The Politics of Spirit and the Self-Destruction of the State to Come

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 124-138
Author(s):  
Andrew Mitchell ◽  
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Stable State ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Central Section ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
The Third ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

Among the Black Notebooks, the one entitled Considerations and Hints III, gives us Heidegger’s thoughts from his time as the rector of Freiburg University, April 21, 1933–April 28, 1934. In it we find Heidegger proposing and defending his own peculiar conception of a “spiritual National Socialism [geistige Nationalsozialismus]” (GA 94: 135). Insofar as “National Socialism” is a political determination and “spirit” an ontological one, Überlegungen III presents us with Heidegger’s “political ontology,” what I will term a thinking of “mediation,” properly understood. Delving into this ontology shows that mediation, the condition of being “in the middle,” of being “between,” is no stable state at all, but one prone to collapse and cancellation. This paper explores three factors in the Notebook that are antagonistic to mediation, and thus to spiritual National Socialism. Two of them Heidegger himself identifies—mediocrity and forgery—the third he does not: enmity. Spiritual National Socialism is doomed to failure, but not for the reasons Heidegger decries. It fails due to the antagonism that necessitates an enemy as Heidegger construes it. Among the Black Notebooks, the one entitled Considerations and Hints III, gives us Heidegger’s thoughts from his time as the rector of Freiburg University, April 21, 1933–April 28, 1934.159 The bulk of the notebook consists in the central section “From the Time of the Rectorate,” which includes entries dated from the very last day of the rectorate, attempts at the wording of a farewell speech, mottos, titled assessments, and retrospective glances over the year just past. In it we find Heidegger proposing and defending his own peculiar conception of a “spiritual National Socialism [geistige Nationalsozialismus]” (GA 94: 135). Insofar as “National Socialism” is a political determination and “spirit” an ontological one, Überlegungen III presents us with Heidegger’s “political ontology,” what I will term a thinking of “mediation,” properly understood. Delving into this ontology shows that mediation, the condition of being “in the middle,” of being “between,” is no stable state at all, but one prone to collapse and cancellation. Today I wish to explore three factors that are antagonistic to mediation, and thus to spiritual National Socialism. Two of them Heidegger himself identifies—mediocrity and forgery—the third he does not: enmity. Spiritual National Socialism is doomed to failure, but not for the reasons Heidegger decries. It fails due to the antagonism that necessitates an enemy as Heidegger construes it.

Let the Witness Speak: From Archi-writing to the Community to come

Derrida Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-270
Author(s):  
Francesco Vitale
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Metaphysics Of Presence ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
The Sacrifice

The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other.

scholarly journals A SEGURANÇA PÚBLICA COMO UM PROBLEMA SOCIOCULTURAL

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. R 01-R 04
Author(s):  
Álvaro de Souza VIEIRA ◽  
◽  
Marcelo PESSOA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Well Being ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Needs ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Main Research ◽  
The Face ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
High Crime ◽  
Past Experiences

The present study falls within the scope of Urban Public Security, to the extent that ostensive and preventive policing actions - motorized, on foot or in prison - tend to better meet the social needs provided for by the demand for the crime prevention and protection service provided. by the State. A study like ours justifies the fact that, in times of the COVID-19 Pandemic, with the almost compulsory impediment of the citizen to come and go by legal instrument, there was a robust increase in the rates of family disagreements, minor bodily injuries, subversions to order and discipline, and other major unlawful conduct. As main research results, it was possible to understand to what extent society tends or not to actively participate in the processes that involve its own mental, physical or social well-being. We also note that there is a certain resistance from this same society regarding the presence of State apparatus, especially in less privileged layers of the community, since citizenship, on the one hand, manifests itself against police actions, in the face of less positive past experiences. R - 01-04 Revista AKEDIA – Versões, Negligências e Outros Mundos p - ISSN 2447-7656 e – ISSN 2674-2561 DOI 10.33726 – Volume 12 – Ano VII – 2º Sem. de 2021 On the other hand, it is seen that part of this same community tends to act, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a passive accomplice, keeping active contexts of high crime, a condition that, in the eyes of the State, appears paradoxical, but which, from a cultural perspective, maybe it's a sophisticated survival strategy.

scholarly journals Motherhood and the Machine

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-69
Author(s):  
Miglena Nikolchina
Keyword(s):  
Animal Studies ◽  
Significant Contribution ◽  
Ethical Perspective ◽  
Theoretical Orientations ◽  
The Third ◽  
Battlestar Galactica ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One ◽  
Philosophical Debates ◽  
Present Text

