Continental Philosophy

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The ego, the Other and the primal fact — Toru Tani

Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism — Dermot Moran

Some differences between Kant’s and Husserl’s conceptions of transcendental philosophy — Thomas J. Nenon

Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s ontological hermeneutics — Carlos Alberto Sanchez

A non-Bergsonian Bachelard — Jean François Perraudin

Laughing at finitude: Slavoj Žižek reads Being and Time — Thomas Brockelman

Ricoeur and the pre-political — Farhang Erfani and John F. Whitmire

What is a Political Event? — Iain MacKenzie

Transgression as a specific form of enjoyment in the criollo world — Gonzalo Portocarrero

The Horror of Self-Reflection: The Concealment of Violence in a “Self-Conscious and Critical Society” — Roberto Farneti

Law, Grace, and Race: The Political Theology of Manderlay — Vincent Lloyd

Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff — Jeanne Morefield

Politics and Connolly’s Ethics: Immigrant Narratives, Racism, and Identity’s Contingency — Paul Apostolidis

(Tip of the hat to linguistic being!)

Balibar, Étienne. “‘Possessive Individualism’ Reversed: From Locke to Derrida.” Constellations 9.3 (2002): 299-317. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mngt4z0mmtx

____________. “Althusser’s Object” Social Text Summer.39 (1994): 157-188. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tte2nkkkxbw

____________. “Difference, Otherness, Exclusion.” Parallax 11:1 (2005): 19-34. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?xbrcack2nzy

____________. “Dissonances within Laïcité.” Constellations 11.3 (2004): 354-367. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ond0kwy0v1i

____________. “Europe, an Unimagined Frontier of Democracy” diacritics 33.3–4 (2003): 36–44. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?qx2ura8td9s

____________. “Europe: Vanishing Mediator.” Constellations 10.3 (2003): 312-338. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?bf7t78jptqp

___________. “From Bachelard to Althusser: The Concept of’Epistemological Break’.” Economy and Society 7.3 (1978):207-237. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?moob3qfjpdf

____________. “Interview: Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey.” diacritics 12.1 (1982): 46-51. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?tmkgq11szuz

____________. “Introduction to Cerroni.” Economy and Society 7.3 (1978): 238-240. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ebiafcueifk

____________. “Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible: New Reflections on Equaliberty.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (2004): 311-322. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?r9rciv8pczr

____________. “Marx, the Joker in the Pack (or the included middle)” Economy and Society 14.1 (1985): 1-27. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mbq1njo2fdk

____________. Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in an Era of Global Violence.” Constellations 8.1 (2001): 15-29. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?voqhla3kwq3

____________. “Propositions of Citizenship” Ethics 98.4 (1988): 723-730. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?es12nyd2cki

____________. “Some Quetions on Politics and Violence” Assemblage 20.Violence, Space (1993): 12-13. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?d0jnwydspgh

____________. “Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?” d i f f e r e n c e s : A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:1 (2003): 1-21. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?qco5ed0da7p

____________. “The Infinite Contradiction” Yale French Studies 88.Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey, and the Labor of Reading (1995): 142-164. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?n1xowfvo8nh

____________. “What’s in a War? (Politics as War, War as Politics)” Ratio Juris 21.3 (2008): 365–386. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?plc9wnwagm3

____________. “World Borders, Political Borders” PMLA 117.1, Special Topic: Mobile Citizens, Media States (2002): 71-78. http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?pdhxmtb5bor

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Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

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All Aboard for Copenhagen! — Joel Kovel

Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change — Joel Kovel

The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection — Michael Barker

Pondering Another Possible World — Robert Nichols

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Metaphor: James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia — John Clark

Art and Environmentalist Practice — Kavita Philip

Open Letter to the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Ministers of the States of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal, Tripura and West Bengal — Kavita Philip

History and Hope from the Present Moment: Peter McLaren and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy — Samuel Day Fassbinder

Beyond the Bowers-McLaren Debate: The Importance of Studying the Rest of Nature in Forming Alternative Curricula — Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

Ecofeminist Cosmology in Practice: Genesis Farm and the Embodiment of Sustainable Solutions — Phoebe C. Godfrey

Reclaiming the Good Life (Now!) — Jane Hindley

Part 2

Foro Social Mundial México 2008

(h/t: Azadeh Erfani)

Penn State Press is publishing Sally Scholz’s latest book, entitled Political Solidarity:

From the publisher’s description:

Experiences of solidarity have figured prominently in the politics of the modern era, from the rallying cry of liberation theology for solidarity with the poor and oppressed through feminist calls for sisterhood to such political movements as Solidarno?? in Poland. Yet very little academic writing has focused on solidarity in conceptual rather than empirical terms.

Sally Scholz takes on this critical task here. She lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs fundamentally from other social and political concepts like camaraderie, association, or community. Scholz distinguishes a variety of types and levels of solidarity by their social ontologies, moral relations, and corresponding obligations. Political solidarity, in contrast to social solidarity and civic solidarity, aims to bring about social change by uniting individuals in their response to particular situations of injustice, oppression, or tyranny.

The book explores the moral relation of political solidarity in detail, with chapters on the nature of the solidary group, obligations within solidarity, the “paradox of the privileged,” the goals of solidarity movements, and the prospects for global solidarity.

More from the publisher, including the Table of Contents

A review of Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations

Cosmopolitanism, notes Seyla Benhabib, is a frequently invoked concept in modern political philosophy; it is a shame, therefore, that we so rarely define this term with the specificity it demands. In this volume, derived from her Tanner Lectures of 2004, Benhabib gives a specific gloss on one particular variant of cosmopolitanism, identifying and defending a specifically political version of cosmopolitan politics. It is an admirable vision, although not one without significant difficulties — as discussed by her commentators, whose contributions are included here.

