scholarly journals The importance of Pierre Bourdieu today. On consent to misery

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-517
Author(s):  
Marc Crépon
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Political ◽  
Considerable Part ◽  
Political Reason ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Moral Condemnation ◽  
Historical Past ◽  
The Voice

This article reflects on the crisis of political reason in this heyday of populistic rhetoric, proposing to move beyond the erroneous dichotomy between ?democratic reason? and ?raging passions,? and the demo-phobia that often derives from it. We propose instead to follow Bourdieu?s footsteps in bringing our attention to the forms of impermeability that fracture our contemporary political and social life, establishing the conditions of possibility of the reasonable and the unreasonable. What marks contemporary political passions as particularly dangerous is their impermeability to the lessons of our historical past, to the moral condemnation of the political instrumentalization of difference and to the sacred character of fundamental principles. This hermeneutical gap, however, is later explained by a more fundamental analysis of the problem of contemporary impermeability, one which operates as a reversal of the dichotomy between political reason and passion. It is no longer the electorate, seduced by the sirens of populism, which is impermeable to the voice of political reason; it is, instead, this very reason, embodied by the elites who claim to recognize themselves in its values and principles, which has become impermeable to the ?conditions of non-existence? in which a considerable part of the population lives. If there is a problem of contemporary impermeability, or imperturbability, it is that of a political discourse that has lost touch with ?all the misery of the world?.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
William Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Caribbean Region ◽  
The Political ◽  
The World ◽  
Colonial Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Formed Part ◽  
Historical Past

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.

Boring Holes: The Crystalline Body of Beckett's The Lost Ones

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Rada
Keyword(s):  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Single Image ◽  
Crystalline Body ◽  
The World ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Life Movement

In a 1937 letter to Axel Kaun, Beckett describes the mark of modern literary ambition as an inexhaustible drive to ‘drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through.’ Much is made of this little line by readers of Beckett from Gilles Deleuze and Mladen Dolar to, more recently, Alenka Zupançiç. As its title teases, this essay takes up Beckett's directive to read for, with, and through the holes bored into language alongside the bodies—narrated and narrating—captured by it as so many boring, banal holes into which meaning, form, and other bodies can be pushed. In The Lost Ones, Beckett's short prose piece from 1971, bodies abound: lost, scurrying, shivering, defeated, sweaty, aroused, pained, aging, nauseated, desiring bodies. Beckett's ‘most anthropological work,’ as C. J. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski have dubbed it, The Lost Ones proposes a series of fundamental contradictions or antagonisms between the narrating ‘anthropological’ voice concerned with quantitatively capturing a neutralized (and neutered, disembodied) totality—and the titular ‘lost’ bodies that inhabit the world of the text, for whom embodiment wholly determines both the potentialities and limitations of life, movement, and feeling. The ‘bore’ of a cylinder—the shape of the contained world of The Lost Ones—incidentally also names the diameter of empty space, the hole, around which its form wraps. This essay explores the antagonistic relationship between the circumscribing forces that envelop and contain life in the cylindrical space of narration, and its bore: the ‘something or nothing,’ as Beckett might put it, into which a substance can drill, enter, flood, leak, or fall. The objectifying impulses of the affectively eviscerating, abstracted narrator of The Lost Ones short-circuit throughout the text in special moments, when the bodies the voice describes erupt into what this essay will call a ‘crystal image.’ Taken from Deleuze's Cinema books, the crystal image and its transmission through ‘crystalline description’ name a set of aesthetic operations through which antagonisms can coexist. In other words: where otherwise mutually exclusive contradictions appear simultaneously as imbricated conditions of possibility for a single image. While the voice gazes, god-like, from above the cylinder, the bodies it describes explode its forms of containment with a kind of qualitative surplus that over and again impedes the narrator's attempts to totalize, circumscribe, and define the limits of embodied and affective life. I argue that the eruption of affect within the scientistic descriptive mode not only forms a crystal image out of an otherwise contained realm of quantifications, but that by pinning oppositional forms of aesthetic capture and representation against one another, the text reveals fundamental contradictions at play within narration and description more broadly. These contradictions and equivocations are not to be resolved or reconciled, I argue, but animated, sparked, and put into play through the process of reading.

