Alexander Stagnell

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• Docent
• Docent in rhetoric at Södertörn University

This book argues that diplomacy, which emerged out of the French Revolution, has become one of the central ideological state apparatuses of the modern democratic nation-state. The book is divided into four thematic parts. The first presents the central concepts and theoretical perspectives derived from the work of Slavoj Žižek, focusing on his und...

This article investigates the ambiguous status of rhetoric, situated between proper philosophy and mere sophistry, through Alan Badiou's three exemplary figures of thought: the philosopher, the anti-philosopher, and the sophist. With the recent return of the sophist in politics in the form of populist politicians, contemporary rhetorical studies ha...

This article approaches a potential tension in the work of Slavoj Žižek between his critique of communist ideology and his endorsement of the communist idea. The aim is to show how this endorsement, in effect, emerged out of Žižek's sustained engagement with communist ideology. The article captures this transformation by focusing on his understandi...

Denna artikel tar sin utgångspunkt i ett skifte inom retorikämnets demokratiförståelse där ett agonistiskt eller antagonistiskt perspektiv alltmer kommit att ersätta det konsensusinriktade demokratibegrepp som tidigare varit dominerande. Mer specifikt handlar det om hur denna förändrade utgångspunkt påverkar analysen av populistisk retorik då den,...

This article takes as its starting point the modern description of rhetoric as a threat to imagination in order to ask the question concer-ning rhetoric's ability to think the new. Against the modern fragmentation of the rhetorical tradition, the focus then turns to the structuralist reinteg-ration of rhetoric, how this has been based on an obscure...

Caves, images, and symbols are recurring topics in the work of Mats Rosengren, from his reading of Plato in his dissertation Psychagōgia – Konsten att leda själar, to his investigation of the world of paleolithic cave art in Cave Art, Perception and Knowledge. While other philosophers might have descended into the cave with the aim of guiding visit...

S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique. Fulltext: https://lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/article/view/119/133

Retoriken och diplomatin delar något vi kan kalla representationens problem och som springer ur svårigheterna att någonsin på ett korrekt sätt representera någonting. Föreliggande artikel tar sig an detta gemensamma problem genom att undersöka de olika lösningar som erbjudits genom historien, något som tar oss från Platons och Aristoteles kritik av...

Bara ett halvår efter att vi hade påbörjat våra doktorandstudier under höst-terminen 2012 inleddes på Södertörn ett samtal om retorikämnets natur. Detta samtal gav upphov till en rad långa diskussioner, men också ett par försök från kollegor att definiera ämnet med målet att en viss förståelse av retoriken skulle kunna utgöra en grund i vilken såvä...

In this article, I take on the question concerning the relationship between language and reality in Barbara Cassin’s philosophistry. More specifically, I am focusing on her interpretation of Jacques Lacans reading of Democritus atomism and heridea that the atom and the void are sophistic creations which, at the same time, follows and avoid the logi...

This article approaches the problem of post-truth and the opposition between philosophical dialectics and sophistic rhetoric. The antagonism is addressed through a reading of Žižek's depiction of the ongoing discussion between Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, the “new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists,” as stained by se...

In the case of Stephen Keyter, one can read his ideology as symptomatic of the hystericizing discourse of the Master, explaining his numerous attempts to confront girlfriends and colleagues alike. Once gathered together, the differences registered in the text show the movement from Keyter to the Ambassador –– that is, the shift in narrative perspec...

If by the end of the eighteenth century the name diplomacy constituted the foundation for a post-revolutionary archi-politics –– thus turning diplomacy into a figure for an anti-democratic democracy by denying the problem of the rabble –– then this tale surrounding the origins of proper diplomacy seemed, from its very inception, to be haunted by it...

Ideology enters the picture in the same moment as the Master Signifier externalizes the immanent antagonism, when the gap is explained through a fantasy relating the subject to its fantasmatic object. The understanding of ideology is thus clearly far removed from the traditional Marxist conception. No other theoretical development during the twenti...

Following Zizek, the main difference distinguishing a post-political ideological configuration from one that operates through repression or disavowal is that, in the case of the former, no symptom can return within its existing symbolic field. This is owing to the fact that the founding antagonism is rejected in toto and not just denied or disavowe...

The coining of diplomacy allowed for the first proper separation of politics into a foreign and a domestic branch. While these practices, up until the French Revolution, had both been referred to as politics, the naming seems to imply that both of them now contained what seemed to be separate social links. While subjects under an absolute monarchy...

Most notably, the notion of an Ideological State Apparatus seems out of place in the realm of international politics since, at least in the traditional Marxist understanding, a state apparatus constitutes the “execution and intervention ‘in the interests of the ruling classes’ in the class struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies agains...

Beginning with the sixteenth century Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, the goal was to capture the ways in which not only contemporary Diplomacy Studies but also its forerunners have tried to formulate the limits of diplomacy and the challenges facing this field. However, even this ultra-political fantasy eventually f...

Kant’s reflections on state-to-state relationships have played an important part in the field of International Relations ever since its formation as a sub-field of Political Science during the first half of the twentieth century. Although it is possible to find what can be considered comments on diplomacy and foreign policy scattered across his pol...

Diplomacy has traditionally been assumed to have its origins in Ancient Greece, most notably because of the role that envoys or ambassadors supposedly played, both in creating and solving the problem of the relationship between city-states. Despite this early reflection on the responsibilities of an envoy, it would take another 2000 years for a con...

In his 1998 book Diplomacy for the Next Century, the Israeli diplomat and academic Abba Eban argued that, formally speaking, the Cold War came to an end neither with the fall of the Berlin Wall nor with the collapse of Soviet Union, but rather with the treaty between NATO and Russia, signed in Paris on May 27th, 1997. The same pattern has seemingly...

This essay seeks to approach the current tensions within the European Union through the lens of the philosophy on perpetual peace. Beginning with Kant’s pamphlet On Perpetual Peace and his depiction of it as “an infinite process of gradual approximation”, the text moves through Hegel’s concept of the necessity of war in order to develop an understa...

The principal aim of this dissertation is to answer the age-old question What is diplomacy? But this study approaches the question in what might, on first look, appear oblique. By employing Slavoj Žižek’s reworked notion of Ideologiekritik with respect to the history, science, and artistic explorations of diplomacy, this work begins by extracting t...

This text aims at investigating the possible effects that Cassin’s rereading of the battle between the philosophers and the sophist might have on the contemporary understanding of the connection between rhetoric and the political. Through her critique of Plato and Aristotle the conflict between Philosophy and Sophistics is perceived as one regardin...

Översättning och introduction av Alexander Stagnell, efter originalen “Ontologie/logologie”, “Sens” & “Rhéto­rique ou espace/temps” i Barbara Cassins L’archipel des idées de Barbara Cassin, Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014, 23-27, 29-34 & 41-49. Med vänligt tillstånd från förlaget.