Benhabib begins with a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism — a tension she believes can be mediated, but never completely overcome. We are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes.

The rest of the review

TOC: Special Issue on Solidarity 

"Measuring the Millennial Moment of Globalization against Heidegger's Summer Semester 1935, and Other Politically Incorrect Remarks"

Theodore Kisiel
Northern Illinois University

"Globalization" has literally become one of the most current of the modish concepts of the new millennium. Among other things, it conjures the very current image of a lightning-speed electronic circulation of vast sums of currency whipping around the world's financial markets in a global cash flow whose reverberations sometimes verge on a cascading collapse. Such a globally impelled "crash," whether by impersonal market forces or by computer hackers, would make the worldwide depression of 1929, at least in its velocity of impact, pale in insignificance, For globalization is essentially a time-space term, i. e., a dynamic term which spells out an infinite velocity in manoseconds through its virtual abolition of space into bilocative simultaneity and its instantaneous reduction of time differences. Of greatest interest is the movement that occurs literally across the surface of our "globe," therefore around the world understood as "the late great planet earth," if I might borrow a phrase from another millennial thinker of our late century. Small wonder that Hal Lindsey has recently added the new buzz-word "globalization" to the list of apocalyptic revelations already found in the old Bible to prefigure Armaggeddon.

But today we are interested in another millennial thinker earlier in our late great 20th century. For Martin Heidegger, as a German citizen as well as a philosopher and university teacher, had to face his own Armaggeddon forewarned by dire predictions of the decline of the West. Heidegger, in 1935 already an established philosopher of be-ing and time, space and the world, was himself no stranger to the modern historical phenomenon of globalization if not yet the precise word. For the early twentieth century had already undergone the first of two global world wars and the worldwide economic depression when Heidegger's native Germany proclaimed with much fanfare the rise of a millennial Third Reich as its indigenous home-grown response to the forces of globalization then working on it at the heart of old Europe, both from within and from without. As late as SS 1935, Heidegger is still hoping against hope that the "philosophy of National Socialism" would find its way to "its inner truth and greatness" as a movement and countermovement, which for him meant finding its way to a uniquely German resolution to the widespread crisis developing from the "encounter of globally defined [planetarischen] technology and modern man" (EM 152).1 We now know that this remark in the 1953 edition postdates the 1935 course by at least a year or two, when Heidegger first began to see clearly that technology was the essential driving force of globalization, serving to account for the phenomenon of total mobilization that Ernst Jünger first saw emerging during the First World War, for the titanic dimensions of the worldwide depression emanating from American capitalism and, worst of all, for the monstrous giganticism of total politization of a totalitarianism (already called a "total state" by the budding Nazi political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, in 1931).

Continue reading here

Editorial Community: Comme-un?

Kuisma Korhonen Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida    

Ignaas Devisch The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy    

Marie-Eve Morin Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities    

Dorota Glowacka Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy    

Timothy J. Deines Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the Resistance of Community    

Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson Cutting Democracy’s Knot     

Paulina Tambakaki Global Community, Global Citizenship?    

Daniel H. Ortega ‘En Cada Barrio’: Timocracy, Panopticism and the Landscape of a Normalized Community    

John Paul Ricco The Surreality of Community: Frédéric Brenner’s Diaspora: Homelands in Exile    

Jake Kennedy Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community

Petra Kuppers Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together

Natalie Cherot Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans or an Activist Community?

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire

Perfect, printable PDF with the right pagination. Click here. 

Universalism used to be a rather simple affair: the more detached from local traditions, the more universal you became. If the stoics could be called ‘citizens of the world’, it’s because they accepted being part of the ‘human race’, above and beyond the narrow labels of ‘Greek’ and ‘barbarian’. A regular scale seemed to lead from local to global, offering a compass along which every position could be mapped. Until recently, the more modern you were, the higher up you ascended; the less modern you were, the lower down you were confined.

Things have now changed a lot. What now is more universal: the American world order or the French Republic? The forces of globalization or those who call themselves anti-mondialists? Local farmers daily influenced by the price fluctuations of commodities or local teachers insulated behind the walls of civil service? Amazon Indians able to mobilize NGOs in their defence or some famous philosopher secluded on campus? And what about China? Certainly a billion and a half people will add some weight to whichever definition of the world they adhere to, no matter how local it might appear to Westerners – if there is still a West.

The rest… 

Two reviews of the works of Benedict Anderson. The first review, by TJ Clark, addresses Anderson's classic  Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism:

Writers only pretend to be embarrassed at the small fame a book sometimes brings them, but there is nothing assumed about the irritation they can feel at having a new line of argument, and a universe of unfamiliar examples, reduced to a single phrase. Great titles are especially dangerous. Imagined Communities is one of the greatest, and I shall be arguing that the cluster of concepts it sums up deserves still to be central to our thinking about the world. But it is understandable, and touching, that the first footnote to Benedict Anderson’s afterword to his new edition should read, in explanation of the trimming of the title in his text: ‘Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.’

Both reviews also address Anderson's new book, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination

Each has interesting takes on the new work; the second review has a particular set of criticisms. 

Omid Payrow Shabani : Constitutional patriotism as a model of postnational political association: The case of the EU

Deborah Cook: Adorno’s critical materialism

Denise Vitale: Between deliberative and participatory democracy: A contribution on Habermas

Brian T. Trainor: The state as the mystical foundation of authority

James Bernauer: An uncritical Foucault? Foucault and the Iranian Revolution

“The Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition was highly privileged to have Étienne Balibar as its Distinguished Visiting Lecturer for 2006. This research article is the text of his remarks delivered at McMaster University on 16 March 2006.”

 Link to the (pdf.) file.