Our Unnamable Present

boundary 2 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 213-220
Author(s):  
Alberto Comparini
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Digital Culture ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Liquid Modernity ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Conditions

In this review essay, I take on Roberto Calasso’s Unnamable Present and offer a critical framework to understand his thought after the publication of The Ruin of Kasch in 1983 and his vision of the world of our contemporary society. I argue that, by broadening Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” concept, Calasso describes the political and ethical consequences of the loss of the sacred in our unnamed, ominous present. The result of this process is the historical creation of the Homo saecularis in the age of digital culture, whose cultural inconsistency is an expression of the current, unsettling political conditions of Western society, which Calasso directly puts in relation to the equally secular development of Islamism and Christianity.

scholarly journals PATRIOTIC VALUE ORIENTATIONS OF KAZAKHSTAN'S YOUTH

2020 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-141
Author(s):  
V.H. Nabiyev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Political System ◽  
Value Orientations ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
Special Role ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
People Today

The article examines the problem of patriotism, which plays a special role in the political life of modern Kazakhstan. In fact, in all over the world, young people today are in very difficult socio- economic and political conditions, when their entry into life is accompanied by changing and peculiar processes of change not only political system or economic mechanisms of management. The change in the system of spiritual and moral values, guidelines and ideals of all citizens, especially young people, is impressive.

scholarly journals Growing Appetites and Hungry Subjects: Addicts, the Undead, and the Long Arc of Theory in Western Social Science

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-133
Author(s):  
A. Jamie Saris
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Need Satisfaction ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Philosophical Idea ◽  
Technological Complexity ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Economic

Abstract This paper explores the Western philosophical idea of “appetites” through the lens of “addiction.” I begin with a brief ethnographic description of a woman whose subjectivity seems to emerge only in the play of her unmanageable desire for various pharmaceuticals. In other words, she is a self-described “addict.” I then look at the relationships between addicts and the undead, especially vampires and zombies, who are seemingly enslaved to their appetites. This leads me to an analysis of the centrality of what I am calling “recursive need satisfaction” in much of Western (especially Anglophone and Francophone) Social Theory that, I argue, relies on a particular understanding of “appetite” in establishing the political-economic subjectivity that lies at the heart of market-oriented state. This same understanding also pushes this formation in a specific historical direction of increasing growth and organisational and technological complexity. As a globalised Western society in the last few decades has become ever more anxious of its place in the world, its impact on various interdependent systems, and the validity of the grand récits that served as its charter, such growth and complexity have emerged as objects of anxiety, even apocalyptic fear, and the terms “addict” and “addiction” have seemed ever more useful for modelling these concerns. I end with some reflections on how we use both zombies and addicts to think through some of the same issues of unchecked and damaging consumption.

Teachers and Traders

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-156
Author(s):  
Adam Sutcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
The Core ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future

This chapter pays close attention to the nineteenth century when philosophical abstraction was displaced as the core of thinking on Jewish purpose in an effort to make sense of the dramatic social, political and economic changes of the era. It talks about how Jews became the key case to political reforms once they were brought into the political mainstream in the wake of the French Revolution. It also analyzes how both Jewish and non-Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth century cast Jews as the bearers of a special role in leading Western society to its developmental destiny. The chapter describes the ways in which Jews proudly presented themselves as cosmopolitans, morally lofty teachers, or ethnically superior builders of the future. It reviews claims that Jews had a vital mission to perform in the world, which found wide readerships among non-Jews that resonated with the admiration for the fortitude of the Hebraic tradition in the writings of non-Jewish thinkers.

Poetry against Empire: Milton to Shelley

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN O’BRIEN
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Central Form

This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to empire was a central form of imagination. It argues that the major poets of this era not only articulated a powerfully anti-imperial vision of the world, but also contended that artistic culture could not flourish under the political conditions of modern imperialism. This is partly a historical claim, and one which assumes that poetry in this period played an important role in the public contestation of Britain's changing place in the world; but it is also a literary claim about the continuing salience of the classical and early modern traditions which governed poetic forms of imagination right up to the Romantic age. The purpose is not simply to record a series of improvised poetic responses to the growth of the British Empire. Rather, it is to show how a poetry grounded since the Renaissance in universal habits of thought and expansive modes of territorial vision was transposed onto an evolving historical reality, and how this process of imaginative transposition took on a heightened sense of political urgency as the implications of Britain's imperial activities broke upon public consciousness.

