencia-se de sofrimento individual na medida em que as causas do primeiro não são aturais (desejos básicos insatisfeitos, doenças, catástrofes naturais), mas resultam do agir humano; e, mais ainda, não resultam anto de relações interpessoais imediatas, mas de relações sociais mais amplas, (...) como a guerra, a pobreza, a exploração etc. No artigo Schopenhauer e a sociedade, Horkheimer afirmou que “no intransigente nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade estriba a raiz de sua grandeza” (p. 47). Para o pai da Teoria Crítica, a acepção schopenhaueriana de que apenas os indivíduos e o curso de suas vidas são reais, enquanto os povos são meras abstrações, não implicaria contrapor a sociedade e o Estado à pessoa singular ou esta àqueles. A sociedade se origina e se transforma a partir de indivíduos socialmente vinculados; o indivíduo não é uma ilha. Com essa chave de leitura, Horkheimer, como discípulo herético, consegue destacar e valorizar em Schopenhauer o aparato social da noção metafísica de sofrimento. O objetivo deste artigo é (i) mostrar em que medida a diferenciação entre sofrimento individual e social estaria implicitamente indicada em Schopenhauer e (ii) até que ponto a leitura de Horkheimer sobre o nominalismo de Schopenhauer em relação à sociedade permitiria sugerir elementos schopenhauerianos para os debates contemporâneos sobre sofrimento social. (shrink)

Als Signatur moderner demokratischer Gesellschaften gilt heute weithin, was John Rawls zu Beginn der 1990er Jahre als „vernünftigen Pluralismus“ bezeichnet hat. Mit ihm einher geht die Frage, wie divergierende Lebensformen miteinander ins Gespräch gebracht werden können und wie sich dabei zu legitimen politischen Urteilen kommen lässt. Ich werde in meinem Beitrag argumentieren, dass sich die genannte Frage lösen lässt, wenn wir uns der jüngeren Diskussion von Arendts Theorie der Urteilskraft von Linda Zerilli zuwenden und diese mit Rahel Jaeggis Überlegungen (...) zur Kritik von Lebensformen verbinden. Dafür werde ich zunächst Arendts Überlegungen zur politischen Urteilskraft rekonstruieren und zeigen, wie diese Kants Modell der ästhetischen Urteilskraft auf den Bereich des Politischen zu übertragen versucht. Ich werde argumentieren, dass Arendt diese Transposition nur teilweise gelingt und eine Reihe von wichtigen Fragen ungelöst bleibt. Arendts Überlegungen sind damit jedoch keineswegs obsolet, sondern müssen vielmehr weiter gedacht werden. Zerilli hat hierfür jüngst einen wegweisenden Vorschlag vorgelegt, der Arendts Theorie der Urteilskraft nicht mehr im Ausgang von Kant, sondern von Wittgenstein zu denken versucht. Die damit einhergehende Perspektivverschiebung erlaubt es, den Streit zwischen divergierenden Lebensformen mit Jaeggi als eine mit den Mitteln der immanenten Kritik geführte Auseinandersetzung um deren Lernfähigkeit zu begreifen, was am Beispiel des Streits zwischen den Lebensformen der Kleinfamilie und der Kommune deutlich gemacht werden soll. (shrink)

This monograph contrasts two prominent models of education, Competence-Based Education (CBE), more recent and currently dominant in most school systems around the world, and Bildung-Oriented Education (BOE), once the basis of the school systems of Northern Europe. CBE is assessment-oriented and interprets learning as the acquisition of clearly definable and allegedly measurable competences, and is supported by supranational organisations, such as the OECD, which approach education from the perspective of human capital theory. BOE is instead teaching-oriented and characterises learning holistically (...) as aimed at the progressive articulation of a meaningful ‘big picture’ in the student’s mind. Emerged in Northern Europe under the influence of the ideals of the Enlightenment and Neo-Humanism of individual and collective autonomy and responsibility, BOE was subsequently enriched with a hermeneutical approach to teaching and socio-political objectives of emancipation and solidarity originating within Critical Theory. The book first analyses CBE and argues that, in spite of its celebrated ‘scientificity’, it is internally incoherent and unreliable, contributes to structural forms of oppression and injustice, can foster social pathologies, and fails to provide students with the kind of intellectual autonomy they need as both human beings and citizens of our complex post-industrial societies. Then, it introduces BOE and articulates and defends an updated version of it from objections raised by critical theorists, poststructuralists and postcolonial thinkers. It argues that BOE is a coherent and flexible model of education that endows students with autonomy and responsibility, can reduce structural forms of oppression and injustice, and can heal social pathologies. (shrink)

