Suchergebnisse

Terroren er intimt forbundet med følelsen af frygt. Artiklen giver en række redskaber til begrebsligt at kunne indkredse denne frygt. Det gøres idehistorisk, individualpsykologisk, socialpsykologisk, sociologisk og med udgangspunkt i terrorens anatomi. Hvad er det ved terroren, som gør at vi frygter den mere end andre trusler mod liv og helbred? Hvordan kan vi begrebsligt indkredse den rystelse, som terroren sætter i os: som frygt eller angst? Og hvilken betydning har det, hvordan vi begrebsliggør truslen: som risici eller katastrofer? Og sidst og ikke mindst, hvad betyder den måde, som vi militært og politisk møder terroren for vores ængstelse for den? Artiklens titel – Efterskælv – sigter til de konsekvenser, terroren har for ikke de umiddelbare ofre, men for alle dem, som ser på eller hører om den. Det vil sige for os alle sammen.Aftershock: Investigating the anatomy of the fear of terror Terror is intimately connected to the feeling of fear. The article offers a number of tools to conceptually narrow down this fear historically, psychologically and sociologically. The starting point is the anatomy of fear. What is it about terror that makes us fear it so much more than other threats to life and health? How can we conceptually narrow down the shock that terror causes as fear or anxiety? What does it mean when we conceptualise the threat as risk or catastrophe? And last but not least, what are the consequences of the way we with our military and politics meet terror in connection with our anxiety? The title of the article – Aftershock – hints at the aftermath of terror – not for the immediate victims, but for all of those who witness or hear about it. That means all of us.

Intro -- Licence and Use -- Title Page -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- A Note on the Authors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. Lacanian interventions: Psychoanalysis as a theory of society -- The unconscious -- Back to Lacan -- Discourse analysis or critique of ideology -- You remind me of Emmanuel Ravelli! -- Chapter 2. The ideological fantasm: Žižek's sociology -- We know very well… -- The mirror stage as critique of ideology -- Fetishism as a political form -- The two sides of the social bond -- Chapter 3. A world out of joint: Žižek's diagnosis of contemporary society -- The fall of the Father -- Nationalism and ethnic conflicts -- Multiculturalism and racism -- Terrorism and 11 September -- Chapter 4. The revolutionary subject: Žižek's ethical and political horizon -- I think not, therefore I am -- The Proletarian -- It is the economy, stupid! -- Postmodernism as the new ideological superstructure of capitalism -- St. Paul on the barricade -- Communism, of course! -- Chapter 5. Did somebody say totalitarianism: Žižek's critics. -- The rebellion against the father -- Passions of the real -- The useful idiot -- Bibliography.

Cover -- International Library of Sociology -- Sociology through the Projector -- Contents -- Foreword by Slavoj iek -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- Sociology and the problem of correspondence -- Socio-fiction -- The cinematic apparatus -- Double readings -- The contents of the book -- 2 Hamam -- Hamam -- Writing Persian Letters -- The Orient as a zero-institution -- Returned to sender -- From the symbolic to the imaginary -- From the imaginary to the symbolic -- Four heroines -- 3 Lord of the Flies -- Play -- The crowd -- Spite -- Evil -- Exception -- Speechless -- 4 City of God -- Three worlds of misery -- City of God as a fantasy space -- Inclusionary exclusion -- The return of the real -- 5 Fight Club -- Capital and its subterranean other -- Insomnia/immobility -- Master of pain -- Microfascism -- Fight Club as critique -- Just joking? -- 6 Brazil -- (Anti)-terror -- The reign of the commodity -- The cynic -- Resistance -- A parallax of scepticism and optimism -- 7 Life is Beautiful -- The accident -- Holocaust as comedy -- The unspeakable -- The Muselmann -- The riddle of the Holocaust -- Post-remembrance -- Afterword -- References -- Index.

Abstract
In the Clouds, Aristophanes apparently ridicules Socratic philosophy as a useless, essentially passive preoccupation, which, "twisted" in the wrong hands, can seriously harm the City. But such an instrumentalist reading of the Clouds (and of philosophy) misses a crucial point regarding the relation between philosophy and comedy. Insofar as philosophy, love of wisdom, is irreducible to wisdom—insofar as, in other words, philosophy is also a matter of taste (a concept which seeks to combine knowledge and pleasure)—the Clouds can be read as an ironic-comic defense of philosophy. To discuss this, the article reads the Clouds in the perspective of free use. This reading makes it possible to articulate two distinct but related senses of perverting philosophy, which are evidenced with material from within the play: the reduction of reason to instrumental reason and/or to state philosophy. To end with, the article discusses the relationship between comedy and philosophy in more general terms.

The article elaborates on Arendt's take on the religious and the political and on how they interact and merge in modernity, especially in totalitarianism. We start with framing the three different understandings of religion in Arendt: first, a classic understanding of religion, which is foreign to the logic of the political; second, a secularized political religion; and third, a weak messianism. Both the classic understanding of religion and the political religion deny human freedom in Arendt's sense. Her transcendent alternative to them both is the notion of the democratic political community: the Republic. Then we turn to Arendt's political theology, illuminating why interrogating Nazism is central to examine the relationship between politics and religion in modernity. This is followed by a discussion of Nazism as a type of political religion. We focus here on totalitarianism, both as an idea and actual institution. We conclude with an assessment of the role of profanation in Arendt's work and its significance vis-à-vis the contemporary 'return of religion' as well as totalitarian tendencies which call for new forms of voluntary servitude.

The paper addresses the ways in which the cultural, the affective and the political intersect, counter and/or feed upon one another in the context of contemporary terror. Initially, building upon Machiavelli and Hobbes, we deal with the political significance of terror (and the fear it provokes), emphasizing its potentiality, which inscribes future within the present. Then we turn to an analysis of terror in the prism of securitization. Terror, in this respect, amounts to de-materialization (the enemy as spectre), de-temporalization (the erasure of the temporal difference between the present and the future), and de-territorialisation (the breakdown of the distinctions between 'inside' and 'outside'. Following this, we observe how these three processes are dealt with at the subjective and objective (social) levels. Regarding the first, subjective, level we differentiate three attitudes as paranoid, panic and rational. Regarding the latter, we consider terror in terms of accident, risk and catastrophe. Then, discussing the rhythmic relations between these conceptualizations and their spatio-temporal consequences, we focus on the notion of catastrophe. We end with articulating the aporias emerging in this context.

What is terror? The question has been surprisingly difficult to answer in the definitive. We approach the problem using William Connolly's theory of essentially contested concepts. Here three characteristics are important: a concept's normativity, complexity and application. The aim is not to present an ultimate solution for defining terror, but instead to offer a new frame for studying the problems involved in the struggle over the meaning of the concept. In doing so, we position ourselves in opposition to both realist and conventionalist approaches to defining terror and to other more commonly used approaches to the study of the discursive struggle over the concept of terror. More specifically we distinguish our approach from analyses of hegemony and discursive formations and from conceptual history. We argue that Connolly's approach can provide a new and productive frame for addressing these issues; it offers a refined understanding of the contestation of the concept of terror, because it gives us an understanding of what it means for a concept to be essentially contested and because it allows us to better distinguish between layers of agreement and disagreement.