scholarly journals DEATH IN THE POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF J. DERRIDA: TERRORISM, SECRECY, DEATH PENALTY AND THE CRISIS OF THE MODERN NATIONAL STATE

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-197
Author(s):  
George Bakhtin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Integral Feature ◽  
Modern Nation State

The article outlines the main crisis points and trends in the development of the modern nation-state. Special attention is paid to the consideration of the phenomenon of terrorism as an inevitable product of the Enlightenment project. The coronavirus pandemic has made the problem points more relevant, calling into question not only the essence of democracies, but also the irreversibility of the processes of globalization. The author suggests following the logic of the argumentation of the French philosopher J. Derrida, who preferred to deconstruct the power discourse in order to find an answer to the question: how and to what extent is it possible to combat violence and terror, the products of modern Western civilization. The article consistently examines the prerequisites for understanding death not only as a secret rooted in antiquity and associated with the classical paradigm of philosophizing, phenomenology, Heideggerianism and existentialism, but also as an economy of mourning for the dead, which is close to psychologism and Freudianism. The focus is concentrated on the study of the mechanisms of the sovereign state that help it to claim comprehensive possession of the moment of death for a person sentenced to death. Capital punishment - an instrument of control on the part of sovereignty - is interpreted as the core of the theological and political tradition that determines the orthogenesis of any nation-state. Finally, the author considers the concept of the “heart of the other” as a starting point for the fight against abuse and for debunking phantasms and illusions that are an integral feature of the modern political organism. It is the deconstruction of the death penalty that is the key subject touched upon by the author of the article.

The Enlightenment and the French Revolutionary Birth Pangs of Modernity

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Wokler ◽  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter's overriding objective is to explain how both the invention of our modern understanding of the social sciences, on the one hand, and the post-Enlightenment establishment of the modern nation-state, on the other, encapsulated doctrines which severed modernity from the Enlightenment philosophy which is presumed to have inspired it. It offers illustrations not so much of the unity of political theory and practice in the modern world as of their disengagement. In providing here some brief remarks on how post-Enlightenment justifications of modernity came to part company from their Enlightenment prefigurations, it hopes to sketch an account of certain links between principles and institutions which bears some relation to both Enlightenment and Hegelian conceptual history.

It Serves you Right

Philosophy ◽  
1962 ◽  
Vol 37 (142) ◽  
pp. 293-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. R. Manser
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point

In this paper I want to examine the notion of desert, which seems to have been neglected by contemporary philosophers. Apartfrom its interest in its own right, it is important to be clear about the meaning of the word if there is to be any understanding of the idea of punishment. And that we are confused over the whole issue of punishment is obvious both from the remarks of professional philosophers and from the comments of the ‘man in the street’. Because of this confusion, the discussion of any actual punishment seems to take place between two parties who never get to grips with the arguments of the other, as in the whole debate over the death penalty. To one set of people, it is obvious that the retention of hanging depends to a large extent on the question of its effectiveness in deterring murderers; to another it is equally obvious that the murderer ‘deserves’ to hang, and that there is no more to be said about the matter. Capital punishment is not a good starting-point for a discussion of punishment in general, for death is clearly unique among penalties; in addition, the topic gives rise inevitably to much sentimentality and resulting muddle-headedness.

scholarly journals The Contested Date of the Emergence of Modern Lithuania: Was 15 May an Alternative to 16 February?

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-108
Author(s):  
Vasilijus Safronovas
Keyword(s):  
Political Competition ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Nation State ◽  
World War ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
First Time ◽  
Second World ◽  
Modern Nation State

Today in Lithuania, the day of the establishment of the modern nation-state is celebrated on 16 February. It is well known that the origins of this celebration go back to the period before the Second World War. However, historians have stated for some time now that in the 1920s, in addition to 16 February, there was another day that was also known as the National Day: 15 May. An attempt is made here for the first time to look at the two celebrations as alternatives set by political competition. The author seeks to find explanations why some politicians wanted to see 15 May as a counterbalance to 16 February, and examines whether this was influenced by their different experiences and different views as to what constituted the starting point of the independent Lithuanian state.

scholarly journals Civic Engagement Index (CEI) - the case of liberal arts universities from Romania

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1080-1088
Author(s):  
Shahrazad Hadad ◽  
Ramona Cantaragiu
Keyword(s):  
Service Learning ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Academic Environments ◽  
Civic Values ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Democratic Principles ◽  
The Moment

Abstract We have arrived to a moment in history when the society we are living in is confronted with different sets of problems: hunger, crime, economic crises, natural disasters or cataclysms, and various human rights violations. At the moment the most appropriate way to solve these problems still lies with the organisms of the nation state. As such, the lack of civic sense and the increasing political apathy will only allow these problems to grow out of proportions. We are of the opinion that most of them can be counteracted if we try to educate the civic sense in people. By civic sense or engagement we understand a type of orientation towards being involved in social groups according to democratic principles. It is said the post-socialist countries are particularly threatened by the lack of civic engagement on behalf of their citizens that have reached the point where they take democracy for granted. This is why we explore the role played by universities in developing and shaping this civic attitude amongst young people. In order to do so, we resorted to questionnaires applied in liberal arts universities in Romania. These universities have a special relation to democratic principles, national pride and the perpetuation of the nation state as an ideal for its citizens and because of this we believe they represent a proper starting point for the current investigation. The areas that are targeted through the questionnaire are the following: the academic environment, the methods through which civic values are instilled in the hearts and minds of the students, and the institutional and personal factors that determine faculty to introduce civic values in their academic environments. Using the results we create the Civic Engagement Index (CEI) that can be used as a valuable benchmarking mechanism for those universities that are trying to enhance their civic engagement activities. Finally, we test the hypothesis that certain universities fail to create civic-oriented graduates and we propose ways in which the organizational culture could be transformed into a more supportive one: civic participation guides, civic responsibility classes, and service learning classes for faculty members to increase their openness towards the promotion of civic values.

