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Other Systems: Mud, Mana, Money

in The Skin of the System: On Germany's Socialist Modernity

This chapter examines how socialism relates to other traditions—especially that of philosophical ontology. Drawing on the disparate fields of philosophy, economics, semiotics, and systems theory, it ... More

This chapter examines how socialism relates to other traditions—especially that of philosophical ontology. Drawing on the disparate fields of philosophy, economics, semiotics, and systems theory, it discusses the connection between ontology and socialism and considers a set of classical ontological problems dating back to Plato's Parmenides to the critique of positivism by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. It uses a combination of “internal realism” (Willard van Orman Quine, Hilary Putnam) and “systems theory” (Talcott Parsons, Niklas Luhmann) to reformulate the ontological problems in a way relevant for understanding socialism and shows that this reformulation is especially helpful in distinguishing between “political ontology” (Carl Schmitt, Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière) and something like “economic ontology” (general equilibrium theory, Marxism). The chapter concludes by suggesting that a “socialist ontology” is obliged by its inmost aspirations to generic superiority to chop up its world differently than liberal political and economic ontologies do.Less

Politics and the Intimate Universal: Neither Servility nor Sovereignty

William Desmond

in The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity Among Religion, Art, Philosophy, and Politics

Chapter 4 considers the intimate universal in relation to politics, for some the space of the public par excellence. Does ontology or metaphysics have relevance for how we understand that relation? ... More

Chapter 4 considers the intimate universal in relation to politics, for some the space of the public par excellence. Does ontology or metaphysics have relevance for how we understand that relation? Desmond argues that we need to ask as much about a political metaphysics (ontology) as a political theology, or a political aesthetic. If the intimate universal has metaphysical significance, this has relevance for our political orientations, not least in relation to the meaning of freedom, here explored with reference to something beyond servility and sovereignty, the slave and the master.Less

The Question of the Political: Back to Where You Once Belonged?

Sergey Dolgopolski

in Other Others: The Political after the Talmud

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ... More

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ontology, exemplified by Jacques Rancière. The notion of the other others comes front and centre in this analysis. In political ontology, the concept of the political is predicated on an ability of a politician, a lawyer, or an artist to employ the philosophical, and in modern terms, “ontological” distinction between what is the case in each case and what seems to be the case in each case. In political theology, it is no longer “being” as opposed to “seeming”, but rather an ability to represent as radically distinct from any particular content conveyed. The chapter further traces foundations of both political theology and political ontology in Kant’s transcendentalism -- in particular in the necessity by which transcendentalism denies “positive law,” which Christianity traditionally ascribed to the Jews. The balance of the chapter shows how, however mutually exclusive, both political theology and political ontology remain intersubjective in their scope and thereby both efface and help notice what, in the following chapters will emerge on the pages of the Talmud as interpersonal rather than intersubjective dimension of the political.Less

Postscript

Sina Kramer

in Excluded Within: The (Un)Intelligibility of Radical Political Actors

In Chapter 8, I discuss how I came to the question of constitutive exclusion in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Drawing on both Afro-pessimist and Latina feminist thought, I outline ... More

In Chapter 8, I discuss how I came to the question of constitutive exclusion in the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Drawing on both Afro-pessimist and Latina feminist thought, I outline a pluralist political ontology as a response to the political ontologies presumed by and reinscribed through constitutive exclusion. Reconstitution, rather than mere inclusion, would be necessary to respond adequately to constitutive exclusion. And I argue for a recognition of our selves as multiple and constituted by each other—a possibility implicit in the critical account of the book, and explicitly developed in practice by #BlackLivesMatter and allied activist organizations.Less

Cultural Case Studies in the Macabresque: Variations of Human Violation in the Twentieth Century

Edward Weisband

in The Macabresque: Human Violation and Hate in Genocide, Mass Atrocity and Enemy-Making

This chapter examines seven case studies of the macabresque during the twentieth century. The macabresque is portrayed within each by adopting the “vignette” as a narrative form. A vignette is a ... More

This chapter examines seven case studies of the macabresque during the twentieth century. The macabresque is portrayed within each by adopting the “vignette” as a narrative form. A vignette is a patch, a semiotic sign, representative of a “mentality” that endows genocide and mass atrocity with a “noble” cause or “moral” if not, indeed, a “sacred” purpose. Similarities across cases of the macabresque emerge; but contrasts also appear that demonstrate major political, cultural, ideological, and attitudinal differences. These contrasts are not incidental side effects of violence. They reveal the relationships of social fantasy, specifically “thing-enjoyment” and mimetic desire and rivalry, in shaping not only ideological constructions of otherness but also the psychodynamics of a political ontology in which ideology is ontology. The case studies include the Armenian Genocide, Stalin’s purges, “Hitler’s Diabolical Laboratory,” blood trauma and the Rwandan Genocide, “Confessional Archives and Angkar’s Torture,” the Argentinian neo-inquisition, and “Bosnian Shame-Camps.”Less

