Suchergebnisse

This text uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions.

This text uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted-ness upon the two defining political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces, under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers multiple sites of theory and practice and two revolutions.

This volume uses the concept of 'norms' to initiate a long overdue conversation between the constructivist and postcolonial scholarships on how to appraise the ordering processes of international politics. Drawing together insights from a broad range of scholars, it evaluates what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new '-ism' for IR, but as a 'situated perspective' offering ex-centred, post-Eurocentric sites for practices of situated critique. Through in-depth engagements with the norms constructivist scholarship, the contributors expose the theoretical, epistemological and practical erasures that have been implicitly effected by the uncritical adoption of 'norms' as the dominant lens for analysing the ideational dynamics of international politics. They show how these are often the very erasures that sustained the workings of colonisation in the first place, whose uneven power relations are thereby further sustained by the study of international politics. The volume makes the case for shifting from a static analysis of 'norms' to a dynamic and deeply historical understanding of the drawing of the initial line between the 'normal' and the 'abnormal' that served to exclude from focus the 'strange' and the unfamiliar that were necessarily brought into play in the encounters between the West and the rest of the world. A timely intervention, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory and postcolonial scholarship

In this review essay I reflect on the centrality of Spinoza's thought to political modernity on the combined occasion of the 350th anniversary of the original publication of his first political treatise, the Tractatus theologico–politicus, and of the publication this year of George Eliot's English translation of Spinoza's Ethics, which had been lying in a drawer for almost a century and a half. His influence is both substantial and methodological. It owes to the singular way in which he calibrated the relationship between reason, or the natural human need to understand, and faith, or the need to believe. But, over a century before the social sciences were invented, Spinoza also laid the foundations for the interpretative methods that would become central to these sciences and to the study of international politics. He remains essential reading for understanding our world.

AbstractIn this article I theorise the concept of misrecognition that we aim to bring to the study of international politics with this Special Issue. I draw upon three sources to do so: recognition theory, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. I show that, while the seeds of an interest in misrecognition were laid in that interdisciplinary Hegelian scholarship known as recognition theory, it remains underdeveloped. To develop it into a concept I chart a path through recognition theory back to Hegel's original dialectic of the master and servant in thePhenomenology of Spirit. What the dialectic captures, I argue, are the actual dynamics of misrecognition in social life, not an idealised form of recognition. This foundational, constitutive misrecognition is what Lacan also theorises by way of his concept of 'fantasy'. Both Hegel and Lacan foreground a misrecognised, desiring subject that challenges the ways in which agency has been understood in international politics. Lastly, I show the purchase of a Hegelian-Lacanian analysis for IR by considering the relations between sovereignty and nuclear weapons under the lens of fantasy.

In this article I consider how our experiences of bodily privacy are changing in the contemporary surveillance society. I use biometric technologies as a lens for tracking the changing relationships between the body and privacy. Adopting a broader genealogical perspective, I retrace the role of the body in the constitution of the modern liberal political subject. I consider two different understandings of the subject, the Foucauldian political subject, and the Lacanian psychoanalytic subject. The psychoanalytic perspective serves to appraise the importance of hiding for the subject effects of excessive exposure to the Other's gaze. I conclude to the importance of the subject's being able to hide, even when it has nothing to hide. By considering these two facets of subjectivity, political and psychic, I hope to make sense of our enduring and deeply political passionate attachment to privacy.

Invited by the editors to respond to Professor Neumann's inaugural lecture,1 in this article I take issue with his core, unquestioned assumption, namely, whether IR should be considered as a science. I use it as a starting point to re-open the question of how the stuff that humans are made of should be studied in IR today. Beyond Neumann's piece, I critically engage with two emerging trends in the discipline, the so-called new materialisms and the interest in the neurosciences, and articulate my concern that these trends have not addressed the deterministic fallacy that threatens to undermine their relevance for the study of a world made by humans. To the latent anxiety as to whether the discipline has finally achieved recognition of its epistemological status as a science, I respond by recalling that other grand tradition in IR, interpretive methods. The study of meaning from within, without reducing it to countable 'things' or to neuronal traces, is, I suggest, better attuned to capturing the contingency, indeterminacy and freedom which constitute key characteristics of the constructed, social world that we study in IR.