Politics: Desire and Power

Author(s):  
Koichiro Kokubun

This chapter explicates Deleuze’s mature political philosophy through a contraposition with Foucault’s. Where Foucault sees the elementary unit of socio-political analysis as ‘power’, Deleuze argues for ‘desire’. That is not to say that Deleuze wished to supplant Foucault’s analyses; quite the contrary, for he rated them on par with those of Marx. Rather, Deleuze felt it necessary to complete and reinforce Foucault’s theory of society based on ‘power’ with the prior notion of ‘desire’, because it is only the assemblage of desire (and not the Lacanian monologic Desire) that can explain why a certain system of power is able to arise and perdure. From here it is possible to identify correctly the respective theoretical levels of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: the former lays the foundation for a theory of society in terms of desire, while the latter is a more ‘Foucauldian’, pragmatic analysis of the concrete workings of desire.

Politics ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ferdinand ◽  
Robert Garner ◽  
Stephanie Lawson

This concluding chapter summarizes some of the major themes and the threads of various arguments discussed throughout the book. It first emphasizes the complexity of the field and the ways in which political philosophy and the empirical study of politics are intertwined, arguing that the study of politics cannot be neatly separated from the study of other disciplines such as philosophy, law, economics, history, sociology, and psychology — and the fact that policy-making typically involves the natural sciences. The chapter proceeds by analysing how globalization influences political studies and highlights the limits of ‘methodological nationalism’ in political analysis. Finally, it considers Eurocentrism in the study of politics and contends that we cannot automatically assume the pre-eminence of Europe and the United States, or the West more generally, noting the apparent inevitability of the rise of other centres of power.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Ylber Aliu

<pre><em>The purpose of this study is to identify the similarities and differences between the political philosophy of<br />Plato and political philosophy of Aristotle. Such comparative study is very important for political<br />thought in general. The main significance of this paper is the precise meaning of the political philosophy<br />of Plato and political philosophy of Aristotle, as well as the meaning of differences and similarities.<br />Often, Plato’s political ideas appear as Aristotle political ideas, and Aristotle’s political ideas appear as<br />Plato’s political ideas. The main method of study in this paper is the comparison method. The ancient<br />political debate between Plato and Aristotle is important to modern political philosophy as it is the basis<br />of modern political theories. The data for paper are taken from the books of these two authors. The<br />political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, although they have similarities in some points, but differ in<br />many other issues, such as: different categories of political analysis, different methodologies of policy<br />study, and different reasons for state creation, different opinions why democracy is a bad form of<br />government and why aristocracy is the right form.</em></pre>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alek Willsey

A speaker needs authority to perform some speech acts, such as giving orders. A paradigm example of this is when a manager orders their employee to take out the trash; ordinarily, these words will give the employee a normative reason of considerable strength for them to take out the trash, and so they should take out the trash, all things considered. I will explore three related problems regarding a speaker's authority. First, there is the problem of defining how and within what scope a speaker has the capacity to set norms for others -- I will call this the Authority Problem. An answer to the Authority Problem would settle what constitutes a manager's capacity to change the normative status of their employee. Second, there is the problem of showing how a speaker uses their authority to produce felicitous authoritative speech -- I will call this the Illocutionary Authority Problem. An answer to this problem will show how a manager exercises their capacity to alter the normative status of their employee, assuming they have such a capacity. Third, there is the problem of explaining how a speaker's right to produce authoritative speech can be systematically infringed -- I will call this the Problem of Discursive Injustice. An answer to this problem will explain how a manager can have their orders systematically misfire despite exercising their capacity to alter the normative status of others in the usual way, such as when the employee routinely misapprehends their manager's orders as being requests. To answer each of these problems within the philosophy of language, I draw on recent work in social and political philosophy. I defend the view that a speaker's authority to alter what someone else ought to do (by giving them and taking away normative reasons for action) is constituted entirely by the respect their addressee(s) have for their use of power directed at them. Further, a speaker's powers are the linguistic tools by which they attempt to exert this normative influence over their addressee(s). Finally, a speaker may be discursively entitled to use their power in specific institutions because of the role they occupy, and this speech can systematically misfire despite this entitlement because they are wrongfully deprived of the respect they deserve.


