Suchergebnisse

Carl Schmitt and James Joyce, contemporaries, responding to the crisis of European civilization of the interwar years, are brought into conversation with one another through the mediation of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, Schmitt as representative and advocate of Apollonian logocentrism and Joyce of Dionysian muthos. Parallels as well as differences in these authors' works are examined to illuminate the figure of the dictator and the theme of political theology, and to reveal the deep affinity between Schmitt and totalitarianism on the one hand and Joyce and radical and plural democracy on the other.

Tribunals, public inquiries and similar institutions, increasingly common in the political culture of the United Kingdom, the European Union, and in America, can be seen as exemplifying the auto-correcting, self-reflexive capacity of political institutions in information-rich and communicatively fluent societies. They represent the modernization of political culture guided by communicative rationality, paralleling the accelerated modernization of globalization. This view is elaborated and modified by an interpretation based on a philosophy of history as recurrence or "metempsychosis" (Nietzsche, Vico, Joyce) and the mythic figure of Trickster as formulated in anthropology and psychoanalysis (Radin, Hyde, Jung). Specifically, the political culture of globalization is cast in terms of the reconfiguration of the archaic and an intensification of myth (Benjamin). An examination of the ongoing Tribunal of Inquiry into Payments to Politicians in Ireland shows how tribunals are theaters in which the politician appears as a recurrence of a Trickster archetype adept at negotiating and playing this liminal and changing context. Tribunals struggle not so much to eradicate and replace Trickster by systems of formal rationality, but to redeem his vital energy and creativity.

The construction of identity and the cultivation of model citizens are explored in the context of a model housing project for the working classes in 19th-century Cork, Ireland. Historical and contemporary ethnographic analysis reveals the deployment of disciplinary technologies to demarcate the respectable working classes from the unruly mob. Power as subjectification is manifest in the anticipatory socialization and self-presentation of prospective tenants to the normalizing gaze of the community and in the performances of good citizenship by past and present residents. Evasions, resistances, and neurotic responses to the civilizing process are also examined.

pt. 1. Globalisation and social inequality in Ireland. Economics: social inequality and the Celtic tiger -- Politics: continuity and change in Irish political culture -- pt. 2. The diversification and commodification of Irish identity. Culture: race and multiculturalism in Ireland -- Consumption: Guinness, Ballygowan and Riverdance: the globalisation of Irish identity -- pt. 3. Globalisation and quality of life in Ireland. Depression: The melancholy spirit of the Celtic tiger -- Binge drinking and overeating: globalisation and insatiability -- pt. 4. Beyond 'consumer citizenship' and neoliberalism: cosmopolitanising Ireland. Social welfare and redistribution: taxation and civic health -- Education and recognition: the cultivation of a cosmopolitan imaginary -- Conclusion: a cosmopolitan ethics for a postnational society