공적 영역에 나갈 수 없는 존재들은 어떤 방식으로 삶을 구가(求暇/歐歌)할 수 있을까? 공적 영역에 나갈 수 없다는 것은 어떤 의미이며, 그러한 배제와 추방의 상황에서도 자신을 비롯한 쫓겨난 존재들의 삶을 드러내는 일은 어떻게 이루어지는 걸까? 이 논문은 한나 아렌트(Hannah Arendt)의 정치 개념을 그 자신의 ‘파리아(pariah)’ 논의를 분석함으로써 ‘파리아의 정치’로 다시 해석하는 일을 통해 이와 같은 물음에 답하고자 한다. 먼저 공적영역에서 ‘보이지 않는’ 일의 의미를 ‘차별(discrimination)’의 구조를 중심으로 밝힌다. 그것은 구체적으로 유대인 파리아와 파브뉴 개념 분석을 통해 다루어질 텐데, 이 두 개념은 (...) 오늘날까지 이어지는 오래된 사회적 차별의 표지로 재해석된다. 다음으로 파리아로서의 유대인: 숨겨진 전통 에서 다루어지는 네 가지 파리아 형상을 차별에 저항하는 네 방식으로 해석한다. 이들 형상은 역사 속에서 삭제되거나 제대로 다루어지지 못한 유대인 파리아의 정치적 경험을 드러낸다. 마지막으로 아렌트 정치 개념을, ‘드러남’과 ‘시작’이라는 그의 행위 개념에 대한 설명에 근거하여, ‘보이지 않는 자들의 존재 현시’와 ‘역사 없는 자들의 역사 생성’이라는 의미를 담은 ‘파리아의 정치’로 다시 쓴다. (shrink)

본 논문은 한나 아렌트의 역사 개념과 이에 대한 발터 벤야민의 영향을 분석함으로써 아렌트 역사 개념이 내포하고 있는 독특한 정치적 의미를 밝히고자 한다. 먼저 아렌트 역사 개념의 주요 특성을 벤야민의 역사주의와 진보주의 비판의 계기와 더불어 분석한다. 여기서 그 특성은 첫째, 그 어떤 정치적 관점도 배제된 순수한 객관적 역사기술의 주장에 대한 비판으로, 둘째, 발전의 이데올로기가 결부된 ‘과정’으로서의 역사 개념에 대한 비판으로 드러난다. 다음으로 이러한 비판을 통해 아렌트가 근대의 역사 개념과 대조되는 고대의 역사 개념의 특성을 공정성과 불멸성으로 변별해냄을 드러낸다. 고대의 역사 개념은 사라진 (...) 시대의 향수를 불러일으키기 위해서가 아니라 역사가 단순한 사실을 넘어서는 진실을 말하는 일이자 일어난 일들에 대한 증언과 재심의 의미를 담고 있음을 드러내기 위해서 등장한 것이다. 이러한 역사 개념의 정치적 의미 속에서 억압받는 자들을 고통으로부터 구제하는 벤야민의 역사 개념의 영향이 가장 크게 드러난다. 우리는 이렇게 보이고 들리는 공적 영역에서 배제된 존재들의 정치와 결코 분리될 수 없는 역사 개념을 ‘파리아의 역사’라고 명명하고, 오늘날 우리 사회에도 이러한 역사 개념에 기반하여 사건의 진실을 규명하고 그 의미를 밝히며 기억하는 공동체가 요구됨을 시사한다. (shrink)

This paper investigates Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour as offering creative strategies for confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist. She offers a distinctive contribution to debates on reconciliation and justice, I suggest, by articulating a tragic approach to unreconciliation. Yet Arendt recognised that tragic accounts of violence can reinforce denial and resignation. In writings on the ‘hidden tradition’ of the ‘Jew as pariah,’ (...) Arendt suggests that humour can be an important response to tragic accounts of political violence and a strategy for awakening an emotional response in those who cannot perceive tragedies to which they have become reconciled. As arts of refusal, tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour invoke and subvert the tragic imagination to reveal possibilities for solidarity, responsibility, and transformation that challenge problematic forms of reconciliation – reconciliation to one’s role as a participant in, or bystander to abuse, reconciliation as self-abnegating assimilation, and reconciliation as compromise, scapegoating, or denial. (shrink)

