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The Politics of Prescription
... De certo modo, a prescrição antecipa seu poder vindouro, apresentando um possível que novos sujeitos políticos deverão sustentar materialmente. Num texto bastante recomendável -e em diversos pontos convergente com o argumento lazariano -Peter Hallward (2005) caracteriza cuidadosamente as chamadas "políticas da prescrição". tância. ...
... tância. Nestes escritos foi sedimentando-se um pensamento da política que influenciaria decisivamente certos aspectos da filosofia de Badiou 3 Além de ser notória, tal influência é reivindicada por Badiou em diversas ocasiões (BADIOU, 2015[1992] e BADIOU, 2017[2005). Num extenso comentário indexado ao prefácio de Lógicas dos Mundos, o filósofo se posiciona abertamente em relação à doutrina de Lazarus, discernindo, a respeito da política, quais seriam os propósitos de uma abordagem antropológica e de uma abordagem filosófica (BADIOU 2008, p. 572 e ss.). 4 ...
A antropologia pós-leninista de Sylvain Lazarus separou-se dos domínios do cientificismo a reboque de dois enunciados radicais: “as pessoas pensam” e “o pensamento é relação do real”. Na história do marxismo, Lênin teria sido o primeiro autor a colocar a ação transformadora das coletividades humanas sob a condição de estabelecer suas próprias condições, independentemente dos ditames científicos, históricos e filosóficos que pretendiam depreender das posições sociais já existentes um devir político positivo, com destino pré-fixado. Neste ensaio, delineio o espaço político-teórico reivindicado por Lazarus e reviso as proposições basilares de sua antropologia, enfatizando a original problemática do real inerente a ela. Meu argumento expõe as consequências decisivas deste pensamento que extrai sua particular figura do real diretamente do campo de “possíveis” aberto pela capacidade intelectiva das pessoas. Sugiro que, se decidirmos aceitar a aparente obviedade do enunciado “as pessoas pensam”, abre-se diante de nós um novo horizonte de pesquisa, potencialmente catastrófico do ponto de vista das garantias epistemológicas objetivistas que vínhamos usufruindo até o momento.
La antropología post-leninista de Sylvain Lazarus se separó de los dominios del cientificismo de la mano de dos enunciados radicales: “la gente piensa” y “el pensamiento es relación de lo real”. En la historia del marxismo, Lenin habría sido el primer autor en poner la acción transformadora de las colectividades humanas bajo condición de establecer sus propias condiciones, independientemente de los dictámenes científicos, históricos y filosóficos que pretendían desprender de las posiciones sociales ya existentes un devenir político positivo con destino preestablecido. En este ensayo, delineo el espacio teórico-político reivindicado por Lazarus y reviso las proposiciones fundamentales de su antropología, subrayando la original problemática de lo real que le es inherente. Mi argumento expone las consecuencias decisivas de un pensamiento que extrae su singular figura de lo real directamente del campo de lo “posible” abierto por la capacidad intelectiva de las personas. Sugiero que si decidimos aceptar la aparente obviedad del enunciado “la gente piensa”, se abre ante nosotros un nuevo horizonte de investigación que es potencialmente catastrófico desde el punto de vista de las garantías epistemológicas objetivistas que hemos usufructuado hasta ahora.
... In general then, the NLS mode was a mode 'in exteriority' in Africa, lasting probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People's Conference in Accra 5-13 December 1958) and 1973 the assassination of Cabral (Hallward, 2005) 13 . The NLS mode is a truly twentieth century mode 14 and its language was often borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode. ...
... The sequence of this mode in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism is today clearly over, and has been so for about thirty years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. ...
... In general then, the NLS mode was a mode 'in exteriority' in Africa, lasting probably between 1958 (the date of the All-African People's Conference in Accra 5-13 December 1958) and 1973 the assassination of Cabral (Hallward, 2005) 13 . The NLS mode is a truly twentieth century mode 14 and its language was often borrowed from Marxism, particularly from the Stalinist mode. ...
... The sequence of this mode in Africa, with all its contradictory attempts to resist colonialism is today clearly over, and has been so for about thirty years. Yet as Hallward (2005) asks, can we begin to speak today of the end of this end? I shall suggest that there is evidence from South Africa to suggest that we can. ...