Antiracism and (re)Humanization

Paul Gilroy

in The Common Growl: Toward a Poetics of Precarious Community

This entry begins by looking at Fanon’s case for a post-racial humanism, seeing it not as a desire for universal valuation, but rather as an arduous adjustment of a foundational political ontology. ... More

This entry begins by looking at Fanon’s case for a post-racial humanism, seeing it not as a desire for universal valuation, but rather as an arduous adjustment of a foundational political ontology. In urging the reader to think beyond the anti-humanism that is so prevalent in thought today, this paper challenges theory, again in the vein of Fanon, to think humanism beyond the epidermalization and racial paradigms that have dominated the discursive structure of the human. In analyzing the colonial, from British atrocities to today’s technological war on terror, and even to Human Terrain, it is possible to see the continuity from a racialized humanism to anti-humanism. The risks posed by such a continuity demonstrate the need for a radical recalibration of the fundamental ontological structures undergirding both humanism and its supposed rejection.Less

Gabriel Tarde

Éric Alliez

in Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage

This chapter analyses Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the philosophical thoughts of Gabriel Tarde. It explains that Tarde is known in the sociological field as the unfortunate adversary of David ... More

This chapter analyses Gilles Deleuze's engagement with the philosophical thoughts of Gabriel Tarde. It explains that Tarde is known in the sociological field as the unfortunate adversary of David Durkheim in his role as heir to an individualistic and psychologistic tradition which was incompatible with the methodological requisites of the new science or with the vision of founding a scientific morality. The chapter discusses Tarde's support for transversal-machinic principles of a political ontology of difference opposed equally to the automation of capitalist axioms and to bureaucratic programming.Less

“Heidegger” and the Jews

Michael Fagenblat

in Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 1931-1941

The first part of this chapter discusses Heidegger’s metapolitical critique of Judaism and world-Jewry. I argue for a placeholder interpretation of this critique. To hold that Judaism is a ... More

The first part of this chapter discusses Heidegger’s metapolitical critique of Judaism and world-Jewry. I argue for a placeholder interpretation of this critique. To hold that Judaism is a placeholder in Heidegger’s metapolitical thought implies that the “history of being” is not essentially anti-Semitic. This is not to apologize for Heidegger’s anti-Semitic ravings but to clear a path toward understanding its source. I locate this source in Heidegger’s neglect of the phenomenological-conceptual and ultimately ontological relation between being and evil. In the second part I analyse the conceptual relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and characteristic features of Jewish thought. Building on MàrleneZarader’s work, I elucidate numerous, crucial points of convergence between the two ways of thinking. This motivates an explanation of why it is that leading Jewish philosophers drew on Heidegger’s philosophy in order to articulate their views. Thinkers briefly discussed include F. Rosenzweig, G. Scholem, A. Altmann, E. Fackenheim, J. B. Soloveitchik, L. Strauss, E. Levinas and M. Wyschogrod. I then argue for a conceptual fault-line concerning the theme of Place. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary theologies of Zion extend this trajectory by adopting topological modes of thinking akin to Heidegger’s but rejected by their European predecessors.Less

Aristotle

Jussi Backman

in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben’s transformative twenty-year project in political ontology, is framed at its very outset in terms of Aristotelian philosophy – read, as we will see, from a strongly ... More

Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben’s transformative twenty-year project in political ontology, is framed at its very outset in terms of Aristotelian philosophy – read, as we will see, from a strongly medieval, Heideggerian and Arendtian perspective. As a locus classicus of the juxtaposition of the two Greek terms for life, zoe (‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’) and bios (‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’), Agamben (HS 1–2) cites a passage in Aristotle’s Politics that notes that there is a certain ‘natural delight (euemeria) and sweetness’ in the ‘mere fact of being alive itself’ (to zen auto monon), which makes human beings hold on to it for its own sake, provided that the mode of life (bios) that this being-alive amounts to is not fraught with excessive difficulty.Less

Producing the People

in The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria

This chapter focuses on the making of Nigerian national culture within the broader black and African world, because it brings into bold relief the very logic of spectacle as a form of cultural ... More

This chapter focuses on the making of Nigerian national culture within the broader black and African world, because it brings into bold relief the very logic of spectacle as a form of cultural commodification. It approaches this important notion as a basic inversion of simulacrum and original—a kind of commodity fetish writ large—whereby an exhibited “people” became more real and authentic than the lands and peoples themselves. That this transformation was in fact quite fundamental to the political ontology of the colonial exhibition is well demonstrated by several studies of British and French imperial culture. But in the postcolonial context of an oil-rich Nigeria, the consequences were very different. The transformation of the public sphere that Nigeria sought to achieve in FESTAC developed into a simulated arena of national participation which was underwritten by oil, projected from “above,” and ultimately detached from its popular base.Less