In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Introduction

Transatlantic differences are at the heart of this issue. The leading article by Etienne Balibar addresses Robert Kagan’s widely discussed thesis that the different foreign policy stances of Europe and America may be explained in terms of their different positions in the global hierarchy of military, economic and political power. Balibar identifies several philosophical confusions in Kagan’s argument, but in addition points to some important theoretical challenges he raises, especially in relation to our understanding of the nature of power and of the nature of global politics.

The following article by Jean-Philippe Deranty and the Symposium on Jacques Rancière’s “Ten Theses on Politics” expose transatlantic differences of another kind, while also addressing the question of exactly what we do or should mean by ‘politics’. Following the publication of Rancière’s ‘Ten Theses on Politics’ in Theory and Event 5.3 2001, these contributions provide further contextualisation and comment on Rancière’s work. Jean-Philippe Deranty provides a helpful overview of his writings from a European perspective, locating it within the broader context of recent French political ontology and arguing for its partial convergence with Axel Honneth’s politics of recognition. In the Symposium, Kirstie McClure and Aamir Mufti interrogate the vision of both politics and political philosophy defended by Rancière, with a view to its translatibility into Anglo-American philosophical idioms and to its ‘timeliness’ in relation to the political conjuncture post September 11, as viewed from either side of the Atlantic. Michael Dillon’s essay focusses on the apparently structuralist conception of time implicit in Rancière’s approach to the political. All three symposiasts draw a spirited response from Rancière in his remarks in reply.

Paul Saurette reviews Ian Hunter’s Rival Enlightenments: Civic and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Thought (Cambridge University Press 2001), describing this important reconsideration of early modern German thought as ‘what you would get if you fused a Deleuzian ethical perspective with a Cambridge school attention to historical detail’. Filip Kovacevic reviews James R. Martel’s Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy, and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge 2001) and offers a Marxian response to the author’s Derridean critique of the interplay between doctrines of lover and liberal political theory. Finally, returning to US matters, Paul Apostolidis reviews Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan’s collection of essays dealing with cultural and political, especially sexual-politics aspects of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York University Press, 2001).

...

Share