scholarly journals Permissibility of Death Penalty as a Hermeneutic Dilemma

Verbum Vitae ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 311-326
Author(s):  
Michał Kosche
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One ◽  
The Right

The notion of moral fairness of application of capital punishment is stretched between two poles of opposite interpretative meanings. On the one hand, there is an imperative related to maintaining the social order and good that justifies in some specific cases killing an individual for the good of the community; on the other hand, there is the message of the Gospel about holiness of each human life. In this regard, at the attempt to investigate the fairness of death penalty, a certain hermeneutic tension related to the overlapping of rights and obligations both with regard to the criminal and society that needs to be protected against him or her. The starting point of this article is an outlook on death penalty with due regard of a ‘hermeneutic charge’ contained both in the duty to protect common good and each individual’s life. Next, the ‘genuine paradox’ was analysed that emerges in a situation where the right to live and the right to protect overlap. All the considerations are concluded with a question whether the recent abolitionist interpretation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church should be classified as the continuity hermeneutic or rather the discontinuity hermeneutic.

From Death Penalty to Thanatopolitics

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-314
Author(s):  
Sabeen Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Starting Point

Drawing from the works of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a theory of political theology for the contemporary Western liberal nation-state. Taking as its starting point the death penalty, it presents a triune theory of governance—what I call Trinitarian Governmentality—which exposes the thanatopolitical dimension fundamental to the very articulation of sovereign power and, as such, the theologico-political. It is thus only by conceptualizing sovereignty as Trinitarian Governmentality—composed of biopower/oikonomia, disciplinary power/theologia, and pastoral power/eschatologia—that we can begin to address Derrida’s central question: how might we theorize a properly philosophical abolitionism for the present?

Machinery of Death or Machinic Life

Derrida Today ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wills
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knife Edge ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Way

The notion of a ‘machinery of death’ not only underwrites abolitionist discourse but also informs what Derrida's Death Penalty refers to as an anesthesial drive that can be traced back at least as far as Guillotin. I read it here as a symptom of a more complex relation to the technological that functions across the line dividing life from death, and which is concentrated in the question of the instant that capital punishment (at least in order to be distinguished from torture) requires. Further indications of such a relation include the forms of automatic machinism that regulate, on one hand, the generalisable certainty that death occurs (in tension with the singular death of each convict), and on the other, the discursive contagion that the death penalty generates. But it can be analysed most productively in the way in which the putative instantaneity of an execution reveals how life is severed from, but also perhaps tethered to death by means of a machinery of time; how that machinery of time ‘abandons’ its indifference in order to decide the moment of death by execution, and at the same time, by contriving an instant at which death takes over from life, produces the uncanny result of having life and death meet on the same knife-edge.

The “Penological Exception” to Extradition: On Ultimate Penalties, Human Rights and International Relations

1993 ◽  
Vol 27 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 310-338 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leon Sheleff
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Reasoning Process ◽  
Judicial Decisions ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment

One of the most significant recent developments in the law of extradition is the serious consideration that courts are willing to display to the punitive consequences of an extradition order, if capital punishment is the specific penalty that the requested person is liable to have imposed on him if convicted. At the same time, this development serves also as one of the most dramatic examples of the manner in which the subject of human rights has become a factor in international relations, which nation-states can disregard only by exposing themselves to negative assessments linked to reluctance to respond to formal requests. For the most part the “linkage” has been focused mainly on economic aid, where donor countries would approve requested aid contingent on positive accounting in human rights, but now, as a result of a number of novel judicial decisions, it seems that similar factors will be examined, when requests for extradition are submitted. At the moment, the focus is on the use of the death penalty, but the very reasoning process used may well open up further possibilities.

George Washington's Romance: Plotting the Federal City, 1791–1800

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Sarah Luria
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Late 18Th Century ◽  
Modern Nation State

Washington, D.C., was born from the marriage of literary, economic, and political revolutions of the late 18th century, when the expansion of the marketplace, the rise of the novel, and the increased circulation of print spawned a bourgeois public sphere and, with it, the modern nation-state. Washington, D.C., was from the start an imagined city, created through the circulation of booster literature to attract investors and so solidify a rational political order. Washington, D.C., arose precisely from this need to ground the imagined landscapes of the Enlightenment, to turn the visionary into the visible and political theory into fact.

scholarly journals The everyday self in Descartes’s philosophy

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Márk Losoncz
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
General Logic ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The World ◽  
Enlightenment Project

As the precursor of the Enlightenment, Descartes creates the general logic of the Enlightenment project: the everyday self does not exist for the order of certainty but forms part of the enterprise. The everyday self is an absence in the strict ordo cognoscendi, but it forms the necessary margin of reliable thinking. If the everyday self exists on the margin, then its reconstruction needs the hermeneutics of margins: it needs to be elicited from scribbled notes. One can see why John Carriero thinks that in Descartes there is no articulated and systematic theory of an everyday relation to the world. In contrast to Carriero, this paper points out the systematic presence of the everyday self in Descartes. It argues that the everyday self is not only a constitutive exterior to the quest for certainty but rather a determining element in the order of certainty. The paper claims that the everyday self is not a secondary figure in Descartes’ philosophy but a starting point on the surface of the texts.

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