Electoral debates are a win-lose game in which the stakes for the political contenders are extremely high. The antagonistic nature of these encounters very frequently results in impoliteness or face aggravating moves with which the debaters aim to hurt the opponent’s positive or negative face.The aim of this research is to investigate the impoliteness strategies employed by politicians during electoral debates. Garcia-Pastor’s (2008) positive-face and negative-face impoliteness strategies are taken as a starting point in the analysis at hand. The final (...) electoral debate of the 2019 presidential elections in the Republic of North Macedonia is used as a data source for this research, which is based on several different hypotheses and is both qualitatively and quantitative oriented. The findings of the research are in line with the insights gained from previous studies, which, more or less, suggests that Macedonian politicians follow the mainstream “rules” when it comes to using impoliteness in political debates. (shrink)

Workplace politeness concerns the structural, interactional and individual level. Using the example of mobbing, it is illustrated how small acts of impoliteness can lead to the destruction a person psychologically and physically. Particularly, so-called downward mobbing is an increasing problem worldwide; most of the cases are orchestrated by superiors, the people subordinates depend on the most. Data clearly illustrate the social toxin created by up to 45 seemingly small actions in five areas of work life. These actions result in health (...) hazards and ultimately loss of jobs. By example of workplace harassment, it is illustrated how systematic acts of impoliteness are used to manipulate a person's emotion and identity, to ensure anxiety-born solidarity in others while abusing power, with high costs for the target, the organisation, and society. The discussion gives way to considerations about intercultural cooperation at the workplace, showing similarities between subtle devaluations in intercultural communication called microaggression and what has been discussed as mobbing. Overall, impoliteness is deconstructed as a sign of degrading social bonds, security and health, thereby raising awareness of the importance of intercultural interaction without microaggression. The practical value of linguistic impoliteness research and its connection to work psychology becomes apparent. (shrink)

Impoliteness in student emails to faculty can have negative consequences. However, the nuances of perceived impoliteness by faculty with different language backgrounds have not been thoroughly studied in the literature. This paper explores how emails written by non-native English-speaking students are perceived impolite by faculty depending on social identity variables such as native speaker status, gender, and seniority. Participants read six emails and rated their perceptions of the emails on a questionnaire. The items on the questionnaire were about lack of (...) face enhancement, use of face threat, acknowledgment of imposition, and not giving a choice in complying with requests. Results suggest that in their perceptions of the lack of face enhancement, senior faculty seemed to be more tolerant than their junior counterparts. Further, non-native speakers of English were found to be more tolerant of the lack of acknowledgment of imposition. However, no significant association was observed between the social identity of the faculty and their perception of face threat nor between social identity and giving a choice in complying with requests. The paper has implications for raising the awareness of the faculty and students about their potential biases in academic correspondence. (shrink)

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity. The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage-which is anything (...) but uniform-begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer. The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories. (shrink)

Starting from Thomas Hobbes's distinctively materialist version of social contract theory, I argue that Hobbes can assist us in theorizing the racialized body politic of the white LEVIATHAN that is the United States. However, we will need to go beyond his own qualified materialism to recognize the social materiality of race, a materiality not to be reduced to, though incorporating, the body.

This study delves into the use of impoliteness strategies within emails sent by undergraduate and postgraduate students to their professors, aiming to discern the variance in their implementation based on (Culpeper and Hardaker’s. 2017. Impoliteness. In: Culpeper, Jonathan, Haugh, Michael and Daniel Kadar (eds.), The Palgrave handbook of linguistic (im) politeness, 199–225. Basingstoke: Palgrave) model. Data, comprising emails from University of Jordan students and semi-structured interviews, underwent analysis to identify impoliteness strategies and themes. Findings indicate a higher prevalence of impolite (...) strategies among undergraduates, totaling 58 instances compared to 38 among postgraduates. Particularly, undergraduates exhibit a greater tendency toward positive impoliteness. Thematic analysis of interviews unveils three contributing factors: work experience, participation in writing skills courses, and familiarity with formality levels. Notably, undergraduates’ lack of work experience contrasts with postgraduates’, often impacting their email etiquette. Moreover, postgraduates’ extensive enrollment in writing courses during MA studies fosters a more formal approach in communication with professors. The study underscores implications for future research, emphasizing the need to explore these dynamics further. By comprehending the influences on students’ email behavior, institutions can devise tailored interventions to promote effective and respectful communication within academic setting. (shrink)