This report was originally written for CODESRIA, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, and is due to be published by CODESRIA as a monograph in the near future. Interface is very grateful to Prof Neocosmos and to CODESRIA for the opportunity to present a preliminary version of this report. We hope that this enables social movements elsewhere in the world to learn from some of the most systematic reflection yet on the current shape of popular struggles in Africa. Preface and acknowledgements This work was originally written as a report for the Codesria Multinational Working Group on Citizenship and submitted in 2007. It has been revised since then. The argument is deployed along the following lines: The contemporary critique of neo-liberalism has concentrated overwhelmingly on its economic theory and socio-economic effects. Very little has been written so far on its political conceptions, particularly of the limited thinking which it imposes on political thought and practice. This work makes a contribution to the latter endeavour by making a case for thinking an emancipatory politics in contemporary Africa. It shows that civil society -the expression of the freedom of the citizen in neo-liberal discourse -must be understood, not as organised society, but as a domain of politics where the hegemony of a liberal, state mode of politics prevails. Politics also exists beyond, or at the margin of civil society. Neo-liberal politics predominantly produces passivity or rarely a politics of petitioning the state. This political passivity must be countered by an active citizenship which often exists beyond the domain of state politics including civil society itself. But this active citizenship -political agency -is not necessarily conducive to a politics of emancipation; it merely enables the possibility of the envisaging of alternative modes of thought and political 'possibles'. To initiate a discussion of the theorisation of emancipatory politics in Africa, this work briefly outlines the philosophy of change of Alain Badiou, and the anthropology of Sylvain Lazarus. In particular it concentrates on the latter's understanding of subjective 'modes of politics' and political 'prescriptions'. Using this perspective, it becomes possible to identify a National Liberation Struggle (NLS) mode of politics as a sequential political subjectivity which dominated on the continent from the 1940s to the 1970s. The main characteristics of this NLS mode of politics are outlined. However, this manner of thinking emancipatory politics has now come to an end, so that emancipation has to be thought differently today in Africa. I then argue in some detail that the period 1984-86 in South Africa (re-) discovered the beginnings of a new mode of Interface: a journal for and about social movements Key document Volume 1 (2): 263 -334 (November 2009) Neocosmos, Rethinking militancy 264 politics, which in several important ways contradicted the core features of the NLS mode. In particular this was a politics which did not see its object as the seizure of power, but as the transformation of the lived experience of power. The monograph ends by comparing the politics of two current post-apartheid South African social movements -the Treatment Action Campaign and the Abahlali baseMjondolo. It shows that, despite appearances, it is the former which has operated within the domain of the state politics of civil society, and the latter which operates beyond those subjective limits. Hence it is the latter which shows the closest fidelity to the event of 1984-86, and which is thus the closest thing today, at least in South Africa, to being the bearer of a thought of emancipatory politics.
... En ese sentido, se cae en otra forma de metapolítica al reducir todas las dimensiones de lo político a la actualización de la paradoja ontológica del fundar/desfundar. Así, el pluralismo de Marchart no lo es tanto, ya que excluye una serie de dimensiones que no son subsumibles a lo paradójico, como una política de la militancia (Badiou, 2010), de la prescripción (Hallward, 2005) o de la construcción estatal institucional. Para estas políticas, lo relevante es dar con los criterios evaluativos para determinar la preferencia de un orden político sobre otro, no solo afirmar que ontológicamente todo es posible. ...
Este libro es el resultado de la colaboración entre el Grupo de Investigación sobre Teoría Crítica de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú y el Grupo de Trabajo Internacional de Teoría Crítica del Instituto de Investigación Social de Frankfurt. El volumen, editado por Gianfranco Casuso y Justo Serrano, ha sido pensado como una introducción general a los muy diversos temas que la teoría crítica ha abordado desde sus orígenes. A pesar de esta pluralidad, las contribuciones se articulan en torno a un mismo tópico: el análisis de los obstáculos para la autorrealización humana, de sus causas y de los medios para superarlos. Estos obstáculos, por lo general relacionados con el concepto de patología social, son inherentes a los procesos de constitución social e individual, por lo que su superación solo puede provenir desde el interior de los órdenes sociales y tener a los propios actores como agentes del cambio. «Patología social», «constitución normativa de la sociedad» y «crítica inmanente» son, de esta manera, los tres ejes principales del libro.
