The Limits of Liberal Tolerance: The Case of Racial Policies

This chapter compares narratives of digital utopia against the turgid material process of factory labor in Asia. It begins by exploring how role-playing video games like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Guild Wars 2, and others shore up evidence for digital utopia by enacting its values of liberal tolerance, freedom, and egalitarianism within a virtual realm. Yet played erotically, role playing offers new connections between the empire and its Asian provinces through playing a role, an act characteristic of the power positions of sexual role play (domination and subjugation). Using Michel Foucault’s theories of ars erotica and aphrodisia, this chapter argues that role playing bounds the gamelike, the queer, and the erotic, as all develop rule-based fantasy worlds with hierarchized avatars or roles. Role play can make explicit the transnational power differentials that function as digital utopia’s conditions of possibility.

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Literature as a Ruthless Excavator of Culture: From the Literary Mode of Being to Lituratterre

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474409841.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 19-69

Author(s):

Nadia Bou Ali

Keyword(s):

The Unconscious ◽

Post Colonial ◽

Language And Culture ◽

Literary Sources ◽

Psychoanalytic Approach ◽

Mode Of Being ◽

Modern Arabic ◽

Liberal Tolerance

This chapter substantiates the book’s psychoanalytic approach to modern Arabic thought. It argues that the framework of theoretical psychoanalysis is an alternative to post-colonial, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist approaches. The chapter discusses the psychoanalytic topology of the symbolic, imaginary, and Real and its relevance to the study of literary sources. It then explicates how fantasy produces and canalizes desire in the context of symbolic crisis in modernity. The chapter addresses the anxieties around language and culture in modern Arabic sources as anxieties underlined by the modern contestation between reason and the unconscious. Diagnosing this contestation between reason and irrationality is crucial for overcoming the antinomy of culturalism/ liberalism that over-determines the study of modern Arabic sources. Anxieties over habits and culture expose early on the limits of liberal tolerance and force us to consider how the compulsion for freedom in modernity is experienced as a split in particularity rather than an affirmation of it. The chapter pits Lacan-Freud against Wendy Brown’s liberal critique of psychoanalysis through Shidyaq and Bustani.

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Questioning the Limits of Liberal Tolerance

Journal of Social Philosophy ◽

10.1111/0047-2786.00094 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 268-276

Author(s):

John deMoulpied

Keyword(s):

Liberal Tolerance

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Liberalism, civilisation and the (non-)oxymoronic limits of tolerance

International Journal of Law in Context ◽

10.1017/s1744552307004065 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 3 (4) ◽

pp. 323-341

Author(s):

Anastasia Vakulenko

Keyword(s):

Liberal Tolerance ◽

Contemporary Islam

In a 2002 interview exploring the darker side of modern Western secularism, Talal Asad suggested that instead of trying to fit contemporary Islam within the liberal secular paradigm we might want to ask, ‘What exactly does the liberal mean by tolerance?’ (Shaikh, 2002). Despite the overwhelming abundance of literature conceptualising liberal tolerance, Wendy Brown’s latest book shows that Asad’s question is far from commonplace or rhetorical.Regulating Aversiondissects the anatomy of contemporary liberal discourse of tolerance, challenging the truism that tolerance is an unconditional transcendental virtue, something that has for so long been taken for granted.

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