Thinking with Balibar

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Academic Culture ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Lexical Entry ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Political Philosopher

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.

Refusal to Mourn

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Runions
Keyword(s):  
American Politics ◽  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
American People ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
The Public ◽  
American Civil Religion ◽  
The Us ◽  
Robert Bellah

In her recent book Precarious Life, Judith Butler points out that not more than ten days after 9/11, on 20 September 2001, George W. Bush urged the American people to put aside their grief; she suggests that such a refusal to mourn leads to a kind of national melancholia. Using psychoanalytic theory on melancholia, this article diagnoses causes and effects of such national melancholia. Further, it considers how a refusal to mourn in prophetic and apocalyptic texts and their interpretations operates within mainstream US American politics like the encrypted loss of the melancholic, thus creating the narcissism, guilt, and aggression that sustain the pervasive disavowal of loss in the contemporary moment. This article explore the ways in which the texts of Ezekiel, Micah, Revelation, and their interpreters exhibit the guilt and aggression of melancholia, in describing Israel as an unfaithful and wicked woman whose pain should not be mourned. These melancholic patterns are inherited by both by contemporary apocalyptic discourses and by the discourse of what Robert Bellah calls ‘American civil religion’, in which the US is the new Christian Israel; thus they help to position the public to accept and perpetuate the violence of war, and not to mourn it.

Depressions Plural

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
K W M (Bill) Fulford ◽  
David Crepaz-Keay ◽  
Giovanni Stanghellini
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Mental Health ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Mental Health Care ◽  
Personal Values ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Law ◽  
Isaiah Berlin ◽  
Political Philosopher

This chapter examines how values influence the heterogeneity of depression. The plurality of values is increasingly significant for contemporary person-centred mental health care with its emphasis on quality of life and development of self-manvnagement skills. Values-based practice is a partner with medical law invn working with the plurality of personal values. The chapter explains what values are, shows how the plurality of values influences the heterogeneity of depression at several levels, and provides an overview of values-based practice. It looks at the resources available for combining values-based practice with medical law in contemporary person-centred care and indicates some of the challenges this raises. It concludes with a brief reflection on these challenges understood as an instance of what the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the challenge of pluralism.

Medicine: Experimentation, Politics, Emergent Bodies

2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Michael ◽  
Marsha Rosengarten
Keyword(s):  
Public Health Policy ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Controlled Trial ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Healthy Human ◽  
Randomized Controlled

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies.

Memorialising Europe

2008 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Jan Margry
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
European Identity ◽  
European Values ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Political Unification ◽  
European Form

In the economic and political unification process of Europe, the idea of the creation of a pan-European identity was put high on the political agenda. With the failure of this effort, the emphasis shifted to the apparently less fraught concept of 'shared cultural heritage'. This article analyses how the politically guided rediscovery of Europe's past has contributed to the creation of a 'Religion of Heritage', not only by raising up a political altar for cultural heritage, but also through the revitalisation, instrumentalisation and transformation of the Christian heritage, in order to try to memorialise and affirm a collective European identity based on its Christian past. In the context of this process, the network of European pilgrims' ways appears to have been an especially successful performative form of heritage creation, which has both dynamised Christian roots as a relevant trans-European form of civil religion that has taken shape, capitalising on the new religious and spiritual demands created by secularisation, and responded to the demand for shared - and Christian inspired - European values and meanings in times of uncertainty and crisis.

La Idea de “Razón Publica” (y su Revisión) en el Último Rawls

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 5-31
Author(s):  
Fernando Aranda Fraga ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Public Good ◽  
John Rawls ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Key Topics ◽  
Political Philosopher

In 1993 John Rawls published his main and longest work since 1971, where he had published his reknowned A Theory of Justice, book that made him famous as the greatest political philosopher of the century. We are referring to Political Liberalism, a summary of his writings of the 80’s and the first half of the 90’s, where he attempts to answer the critics of his intellectual partners, communitarian philosophers. One of the key topics in this book is the issue of “public reason”, whose object is nothing else than public good, and on which the principles and proceedings of justice are to be applied. The book was so important for the political philosophy of the time that in 1997 Rawls had to go through the 1993 edition, becoming this new one the last relevant writing published before the death of the Harvard philosopher in November 2002.