... Enquanto o movimento feminista daquele país reivindicava o direito de voto para as 41 Alguns autores que desenvolvem esta perspectiva sobre a política: Sylvain Lazarus (2017), Michael Neocosmos (2018) e PeterHallward (2005). 42 Em Spinoza, segundoAzevedo (2018, p. 51), "a compreensão do corpo passa por duas proposições, uma dinâmica: o corpo se define pelo poder de afetar e ser afetado; e outra cinética: a individualidade de um corpo também se define pelas relações de repouso e movimento, de velocidade e lentidão". ...
... Firstly, Chomsky's theory of the genetically determined human language faculty has served to focus the scope of linguistic inquiry on the biological uniqueness of human beings. Paradoxically, this biological uniqueness, as pointed out in the quotation from Hallward (2008) at the outset of this paper, sets human beings, and the human capacity for language, at a distance from the rest of the natural world. I think that this distance is maximized by Chomsky's emphasis on syntax. ...
It is not unusual for contemporary linguists to claim that “Modern Linguistics began in 1957” (with the publication of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures ). Some of the essays in Chomskyan (R)evolutions examine the sources, the nature and the extent of the theoretical changes Chomsky introduced in the 1950s. Other contributions explore the key concepts and disciplinary alliances that have evolved considerably over the past sixty years, such as the meanings given for “Universal Grammar”, the relationship of Chomskyan linguistics to other disciplines (Cognitive Science, Psychology, Evolutionary Biology), and the interactions between mainstream Chomskyan linguistics and other linguistic theories active in the late 20th century: Functionalism, Generative Semantics and Relational Grammar. The broad understanding of the recent history of linguistics points the way towards new directions and methods that linguistics can pursue in the future.
As of February 2020, this e-book is Open Access CC BY-NC-ND, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.
... Historically, human efforts to prescribe or advocate one discourse over others have been contentious, regardless of the religious or scientific warrant behind the efforts (Hallward, 2005). In science, this problem acquires complexity, given scientists' needs to work from common understandings. ...
In this paper, I outline some aspects of what I describe as a “discursive sensibility.” Drawing from discourse theory and research, I consider problem gambling in terms of this sensibility: an appreciation for and flexibility in working with differences in how language is used in describing and addressing gambling. I look specifically at how this discursive sensibility can be reflected in particular approaches to practice and research.
Aggression against Kosovo is an example of how the NATO and the 'international community' have (mis)used Serbia and Kosovo in a classic modern exercise of identity construction by disciplining the Balkan 'other'. The discourse of security is not a neutral academic terrain, but a continuous struggle for political power, access to resources, and the authority to articulate new definitions and priorities of security. Modern reasons for war were absent because the conflict in Kosovo centered around the pursuit of moral aims (rather than traditional politics) by other means. The vocabulary employed related more to the tradition of a just war (a notion that preceded the era of modern wars), which was firmly grounded in denationalization and aimed to replace politics with the imperative of universal principles and virtue. The aim of the paper is to show that the Kosovo model of aggression, behind the discourses of moral goals, traditionally political, has aimed to implement the New World Order of imperialist powers under the auspices of the 'international community' and to establish full control over natural resources.
