How can Catherine Pickstock's statement that "Traditional communities governed by liturgical patterns are likely to be the only source of resistance to capitalist and bureaucratic norms today" be interpreted in contemporary South Africa in such a way that justice and recognition are upheld? I propose to answer this question in the following four steps. First, the notion of liturgy with reference to politics will be briefly discussed. Second, modernity as an ongoing liturgical disruption, in general, and more particularly in South Africa will be discussed. Third, South Africa as a country between tradition and modernity will be addressed. In conclusion, some proposals for the facilitation of a liturgical politics in modernity, in general, and in South Africa, in particular, will be made. These proposals will be concerned with a plea for the province, the contemplative church and the contemplative university.
Reflecting on the development of the global economic system, the present article describes the phenomenon of hyper-individualism in the age of "second modernity" and, making a distinction between the "family collective" and the "patriotic collective", discusses the individual's oscillating loyalty between the family and the nation state in this process. An answer is sought to the question why, in the contemporary period, individuals who are confronted with a (health) crisis appear to have lost confidence in the authority of the nation state, regardless of whether they live in a country with a democratic government or one with an authoritarian regime. Building on this finding, the article also addresses the importance of a revival of the political agora. ; Kot razmislek o razvoju globalnega ekonomskega sistema pričujoči članek opisuje pojav hiperindividualizma v obdobju »druge modernosti«. Avtor razlikuje med »družinskim« in »patriotskim kolektivom« ter na tej osnovi prikaže, kako v tem procesu posamezniki in posameznice nihajo med družino in nacionalno državo. Članek išče odgovor na vprašanje, zakaj vse kaže na to, da posameznice in posamezniki, ki se soočajo z (zdravstveno) krizo, v sodobnem času izgubljajo zaupanje v nacionalno državo, in sicer ne glede na to, ali živijo v državi z demokratično vlado ali v takšni, ki ji vlada avtokratski režim. Na osnovi rezultatov pričujoče študije avtor izpostavi tudi pomen preporoda politične agore.
Following the organization, in 2009, of the first conference on The British Empire: Ideology, Perspectives, Perception, the Research Group dedicated to Culture Studies at the University of the Lisbon Centre for English Studies organized, in 2010, a second conference under the general title Empire Building and Modernity. This conference constitutes the second part of a three year project undertaken by the group, which will be followed, in 2011, by a third initiative, called Reviewing Imperial Conflicts. The proceedings of the second conference are now presented in this book. Empire Building and Modernity gives a larger scope to the original project, which was developed more strictly around the British Empire, and provides the opportunity to deal with questions related to the formation of modern European empires, namely the Portuguese Colonial Empire. The different chapters in this book reveal a variety of approaches that are very often at the cutting edge of the methodologies adopted in cultural studies, particularly in the field of post-colonial studies. The building of new perceptions on imperial issues interpreted through literature, the visual arts, history and political science, the role of museums, questions of gender and race and the construction of identity through language constitute the guidelines of the contributions presented in this volume. I hope you will enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed discussing the issues that contributed to its making. ; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia
The critique of ocularcentrism, the dominant tendency in Western (and perhaps not only Western) thinking to favour sight at the expense of other sense modalities, has recently come under attack from post-structuralist and post-phenomenological thinkers. The critique of ocularcentrism (documented in Martin Jay's work Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought) is intended to reinforce and supplement the critique of logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, in other words, it forms part of the critique of Enlightenment rationality. I argue that the critique of Enlightenment rationality frequently overshoots its target. Heidegger's critique of the »scopic« rationality of our culture has been invoked as a radical alternative to ocularcentric thinking. I attempt to show that Heidegger's critique of Enlightenment rationality and of modernity is not radically anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist, as his followers maintain. I also try to show that Heidegger is at best a dubious ally in the fight against an oppressive »scopic« rationality because of the sinister political background