Spiritualizing reason, rationalizing spirit: Muslim public intellectuals in the German far right

Muslim, ex-Muslim as well as converted Muslim intellectuals are increasingly prominent figures in the West European far-right movement. By analysing their publications and online presence, we observe that concepts utilized by Muslim-background intellectuals popular in the German far right build on two seemingly contradictory tropes of German national identity—rationality and spirituality—and a civilizationism that oscillates between notions of rational liberalism and an illiberalism based on spiritualism. As these intellectuals combine the tropes of German nationhood and European civilisation, the far right builds connections with the growing Muslim demographic in Germany. The movement provides space for a variety of Muslim-background intellectuals: those who embrace a secular-liberal self-description emphasize how rationalism is synonymous with Germanness, while those who embrace a religious self-description critique liberal rationalism as lacking spirit. In so doing, Muslim public intellectuals help the far right to simultaneously spiritualize national reason and rationalize national spirit.

Murderous Consent

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

Teoretyczne ujęcia konfliktu politycznego

Theoretical approaches to political conflictThis article reconstructs and develops theoretical approaches to analysis of political conflicts in the disci­plines of political science, political philosophy and sociology. In the consecutive sections of the article the author develops theoretical assumptions of liberal rationalism, agonism, political realism, structuralism and constitutional theory. These theoretical approaches differ in the attitudes towards the causes of conflict and the role of conflict in the modern political system. Liberal rationalism is a normative theory of con­sensus within political community based on common values. Agonism perceives conflict as an essential ingredient of politics. Political realism sees conflict as permanent element of politics on the internal and international level. Constitutional theory embraces legal rules and cultural norms that define legitimate ways of political action, through which conflicts are regulated.

Blind Faith and Political Rationalism in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

Political conflicts around the world increasingly reflect a religious challenge to liberal rationalism. Given the tendency of modern political rationalism to underestimate the power of religion, it seems reasonable to consider the classical analysis of religious antirationalism set forth with great clarity in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. The play seeks to demonstrate that religious antirationalism—as exemplified by Oedipus—is self-contradictory and self-destructive, but also that it is rooted in such enduring human traits as our awareness of our mortality, our hope for immortality, and our angry refusal to accept our mortality. Sophocles advocates a sober and cautious political rationalism that recognizes the dangers of religious passion to political life, but also the permanence of religious passion within political life. Such a political rationalism, embodied by Theseus, constitutes a middle way between a blind piety which rejects reason and an excessively hopeful political rationalism which underestimates the power of religion.

Modes and Manifestations of Improvisation in Urban Planning, Design, and Theory

The enterprise of musical improvisation is examined as a fruitful source of approaches to urban planning, design, and theory. When musicians improvise, they cooperate and take risks in ways that recommend fitting strategies for urban planners, who traditionally view their planning function as dependent upon values of liberal rationalism. Furthermore, some improvising musicians deliberately stage their performances as interventions in their urban communities, thereby linking the aesthetic aspects of music to social and political action. Examples of three modes of musical improvisation—deviation, response, and insurgency—adapted to the work of urban planners, designers, theorists, and historians illustrate how such enterprises can challenge a purely rational, purely planned understanding of such work, as well as how planning work already and inevitably entails improvisational impulses and influences. The paper thus urges on planning professionals an ethos of improvisation inspired by musicians.