Em 2015, meus interlocutores no movimento popular dos cortadores de cana-de-açúcar do norte uruguaio enunciavam seus propósitos políticos em referência a um conjunto de palavras emblemáticas que, segundo eles, indicariam a existência de uma antiga “autonomia” passível de ser atualizada no tempo presente. Argumento que esse tipo de recordação é da ordem das “autênticas lembranças” (Walter Benjamin). Nelas, está em jogo a hipótese segundo a qual um acontecimento passado poder ser redescoberto à luz das inquietações atuais que o transformam em objeto de atenção política. Testo essa hipótese mediante uma “análise sequencial da política” (Sylvain Lazarus). Seleciono algumas palavras que mobilizavam a atenção dos meus interlocutores para, em seguida, submergir-me nas formas de consciência que outrora elas sustentaram. Finalizo o artigo refletindo sobre como um processo político contemporâneo pode revalorizar as experiências autonômicas pretéritas, expondo-nos ao que Benjamin denominaria uma “cristalização em mônada” do tempo da emancipação. Palavras-chave : Autonomia. Lembrança. Política. Movimento popular. Uruguai NAMES OF THE POSSIBLE: AUTHENTIC MEMORIES AND SEQUENTIAL STUDY OF AUTONOMOUS POLITICS IN THE EXTREME NORTH OF URUGUAY Abstract: My interlocutors of the sugarcane cutters popular movement of Northern-Uruguay enunciated their political purposes by referring to a set of emblematic words that, according to them, point to the existence of an old-time ‘autonomy’ that could nowadays be actualized. This kind of perspective regarding the past belongs to the realm of ‘authentic memories’ (Walter Benjamin) and raise the hypothesis that a past event can be rediscovered in light of current concerns that make it an object of political attention. I verify this hypothesis through a ‘sequential analysis of politics’ (Sylvain Lazarus). I select some words that capture the attention of my interlocutors and then I immerse myself in the forms of consciousness that such words once held. Finally, I reflect on how a contemporary political process can give us access to an old-time autonomic experience, exposing us to what Benjamin would call ‘crystallization in monad’ of the time of emancipation. Keywords : Autonomy. Memory. Politics. Popular movement. Uruguay
Since 2004, the Marlin Mine, located in North-west Guatemala, has produced conflict between Goldcorp, the Guatemalan state and the primarily indigenous Mayan communities affected by the mine. This conflict has generated local anti-mining movements that organized community consultations which, grounded in indigenous rights law and Mayan decision-making practices, allow affected communities to decide whether or not to permit mining in the region. While communities resoundingly rejected open-pit mining, and while this decision received international support, the Marlin Mine continues operations. Drawing on field research and new developments in philosophies of rights, this paper makes two related arguments. First, Mayan anti-mining resistance must be situated within a broader colonial history defined by exploitation and primitive accumulation. Second, Mayan activism challenges current conceptions of the relationship between rights, cultural identity and political agency; most significantly, Mayans do not only claim rights on the basis of identity, they enact and politicize the form in which these rights potentially take place.
Michel Houellebecq’s 2010 novel La Carte et le territoire (The Map and the Territory) concerns an artist, Jed Martin, French despite his American-sounding name, whose work is in various ways concerned with work and labour. Martin begins, as a student, taking photographs of industrial objects in his aim to give an objective description of the world. His next project, which will make him famous as an artist, is a series of photographic close-ups of Michelin maps of provincial France in an exhibition titled ‘The Map Is More Interesting Than the Territory’. Then he turns to painting with a 60-work series in oil titled the ‘Series of Simple Professions’ and made over seven years, which explores the division of labour in contemporary society. The paintings include Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and his masterpiece Bill Gates and Steve fobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology. Defeated by attempts to paint Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market, particularly by his difficulty in painting Koons’s face, Jed Martin turns to Michel Houellebecq, a fictional character in his own novel, as a subject (for the painting Michel Houellebecq, Writer). The writer then composes an essay for the exhibition catalogue in which he reflects that Martin’s view of capitalism is ‘that of an ethnologist much more than that of a political commentator’ (Houellebecq, 2011, p. 122).
The 'theatrocracy'-sovereignty of the audience-condemned in Plato's Laws is reinstalled as a radical principle of egalitarian politics in Jacques Ranciere's work. Peter Hallward examines the implications and limitations of his approach. Is today's post-political order vulnerable to theatrocratic attack?
A fundamental re-reading of Agamben that defends and develops his philosophy as post-Heideggerian political ontology. What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. He shows instead that it engages in political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbott demonstrates the crucial influence of Martin Heidegger on Agamben's work, locating it in the post-Heideggerian tradition of the critique of metaphysics. He also positions it in relation to the thought of Benjamin, Nietzsche, Levinas, Nancy, and Wittgenstein. As he clarifies it, Abbott links Agamben's philosophy with Wittgenstein's picture theory and Heidegger's concept of the world-picture, showing the importance of this for understanding - and potentially overcoming - the forms of alienation characteristic of the society of the spectacle.
This paper begins by noting that some forms of leftism reinforce rather than oppose the exclusion of the urban poor from the agora. It shows that neither the capacity for intellectual nor for ethical seriousness can be read off a sociological location and suggests that a humanism made, in Cesaire’s terms, ‘to the measure of the world’, a commitment to a universal ethic, is necessary if the humanity, and therefore the prospect of political agency, on the part of all people is to be recognized. It concludes by arguing that recent debates about a return to a communist Idea need to be mindful of a history in which communism has been a form of imperialism rather than a genuinely universal ideal.
