Empire

Frontiers on land and bodies are performative of imperial expansion and acceleration. This chapter argues that frontier sites are especially productive of imperial formations, as they expose inconsistencies and excesses that are met with a particular rage and discipline. As such, frontier sites are productive of iterations of imperial violence, which includes the construction of new infrastructures and technologies of violence, as well as the discursive justification for this violent apparatus. Palestine is a frontier of imperial formations that is productive of war technologies, but also a site where debates over the legitimization of the use of this violence takes place. Performances on the frontiers of empire such as Palestine are constitutive of subject and subjectivities on resistance and settler colonialism in global politics. The marking of Hamas as terrorists is central to the coding and interpretations of Palestine in public discourses. The democratic election of Hamas troubled the coding of the movement as an illegitimate terrorist Other, which was met with a performative anxiety and rage by the European Union. The EU had headed the election-monitoring mission in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and they had declared the elections transparent, free. and fair. Their response, however, was to diplomatically and financially sanction Hamas, which had profound consequences for Palestinian governance. Hamas and Gaza exposed fault lines in empire’s attempt to defend its use of violence. and as such they are also productive of new forms of enacting imperial violence. The chapter explores the performances of Tania El Khoury, whose work uses intimate scenes and audience interactivity to foreground the pain and oppression of imperial violence. Performance acts as a cultural frontier that negotiates and expresses subversive and resistant meanings of violence in global politics.

Creating Value by Sharing Values: Managing Stakeholder Value Conflict in the Face of Pluralism through Discursive Justification

ABSTRACTThe question of how to engage with stakeholders in situations of value conflict to create value that includes a plurality of conflicting stakeholder value perspectives represents one of the crucial current challenges of stakeholder engagement as well as of value creation stakeholder theory. To address this challenge, we conceptualize a discursive sharing process between affected stakeholders that is oriented toward discursive justification involving multiple procedural steps. This sharing process provides procedural guidance for firms and stakeholders to create pluralistic stakeholder value through the discursive accommodation of diverging stakeholder value perspectives. The outcomes of such a discursive value-sharing process range from stakeholder value dissensus to low (agreement to disagree) and increasing levels of stakeholder value congruence (value compromise) to stakeholder value consensus (shared values). Hence, this article contributes to the emerging literature on integrative stakeholder engagement by conceptualizing a procedural framework that is neither overly oriented towards dissensus nor consensus.

The Comedy of Reflexive Modernity: Reason, Religion and the Ambivalence of Humour

This article utilizes Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘reflexive modernity’ to account for the ambivalent view of humour in the public sphere: its celebration as a form of criticism of irrationality and injustice and its censure as a vehicle for the denigration of subordinate or marginal groups and identities. The article argues that the power and ambivalence of humour in contemporary culture can be understood with reference to the two key features of reflexive modernization: the demand for the discursive justification of all claims to cognitive and normative authority and the obligation to respect the equal rights of all individuals. Drawing on Beck’s distinction between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ modernity, the article uses the example of the Danish ‘Muhammed Cartoons’ to show that critical-emancipatory joking cannot simply lay claim to an ‘Enlightenment’ view of secular-scientistic reason in conflict with an atavistic and backward ‘religion’ due to the transformation of reason by reflexive scientization and the transformation of religion resulting from the effects of globalization and cultural cosmopolitization. The article draws on accounts of the comic practice of Muslim comedians and a consideration of the British TV sit-com Rev to demonstrate the possibility of a ‘religious’ joking that is thereby eminently ‘modern’ whilst respecting the values of human universality and individual dignity. The article concludes by reiterating the centrality of Beck’s theory for the understanding of the enduring power of comic representation to constitute a cultural reflexivization endemic in contemporary society and argues for the relevance of ‘reflexive modernity’ to cultural sociology.

Holistic Alethic Pluralism: A Reformational Research Program

This essay lays out a reformational research program on the idea of truth. First it describes challenges to the idea of truth in contemporary philosophy and gives reasons why a robust conception of truth is needed. Next it presents two overriding concerns – ontological and axiological – that such a conception should address. In addressing these concerns, a contemporary reformational approach will take up three sets of issues: relations between propositional truth and the discursive justification of truth claims; distinctions and connections between propositional and nonpropositional truth; and the sorts of cultural practices and social institutions within which truth occurs. My detailed response to these issues, as sketched in the last section of the essay, is to propose a holistic, normative, and structurally pluralist conception of truth, one that I call holistic alethic pluralism. Propositional truth is important but not all-important, and reformational philosophy needs to show why that is so.

The Limits of Cyclization

This article examines Friedrich Schlegel’s theory of philological practice and presents it as crucial for any philology that seeks to establish its philosophical ground without taking resort to theory. Schlegel’s concepts and the form of argument he employs, as illustrated in his notes “On Philology”, are elucidated. Schlegel focuses on ‘cyclization’ as a reiterated critique of a non-discursive practice that eventually leads to a mastership akin to art. Schlegel’s “Lucinde” is—as the article demonstrates—to be read as a novel that serves this philological purpose. Finally, the question of how to deal with art as a telos of philology in times of the modern university is discussed, with the conclusion being that we have to distinguish between the process of gaining insight and the discursive justification of that insight.

Recognition, feelings of injustice and claim justification: a case study of deaf people's storytelling on the internet

This paper argues that Honneth's theory of recognition opens promising venues for exploring the role of emotion in politics, particularly when issues of injustice are at stake. While endorsing Honneth's view that ‘feelings of injustice’ are an important source for intelligibility of injustice, and that disadvantaged individuals need to build a ‘shared interpretative framework’ in struggles for recognition, this article contends that a more nuanced account of discursive justification is required to deal with dissent and moral disagreement. As a response to this problem, we suggest that Honneth's approach of subjective reaction to injury as violation of conditions to practical identity can be brought together with notions of discursive justification in the Habermasian fashion. Through an empirically based analysis – using storytelling of deaf people gathered in two virtual environments: (a) the website of the main Brazilian organization for deaf persons (FENEIS), and (b) Orkut, an online social network – this paper evinces that subjects not only articulate feelings of injustice or claims for recognition in everyday experience, but also usually engage in interpretation, judgment and justification of such claims. Results show that Honneth's theory of recognition, when articulated with a notion of discursive justification, can better equip scholars concerned with practices that aim to overcome injustice.