Abstract. The article explores the significance held by political myths for legitimacy and politics. To that end, we examine political myth in line with the contemporary theory of political myth, which understands political myths as an integral part of all political communities that is not inherent to just authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. Every political community has their own stories/narratives that are accepted by most of the population and form the base of the legitimacy of the political order, whether it be a democratic or a non-democratic political order. In the final part of the article, we examine which narratives had such a legitimising power by analysing the political speeches of Franjo Tuđman while he was in office. Keywords: legitimacy, politics, political myth, political speech analysis, Tuđman.
The essay seeks to evaluate the pertinence of the inquiry laid out in Il Regno e la Gloria to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics, in particular its relationship to a Marxian communism, which Agamben appears to consider incapable of a truly radical or total critique of the status quo. To do this, the paper is divided into three sections. In the first part the question of what is meant by the "theological genealogy of the economy and government", as announced by the book's subtitle, is elaborated. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben's reliance on a certain understanding of secularization, of the kind that permits him to declare that modernity merely brings to completion the Christian 'economy' of providence, or indeed that Marx's notion of praxis 'basically is only the secularization of the theological conception of the being of creatures as divine operation'. The paper tries to show that Agamben's work relies on a type of historical substantialism that clashes with his claim to be engaging in a genealogy. In the second part Agamben's suggestions about the genealogical thread running from Trinitarian oikonomia all the way to Smith's invisible hand, and implicitly all the way up to the present, are contrasted to understandings of the (modem) economy which, being premised on the limitlessness of monetary accumulation, transcends any absorption by a theological genealogy. In the third and final part certain aspects of Agamben's archaeological excavations -- in particular his delineation of the economic-theological notion of administration -- are examined, and the question is posed whether they might permit a deconstruction of the Marxist reference to communism as the withering away of the state and the shift towards an 'administration of things'. Adapted from the source document.
This article deals with the problems Foucault's work is faced with when entering its later phase. The analysis of discontinuities in history is replaced by an analysis of continuities in subjectifying sexuality. If in the first part of The History of Sexuality the subject was still the effect of power relations, the latter two parts introduce the possibility of the subject of mastery over pleasures, which can only affect politics through ethics. In analyzing the late Foucault & two contemporary authors inspired by his work, namely Judith Butler & Giorgio Agamben, we assert that Foucault's project encounters difficulties precisely at the point where it is supposed to be the strongest: thinking the ruptures & the excesses in both the flux of power relations as well as on the level of the singularity of enjoyment. Why can he not cope with this in a different manner than by animating the antique subject of "the care of the self," which searches for its consistency in self-control? Instead of resorting to the virtues of moderation, why does he not rather deal with the problems of the discontinued subject with the construction of a subject that would subjectify the discontinuity itself? Adapted from the source document.