This contribution takes a look at video-sharing platforms to highlight a popular entertainment format which consists in re-framing political discourse for the purposes of entertaining the audience and, at the same time, providing an evaluation of that discourse. Evaluations of political discourse uncover the role and importance imputed to it by those who are outside of the political system, but who are directly impacted by it, that is, the people. A sample of French-language data, collected from YouTube, is examined for (...) the categories of evaluation which are used by the authors, which are conjectured to represent the ideas ordinary citizens have about political discourse. Reframing political discourse carries these evaluations through offensive language and humor. Teasing out the relevant parameters of evaluation can provide a basis for understanding how regular citizens gauge political discourse. Appropriateness appears to be an important evaluation criterion pertaining to the characteristics of political discourse, occurring in a particular context. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse the issues of war and violence in the thought of Hannah Arendt, drawing on articles published in the newspaper Aufbau between 1941 and 1945. In these texts Arendt argues for the organisation of a Jewish army to engage in the struggle against Nazism. Here I attempt to show that this call for a Jewish army is not in contradiction with the separation between power and violence that Arendt posited. With this objective, I (...) will compare Aufbau’s writings not only with On Violence, but above all with Was ist Politik? and I will try to interpret this comparison by means of the concept of impolitical, elaborated by the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito. This way I will suggest a new reading of the relationship between politics and violence. It is not a matter of considering the Jewish question only as a starting point to analyze Arendt’s thought, or to interpret her claim in favor of a Jewish army as the result of a specific historical context, but also to see how these positions spring from a will of transformation of this same context and are coherent with the development of her thought. (shrink)

Civility is formed by social norms that guide our behavior and allow us to interact appropriately with others. These norms affect everyone and are learned through the socialization process. However, in the same process, people also learn gender norms that dictate how men and women should behave, leading to gender stereotypes and differentiated behavioral characteristics. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between gender and civility, and how we react to those who behave uncivilly given their gender. (...) The results of Study 1 showed that even in a fictional and gender-neutral society, uncivil behaviors were associated with stereotypically masculine characteristics, and those who behaved uncivilly were dehumanized. In Study 2, gender differences were observed in incivility. Women were harsher when facing uncivil transgressors than men, especially if the transgressor was another woman. Our findings support the notion that gender norms are applied to civility, leading those supposedly equal social norms to unequal perceptions and evaluations. (shrink)

No Aggression, Only Teasing: The Pragmatics of Teasing and Banter A bone of contention among researchers is whether the primary function of humour is the expression of aggression against the hearer or the promotion of solidarity between the interlocutors. It is commonly averred that teasing boasts a dichotomous nature, i.e. malignant and benevolent. The former coincides with the potential for criticising, mocking and ostracising the interlocutor, whereas the latter accounts for playfulness and bonding capacity.The overriding goal of the paper is (...) to expound the rapport-building function, which is here postulated to be inherent to teasing. First and foremost, I will determine the scope of interest differentiating between putdown humour and teases, which may assume the form of retorts and develop into multi-turn teases, i.e. banter. Subtypes of teasing will be discussed with a view to proving that it is inherently devoid of genuine aggressiveness. The underlying premise is that teases, even if ostensibly aggressive, i.e. face-threatening, are geared towards solidarity, in conformity with the framework of politeness, including mock impoliteness, holding between intimates. Also, teases fulfil a few subordinate functions such as defunctionalisation or mitigation of face-threatening messages they may carry. (shrink)

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints on (...) an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile. (shrink)

This paper intends to examine the development of conflictual interactions, how they might be resolved, and the socio-cultural norms involved, by adopting an analytical framework in an online gaming context. The current paper was inspired by Kádár and Haugh’s framework as it enables me to investigate both the macro and micro aspects of (im)politeness. The study’s aim is to further examine how impoliteness, language aggression and conflict are realised in two online gaming platforms, namely Fortnite and PUBG Mobile. Thus, I (...) will explore discursively how these phenomena are subjective in a Tunisian Arabic setting and discuss how participants reach their subjective perception of conflict in ways that do not always correspond to the supposed intentions of the ostensible offender. The results indicate that conflict is subjective as it is evaluated in different ways by different gamers and could be a result of a conflictual intention. The findings also reveal that conflict may also be created/ escalated as a result of a non-conflictual intention. Thus, this paper contributes to understanding of conflict, how impoliteness can lead to conflict and the various aspects of impoliteness/the perception of impoliteness. (shrink)

This article examines the place of phenomenology within Esposito’s thought on the impolitical. In order to do this, this piece firstly expounds the task of Deconstructionism within the framework of Esposito’s general thoughts about the community. Secondly, it shows the meaning and the relevance that the categories of subject and substance have for the metaphysical tradition of political philosophy. Finally, the article delves into the author’s reading of Arendt’s phenomenology when it comes to the concept of origin. The main (...) purpose of this article is to show the ways in which the impolitical becomes a thought of the community which bears within itself the denial of the political as the effort of a metaphysical subject to make the origin visible as a phenomenon. (shrink)

It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let's call it Mom's Maxim. We tend to accept Mom's Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom's Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill's Principle.