of his critique of modernity. ; Kritika okularocentrizma, prevladujoče težnje privilegirati vid na račun drugih čutnih modalnosti v zahodnem (in morda ne le zahodnem) mišljenju, je pred nedavnim postala predmet napada poststrukturalističnih in postfenomenoloških mislecev. Kritika okularo-centrizma (ki jo je dokumentiral Martin Jay v knjigi Sklonjeni pogled: Zavračanje vida v francoski misli dvajsetega stoletja) naj bi okrepila in dopolnila kritiko logo-centrizma in metafizike navzočnosti. Povedano drugače, ta kritika tvori del kritike razsvetljenske racionalnosti. V članku zagovarjam mnenje, da kritika razsvetljenstva pogosto cilja višje kot pa leži njena tarča. Heideggrova kritika »skopične« racionalnosti naše kulture naj bi služila kot radikalna alternativa okularocentričnemu mišljenju. Pokazati skušam, da Heideggrova kritika razsvetljenske racionalnosti in modernosti ni radikalno antiesencialistična in antifundacionalistična, kot trdijo njegovi učenci. Pokazati tudi skušam, da je Heidegger, zaradi svoje problematične politične preteklosti in kritike modernosti, v najboljšem primeru dvomljiv zaveznik v boju proti zatiralski »skopični« racionalnosti.
T he article contains an analysis of the major lessons of Immanuel Kant's philosophical project of perpetual peace in the context of development of contemporary political systems and international order. The author reviews the history of philosophical and legal accounts of perpetual peace, as well as the political context of Kant's project. The third part of the article offers a detailed analysis of Kant's proposals with regard to the institutional construction of constitutional republics and of a global federation of peoples. The author concludes that from the perspective of the 'second Modernity,' the experience of early Modern philosophers might assist in resuming a more active dialogue between philosophers and political leaders, as well as inviting contemporary philosophers to take a leadership role in the institutional construction of preconditions for civil peace and the prevention of wars in Eastern Europe.Keywords: Enlightenment, peace, Modernity, second modernity, Kant, progress, contemporaneity, de-modernization, Ukraine, post-Soviet society ; У статті розглянуто основні уроки кантівського філософського про-єкту вічного миру в контексті становлення Модерну з його полі-тичними системами і міжнародним ладом. Автор аналізує історію філософських і політико-правових позицій у розвитку ідеї вічного миру, а також історико-політичний контекст Кантового проєкту. У третій ча-стині статті подано аналіз пропозицій Канта щодо інстуціонального об-лаштування вічного миру, розвитку конституційних республік і світової федерації народів. Автор висновує, що в ситуації «другого Модерну» дос-від ранньомодерних філoсофських пошуків спонукає сучасних філософів до активного діялогу з державними діячами, а також до лідерства в інсти-туціональній розбудові передумов громадського миру і попередження воєн у східно-европейському реґіоні.Ключові слова: Просвітництво, мир, модерн, другий модерн, модерність, Кант, прогрес, сучасність, знесучаснення, демодернізація, Україна, постра-дянські суспільства
The article aims to show that style as a political problem is one of the conditions of possibility to understand the reactionary ethos of Latin American modernity. The conjecture is that Latin American modernity is a diachronic time that maintains a liberal time in tension with reactionary time, reason enough to suggest that the style of "antimoderns" allows to understand some the problems of Latin American aesthetic-political formation. Therefore, the article is divided into three parts. The first discusses style as an ethical problem, rather than aesthetic or rhetorical. The second postulates the notion of style and its gnostic traits in the Colombian Nicolás Gómez Dávila. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of Octavio Paz's style concept to show how an intellectual who defines himself as a liberal can share a reactionary style as a symptom of an epochal ethos. ; El artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar que el estilo como problema político es una de las condiciones de posibilidad para comprender el ethos reaccionario de la modernidad latinoamericana. La conjetura de fondo es que la modernidad latinoamericana es un tiempo diacrónico que mantiene un tiempo liberal en tensión con un tiempo reaccionario, razón suficiente para sugerir que el estilo de los "antimodernos" permite comprender algunos los problemas de la formación estético-política latinoamericana. Por consiguiente, el artículo está dividido en tres partes. La primera discute el estilo como un problema ético, antes que estético o retórico. La segunda postula la noción de estilo y sus rasgos gnósticos en el colombiano Nicolás Gómez Dávila. Por último, el artículo cierra con una discusión del concepto de estilo de Octavio Paz para mostrar cómo un intelectual que se define a sí mismo como liberal puede compartir el estilo de un reaccionario como síntoma de un ethos epocal.