The freedom which Africa was to attain with liberation from colonialism had originally promised to emancipate all the people of the continent from poverty and oppression. Yet anyone can observe that this has not happened. Uhuru is still elusive; freedom seems unattainable. Nationalist, socialist and neo-liberal conceptions of human emancipation have all failed to provide a minimum of freedom for the majority of Africans who are living under conditions which worsen daily as the crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy worsens. All three of these views of freedom were elaborated and theorised as universal by the social sciences. It is these conceptions which still orientate our thought. The fact that freedom has not been achieved evidently means that our thinking has so far been deficient. This article argues that the social sciences have played their part in our inability to think freedom and are consequently in need of fundamental restructuring. Central to their limitations if not their failure to comprehend emancipation in a manner adequate to the problems of the twenty-first century in Africa, has arguably been their inability to take what excluded people say seriously enough. In the past they have been plagued by the notion that only those with knowledge and power are capable of thinking a new way forward, thus aligning their thinking with that of the state (either in its current or forthcoming form). Given the lack of success of the social sciences in thinking human emancipation so far, we should consider alternatives which are open to popular perspectives. The article argues for an expansion of the social sciences to include the idea that 'people think' in Africa, and that therefore reason is not exclusively the prerogative of academics and politicians. Marx once observed that 'the state has need ... of a very stern education by the people'. This remark is even truer today than it was in his time. © Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2014.
This paper takes Agamben's conceptualization of form-of-life as its point of departure and situates this idea within the larger context of Agamben's philosophy. Agamben diagnoses our contemporary political crisis and searches for a mode of existence where life would remain inseparable from its form: in this way he offers both a compelling analysis of sovereign power and a redemptive hope. However, it is not clear to what extent his notion of messianic redemption corresponds to that of political emancipation, for the register of change in Agamben's political philosophy is framed exclusively in ontological terms, leaving the coming politics in a suspended sphere of pure mediality which subordinates questions concerning political contestation and material transformation. My contention is that an ontological politics modeled on potentiality proves a necessary yet insufficient ground for thinking political emancipation. It therefore behooves us to explore ways in which we can build on Agamben's insight, but take it in a different direction and place it on a different level of analysis. The argument of this paper is that, rather than seeing the condition of possibility of change as being equivalent to change itself, we need to think the ethical exigency (in the form of the messianic as not) and the political dissensus (in the form of the hypothetical as if together as forming a dialectic-such that ethics and politics are made in service of each other, not in place of each other.
This essay defends an idea that is no longer fashionable: that there is a whole. The motivation for a defense of this notion has nothing to do with intellectual conservatism or a penchant for Hegel. Rather, what we hope to establish is a second path into what Alain Badiou has called the 'Cantorian Revolution'. In order to open this path we undertake a three-fold task. First, we deconstruct Badiou's onto-logical project by isolating the suppressed significance of Ernst Zermelo. This point allows us to recover a Cantorian possibility for addressing the infinite as an inconsistent whole. Second, we turn to work by the logician Graham Priest in order to remove the absurdity of discussing true contradictions. Finally, we return to Jacques Derrida's early work on Husserl in order to chart a phenomenological path to an affirmation of an inconsistent whole. We close, then, with the implications for contemporary philosophy.
Within a few years, the "partition of the sensible" (le partage du sensible) has become something of a household word in France. With this phrase, Jacques Rancière refers to the most basic system of categorization through which we perceive and intuitively classify the data provided to our senses. Literary critics, philosophers and theorists of aesthetics, but also sociologists and scholars interested in migrations - everybody seems to find in this catchy phrase what s/he always wanted to express, but never dared to say. I, of course, count myself among these people seduced by the partage du sensible. Its role as a hinge between politics and aesthetics proves extremely useful whenever one attempts to talk just about anything. Far from being weakened by its status of passe-partout, this phrase allows us to dig tunnels under disciplinary frontiers, it sets up an interface through which various approaches can interact and shed light on each other, it offers a foundational common ground on the basis of which we can better root and articulate our various reflections on some of today's most urgent problems.