This essay contends that while Nancy and Esposito have strikingly similar concepts of the place of the political in post-metaphysical community, their respective articulations of these concepts noticeably diverge. Because of his commitment to excavating the political project of immunity as central to the Western political tradition in and through the category of the legal person, Esposito announces community as impolitical, as the interruptive spacing, and thus alternating displacement, of the political conceived as the site of emancipatory agency. In (...) contrast, in the work of Agamben and in the recent work of Nancy, an articulation of the person and the political in more agential terms can be found. This divergence presents interpretive difficulties insofar as Esposito's discussion of community as impolitical could be read as advancing ontological neutrality or passivity that threatens to separate political activity from its liberating potential. I argue that such ontological neutrality is a product of Esposito's confrontation with the political as dominated by both the logic of immunity and an engagement with the complex legacy of Heidegger's problematic political trajectory. To this extent it is an open question whether Esposito's project leaves room for a new vision of the political and for political agency. (shrink)

Analyzes key concepts and arguments in the work of one of Europe’s leading philosophers. One of Europe’s leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito’s political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative (...) biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito’s reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito’s philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns. “To my knowledge there are no other books—in Italian or English—that attempt to provide a critical introduction to Esposito’s works and an engagement with his works in fields outside of political science and philosophy. This volume is an important first.” — Rhiannon Noel Welch, author of Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy. (shrink)

Some bemoan the incivility of our times, while others complain that people have grown too quick to take offense. There is widespread disagreement about what counts as an insult and when it is appropriate to feel insulted. Here I propose a definition and a preliminary taxonomy of insults. Namely, I define insults as expressions of a lack of due regard. And I categorize insults by whether they are intended or unintended, acts or omissions, and whether they cause offense or not. (...) Unintended insults are of particular concern since greater understanding may help us to avoid them. And insults by omission warrant special consideration because they suggest an interesting extension of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. (shrink)

Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) is a weekly, half-hour long session in the British House of Commons, which gives backbench Members of Parliament (MPs) and the Leader of the Opposition (LO) the opportunity to ask the Prime Minister (PM) questions on any topic relating to the government’s policies and actions. The discourse at PMQs is often described as adversarial (see Bull & Wells 2011) and in this paper I will show how the notion of impoliteness can be applied to both the (...) questions and the answers which make up the session. Through the detailed analysis of six sessions of PMQs I will also demonstrate that PMQs is also a source of polite linguistic behaviour of the sort described in Brown & Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory. Comparisons between Gordon Brown’s and David Cameron’s speech styles will also be drawn. (shrink)

It is generally assumed in pragmatics that face is essentially a “socially attributed aspect of self”, and that politeness is one kind of facework, alongside other forms of facework such as impoliteness, mock impoliteness, mock politeness, self politeness and so on. In this paper, the assumed necessary link between face and im/politeness is questioned. Drawing from emic studies of face and im/politeness, it is argued that face and im/politeness should be studied, in the first instance, as distinct objects of study (...) in their own right. It is also suggested that drawing from a wider range of emic conceptualisations of face and im/politeness opens up aspects of interpersonal phenomena that have been relatively neglected in pragmatics to date, namely, the importance of relationships as well as the sets of expectancies that underpin evaluations of im/politeness, as distinct areas for theorisation and analysis. It is concluded that while the Goffmanian face paradigm has proven very productive in pragmatics, drawing from various other emic understandings affords further hitherto relatively under-explored analytical opportunities in the study of interpersonal phenomena. (shrink)

This explorative study contributes to the theoretical debate on political incivility beyond the domination of Western-centric approaches while connecting the bodies of literature in political philosophy and media research. It offers empirical evidence of Bolsonaro’s delegitimizing criticisms and uncivil expressions toward the press, some specific news outlets, and individual journalists during the first two years of his presidential mandate in Brazil. It concludes that Bolsonaro displayed the complete repertoire of the defining elements of political incivility in liberal democracies vis à (...) vis the delegitimization of the press. He also unprecedently pushed the limits of civility in political discourse by employing the entire arsenal of verbal manifestations of impoliteness. (shrink)

In this paper I will undertake a review on Hans Blumenberg’s analysis of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works. My point is underline the peculiar position that Wittgenstein has in Blumenberg’s texts. I will consider his impolite commentaries concerning the Philosophical Investigations and Wittgenstein’s decision of becoming a teacher. I will try to characterize Blumenberg’s conception of Wittgenstein as an intellectual figure and on the most popular contributions of Wittgenstein’s thought.

