ABSTRACT This paper explores the discourse in contemporary men’s rights activism that masculinity itself is endangered and thus understood as contingent with Denmark as a case study. Building on both interviews and a content analysis of online posts, I demonstrate how prominent Danish men’s rights activists share the sentiment that masculinity is existentially threatened in today’s ‘feminized’ society. Furthermore, I argue that this crisis of masculinity discourse functions to support a distinct form of hegemonic masculinity and a postfeminist narrative in a Danish context. This mode of hegemonic masculinity differs from approaches that treat and uphold historical masculinity norms – such as assertiveness, aggression, risk-taking, and competitiveness – as naturally dominant. Instead, the starting point for such a contingency-aware form of hegemonic masculinity is that a certain masculine culture is under attack and must be defended. However, I also point to some degree of performative contradiction between the defense of particularly individualist assertiveness and the collective organizational practices in influential men’s rights activist groups, such as The Danish Men’s Council.

This paper addresses the social role of speculative philosophy in Hegel’s thought. Speculative philosophy, culminating in absolute knowledge, articulates a total system that includes the act of its own enunciation. Such a philosophy has a reflexive structure. Enunciation here, however, is inherently a performative contradiction: what is being enunciated is constituted as a non-something within the very act of enunciation. As such, the act of enunciation signals both the closure and delimitation of something and simultaneously an opening of the same — introducing non-identity into the system. These reflexive aspects of speculative philosophy have significant implications for its institutional role, but also result from it. On the one hand, philosophy must articulate all the determinations necessary for the conditions of its own emergence. It must comprehend the world in which it can appear. On the other hand, for Hegel, speculative philosophy is tasked with shaping the selfsame reality: it serves as a paradigm for institutions in modern society, introducing rationality into them. So, on one hand, it is meant to be identical with reality, but on the other, is called upon to change it. In a way, it transcends reality. This combination of circumstances amounts to its non-identity with itself and gives us reason to turn any criterion for the critique of the current state of affairs against itself. When it critiques the present state of affairs, speculative philosophy fails to see that it is itself a product of those same circumstances. When it critiques the critics, it does not recognize that they, too, are part of this reality. As long as speculative philosophy not only reconstructs the conditions of its own emergence — modern society — but also reforms society, any moral critique of society turns out to be both necessary and unreliable.

Breaking Down the Code

From the 1980s onwards, Derrida began writing numerous experimental and playful texts, particularly in the form of prefaces. This article first explores why Derrida uses the preface as a textual laboratory, then shows that, after ‘the end of the book’, the preface is both an impossible mode of writing and the only permitted mode of writing. Derrida takes Hegel as both a precursor and an adversary: Hegel sought to sublate the preface for different reasons than Derrida but had to write even more prefaces to do so. By analyzing Derrida's reading of this performative contradiction in Hegel, the article clarifies why Derrida is obsessed with the desire to incessantly preface. Finally, the article situates Derrida's ‘incessant preface’ within the broader context of the development of deconstruction, often referred to as a ‘turn’.

An environmentally reoriented educational policy is oftentimes regarded as the premier locus for a societal response to the climate crisis. As observed by Gough (2021), a general belief shared among both policy makers and academics is a consensus that education needs to be perceived less as an instrument for securing sociocultural reproduction and transmission of existing knowledge and more as a catalyst for social and cultural change. The aim of this article is a critical investigation into possibilities and obstacles for education to achieve such change, given the condition of ‘ontological insecurity’ (Hamilton, 2017) that the Anthropocene implies. It is divided into three parts: 1) following Chakrabarty, I identify the politico-aesthetic challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change and formulate their relevance as an educational ordeal; 2) I enquire about the challenges and possibilities for environmental education to foster societal change and conclude that, while a general policy change toward sustainable education may be insufficient, education remains a premier site where negotiations could take place between the deep-seated beliefs about subjectivity and an open anticipation of unforeseen modes of agency; 3) after providing a comparative analysis of classical humanist Bildung and post-humanist accounts of subjectification in education, I conclude that these approaches constitute a performative contradiction, which allows the experiential challenges of the Anthropocene to be approached in terms of a reimagined aesthetic education thematized as a critique of (human) capacity.