The paper examines the complex relation between anti-democratic forces (“the extremists”) and the broader liberal-democratic institutional environment. The task of containing extremists is analysed both from a theoretical standpoint and in terms of its practical feasibility. I argue that the realities of political communication and the character of political argumentation make containing extremism in practice a much more daunting proposition than is usually understood in the literature. Insights from political philosophy, political science and communication theory are brought together to press (...) these points. As a result, extremists often cannot be stopped from running for office even if the state possesses tools to ban extremist parties. Moreover, once extremist politicians become members of legislative bodies, several democratic and procedural considerations start to apply to them so that it becomes difficult to limit their influence. Their elevated status (given their positions as legitimate representatives of the people, together with the increased media and argumentative platform they gain) complicates attempts at stopping the proliferation of their views. The last part of the paper briefly sketches possible (remnants of) a strategy of containment, arguing that only a combination of informal sanctions can be (partially) successful, including deplatforming, refusal to engage with them, and a pariah status in the legislative assembly. (shrink)

In The Politics of Exodus, Mark Dooley offers a lively interpretation of Kierkegaard as a precursor of the ethical and political insights of Jacques Derrida. While many connections have been forged in recent years between these two quintessentially "Continental" figures, Dooley's book argues that these affiliations run much deeper than any previous commentators have suggested. Indeed, his most controversial claim is that Kierkegaard is anything but a proponent of asocial individualism, but is one whose writings bear witness to the (...) notion of an "open quasi-community" which has driven much of Derrida's work over the past decade. In vigorously challenging conventional wisdom surrounding the place of Kierkegaard in contemporary thought and political theory, Dooley shows how powerfully postmodern and politically charged the latter's specifically 'religious' ideas are. As such, Kierkegaard ought to be read as someone who anticipated Derrida's claim that genuine responsibility in the political sphere depends upon a phophetic call for justice on behalf of the least among us. will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of religion and postmodernism, as well as to those with interests in ethics and politics from a Continental perspective. It will undoubtedly change the way we read Kierkegaard in the new millennium. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this (...) collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

Introduction Someone comes and says something. Without really needing to think, I understand what is said, refer it without difficulty to familiar codes, ...

This paper discusses Hannah Arendt’s model of the Jewish pariah, developed in her study of Jewish assimilation. The argument is that Arendt’s model represents her early efforts to move beyond Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. The paper focuses on Arendt’s concept of a conscious pariah as a model for political resistance, independence, and agency. It shows how Arendt infused elements of Heidegger’s philosophy into her early vision of Jewish politics, while also transcending the limits of Heidegger’s ontological project with (...) her political vision. The paper suggests that Arendt’s book on Rahel Varnhagen shares similarities with Heidegger’s work on Mitsein in Being and Time, while her 1944 model of the conscious pariah, especially the focus on the pariah as a rebel, illustrates her concerns with Heidegger’s work on the Volk. (shrink)

The Politics of Aesthetics rethinks the relation between art and politics, reclaiming 'aesthetics' from its current narrow confines to reveal its significance ...

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

In this book, Livingston develops the political implications of formal results obtained over the course of the twentieth century in set theory, metalogic, and computational theory. He argues that the results achieved by thinkers such as Cantor, Russell, Godel, Turing, and Cohen, even when they suggest inherent paradoxes and limitations to the structuring capacities of language or symbolic thought, have far-reaching implications for understanding the nature of political communities and their development and transformation. Alain Badiou's analysis of logical-mathematical structures forms (...) the backbone of his comprehensive and provocative theory of ontology, politics, and the possibilities of radical change. Through interpretive readings of Badiou's work as well as the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Livingston develops a formally based taxonomy of critical positions on the nature and structure of political communities. These readings, along with readings of Parmenides and Plato, show how the formal results can transfigure two interrelated and ancient problems of the One and the Many: the problem of the relationship of a Form or Idea to the many of its participants, and the problem of the relationship of a social whole to its many constituents. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida has had a huge influence on contemporary political theory and political philosophy. Derrida's thinking has inspired Slavoj Zizek, Richard Rorty, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and many more contemporary theorists. This book brings together a first class line up of Derrida scholars to develop a deconstructive approach to politics. Deconstruction examines the internal logic of any given text or discourse. It helps us analyze the contradictions inherent in all schools of thought,and as such it has proved revolutionaty in (...) political analysis,particularly ideology critique. This book is ideal for all students of political theory,and anyone looking for an accessible guide to Derrida's thinking and how it can be used as a radical tool for political analysis. (shrink)

This is a story about Alcibiades, about Athens, and about the politics of rumor. When rumor set its claws into Alcibiades, it contributed not only to his own downfall, but to the downfall of Athens. The very traits that made Alcibiades an effective public figure also made him vulnerable to rumor. In the end, Thucydides himself excised rumor from his own histories because he came to see its destructive force.