This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering (...) topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. (shrink)

Denial of death We don’t like to think about our deaths, and there are cultural developments – social, technological, economic – that make it easier than ever before to live without constant reminders of our mortality. We hide the evidence of death. We live separately from our old people, and quarantine the dying in hospitals and hospices. It’s impolite to mention death in conversation. We view death not as natural and inevitable stage of life, but as a calamity, a mistake, (...) an accident. This attitude towards death isn’t shared by all cultures, and it’s a relatively recent development even in the west. The result of it, however, is a diminished appreciation of the finitude of life. We spend our lives in the way a foolish man spends his fortune as though there will always be more where that came from, Tolstoy, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, perhaps the most famous literary portrait of the psychology of a dying man, captures how very easy it is – although we all know in an intellectual sense that we all die - to meet our ends with the shock the foolish spender feels when the last dollar is spent. With a sort of desperate plea ‘Nobody told me it was going to end’. Ivan Ilyich (who has sustained a mortal injury in some stupid household chore… putting up a curtain rod) when he begins to acknowledge the signs of his impending death, thinks to himself.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 433-452 [Access article in PDF] When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle Gregory Matthew Adkins Introduction There has been a recent trend in the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual culture to analyze that culture from a sociological perspective. This perspective, a necessary corrective to a pure history of ideas, takes knowledge as a socially constructed phenomenon and thus subject (...) to sociological analysis. The point of the sociology of knowledge, however, is not to re-hash and bolster old externalist arguments but to do away with the whole debate over whether ideas or social conditions are more important in intellectual history and the history of science. A focus on sociology does not mean that ideas do not matter. This becomes apparent when analyzing the ethics of early modern intellectuals.For example, Anne Goldgar's recent work, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (1995), gives much attention to the sociology of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Republic of Letters--but at the cost of relegating the role of ideas to the sidelines. According to Goldgar, if one wants to understand early modern intellectuals as a community, including their ethics and sense of morality, one should focus on forms of sociability rather than the ideas and philosophies they put forth in their writings. An aristocratic ethic dominated early modern scholarship, she argues, and even took precedence over knowledge claims: "[i]n striving to make its inner workings acceptable to the outside community the Republic of Letters chose, like the aristocracy, to empty its internal relationships of content, choosing instead to concentrate on form.... [A]rguments were often judged on the politeness with which they were presented, rather than on their intrinsic merit." 1 Men of [End Page 433] letters, although often of humble origin, cultivated nobility by emulating aristocratic modes of decorum and noble interests in status and reputation. One way they promoted these ideas was through a literary genre adopted from classical antiquity, the éloge (eulogy), which presented exemplary modes of behavior by praising the lives of the "heroes" of the Republic of Letters. Interestingly, the years on which Goldgar focuses her analysis almost precisely encompass the period of Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle's mature intellectual production. Yet Fontenelle (1657-1757), widely hailed during his lifetime as having perfected the art of the éloge, plays no role in her argument.From 1699 to 1740 Fontenelle, as secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Royale des Sciences, composed some sixty-nine éloges in honor of recently deceased members of the academy and of other notable savants. Even a brief glance at Fontenelle's eulogies reveals an intimate link between philosophy and morality. A more careful examination of them in the context of his life and works shows that this link was logically commensurate with his genuinely held notions of human nature, happiness, reason, and the good. In fact the relationship in the eulogies between notions of nobility and the virtues proper to the savant or philosopher is highly intellectualized. Fontenelle was not as concerned with status and reputation or with self-fashioning as one might think. 2 We can only assimilate his ethics to those of the court aristocracy if we ignore what he actually wrote.Through his eulogies and other writings, Fontenelle's thoughts on philosophy and morality have had a lasting impact on western culture. He presented an image of what would come to characterize the proper, objective, modern scientist and thinker. 3 In order to understand the éloge as an institution in the Republic of Letters (and by extension the early modern intellectual ethic) it is therefore important to examine Fontenelle's moral philosophy more carefully. It is a philosophy expressed in his eulogies but understood clearly only in the context of his life and works. On the ÉlogesAs noted above, one way to contextualize the institution of the éloge is to place it within a Republic of Letters concerned with adopting the manners of the nobility: the éloges... (shrink)

The article discusses the cognitive-linguistic technique of frameshifting and its potential for deliberate impoliteness in antagonistic politically charged discourse. Frameshifting involves the construction of utterances in such a way that their comprehension involves two stages: the reader is first led to invoke one mental frame and then is forced to discard it and to invoke a different frame, with the final message being deliberately insulting. The article demonstrates that frameshifting, which has been studied predominantly in humorous discourse, can also be (...) used in aggressive communication to intensify the insulting potential of utterances and to simultaneously increase prominence and memorability of the message. The article argues that the effects of impoliteness can depend on the manner of expression, and if the speaker chooses a particularly innovative and conspicuously intentional means of expression, the intent to insult comes to the forefront, the insulting meaning is amplified, and the resulting negative message is strengthened. (shrink)