This paper argues that "modernity", as a process, a temporality, a category, and so on, is akin to Orientalism in that those who speak of it produce it as their ideology, their stereotyping of themselves and their others. The first section, on time, employs Kristeva's work in "Women's Time" in regards to the gendered politics of chaos and ordering. The second section, on alterity, pulls from various "times" and "spaces", where multiple authors from, at times, conflicting backgrounds converge on the politics of othering. The third section, on consent, is on structuring the limits of imaginable alternatives of discourse. The final section draws from the previous three in order to deconstruct "modernity" as a mythology of temporal, spacial and societal orderliness, producing forms of alterity to manufacture the consent of whomever speaks of modernity towards creating a convenient history and setting a hegemony-laden agenda. As such, modernity takes the place of "the real" to consolidate and augment hegemony by way of self-naturalization. It is a manufactured consent, of those who speak of, to and about it, to colonial aggression and arrogance by evacuating colonial relations of power from the limits of the debate.
Critiques of modernity often align with critiques of the existing institutions of lib-eral democracy. We argue that the degrowth movement can learn from the experience of past critiques of modernity by avoiding their major mistake - that is, (inadvertently) conflating a critique of modernity with a rejection of liberal democratic institutions. Hence, we suggest to frame degrowth as the promotion of new vocabularies within a deliberative account of democ-racy. Specifically, we proceed in three steps: first, we briefly review some essential critiques of modernity and their stance towards liberal democracy. Second, we illustrate how some of the argumentative patterns within the degrowth literature may inadvertently endanger core values of the open society. Third, we introduce our perspective on a liberal degrowth that aims to fulfil the "unfinished project of modernity".
The difference between the political philosophy of the second school and that of the modern classics is above all metaphysical. The historically fundamental argumentative similarities are theoretically irrelevant to this difference, whose primary principle is the centrality of a (really) common good, manifested in a teleological ethic centred on virtue. The article reviews how, for this reason, a series of topics that early modernity articulates as aspects of a single political problem still constitute for these authors independent questions, only linked in the idea of political common good. ; La diferencia de la filosofía política de la segunda escolástica con la de los clásicos modernos es sobre todo metafísica. Las semejanzas argumentales, históricamente fundamentales, resultan teóricamente irrelevantes respecto de esta diferencia, cuyo principio primario es la centralidad de un bien (realmente) común, manifestado en una ética teleológica centrada en la virtud. El artículo revisa cómo, por esta razón, una serie de tópicos que la primera modernidad articula como aspectos de un único problema político, todavía constituyen para estos autores cuestiones independientes, solo vinculadas en la idea de bien común político.