Socjalizacja i edukacja polityczna, jako ważne determinanty kultury politycznej

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (16) ◽  
pp. 31-51
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Piwnicki
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Definition Of

It is recognized that politics is a part of social life, that is why it is also a part of culture. In this the political culture became in the second half of the twentieth century the subject of analyzes of the political scientists in the world and in Poland. In connection with this, political culture was perceived as a component of culture in the literal sense through the prism of all material and non-material creations of the social life. It has become an incentive to expand the definition of the political culture with such components as the political institutions and the system of socialization and political education. The aim of this was to strengthen the democratic political system by shifting from individual to general social elements.

scholarly journals How the Female Subject was Tempered. An Instructive History of 8 March and Its Media Representation in Naša Žena (Our Woman)

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-43
Author(s):  
Paula Petričević
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Female Subject ◽  
Media Representation ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Abstract The author explores the socialist emancipation of women in Montenegro during World War II and its aftermath, using the example of the 8 March celebrations. The social life of this ‘holiday of the struggle of all the women in the world’ speaks powerfully of the strength and fortitude involved in the mobilization of women during the war and during the postwar building of socialist Yugoslavia, as well as the sudden modernization and unprecedented political subjectivation of women. The emancipatory potential of these processes turned out to be limited in the later period of stabilization of Yugoslav state socialism and largely forgotten in the postsocialist period. The author argues that the political subjectivation of women needs to be thought anew, as a process that does not take place in a vacuum or outside of a certain ideological matrix, whether socialist or liberal.

The Anthropology of Hope

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stef Jansen
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unintended Effects ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Political Critique ◽  
The World ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Relationship

As part of a belated interest in people's engagements with possible futures, the start of the 3rd millennium has witnessed the emergence of a burgeoning subfield around the anthropology of hope. Anthropologists investigate the objects of people's hopes and their attempts to fulfil them. They also reflect on hope as an affect and disposition, and as a method of knowledge production. Three interrelated but analytically distinguishable concerns can be discerned in the anthropology of hope. First, anthropologists are interested in the conditions of possibility of hoping. Such studies of the political economy of hope explore the circumstances in which hopefulness does or does not flourish, and the unequal distribution of intensities of hoping, and of particular hopes, amongst different categories of people. A second domain consists of anthropological research on the shapes that hoping takes. Studies in this phenomenological vein investigate how hopefulness and hopes appear in the world. How does hoping work over time in people's practices, reflections, and orientations, and with which intended and unintended effects? Third, we find a concern with the relationship between hoping as a subject matter of ethnographic study and anthropology as a form of knowledge production. How do scholarly understandings of hope inform the development of the discipline and, in particular, its engagement with political critique and its capacity to help imagine alternatives?

Sociology in a crisis: Covid-19 and the colonial politics of knowledge production in Aotearoa New Zealand

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-703
Author(s):  
Simon Barber ◽  
Sereana Naepi
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
The World ◽  
Critical Edge ◽  
The University

Rather than being exceptional for Māori and Pacific Peoples, Covid-19 is the latest iteration of virulent disease that arrived with European colonisation. The various pandemics are connected; they exacerbate and intensify existing conditions of colonial inequality and injustice. The political and economic marginalisation of Māori and Pasifika within Aotearoa New Zealand ensures that Covid-19 will have disproportionate impacts upon them. Covid-19’s impacts will be felt in the academy as everywhere else. The immediate issue will be the culling of less popular ‘uneconomic’ courses, and of precarious instructors (where Māori and Pacific teachers are over-represented). Colonisation never ended. Ongoing domination is secured through the reproduction of social life, including via social institutions like the university. While sociology likes to think of itself as the critical edge, it often fails to be so in relation to its own assumptions. In order for sociology to be part of the solution, instead of simply perpetuating the problem of racism as it is wont to do, its practitioners must recognise our place in the world, must speak to our ways of knowing and being, and must validate the aspirations of Māori and Pacific communities, Māori and Pacific students and Māori and Pacific staff.