“Politeness” appears to be connected to a quite disparate set of related concepts, including but not limited to, “manners,” “etiquette,” “agreeableness,” “respect” and even “piety.” While in the East politeness considered as an important social virtue is present (and even central) in the theoretical and practical expressions of the Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist traditions, (indeed politeness has been viewed in these traditions as central to proper education) it has not featured prominently in philosophical discussion in the West. American presidents Thomas (...) Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington all devoted discussion to politeness within the broader ambit of manners and etiquette, as too did Erasmus, Edmund Burke and Ralph Waldo Emerson but on the whole sustained philosophical engagement with the topic has been lacking in the West. The richest source for philosophical investigation is perhaps afforded by the centrality of the concept of respect in Immanuel Kant.However in this paper we will instead draw on the writings of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to defend the centrality of “politeness” as an important and valuable moral virtue. Starting with an analysis of the broader Aristotelian arguments on the virtues associated with “agreeableness,” namely, friendliness, truthfulness and wit I will argue that “politeness” should be thought of as an important moral virtue attached to social intercourse (and by extension the vice of impoliteness). I then move to identify an even broader and more important account of politeness, drawing on the work of Aquinas, as intimately connected to the notion of pietas (piety) as a fundamental part of the virtue of justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Citizenship and Culture in Early Modern EuropePeter N. MillerCharlotte Wells, Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xviii, 198p.Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1994), xviii, 449p.Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (...) 1994), xxiv, 483p.Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1775 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), xv, 395p.Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), xiii, 217p.Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), viii, 270p.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), xiii, 338p.E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s “Fable”: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xii, 284p.The pre-modern political world was broken and remade in the two centuries that separate Montaigne from Jefferson. The long agony of the mixed constitution that began in the civil wars which raged in Iberia, France, the Low Countries, and England and seemed settled by the widespread adoption of the maxims of reason of state, revived at the end of the period, with revolution in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Geneva, and, more famously, [End Page 725] British North America and France. The problem, classically, turned on the location of sovereignty, or supreme authority, in political systems designed to balance and diffuse rather than concentrate power. When budget deficits and fratricidal culture wars raised the cry of “necessity”—with the knowledge, of course, that necessity knew no law—estates and kings across Europe found themselves at daggers drawn. The claim that the ruler, who naturally was wholly committed to the common good, had therefore the ability to take emergency action was used both by those accustomed to rule and those newly attained to it by force. The pursuit of an “interest” that was identified with the nation’s effectively marginalized discussions of right and law while still serving an essentially constitutional, justificatory role in political debate. But if unchecked authority was necessary in order to meet the challenge of a world characterized by change and chance and thus had to reside somewhere, was there anything that made its exercise by one body more appropriate than another? This was the question that lay behind the late eighteenth-century repudiation of the reason of state “solution” to the problem of the mixed constitution. The answer, which clearly underpinned the establishment in fact of what had first been theorized already a century earlier, was that only consent could legitimate the exercise of sovereignty in time of necessity.1Representation, in one form or another, was the acknowledged solution to the problem formulated by Hobbes: “the name of Tyranny, signifieth nothing more, nor less, than the name of Sovereignty, be it in one, or many men, saving that they that use the former word are understood to be angry with them they call Tyrants.” But representation also acknowledged the reality behind the charged category of “citizenship”: most people in most places could not be said to live the life of the active citizen celebrated in Roman republican literature. Hence Hobbes’s attack on recourse to classical exempla in general, and the Libertas of Lucca in particular. The idea of civis as law-abiding subject was as radical a redrawing of the terms of debate as the identification of human nature with unsociability. Insofar as politics, classically, justified itself as the means for individual self-perfection, the practice of the ancient citizen could be conceived of as the practice of that best life speculated upon by philosophers. For the represented citizen, however, politics necessarily occupied a more subsidiary position. What, then, defined the best life to which he could aspire?There is no simple answer to this question, and the early modern ambivalence has persisted into our own time... (shrink)

Offering a critical introduction to the philosophical debate on the concept of the political, this book explores recent developments in continental philosophy. Inna Viriasova engages with key contemporary thinkers including Agamben, Esposito, Henry and Meillassoux and explores the debate in the context of the Italian concept of the impolitical.