In this work, I show the perspectives revealed for an analysis of the problem of scepticism regarding meaning (“Kripke’s problem”) using the categories of linguistic prag-matics (performativity, the distinction of locution, illocution and perlocution). I provide a critical analysis of the argumentation against scepticism proposed by Vsevolod A. Ladov and Evgeny V. Borisov, who appeal to performative contradiction ascribed by them to sceptical discourse. With extrapolation of this style of argumentation to the discussion of scepticism in general, I show its vulnerability in light of the counter-argument from sceptical illocution proposed in the present work. Taking into account the polemic discussion spread out around the “straight solution” in the literature, I point out that knowledge of meaning by introspec-tion, postulated by Borisov, should be understood as a performative establishment of mean-ing in individual speech acts (thus, the notion of performativity arises once again in his ar-gumentation). I propose and substantiate the opinion that the appeal to such performativity is not a full-aspect solution for the problem. Addressing the distinction of locution, illocution and perlocution allows analysing the problem of scepticism regarding meaning in a new per-spective, posing the question: What aspect of meaning – locutive, illocutive or perlocutive – is concerned? I propose and explicate the hypothesis that objectivity and stability of mean-ings is maintained by the perlocutive aspect of speech; that does not exclude relativity and fluidity of reconstruction of meanings in the illocutive aspect.

The paper suggests a straight solution to the problem of meaning skepticism presented in Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. The solution is based on Ladov’s moderate solution to the problem. Ladov’s solution is to the effect that the total skepticism cannot be a theory because it cannot be stated without performative contradiction. This entails that only a limited skepticism is possible as a theory. I argue that the limited skepticism is compatible with the view that meaning can be known provided the knowledge of meaning is construed as an internal part of a speech act, not as a result of interpretation of behavioral facts.

The article analyses the argument from the justified use of force, put forward against jusnaturalist skepticism by Stephan Kinsella. This argument is intended to show that skepticism about natural rights has become entangled in a performative contradiction, because in order to prove that no natural rights exist, it must assume the existence of such rights. The defeat of jusnaturalist skepticism, in turn, is to prove apagogically the existence of natural rights, including the libertarian private property rights. The article shows, using Hohfeld’s analysis method, that the anti-skeptical argument from the justified use of force does not achieve its goals.

The phenomenon of envy has mostly been analyzed as a special form of a subject???s emotion or feeling. However, its rational structure and moral-psychological dimension have rarely been analyzed in detail. In this paper I argue that envy is not only an unpleasant complex emotion but rather a highly interesting attitude and strategy, which consists in finding reasons for denying another person the recognition she actually deserves. Envious people systematically confuse envy with justified moral resentment. This rationalizing denial of recognition is due to a form of rational self-deception by the envious person. I will analyze this strategy of envy in more detail by referring to John Rawls???s conception of justice and Immanuel Kant???s concept of rationalizing. I shall conclude by arguing that envy is characterized by a paradoxical structure, which consists in the fact that we never consciously and willingly envy, so that the speech act “I envy you” implies a performative contradiction.

Socrates’ use of performative contradiction against sophistic theories is a recurrent motif in Plato’s dialogues. In the case of Plato’s Theaetetus and Gorgias, Socrates attempts to show that Protagoras’ homo mensura doctrine and Gorgias’ doctrine of the power of logos are each performatively contradicted by the underlying activity of philosophical dialogue. In the case of the Theaetetus, Socrates’ strategy of performative contradiction hinges on Protagoras’ failure to perform in the way that he theorized the sophist performing—namely, being able to change appearances through logoi (Theaetetus 166d–167d). In parallel fashion, Gorgias’ account of the power of rhetoric is performatively contradicted by the orator’s inability to prevail over Socrates, instead resorting to insincere responses to Socrates’ questions in order to save face—a dialogical “performance” that ties directly to Socrates’ portrait of Gorgianic rhetoric as a matter of pandering to the audience (Gorgias 460a–465a). Plato’s aim in dramatizing these performative contradictions, I argue, is to illuminate both the proximity between Socrates and the great sophists, particularly with respect to Socrates’ practice of elenchos, but also the distance between Socrates and the sophists in how they conceive of our situatedness within the world of human concerns.