This working paper aims to reformulate the teleological concepts of Europeanization by relating them to modernity's ambivalences, which seems necessary for two reasons. First, both the number and the scope of crises in European politics and societies have increased considerably in the last two decades. Second, and more importantly, the project of European integration has changed its status from being a potential problem solver to being a part of the problem. The paper establishes a broader historical perspective than is usual in most projects on Europeanization. It argues that crises and drawbacks have been a part of European societal and political development during most periods of European history. One reason has been the purely European strategy of colonialism, which was used as a mechanism to outsource the negative consequences of modernity to places outside of Europe and to peripheral locations within Europe. By including historical and postcolonial perspectives on contemporary Europeanization, we argue that Europe and modernity are not characterized by teleological progress but rather engender ambivalent and entangled developments. ; Die Autor*innen verfolgen das Ziel, teleologische Konzepte der Europäisierung zu reformulieren, indem sie die Ambivalenz der Moderne als Bestandteil von Europäisierung berücksichtigen. Dies erscheint zum einen notwendig, weil die Zahl und Tiefe der europäischen "Krisen" in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten deutlich zugenommen hat. Zum anderen hat sich dabei der Status europäische Integration von einer potentiellen Lösung von Problemen zu einem Verursacher von Problemen gewandelt. Die Autor*innen nehmen eine breitere historische Perspektive ein als in den meisten sonstigen Projekten zur Europäisierung der Fall ist. Sie argumentieren, dass Krisen und Rückschritte in der europäischen Geschichte eher der Regelfall als die Ausnahme waren. Diese Krisen fanden allerdings nicht immer allein auf europäischem Territorium statt, sondern die negativen Konsequenzen der Moderne wurden über die ...
This article argues that there is both sameness and difference as between the secular and the religious, and that law, modern law, is constituently enmeshed within this sameness and difference. That combination of sameness and difference, along with the integral part of law, is traced in a cumulation of three historicities, the first being the creation of the world's imperium, of the modern world-system, in the sixteenth century. Then, with the second historicity we have the time of revolutions, seen here as almost revolutions, of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And finally, with the third historicity we have the time of high modernism and the death of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each of these three phases is captured, as it were, in the work of a corresponding thinker who is taken to be a telling instance: Vitoria, Hobbes, Nietzsche. All of that is then briefly brought into what could precariously be called the present and in a way that reveals the exercise to have been all along a history of the present.
In the last decade, theorists in anthropology and other disciplines have vigorously critiqued commonplace distinctions between secularism and religion. Highlighting how secularism is a form of Western epistemology, such theorists have argued this distinction is deeply problematic because it obscures secularism's historical, political, and cultural particularity. My dissertation argues Iran is well situated to engage in this debate because its political terrain brings into relief how discussions of secularity and religiosity often fall back on an irresolvable dichotomy wherein secularism is defended without qualification or religious authoritarianism is ignored altogether. In an effort to move out of this impasse, my dissertation critiques the presumed neutrality of secularism without defending a thoroughly undemocratic Islamic Republic. Through an examination of three sites within Iranian politics since 1979, I show how alternatives to both secularism and undemocratic forms of Islam are already present in Iran. The first site that I explore is the contemporary Iranian women's movement, specifically the One Million Signatures Campaign, which seeks full gender equality within the laws of the Islamic Republic. I argue that the internal logic of rights and a specific set of socio-political conditions that arose out of the revolution in 1979 made the newly fostered cooperation between Islamic and secular feminists within this campaign possible. Utilizing critiques of rights by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminists, I arrive at a critical endorsement of women's rights in Iran that calls for nurturing more radical political imaginaries by not treating rights jurisprudence as the apex of social justice struggles. My second site focuses on the politics of time and its role in the 2009 post-election uprising as a further example of the porous boundary between secularism and religion in Iran. After surveying the history of Iran's three dominant calendars and the forty-day mourning cycle of Shi'ite Islam in the last century, I argue the Islamic Republic is founded on temporal simultaneity, a non-secular organization of time wherein past, present, and future are enfolded into one dynamic moment. I conclude that during the 2009 uprising, protesters initiated a crisis of legitimacy for the regime by reconfiguring temporal markers that comprise this symbolic foundation of the contemporary Iranian state. My final site is the visual culture in the Islamic Republic as well as Western understandings and depictions of it. I argue such analyses of artistic production in Iran by Western observers rely on a particular understanding of the state, religion, and art as discrete categories wholly separate from one another. This argument is twofold, the first part of which is a historical survey that shows how the relationship between art and the state in Iran over the last sixty years has been co-constitutive. On the basis of this history, I then explore contemporary Iranian street art, both sanctioned and illicit, to show how this convergence of art and the state has continued to unfold in the Islamic Republic. I show how the boundaries between culture and the state have not calcified under the current regime but remain dynamically in flux, albeit different ways than in the previous historical epoch. Lastly, I trace how the politics of secularism and religion both consolidates and frays the public/private divide within these three sites. Given this fact, the question of what to do with secularism and religion in Iran is ultimately a question of what to do about the divide between the private and public spheres. Taking up the issue of the double-bind structuring the public/private divide, I conclude my dissertation by surveying the ethical-politico limitations and possibilities of these alternative political imaginaries in Iran.