Should philosophers be more polite to one another? The topic of good manners—or, more grandly, civility—has enjoyed a recent renaissance in philosophical circles, but little of the formal discussion has been self-directed: that is, it has not examined the virtues and vices of polite and impolite philosophizing, in particular. This is an oversight; practices of rudeness do rather a lot of work in enacting distinctly philosophical modes of engagement, in ways that both shape and detract from the aims of our (...) discipline. If we fail to recognize practices of rudeness, we become vulnerable to some of... (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this research,1 we aim to analyze how misogyny establishes itself in an interaction on X (formerly Twitter) to legitimize hate speech, under the argument of opinion defense. Theoretically, in light of Interactional Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, we conceive that impoliteness strategies contribute to the construction of linguistic-discursive violence scenarios in online-mediated interactions, as they both reduce interlocutive distance and generate sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal, and antifeminist metapragmatics. Methodologically, we adopted a qualitative approach to analyze an interaction on X based on (...) the inclusion and exclusion criteria proposed in this study, using the netnographic method. Analytically, we observed that interlocutors C, E, and F frequently used impoliteness strategies in constructing opinion-based discourses to attack feminism and legitimize hate speech. (shrink)

The present study sets out to investigate the role of ‘culture’ as one of the many important factors that influence the evaluation of politeness in Persian from a Cultural Linguistics perspective. The paper argues that Cultural Linguistics, and in particular the notion of cultural schema, has the potential to offer a robust analytical framework for the exploration of polite use of language. We elaborate on this proposal by presenting examples of data from Persian in which speakers interpret impolite behaviour in (...) light of a number of Persian cultural schemas. The study also offers a novel three-layered approach for the analysis of politeness data that combines metadiscourse analysis with the ethnography of cultural conceptualisations, while highlighting the importance of the notion of ‘heterogeneous distribution’ of cultural conceptualisations, a pivotal theoretical concept in Cultural Linguistics which accounts for the variations in speakers’ evaluation of politeness. (shrink)

This paper explores the way in which Agamben takes part in the dialogue on “impolitical communities” that was inaugurated by J. L. Nancy and was soon followed by authors like M. Blanchot, J. Derrida and R. Esposito, among others. Although Agamben’s ontological exploration of ‘whatever being,’ followed later by the political idea of form-of-life, are still very close particularly to Nancy’s work, the article will show in which ways Agamben’s view of a political coming community explores different paths and (...) moves in unusual registers, that help to understand in new ways the kind of inoperativeness involved in a contemporary rethinking of community. The notion of experience of thought as potentiality and its relationship to that “tiny displacement” of the world which Agamben seems to connect with his idea of a coming community will play a central role in the analysis. (shrink)

El propósito de este artículo es analizar las estrategias de descortesía verbal en una muestra de discurso parlamentario chileno. Para tal propósito se estudiaron las secuencias de discurso que manifestaban dichas estrategias en un corpus de 28 sesiones de la honorable Cámara de Diputados de Chile realizadas entre 2005 y 2007, en las que se discutieron diferentes asuntos polémicos de interés público. Para el análisis de la descortesía en el discurso político aquí realizado se consultaron los trabajos de Chilton y (...) Schäffner (1999), Blas Arroyo (2001 y 2003) y Bolívar (2005), entre otros. Una vez analizados los textos de las transcripciones de las sesiones de la muestra se identificaron las siguientes estrategias de descortesía: atacar la imagen pública del oponente y resguardar la propia imagen pública. Asimismo, la primera de dichas estrategias se subclasificó en las siguientes tácticas: desacreditaciones, ridiculizaciones y amedrentamientos. The purpose of this article is to analyze impoliteness strategies in a sample of Chilean parliamentary discourse. To that effect, this study puts forward an analysis of the discourse sequences manifesting these strategies in a corpus constituted by 28 sessions held between 2005 and 2007 by the honorable Chamber of Representatives of Chile, in which different and controversial issues of public interest were discussed. For the analysis of impoliteness in political discourse carried out in this study, the works of Chilton y Schäffner (1999), Blas Arroyo’s (2001 and 2003) and Bolívar’s (2005) were consulted, among others. Once the transcriptions of the sessions under analysis were processed, the following impoliteness strategies expressing the representatives’ political goals were identified: attacking the opponent’s public image and protecting the own public image. Likewise, the first of these strategies was sub-classified into the following tactics: discrediting, ridiculizing, and intimidating. (shrink)