In her conceptualization of the human as defined by the capacity for revolt Kristeva unavoidably touches upon issues of robotization, technology, and the virtual. The concepts of animal and machine, however, although they do appear occasionally and in important ways, are never at the focus of her inquiries and are absent in her “New Forms of Revolt.” Yet these two concepts to a large extent define the field of contemporary philosophical debates of the human giving rise to three major theoretical orientations. On the one hand, there is the trend which tries to come to terms with technological novelties and the merging of human and machine that they imply. This trend unfolds under the rubric of “transhuman” or “posthuman” and of the “enhancement” of man. The second trend predominates in animal studies. Mostly in an ethical perspective but also ontologically, this trend, to which Derrida’s later writing made a significant contribution, questions the idea of the “human exception” and the rigorous distinction between man and animal on which this exception rests. While apparently antagonistic, both trends align the human with the animal and oppose it to technology. The third trend collapses the distinctions on which the previous two rely through the lens of biopolitics: drawing on Heidegger, Kojève, and Foucault, it regards contemporary technological transformations as amounting to the animalization of man.  The human disappears in the animal, in the machine, or in the indistinguishability of the two, confirming what Agamben has described as the inoperativeness of the anthropological machine. The present text turns to Kristeva’s conceptions of motherhood and revolt as introducing a powerful inflection in this tripartite field. Remarkably, it is precisely new sagas of rebellious machines like Battlestar “Galactica” that foreground the relevance of Kristeva’s approach.

scholarly journals The Balkans: A view into the future without internal and regional stability there is no integration into Europe

2002 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-201
Author(s):  
Zivorad Kovacevic
Keyword(s):  
Present Situation ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
International Community ◽  
The State ◽  
The Self ◽  
Regional Stability ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
To Come ◽  
Set Up

The author analyses the present situation and the prospects of internal and regional stability and security in the countries of the European South East. He says that we have now some peace and some stability and security in the region. The peace is fragile and more the state of no-war than stable peace. The fact remains that the self-sustaining regional stability remains a good distance away. The sources of regional instability are in uneliminated consequences of the recent wars and in the fact that nowhere in the region the complete discontinuity with the policies, ideologies, way of thinking and institutional set-up inherited from previous regimes has been realized. The region needs the coherent approach and active participation of the international community and its military presence in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia for years to come. Let's not delude ourselves: if the troops were withdrawn today who could tell what would happen tomorrow.

The One Hundred Days

2021 ◽  
pp. 336-356
Author(s):  
Peter Fritzsche
Keyword(s):  
New Deal ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
The Third ◽  
Great Achievement ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter studies how the transformations which occurred in less than “one hundred days” in Germany evoked the original template for the one hundred days: Napoleon Bonaparte's return from Elba and the reestablishment of the empire until his abdication in the wake of Waterloo in 1815. Each of the hundred days—Napoleon's, Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Adolf Hitler's—recharged history. The one hundred days consolidating the New Deal and the Nazi seizure of power gave new shape to the future in the extraordinary year of 1933. Ultimately, the great achievement of the Third Reich was getting Germans to see themselves as the Nazis did: as an imperiled people who had created for themselves a new lease on collective life. Not everyone agreed with the Nazis on every point, but most adjusted to National Socialism by interpreting it in their own way, adhering to old ideas by pursuing them in new forms. As a result, more and more Germans had accepted the Third Reich. This reassembly closed off any consideration of returning to the democratic governments of the Weimar Republic; it was neither recognized as a possibility nor desired.

Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa: Father, Family, Food. By Michael G. Schatzberg. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. 292p. $49.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (4) ◽  
pp. 866-867
Author(s):  
Robert Fatton
Keyword(s):  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indiana University ◽  
The Third ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
Status Of Women

Political Legitimacy in Middle Africa is an insightful, refreshing, and original book that refines and expands our understanding of the so-called “politics of the belly.” A phrase made famous by Jean Francois Bayart (The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, 1993), the politics of the belly is the phenomenon of “eating” the fruits of power. The extent to which officeholders monopolize or share these fruits with the larger community has, however, significant consequences for their legitimacy. As Michael Schatzberg suggests, a “moral matrix of legitimate governance” (p. 35) embedded in familial and paternal metaphors shapes these belly politics. In turn, he argues that the moral matrix is rooted in four major premises. The first and second are related to the image of the ruler as a “fatherchief,” who has the obligation, on the one hand, to nurture and nourish his “family,” and on the other hand, to punish his “children” when necessary and pardon them when they truly repent. The third premise concerns the status of women in society; while they are not considered equal to men, rulers should, nonetheless, respect their role as “counselors and advisers.” The fourth premise “holds that permanent power is illegitimate and that political fathers…have to let their children grow up, mature, take on ever-increasing responsibilities in the conduct of their own affairs, and eventually succeed them in power” (p. 192).

Africa’s Response to r2p

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Noemi Gal-Or
Keyword(s):  
Global Governance ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
African Union ◽  
World Summit ◽  
The Third ◽  
Regional Collaboration ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Security Challenge ◽  
The One

Although the idea of r2p had been enshrined in the Constitutive Act of the African Union (au) shortly before the term was coined by the iciss, the au has been slow to live up to the commitment. Balancing r2p, on the one hand, with non-interference within the domaine reservé of the state, on the other hand, has proven an uphill battle. r2p sceptic member states have persistently opted for non-interference, and at most, a “non-indifference” approach representing a non-committal stance with regards to r2p. This paper offers reflections about the particular African construction of the third r2p “collective global” pillar, and explains the African reticence about the original iciss and 2005 World Summit Outcome versions of r2p. It expounds on the key reasons for this tempered reception and sheds light on the global governance security challenge as it plays out in the un-au politics of regional collaboration.