How Civic is Russia's New Civil Religion and How Religious is the Church?

2017 ◽  
pp. 125-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Teper
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Institutions ◽  
The Face ◽  
Political Model ◽  
Soviet Russia ◽  
Religious Elements ◽  
The Church

This chapter demonstrates how and why a shift in the balance between civic and religious elements of a civil religion can take place, using Russia as an illuminating case study. Post-Soviet Russia is used to demonstrate how religion can be utilized to reinforce national identity and the legitimacy of the political system in the face of their civic weaknesses. The chapter demonstrates how, eventually, the civic-democratic political model officially designated during Yeltsin's presidency gradually changed to a more religiously grounded one, albeit a model that is not fully recognized, during Putin's rule. Moreover, the Russian case allows us to differentiate between two possible levels of civil religion: an official and openly communicated secularism, and an established church religion, promoted by the establishment in more subtle but not necessarily less aggressive ways. It further shows that just as the state has to adopt religious features in order to be deified, religious institutions have themselves to become more secular to be suitable for adoption as the state's civil religion.

The Political Philosopher

Louis XIV ◽  
1972 ◽  
pp. 152-159
Author(s):  
Louis Bertrand
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Philosopher

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity

2015 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 106-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Political ◽  
Dance Studies ◽  
Community Dance ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity developed out of a symposium organized by the Master in Choreography and Performance at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany, which was held with a joint symposium Thinking—Resisting—Reading the Political organized by the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture at the same university in 2010. Whereas the cultural studies symposium asked, “What specific perspectives and methodological consequences arise for the study of culture that are informed by recent deliberations on the relationship of the political and the aesthetic?” (2010), the dance symposium invited participants and contributors to the anthology “to think about the multiple connections between politics, community, dance, and globalization from the perspective of Dance and Theatre Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology” (13). As indicated by the title of the cultural studies symposium and some of the key speakers, including Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe, and Judith Butler, the term political is not used as broadly as it might be used in U.S.-based dance studies discourse. Rather, the political is predominantly investigated by both symposia for its resistive potential and from a liberal or post-Marxist stance.

The Political Psychology of Religion in Plato's Laws

1976 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 1059-1077 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas L. Pangle
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
Psychological Needs ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science And Society ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
The City

This paper explains Plato's conception of the relation between politics and “political religion” (ideology) in a nonliberal participatory republican system. The discussion is in the form of a commentary on the drama of a part of Plato's Laws. The underlying methodological assumption is that Plato presented his political teaching not so much through the speeches as through the drama of the dialogue, and that he held this to be the most appropriate form for political science because in this way political science can most effectively stimulate thought about its subject matter, the psyche involved in social action.Following Plato, we focus first on the psychological needs such a political system generates and attempts to satisfy through civil religion. We then move to a consideration of how political “theology” serves to mediate between science and society, or the philosopher and the city.The essay is intended to contribute to the Montesquieuian project engaging the attention of more and more political theorists: the endeavor to help contemporary political science and psychology escape from the trammeling parochialism of exclusive attention to twentieth century theoretical categories and empirical experiences.

Politische Prekarität

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hollendung
Keyword(s):  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Political ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Political Theories ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
May Day

To what extent can political theories adequately address the dangers that may accompany the political? This monograph is less concerned with the emancipative potential of the political, but rather with its downsides. Drawing on the concept of precarity, as defined in sociology and the May Day movement, it calls into question the ideas of sovereignty and autonomy using the theories of Judith Butler. The book systematises the controversy on what ‘the political’ is. Subsequently, it defines ‘political precarity’ in accordance with the ideas of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. These theories are complementary and conflicting in several respects and they mutually point out each other’s weaknesses. However, Hollendung identifies an innovative understanding of the precarious by intertwining these ideas.

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