La recepción durante el siglo XX se preguntó si la filosofía nietzscheana era a-, im- o anti-política, es decir, si podía ser asimilada por la democracia, o si era antimoderna, elitista y reaccionaria. El italiano Roberto Esposito ha propuesto leerla como formando e informando el paradigma de la biopolítica. Se discuten cuatro lecturas de esa biopolítica: como formadora del paradigma de la inmunidad, como tanatopolítica, como liberal y neoliberal, y como biopolítica afirmativa. Twentieth-century readers wondered if Nietzschean philosophy was apolitical, (...) impolitic, or anti-political; that is, if it could be assimilated by democracy or if it was antimodern, elitist, and reactionary. The Italian philosopher Robert Esposito has proposed reading Nietzsche's philosophy as forming and informing the biopolitical paradigm. Four readings of these biopolitics are discussed: as part of the paradigm of immunity, as thanatopolitics, as liberal and neoliberal, and as affirmative biopolitics. (shrink)

Uno de los motivos recurrentes del pensamiento contemporáneo, es la indagación sobre el concepto, la representación y la valoración de la comunidad como una dimensión de la experiencia, en particular en su incidencia política/impolítica. Pero "comunidad" se ha manifestado como un "semantema" elusivo, es decir, una familia de nociones y asociaciones significativas, que abren y complejizan más y más la búsqueda de un concepto preciso, hasta empujarnos hacia las típicas "vías negativas" para la caracterización o definición del mismo. A modo (...) de hipótesis, sin pretender con ello construir un esquema abarcador, sostendré que hay un núcleo estético en ese semantema, aludiendo con "estética" a la presencia, en el punto pivote de la constelación que delimita "lo comunitario", de términos como sonido/silencio, diferencia, doble, forma, identidad, imagen y semejanza. Se trata mayormente, como es evidente, de significaciones construidas sobre los planos auditivo y visual de lo sensorio. Como una especificación de dicha hipótesis, ensayaré la elaboración de una noción de comunidad a partir de la pregunta acerca de cuándo hay comunidad. La respuesta a articular, es que hay comunidad cuando hay imagen, esto es, corporización de una semejanza y de un sentido, capaces de conjurar tanto la amenaza de lo informe como la de la forma sin semejanza. El fundamento último de esta hipótesis, es que nuestro ser-en-común originario toma consistencia en el plano de lo sensible porque se vincula a la insuficiencia de toda representación para subordinarlo a un concepto, pues se presenta aquí, entre comunidad y concepto, la misma distancia infranqueable que hay entre la existencia y su teorización. One of the recurrent motifs of contemporary thought is the inquiry about the concept, representation and valuation of community as a dimension of experience, particularly in its political/impolitic influence. But "community" has proved to be an elusive semanteme, i.e., a family of notions and significant associations that make the search for a precise concept very complex, pushing us to the typical "negative ways" for its characterization or definition. As a hypothesis, and with no intention of building an all-encompassing frame, I will hold that there is an aesthetic nucleus to this semanteme, understanding "aesthetic" as the presence of terms such as sound/silence, difference, double, shape, identity, image and likeness, occurring at the very pivot point of the constellation that defines "the communitarian". It refers mostly to significances related to the hearing and seeing senses. Following this hypothesis, I will try to define a notion of community answering the question of when a community occurs. The answer to this being that there is a community when there is an image; that is, the embodiment of a likeness and a sense that can thwart the threat of what is shapeless or of a shape with no likeness. The ultimate foundation of this hypothesis is that our original being-in-common becomes consistent to the senses because of its inability to subordinate to a concept, as happens with any representation, being the unbridgeable distance between community and its concept the same there is between existence and its theorization. (shrink)

Starting in early childhood, children are socialized to be honest. However, they are also expected to avoid telling the truth in sensitive situations if doing so could be seen as inappropriate or impolite. Across two studies (total N = 358), the reasoning of 3‐ to 5‐year‐old children in such a scenario was investigated by manipulating whether the information in question would be helpful to the recipient. The studies used a reverse rouge paradigm, in which a confederate with a highly salient (...) red mark on her nose asked children whether she looked okay prior to having her picture taken. In Study 1, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark was temporary and the confederate did not know it was there. In Study 2, children tended to tell the truth only if they were able to observe that the mark could be concealed with makeup. These findings show that for children as young as age 3, decisions about whether to tell the truth are influenced by the likelihood that the information would be helpful to the recipient. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo analisa a categoria de impolitico de Roberto Esposito. Tem por objetivo demonstrar a relação entre os conceitos de impolitico e de das Politische. Inicialmente, a pesquisa explora a categoria de impolítico e demonstra alguns pressupostos não assumidos em relação ao pensamento de Carl Schmitt. Em seguida, insere Schmitt na tradição impolítica reconstruída por Esposito e elabora algumas considerações sobre as características impolíticas do das Politische. Ao demonstrar, como resultado, um ponto cego na análise espositiana, qual seja, a (...) ausência de um capítulo necessário sobre o jurista alemão, chega à conclusão de que Esposito elabora uma refinada interpretação da obra de Schmitt, resolvendo alguns problemas de transição, na obra do autor, na década de 1920, porém, oblitera sua influência; propõe uma leitura que afasta Schmitt da teologia política, ao vinculá-lo à tradição impolítica e esboça a relação entre impolitico e das Politische.: This article analyzes Roberto Esposito's idea of the impolitico, with the aim of showing the relation between the impolitical and Carl Schmitt's das Politische. Schmitt is examined in terms of the impolitical tradition reconstructed by Esposito, and the impolitical characteristics of das Politische are discussed. We then argue that Esposito gives a refined interpretation of Schmitt, solving some problems regarding transitions in Schmitt's work the 1920s, but that Esposito ends up obliterating Schmitt's influence. We propose a reading, which separates Schmitt from political theology by linking him to the impolitical tradition and which drafts the relation between the impolitico and das Politische. (shrink)