The Heideggerian question posed here as "what does it mean to dwell in a global age" leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial "in a global age" is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between "our age" and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of "our global age" and the one sketched in Heidegger's 1954 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking." We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of "dwelling in a precarious age" has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same "metaphysics" that has precluded the possibility of "dwelling" (initiated a "denial of dwelling" as it is put here) throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here ("what does it mean to dwell in a global age") should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter "dwelling"?
This PhD has pursued three different and interconnected objectives, each corresponding to one of the three parts of the PhD. In Part I, a historical reconstruction is provided in order to present the background against which some political paradoxes in the present have to be understood in relation to globalization. On the one hand, it presents a range of historical developments that have helped to describe some lineaments of the modern world as a history of domination that underpins the univocal and reductionist conceptual association between modernity and globalization. A connection is established between this view of modernity and imperialism, and between progress and globalization. On the other hand, it discusses the conceptual shortcomings and historical inadequacy of this understanding of modernity against the background of recent findings and offers an interpretation of modernity as being constituted by a tension between a totalizing and a pluralizing interpretation of the world. An alternative pluralizing interpretation of modernity, which is not related to globalization, linked to the concept of autonomy and is best suited to understanding our current condition, is proposed. Part II aims, first, at challenging the narrative of the current hegemony of the liberal understanding of autonomy which underpins political globalization and makes unworkable any notion of a collective self; and second, at retrieving philosophically the normative content with which the concept of autonomy is associated. An assessment of the current global situation is offered which aims at showing the need for the construction of a bounded collective self in order to uphold democracy and challenge the modes of domination that contract theory, as a normative framework for institutional social life, perpetuates by means of legitimation or obfuscation. Part III establishes the historical context in which the views offered in parts I and II have been elaborated. First, a conceptual history of autonomy is provided. To my knowledge, no ...
This paper is funded by the School of Doctorate Studies of the University Iuav of Venice and will be part of my PhD dissertation about Kazuo Shinohara's work. Since the Japanese book Jutaku kenchiku (Residential Architecture) by Kazuo Shinohara has never been translated into English, the quotations reported here have been translated by me, thanks to Mr Yosuke Taki who did the Italian translation for me. ; Since, according to Kenneth Frampton, 'regional or national cultures must today, more than ever, be ultimately constituted as locally inflected manifestations of "world culture"', contemporary Japanese culture would be in this sense the 'world culture' par excellence, structured on two important cultural imports - the first occurred between the 6th and 7th centuries when from China was introduced the ideographic writing, Confucian model of society and along with them Indian Buddhism; and the second one, during the late 19th century, when for the rapid modernization of the country Western politics, science and technology were adopted. Having soon faced, and deeply questioned, the possibilities and problems of a global dimension of the thought, Japanese culture could be considered an original synthesis of universality and local identity where, although the many contradictions, the meeting with the stranger allowed to discover what 'not to be', rather than what to be. Starting from the other side of modernity, and tracing the different aspects of the adoption of Modern Movement in Japan, aim of this paper is to introduce the figure of the Japanese architect Kazuo Shinohara (1925-2006) who unveiled the plurality and richness of our spatial structures, the universal and the particular in which we are immersed, most of the time, without consciousness. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