The Northern Irish civil rights movement, like other minority or subaltern struggles, has been interpreted in terms of the national minority’s struggle for state recognition. Such frameworks emphasise the importance of identity in political conflict and tend to assume the state as guarantor of the recognition of identity. The difficulty here is that political possibilities that exceed the terms of identity and the state are obscured. Moreover, the interpretation of the Northern Irish conflict in these terms forms part of the consociational approach to conflict resolution which operates as normative underpinning to the post-conflict state. This article provides an alternative interpretation of the political significance of the civil rights movement. Rather than assuming the analytical usefulness and political significance of identity, I seek to trace the tension between identity and disidentification within the movement, drawing attention to the ways in which activists were aware of, and sought to respond to, the dangers of identity politics.
Popular protest is occurring on a remarkable scale in South Africa. Nonetheless, there is a significant degree to which it tends to be organized and articulated through the local. This contribution argues that while the political limitations of purely local modes of organization are clear, it should not be assumed that local struggles are some sort of misguided distraction from building a broader progressive movement. It is suggested that, on the contrary, the best prospects for the emergence of a broader popular struggle lie in building, sustaining and linking local struggles.
This essay takes issue with Critchley's diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Infinitely Demanding on an anarchic metapohtics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than infinite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of "Prometheanism".
My goal in this essay is to demonstrate the continuing relevance of Hegel's theory of right for contemporary emancipatory politics. Specifically, my contention is that Hegel's Philosophy of Right can and should be read as defending the possibility of principled, decisive side-taking in political struggles. By revisiting Hegel's Philosophy of Right, I seek to demonstrate four interconnected theses: that the will's freedom is both (a) the fundamental principle upon which genuinely political change can be grounded, and (b) essentially external to, or subtractable from, any and all social alignments; but is nonetheless (c) necessarily actualized in specifically political institutions, and finally (d) only truly actualized through emancipatory reforms of such institutions. In combination, these four theses demonstrate that politics is the principled, decisive and emancipatory reform of existent political institutions through historically determined political movements. Having established these basic theses, I will examine how the philosophy and politics of "prescriptive reform" operates in practice.
The slogan ‘capitalism is crisis’ is one that has recently circulated swiftly around the global Occupy movement. From Schumpeter to Marx himself, the notion that the economic cycles instituted by capitalism require periodic crises as a condition of renewed capital accumulation is a commonplace. However, in a number of recent texts, this conception of crisis as constituting the very form of urban capitalist development itself has taken on a more explicitly apocalyptic tone, exemplified by the Invisible Committee's influential 2007 book The Coming Insurrection, and its account of what it calls simply ‘the metropolis’. ‘It is useless to wait’, write the text's anonymous authors, ‘for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement.… The catastrophe is not coming, it is here.’ In considering such an apocalyptic tone, this paper thus situates and interrogates the text in terms both of its vision of the metropolis as a terrain of total urbanization and its effective spatialization of the present as itself a kind of ‘unnoticed’ apocalypse: the catastrophe which is already here. It does so by approaching this not only apropos its place within contemporary debates surrounding leftist politics and crisis theory but also via its imaginative intersection with certain post-1960s science fiction apocalyptic motifs. What, the paper asks, does it mean to think apocalypse as the ongoing condition of the urban present itself, as well as the opening up of political and cultural opportunity for some speculative exit from its supposedly endless terrain?
Abstract Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? is a provocative polemical analysis of the narrowing of political horizons that has occurred over the past couple of decades and of the powerful ideological grip that capitalism holds on the collective, social psyche, destroying our capacity to imagine political alternatives. Fisher seeks to illuminate the major cultural and social effects of a post-Cold War politico-ideological condition in which (according to Žižek’s well-known observation) ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’. Building on this analysis, Fisher identifies some key tensions and contradictions in the ideological armour of contemporary capitalism and extrapolates from this some tentative strategic propositions for the anticapitalist Left. This review-article argues that, while Fisher’s book provides valuable conceptual and strategic resources for the Left, it is hamstrung by several weaknesses – not the least of these a tendency to make unconvincing, sweeping claims about the novelty and distinctness of what Fisher terms ‘capitalist realism’ and a tendency to present a caricature of current left-wing thinking.