1983 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Jacobson Schutte

As historians have long recognized, the “perfidious Machiavel” of the stage was by no means the only image of Machiavelli in the minds of English intellectuals before 1640. Besides frequent denunciations of the Florentine as a devious, amoral politician and an atheist (most of them sincerel a few pro forma), one encounters in English works of theology, moral and political philosophy, and history two other approaches to Machiavelli the political scientist. Some writers, with or without acknowledging their source, mined II Principe and the Discorsi for detailed information. Slowly, tentatively, and sometimes surreptitiously, others worked toward a partial appropriation of Machiavelli's political analysis. The scholarly consensus, however, is that before Machiavelli's new paradigm could be fully accepted in England, a major shift in the political situation had to occur. Only with the coming of the Civil War would writers like James Harrington unreservedly endorse Machiavelli's rejection of the medieval world view in favor of classical political wisdom, which they held to be directly applicable to modern English circumstances.


Author(s):  
أ.د.عبد الجبار احمد عبد الله

We have chosen to be the opening of the number linked to the mention of bright names that have been the pillars of the Faculty of Political Science and its pillars since its founding, who contributed to the construction of the great edifice, the scientific and educational edifice. There is no doubt that the College of Political Science / University of Baghdad has an important and sensitive position in post-2003 Iraq through adopting an approach related to democratic political philosophy based on citizenship, equality and rule of law. The Deanship of the College affirms and will continue to emphasize this approach as the right approach to the success of the institution. The scientific, moral and educational duty that we believe is important in leading the students to safety and taking their hands to the corner of the future by enabling them not to teach them the scientific, objective, and cognitive approach, and constructive political analysis, not destruction.  


Author(s):  
D.B. Polyakov ◽  

The article is devoted to the actual and, perhaps, even painful topic of political violence considered through the prism of contemporary anarchist thought and, in particular, through the understanding of violence in the theory of postanarchism. The aim is to fixate with using the historical-philosophical descriptive approach the intensification of conflict discourse in contemporary radical political philosophy, as well as a specific postanarchist articulation of such type of violence, which would imply going beyond the logic of a standard encounter of opposing political forces. Such articulation in works of the leading theorist of post-anarchism S. Newman is accompanied by the reception of the conceptual apparatus of the German thinker W. Benjamin. The resulting thesis of this work can be considered as the conjugation of the increasing politicization of life with the tendency to think of politics and the political in terms of antagonism, war and, ultimately, violence. In other words, if the political is thought in this way, it can be assumed that the growing politicization of practically all aspects of life is fraught with similar impulses. In the context of the above, the consideration of postanarchism seems not only adequate as an example of reflecting current trends in political philosophy, but also from the point of view of novelty, because the postanarchist theory as such is rather poorly covered in the Russian academia. From this, firstly, the practical significance follows, because the article gives a notion of the little-studied phenomenon of Western political thought, which correlates with the realities of contemporary politics. Secondly, this work sets a number of vectors for further research concerning both the relationship between the theory and practice of contemporary protest movements and the reaction of state institutions to them. In addition, further work on the problematization of the theory of post-anarchism itself, which is not distinguished by uniqueness and homogeneity due to its own methods and approaches (anti-essentialism, deconstructivism, micro-political analysis, etc.), can also become perspective. Therefore, subsequent development of the topic with the involvement of a larger number of primary sources on the postanarchist theory seems to be significant.


Author(s):  
Koichiro Kokubun

What gives us the right to speak of a Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy at first sight concerned solely with interpreting other philosophers and writers? And granted there is such an entity as ‘Deleuzian philosophy’, is this philosophy a practically and politically consequential one, as so many interpreters have hoped? This book begins from Deleuze’s method of ‘free indirect discourse’ to locate and explicate Deleuze’s philosophy. Through free indirect discourse Deleuze burrows under the texts of a thinker to attain the underlying question, which he inherits critically to expound his own philosophy of ‘transcendental empiricism’. This philosophy however was politically impotent, for its final practical conclusion was that one had to ‘wait for failure’, which is strictly impossible. This book goes on to argue that it is the self-recognition of this impasse that forced Deleuze into a veritable wager, the collaboration with Guattari. For Deleuze not only recognised the existence of this practical/political impasse, he also understood its source: the strong structuralist influence in his philosophy. And he had the intuition that in Guattari there were the germs of a way of thinking that could move beyond structuralism (more specifically its culmination in Lacanian psychoanalysis). Finally, this new Deleuzian practical philosophy is explicated through an examination of Deleuze’s ambiguous relation to Foucault: Deleuze would ultimately opt for ‘desire’, not Foucault’s ‘power’, as the elementary unit of political analysis, because it is the assemblage of desire that makes possible the specific constellation of power in a given society.


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