Suchergebnisse

Seeing that political communities are often believed to have an imaginary constitutional basis, this article raises the question how we – citizens of those communities – relate to this imaginary basis, and to the legitimacy it claims. As the answers already given tend to focus on the instrumental, here it is argued that insights from fiction theory can be used to shed new light on the mechanisms involved in our ability to adhere to the idea of there being an original (normative) foundation of the state. Drawing from Johan Huizinga and other play-oriented thinkers, the constitutional fiction is reconstructed as a social situation in which the existence and hegemony of a foundational normative framework is pretended to be the case. It is argued that our ability to adhere to this public form of pretense stems from the capacity to have separate spheres of consciousness: one to go along in the enacted world, and one to generate our own personal response to it. In the interaction between these two spheres of consciousness we develop our normative commitments and collective identity, while ascribing them to an imaginary constitution.

AbstractThis article analyzes the debate between the proponents and opponents of artistic moral rights and, more specifically, the right of integrity as recognized in the Berne Convention, with the aid of agonistic political theory. Envisaging art as a site of antagonistic struggle, the right of integrity is conceived of as a state-backed mandate to claim an inviolable place for artistic work, founded on a Romantic notion of authorship. The plea against the entrenchment of this right is considered a counter-hegemonic response that challenges this notion in favor of an unfettered development of art and its surrounding discourse. As such, this debate seems to revolve around a conflict of alleged interests – those of artists, of art's public, and of art itself. It is argued that insights into the discursive behavior of rights, and, by extension, into the effect of rights discourses on antagonistic struggle, are needed to foster this debate.