Search

This paper focuses on Lefort's and Rancière's conceptions of democracy as a set of conflictual processes through which the composition of the public sphere is reassessed. Reading their works together and sometimes in opposition to each other, the paper extracts elements of a theory of inessential sovereignty that avoids the pitfalls of populist antagonism and of neoliberal diffuse domination. It analyses Lefort's and Rancière's understandings of democracy as rule of the people, which are based on ontological and aesthetical distinctions between 'politics' and 'the political'. It argues that in the structural situation of dissensus described by both Lefort and Rancière, popular sovereignty could be conceptualized as lying in an ability to shape and transform the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the implications of Judaism for politics, focusing on the historical and philosophical discussions surrounding Jewish politics from the Enlightenment to modernity. It examines how Jewish philosophy has sought to establish connections between universal reason and Jewish traditions and how these inquiries have influenced Jewish integration within European nation-states and the creation of the State of Israel.

Emmanuel Levinas, in his book 'Otherwise than Being or Beyond' and in his other works, maintains that memory is non-ethical, and that the ethical encounter with the other is immemorial. A study argues that, contrary to Levinas's insistent claim regarding the non-ethical nature of memory, his 'ethics as first philosophy' involves individual memory.

In this paper, I argue that Arendt's understanding of freedom should be examined independently of the search for good political institutions because it is related to freedom of movement and has a transnational meaning. Although she does not say it explicitly, Arendt establishes a correlation between political identities and territorial moves: She analyzes regimes in relation to their treatment of lands and borders, that is, specific geographic movements. I call this correlation a political itinerary. My aim is to show genealogically that her elaboration on the regimes of ancient, modern, and 'dark' times is supported by such a correlation. I read Arendt in light of the current clash between an amorphous global political identity (and 'new' international order) and the renewal of nationalisms. I show that, for Arendt, the world is divided by necessary frontiers--territorial borders and identity frames--and that the political consists precisely of the effort to transgress them. Arendt never proposed a restoration of authority but, on the contrary, a worldwide anarchic (that is, based on no predetermined rule) politics of de-localization and re-localization; in her terms, a politics of free movement of founded identities, a cosmopolitanism, which, nevertheless, would have nothing to do with global sovereignty.

This essay examines and challenges some of the theoretical arguments of the neoliberal attack on the concept of popular sovereignty. I argue that in order to resist both the neoliberal reaction against popular power and the subsequent resurgence of populist rhetoric, we need to rework the concept of popular sovereignty. I focus on three groups of texts written in the early years of the neoliberal shift—namely, from the mid-1970s to early 1980s—which deal with the question of sovereignty: Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty ; Foucault's works of the late 1970s; and Lefort's reflections on the symbolic dimension of power. While Hayek and Foucault defend similar views on sovereignty and argue that it is or should be replaced by technics of management, Lefort proposes a de-essentialized conception of democracy based on redefining sovereignty as the possibility of continually refiguring the space of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a political reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', which examines agency and resistance in situations of political wrong. Le Guin's short story allows us to reformulate the questions of the boundaries of popular sovereignty and the opposition to general consent. These concerns will be here regarded as elements of a critique of neoliberal capitalism, in which freedom and self-realization are founded on injustices that persist because of a prevalent conception of the good life. The case of 'Omelas', moreover, challenges our understanding of resistance in revealing the blurred boundary between political action and mere noncompliance. The question asked will be about the nature of noncompliance: is noncompliance a form of resistance, and, if so, can it transform the political reality? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the writing of political theory based on the storytelling ability of Hannah Arendt. Interpretation of Arendt's works by various authors; Association of political concept with storytelling; Advantage of storytelling for recounting political disclosures.