The claim that there is “no alternative”, to contemporary neoliberal capitalism is widespread today. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of reification to scrutinize the alleged necessity of the capitalist social order. Developed by Georg Lukács, the problem of reification refers to the experience of social arrangements as thinglike entities rather than as products of social construction. By addressing the problem of reification within a social ontology of forms of life, the occurrence of reification is understood as resulting (...) from the normatively neutral self-presentation of the capitalist form of life. To de-neutralize social norms that shape the capitalist form of life, this paper argues that social critique should turn to shared standpoints from which reification is experienced as a problem. Such standpoints can be found in social practices that are already involved in shared, normatively imbued forms of life beyond the reified logic of the capitalist form of life. Hence, it is argued that alternative forms of life are positioned to de-reify the norms that guide the capitalist form of life at large. (shrink)

En el contexto en el cual la ideología de género e implícito lo femenino se ha vuelto un tema que preocupa, nos proponemos una reflexión sobre cómo deberíamos entender el papel de lo femenino en nuestra sociedad contemporánea, en relación al estudio de las vidas y las ideas de dos mujeres importantes para la cultura alemana de final de siglo XVIII e inicio del siglo XIX: Caroline Schlegel y Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Cuando hablamos de pensamiento femenino, tenemos que tener (...) una mirada retrospectiva y comprender muy bien cuál ha sido el aporte de las mujeres para nuestra cultura para así saber cuál tiene que ser la dirección de nuestros debates actuales sobre el mismo. El artículo se enfoca en resaltar la importancia de la formación y el cultivo de las capacidades espirituales de estas dos mujeres que lograron en su época volverse figuras muy respetadas y apreciadas por los grandes filósofos románticos, con la intención de transmitir que la “cuestión femenina” no se puede reducir a un asunto de meros derechos y política, sino que tiene que ver con la labor y la tarea que la mujer tiene de asumir las potencias de sus cualidades y usar su inteligencia para edificar nuestra cultura. (shrink)

On Jaeggi’s reading, the immanent and progressive features of ideology critique are rooted in the connection between its explanatory and its normative tasks. I argue that this claim can be cashed out in terms of the mechanisms involved in a functional explanation of ideology and that stability plays a crucial role in this connection. On this reading, beliefs can be said to be ideological if (a) they have the function of supporting existing social practices, (b) they are the output (...) of systematically distorted processes of belief formation, (c) the conditions in which distorting mechanisms trigger can be traced back to structural causal factors shaped by the social practice their outputs are designed to support. Functional problems thus turn out to be interlocked with normative problems because ideology fails to provide principles to regulate cooperation that would be accepted under conditions of non-domination, hence failing to anchor a stable cooperative scheme. By explaining ideology as parasitic on domination, ideology critique points to the conditions under which cooperation stabilizes as those of a practice whose principles are accepted without coercion. Thus, it seems to entail a conception of justice whose principles are articulated as part of a theory of social cooperation. (shrink)

A co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, its newspaper, and hospitality houses, the writer Dorothy Day promoted public peace nationally and internationally as a journalist, an organizer of public protests, and a builder of associational communities. Drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s conceptions of the role of speech and action in creating the public realm, this paper focuses on several of Day’s most controversial public positions: her leadership of non-cooperation against Civil Defense drills intended to prepare New York City residents to survive (...) a nuclear war; her urging of Catholics to find common cause with the Cuban revolutionary government; and her support for interracial farming communities in the Southern United States. As Arendt asserts about Rahel Varnhagen’s salon in Berlin, by being public meeting spaces hosted in private houses, Catholic Worker communities fostered egalitarian rather than “agonal” politics. Like Gandhi’s newspapers and ashrams as well as “Occupy” communities such as Zuccotti Park, Day’s newspaper was a center for incubating and implementing social reform. The Catholic Worker provided a place where writers could question the official rhetoric of such conflicts as World War II and the Cold War, put forward different interpretations of unfolding events, and chart possible alternatives to establishment agendas. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is often--but somehow not unfailingly--credited, together with Alasdair MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor, as being one of the central voices in the philosophical turn to the concept of narrative of a generation or more ago. Some have even cited her 1958 The Human Condition as providing a particular impetus for later accounts of narrative. This essay examines what contemporary philosophical accounts of narrative might still owe Arendt, exploring her approach to narrative in theory as well as practice. (...) The first part looks at Arendt's use of philosophical sources from the tradition--Aristotle, Augustine and Hegel--with an eye to how her appropriation of these figures differs from that of contemporary philosophers of narrative. Three of Arendt's typically bold and rich claims about narrative action emerge as important: the notion of action as revealing an agent's own daimon: the condition that such action be revealable within a world or shared public space which has resilience yet vulnerability; and the potential for agents revealed within such a world to discover some form of narrative rebirth in their efforts at storytelling. The second section examines the extent to which Arendt herself allowed those claims to be tested and thought through in her own attempts (in Men in Dark Times, Rahel Varnhagen and elsewhere) at constructing biographical narratives. (shrink)