For a long time people who have witnessed the Shoah have been considered as documents or sources on the basis of which constructing a building that they cannot more inhabit; or, in a opposite vein, they have been sacralised by a religious, impolitic listening, that feeds an Auschwitz metaphysics capable of erasing the responsibilities while singing psalms to the memory’s duties. Pressed by the impossible claim of giving themselves “authentically” and, at the same time, getting out of the way to (...) the construction of the “historiographical truth”, called into question in the manners and contents of their repeating the same story, the witness has become a paradoxical character. But they are also capable, in a beneficial reversal, of showing us something concerning our own rhetoric and making us think upon respect as a political category: what is it, in fact, that produces a society incapable of respecting the witnesses of its own extreme end? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.1 (2004) 78-88 [Access article in PDF] Remembering Beauty:Reflections on Kant and Cartier-Bresson for Aspiring Photographers Stuart Richmond In the past few decades beauty has become something of an endangered species in the Western art world. Indeed, beauty has never been a central aim of contemporary art, which has tended to focus on meaning and politics rather than formal values, conceptual art being a (...) case in point. Feminist artists and critics, reacting to the objectification of women in society have rendered attention to women's beauty, especially the nude, impolitic. This is perhaps understandable given the persuasive emphasis on beauty in marketing, that many argue socializes an unhealthy self-image in young people and distracts attention from important social issues. As well, techno-global-business practices increasingly invade our lives and private spaces with a virtual culture of information and efficiency. We do not know how this retreat from the sensual, concrete present will affect human sensibilities and values in the long run, although there are some disturbing signs. Seen as un-cerebral and allied with pleasure, beauty and its alter ego, appreciation, have acquired a decided regressive air. Having said that, for many people at the level of ordinary life — in human relationships, arts activities, and love of nature, for example — beauty never really went away because beauty is a source of pleasure and well-being that we cannot help wanting. As Plato pointed out, beauty is the only visible quality that inspires love. 1 A life of beauty in a free and ethical environment is an invitation to a life worth living. Though I cannot pursue the matter here, it is noteworthy that we often call a person of courage, goodness, and humility, a beautiful human being. Around the world people find many paths to beauty and of late in the Western artistic and academic worlds, beauty seems to be making a comeback. But beauty is a difficult thing to talk about, partly due to its being an experiential concept, partly because it has a long and complex philosophical history, and also because there is the risk in analysis of reducing it to something small and formulaic. Words in the end cannot replace the experience [End Page 78] of beauty. Despite these concerns, however, I believe that now, more thanever in the arts and education, we need to develop capacities for creating and appreciating beauty, if only to bring us back into contact with what is sensual and intrinsically worthwhile after so much arid theorizing, conflict in the world, and technocratic obsession. Through beauty we might be able to regain a stronger sense of human values and pleasure in living. Therefore, my aim here is to re-examine beauty in order to strengthen its role in aesthetic education. I do not expect to develop any precise definitions but I shall aim for a few signposts. Background to the Concept of Beauty "Beauty," "beautiful," or "the beautiful" refer primarily to a quality found pleasing to the senses. Here I shall restrict discussion to the visual domain, and later principally to art. As noted, beauty has a long philosophical history but the concept remains vague. From classical times on, beauty has been defined or associated with such properties as symmetry, balance, variety, harmony, proportion, order, unity, and perfection. And indeed, these features have long provided normative guidelines for the creation and appreciation of beauty. Over time we have learned the shape and proportions of a beautiful pot or supporting column. The golden section, a ratio of 1:1.6, has been used to good effect in design for millennia, the Parthenon being a prime example, the 35 mm negative another. However, as is well known, differences in beauty in individual cases tend to elude definition on account of this or that property or collection of properties. Exceptions can always be found. A painting may be well balanced but lacking in a certain élan vital, or unbalanced but beautiful. The variability of beautiful things seems to rule out a... (shrink)