scholarly journals Radical Hope or the Moral Imperative of Images in the Work of Susan Sontag Jean-Luc Godard

2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idit Alphandary
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Imperative ◽  
Susan Sontag ◽  
Life Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
New Form ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

In the films For Ever Mozart, In Praise of Love and I Salute You Sarajevo, Go-dard’s images introduce radical hope to the world. I will demonstrate that this hope represents an ethical posture in the world; it is identical to goodness. Radical hope is grounded in the victim’s witnessing, internalizing and remembering catastrophe, while at the same time holding onto the belief that a variation of the self will survive the disaster. In The Gift of Death, Jacques Derrida argues that choosing to belong to the disaster is equivalent to giving the pure gift, or to goodness itself, and that it suggests a new form of responsibility for one’s life, as well as a new form of death. For Derrida, internalizing catastrophe is identical to death—a death that surpasses one’s means of giving. Such death can be reciprocated only by reinstating goodness or the law in the victim’s or the giver’s existence. The relation of survival to the gift of death—also a gift of life—challenges us to rethink our understanding of the act of witnessing. This relation also adds nuance to our appreciation of the intellectual, emotional and mental affects of the survival of the victim and the testimony and silence of the witness, all of which are important in my analysis of radical hope. On the one hand, the (future) testimony of the witness inhabits the victim or the ravaged self (now), on the other hand, testimony is not contemporaneous with the shattered ego. This means that testimony is anterior to the self or that the self that survives the disaster has yet to come into existence through making testimony material. Testimony thus exists before and beyond disaster merely as an ethical posture—a “putting-oneself-to-death or offering-one’s-death, that is, one’s life, in the ethical dimension of sacrifice,” in the words of Derrida. The witness is identical to the victim whose survival will include an unknown, surprising testimony or an event of witnessing. The testimony discloses the birth or revelation of a new self. And yet this new self survives through assuming the position of the witness even while s/he is purely the victim of catastrophe, being put to death owning the “kiss of death.”

cepts, or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall deuises. But such, me seeme, should be satisfide with the vse of these dayes, seeing all things accounted by their showes, and nothing esteemed of, that is not delightfull and pleasing to commune sence. For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato, for that the one in the exquisite depth of his iudgement, formed a Commune welth such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the Persians fashioned a gouernement such as might best be: So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule. So haue I laboured to doe in the person of Arthure: whome I conceiue after his long education by Timon, to whom he was by Merlin deliuered to be brought vp, so soone as he was borne of the Lady Igrayne, to haue seene in a dream or vision the Faery Queen, with whose excellent beauty rauished, he awaking resolued to seeke her out, and so being by Merlin armed, and by Timon throughly instructed, he went to seeke her forth in Faerye land. In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceiue the most excellent and glorious person of our soueraine the Queene, and her kingdome in Faery land. And yet in some places els, I doe otherwise shadow her. For considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royall Queene or Empresse, the other of a most vertuous and beautifull Lady, this latter part in some places I doe expresse in Belphœbe, fashioning her name according to your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia, (Phœbe and Cynthia being both names of Diana.) So in the person of Prince Arthure I sette forth magnificence in particular, which vertue for that (according to Aristotle and the rest) it is the perfection of all the rest, and conteineth in it them all, therefore in the whole course I mention the deedes of Arthure applyable to that vertue, which I write of in that booke. But of the xii. other vertues, I make xii. other knights the patrones, for the more variety of the history: Of which these three bookes contayn three. The first of the knight of the Redcrosse, in whome I expresse Holynes: The seconde of Sir Guyon, in whome I sette forth Temperaunce: The third of Britomartis a Lady knight, in whome I picture Chastity. But because the beginning of the whole worke seemeth abrupte and as depending vpon other antecedents, it needs that ye know the occasion of these three knights seuerall aduentures. For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come,

2014 ◽  
pp. 738-738
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Times ◽  
The One

Nature without Self: Beauty, Death and Subjectivity in the Poetics of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens

2020 ◽  
pp. 141-165
Author(s):  
Mark Sandy
Keyword(s):  
Walt Whitman ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Critical Distance ◽  
Natural Process ◽  
The State ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
The Self ◽  
The World ◽  
To Come

Reflecting on the concerns of previous chapters, this section explores how post-Romantic poetics avow and disavow Romantic ideas about beauty, nature and the self in a bid to come to terms with life in all its ordinariness; with what Stevens plainly identifies as the state of things merely as they are. Ironically, those necessary fictions of the self and environment (the world of the human and nonhuman things) find themselves contradictorily embedded both in and beyond the fictive. Imaginative acts of self-dissolution signal an aesthetic critical distance between the self and nature to be illusory and the extent to which the self is inescapably mired in the fragility of natural process and perpetually aware of its own terminus in death. Accordingly, my coda evinces the British Romantic entanglements in the poetic thought of Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman, as well as Stevens’s complicated, and complicating, post-Romantic responses to those British and American Romantic models of self and nature that Stevens both imaginatively inherits and transforms.

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