scholarly journals The Alliance Between Politics and Philosophy with Regard to the Threats of the XXI Century

wisdom ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (7) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Will POGHOSYAN
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Law ◽  
The Political ◽  
Pursuit Of Happiness ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
The World ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Republic

The alliance between politics and philosophy pursues the object to change the world as public or social life. The life implies various degrees of quality, and suggests existence regarded as a desirable condition: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the main point of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776). We have here a whole philosophy of politics referring to Plato’s doctrine of the practical influence of philosophy on the state power to change the world (Plato, 1971, Rp. V 473d, VI 501e, VII 540d). The philosophy of politics holds life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be unalienable rights and just so lays down the basic human rights as the principles of the political law, public law. The form of government which secures these rights is called democracy. America is no longer the ruler of her own spirit. In Armenia and Russia, there is instituted now timocracy, a form of government in which love of honor is the ruling principle (timē honor + krateein to rule). There exist here public law apart from human rights. The task of the philosophy of politics is to secure democracy in the United States of America and to carry out the transition from timocracy to democracy in the Republic of Armenia and the Russian Federation.

scholarly journals Athens in Play

1969 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Elina Lex
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Social Function ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Social Connection ◽  
Interactive Art ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Socioeconomic Crisis

This paper explores the significance of experimental art spaces in the context of the political and socioeconomic crisis in Athens, Greece. Through ethnographic research, the aim is to examine where these galleries are situated in the socioeconomic moment but also, more significantly, how engaging in them can play an important role to a culture under crisis. By examining “play” through the disciplines of games, participatory, and interactive art, I address the social function of play and how it occupies a meaningful place in one’s social life despite being a separate mode of experiencing the world. Specifically, this paper investigates how the act of being “caught up” in play facilitates social connection, meaning, relief, stimulation, and agency in times of crisis.

scholarly journals OLD SAGE FOR NEW AGE? THE REVIVAL OF RELIGIOUS CONFUCIANISM IN CHINA

2012 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-299
Author(s):  
Chaohua Wang
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Chinese People ◽  
World Religions ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The World ◽  
Individual Existence

In recent years, Confucianism has been once again identified as the essence of Chinese civilization and a religion that was central to the Chinese people throughout China’s long history. Scholars are appealing to the Communist Party to make Confucianism the State religion (guojiao). What are the political implications of the phenomena? Can these claims stand to intellectual scrutiny? Conducting a brief historical survey of religious Confucianism in Chinese politics, in addition to an analysis of shared principles essential to various Confucianist positions today, this paper argues that religious Confucianism presented by its contemporary promoters is a constructed myth originated mainly from the Qing times (1644- 1911). The supposed Confucian teaching does not carry religious meaningfulness associated to either individual existence or social life in contemporary China. It remains powerful primarily in connection to the State, or a collective nation (Zhonghua), vis-à-vis the world outside ethnic Han communities. Despite this - or precisely because of this - a revived religious Confucianism may have the greatest potential to become a political force in China in our globalizing age, more so than any other major world religions, even if others may have larger Chinese following than Confucianism.

scholarly journals ISLAMIC POLITICAL THOUGHT

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nguyen Thi Hong Hanh
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Islamic Political Thought ◽  
The World

Islam is the second largest religion in the world with the rapidly growing number of followers throughout the five continents. In this context, Islam plays an increasingly important role in social life, especially in the political field. Undeniably, recent events show that the influence of Islamic political thought on various activities such as politics and military is profound. In  this article, the author presents an overview of Islamic political thought through three dimensions, namely: Islamic law, Islamic social order, and Islamic political power.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document