scholarly journals National and religious self-identification of Ukrainian Greek Catholics in Poland

2002 ◽  
pp. 62-74
Author(s):  
O. Volynets
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
National Organization ◽  
New Organizational Forms ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Polish Law ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
Grand Duchy

Appearance in the political arena of the world in the XVI century. of the new state, the Commonwealth, had a significant impact on the development of the Ukrainian civilization process. The Ukrainian nobility, merged with the mass of Polish nobility, still lived under Polish law and was easily colonized. This process was especially rapid in the Kholm region and Podlasie. He was greatly influenced by the small Polish gentry from Mazovia and Lesser Poland, who settled in Ukrainian lands before the signing of the Union of Lublin, Ukraine, united with Poland and Lithuania, gradually losing its ancient customs and rights. The Union destroyed the remnants of Ukrainian state traditions that took the form of autonomy in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Ukrainians were forced to adapt to the new socio-political conditions in which they found themselves. National-political life no longer connects with the state, but begins to create new organizational forms. The national organization, at the time of the threat of total national destruction, is largely becoming defensive.

Some Further Comments on “The End of Ideology”

1966 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seymour Martin Lipset
Keyword(s):  
Small Groups ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Central State ◽  
Final Comment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
Rules Of The Game

I am somewhat puzzled by Professor LaPalombara's critique of the decline or end of ideology thesis which points out that deideologisation is itself ideological behavior in a pure sense. This is obvious to most of those who have written on the subject. In an article cited in other contexts by Professor La Palombara, I., for one, have written as follows:As a final comment, I would note that not only do class conflicts over issues related to division of the total economic pie, influence over various institutions, symbolic status and opportunity, continue in the absence of weltanschauungen, but that the decline of such total ideologies does not mean the end of ideology. Clearly, commitment to the politics of pragmatism, to the rules of the game of collective bargaining, to gradual change whether in the direction favored by the left or the right, to opposition both to an all powerful central state and to laissez-faire constitutes the component parts of an ideology. The “agreement on fundamentals,” the political consensus of western society, now increasingly has come to include a position on matters which once sharply separated the left from the right. And this ideological agreement, which might best be described as “conservative socialism,” has become the ideology of the major parties in the developed states of Europe and America. As such it leaves its advocates in sharp disagreement with the relatively small groups of radical rightists and leftists at home, and at a disadvantage in efforts to foster different variants of this doctrine in the less affluent parts of the world.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

THE GENESIS OF CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY, DEVELOPMENT TRENDS AND PROSPECTS IN THE POLITICAL REFORM OF MODERN COUNTRIES (ON THE EXAMPLE OF RUSSIA AND FRANCE)

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-43
Author(s):  
MARIETA EPREMYAN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Reform ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Political ◽  
Development Trends ◽  
Conservative Ideology ◽  
The World ◽  
Christian Conservatism ◽  
The Future ◽  
Conservative Policy ◽  
Depth Interviews

The article examines the epistemological roots of conservative ideology, development trends and further prospects in political reform not only in modern Russia, but also in other countries. The author focuses on the “world” and Russian conservatism. In the course of the study, the author illustrates what opportunities and limitations a conservative ideology can have in political reform not only in modern Russia, but also in the world. In conclusion, it is concluded that the prospect of a conservative trend in the world is wide enough. To avoid immigration and to control the development of technology in society, it is necessary to adhere to a conservative policy. Conservatism is a consolidating ideology. It is no coincidence that the author cites as an example the understanding of conservative ideology by the French due to the fact that Russia has its own vision of the ideology of conservatism. If we say that conservatism seeks to preserve something and respects tradition, we must bear in mind that traditions in different societies, which form some kind of moral imperatives, cannot be a single phenomenon due to different historical destinies and differing religious views. Considered from the point of view of religion, Muslim and Christian conservatism will be somewhat confrontational on some issues. The purpose of the work was to consider issues related to the role, evolution and prospects of conservative ideology in the political reform of modern countries. The author focuses on Russia and France. To achieve this goal, the method of in-depth interviews with experts on how they understand conservatism was chosen. Already today, conservatism is quite diverse. It is quite possible that in the future it will transform even more and acquire new reflections.

The New Terrain of International Law

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Alter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Constitutional Review ◽  
Delegation Of Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. This book charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics. The book presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, the book argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. The book explains how this limited power—the power to speak the law—translates into political influence, and it considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.

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