In Metapolitics, French philosopher Alain Badiou uses the concept of a Thermidorean to denote a political subjectivity constituted through the termination of a political sequence. For Badiou, the actual Thermidor that followed the Jacobin insurrection of the French Revolution was not just a singular event but is a general type of political reaction. Badiou argues that a Thermidor is a reaction that is based on a corruption of political will and disarticulation of the political demands that inform a sequence of emancipatory politics. This article applies Badiou’s concept of Thermidorean politics to show how conservative forces in South Korea have targeted the political spaces of the Korean democracy movement. The afterlife of cold war representations of social space, the role of reform forces in the disarticulation of radical demands of the democracy movements, as well as the role of ‘renegade’ (formerly oppositional) intellectuals in the creation of a chimera of ‘pro-North’ Left are analysed here as sources of a Korean Thermidor.
This article considers some of the ‘haptic’ and literally sensual procedures of postconceptual work that might suggest a new way of thinking the politics of the aesthetic today beyond the limitations – by now widely-known and well-theorized – of so-called ‘relational aesthetics’. Focusing on the work of the Mexican Yoshua Okón, in particular his recent Pulpo/Octopus (2011), the article engages a return to the site of political struggles (a return sometimes staged in highly literal ways, as we see in Okón) from a kind of naively apolitical gaze that emphasizes the ‘social’ aspect of the work and quite necessarily misses the kind of politics that the work makes possible. My wager here is that the minimal distance from politics that these works establish resolves the impasse of political thinking today by producing its return in a purely accidental (and also experimental) fashion.
This article compares Noonan's needs-based normative model of democracy and Hardt's and Negri's ontological model of the constituent power of the multitude. Both models are rejected as theoretical accounts of the idea of democracy on the ground that they over-rely on a linear, teleological conception of time. The article argues that time matters for the way we understand democracy, and contends that the meaning of democracy is better grasped through Benjamin's messianic concept of time as rupture of the historical continuum. This logic of temporal and historical change underscores an alternative idea of democracy as dialectic of theory and practice that is inherent to the notion of the will of the people. However, the article contends that the understanding of the idea of democracy in terms of the messianic highlights at the same time the limits of democracy, as it focuses on the political aspect of domination, but fails to grasp the systemic contradictions of capitalism.
Politics, whether that of the state or that constituted beyond the state, must be analysed as thought, as subjectivity. This article proposes to do so in connection with state politics in Africa since independence. It consists of a brief theoretical justification for such a perspective, a methodological stress on the process of elucidating the names around which such politics is deployed, and an application of these conceptions to the politics of the post-colonial African state. It shows that two different forms of state can be elucidated, namely a ‘developmental state’ form in which parties play a subjective role of mobilizing popular political subjectivities within the state, and a ‘post-developmental’ state form, hegemonic today, in which a consensus is established between state and civil society organizations. In either case the sites of alternative politics to these state political sequences which arise beyond state subjectivity are briefly elucidated.
The celebration of Peter Marcuse's 80th birthday at the Right to the City conference in the fall of 2008 provided a poignant moment to reflect on the circumstances under which urban studies, critical theory and radical politics have come together so instructively in his own life and work. An adequate consideration of these involves not only the personal and political dimensions of his exemplary career, but also the world-historical forces that triangulated radical thought, revolutionary politics and metropolitan life in the 20th century. Their trans-Atlantic trajectories—from the revolutionary conjunctures between the world wars through military-Keynesian restorations of capital to the uneven globalization of neoliberal imperialisms—raise a challenging question concerning the legacies and possibilities of critical urban theory. How has urban studies learned from and contributed to critical theory, in response to the demands of radical politics? In this paper, I reflect on the relevance of the Frankfurt School and Henri Lefebvre in particular for drawing a balance sheet on critical urban theory following the experiences of modernism and postmodernism, while suggesting that its future now rests on the delivery of a radical politics based on a revolutionary conception the Right to the City—one capable of doing justice to the utopian moments alive in an Age of Empire and a Planet of Slums.
This paper offers a theoretical framework for understanding both the invasion of Iraq and the “war on terror” in the context of neoliberal globalization. I argue that both the foreign and domestic policy pursued by the Bush administration under the rubric of the war on terror are in fact best understood as strategies for advancing the neoliberal agenda, in large part by seeking to undo gains made by the labor movement during the 1990s. I argue that for this ambitious and aggressive administration, the post‐9/11 atmosphere offers the prospect of permanently restructuring both popular expectations of government and the ability of working people to challenge corporate prerogatives.