Suchergebnisse

Agamben's Homo Sacer (1998) here serves as a stimulus for developing a neo‐Durkheimian approach to the political. Durkheim's sociology of the sacred and government is read symptomatically to highlight the extent to which sacralisations refer to a real but underdetermined ontology of the social that threatens to break loose into violence against the mechanisms of rule that regulate institutions, actions and the broader normative terrain in which collective fates are thought about and problematised. This neo‐Durkheimian approach is deconstructive of Agamben and reconstructive of an alternative to his state‐focused conception of sovereignty, the political and sacralisation. The political field is reconceptualised as structured by the sacred difference between politics and rule, instantiated by a limen – a door – through which the violence of politics may break, opening social life to the field of the contingency of history. This alternative thus shifts the focus from a political emergency to which states of exception, decided by state sovereignty, are a violent response, to exceptional states of an emergent politics grounded in the sacred power of popular sovereignty that may result in violence against rule.

AbstractExtending recent developments in the neo‐Durkheimian analysis of suicidality as an indicator of social pathology, this paper analyses individual level survey data on suicidal ideation, perceptions of social support, and the sense of belonging from three Canadian provinces drawn from theCanadian Community Health Survey(2015–16). We ask whether or not social support and a sense of belonging affect suicide ideation differently. In answering this question, we pay attention to both subjective and objective indicators of integration, and how subjective indicators independently affect suicide ideation. Results show that a higher level of social support had the largest effect on suicidal ideation and that the effect of a sense of belonging disappeared when measures of social support are accounted for. These findings are consistent with Durkheim's general theory of suicide and previous studies on mental health, highlighting the importance of regular, proximate social interaction as a prophylactic against suicidality.

Critically reconsidering Durkheim's sociology of suicide, we develop a quantitative analysis of individual level data contained in the Canadian Community Health Survey (2009-2012) to investigate the relationship between perceptions of social support and suicidality in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. We operationalize Durkheim's general sociology to investigate relationships between people's perceptions of the more objective aspects of social life (structural-institutional) and the more subjective dimensions of social life, on suicidal ideation. We find that people's perceptions of the quality of social support available to them significantly affect susceptibility to suicidality, lending credence to key aspects of Durkheim's general sociology of social pathology.

This article provides a critical introduction to the first English translation of Durkheim's Saturday, 2 December 1899, lecture that he entitled 'Course Outline: On Penal Sanctions'. It was written for the first class of the final year of his course 'General Physics of Law and Morality'. We provide some context to the lecture, a description of the four-year long course at Bordeaux of which it was a part, offer notes on our translation, and discuss the salience of its content. Of particular note is Durkheim's sociological reasoning, and the critical impact of antisubjectivism on the development of his special theory of sanctions and conception of morality as part of social reality.

This article is the introduction to the Special Issue on Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Contemporary Engagements.