being president of the american folklore society (AFS) yields gifts galore, especially the opportunity to collaborate with the Board, staff, and membership to bring our Society forward into the future. I thank all of you for electing me to the honor and privilege of serving the American Folklore Society. Additionally, I thank you for two special perks: the Presidential Suite and its 2 years’ worth of hotel swank, and the Presidential Address, a chance this evening to share certain concerns in a test flight of some material that I hope will add pages to my current book and performance project What a Witch! Said not like a 10-year-old dissing her girlfriend, “what a witch,” but like a woman feeling her power: “What a Witch!”—I dedicate this presentation to folklore feminists everywhere.1Continuing where we left off last year at Miami's 2016 Women's Section Croning Ceremony, I invite the coven of the feminist killjoys and their friends to convene once again.2 Tonight, I'll hook a ride with the witch in flight to prove the depth of folklore's delights for me as a feminist lesbian queer woman who entered graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin over 40 years ago, in August 1977. It's been a great journey—and now there's one more trip to take. I'll board my broom, and like Bette Midler playing the lead witch in the movie Hocus Pocus, who commands her sisters with such pride and satisfaction, I, too, command of all you: “Let's ride.”I began my presidency 3 years ago with an urgent desire to reinvest in our discipline's core understanding of folk narrative. Perhaps more than any other aspect of our nearly 200-year-old discipline, the collection, study, and analysis of narrative arts, storytelling, and storytellers have been the central gift of folklore to the humanities and to the world. Our deep commitment to and expertise in stories, unfolding and unfinished in their variations through time, inspire me to continue in the vein of so many colleagues who have preceded and the many who will go ahead in doing one of the things folklore does best: telling the story of traditional stories.I'd be surprised if folklorists around the hemisphere had not taken note—whether dismayed or delighted—that today everyone's a storyteller and that the act of storytelling is increasingly being commodified. Caught up in the delirium driven by the current hegemony of the “me” story promoted across a dizzying array of web platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as in popular live performance projects such as StoryCorps and The Moth, we live in a world of limitless access to the performance of reductive personal stories, each competing for dominance in the feedback frenzy of “likes” and “hearts.” Then it's over: the very category for “Story” on Facebook and Instagram ensures disposability of your post within 24 hours.Doth the woman protest too much? Of course! But here's our solution. Folklore's corrective to the current glut of throwaway first-person narration engages us in recommitting to the explanatory and interpretive power of the third-person folk narrative, performed in its many distinct genres and cultural variations, repeated and revised over generations. Ours is the very important disciplinary charge—specific to folkloristics—of revealing the significance of collectively owned narratives, the ones that give us the shareable world envisioned millennia ago in Aristotle's Poetics. The ones that allow the willing suspension of disbelief to stimulate imaginative identifications and attachments. Malik Gaines, following Arjun Appadurai (1996:7), argues that “works of the imagination create a collective platform from which to project notions of ‘resistance, irony, selectivity, and in general, agency’” (Gaines 2017:17). Old stories and their variants constitute one such platform, allowing tellers to take the same old plot or tale type and make it useful over and over again by working it, making it say something new to us, not only by giving answers but more often by raising questions—stories as “equipment for living” or “good to think,” perhaps even better to feel.3I chase old stories that raise questions about the status of women, questions about desire and gender, about feeling queer and being queer. It's no wonder my career trajectory led me to the traditional witch figure, whose stories make a mess of sex and gender, exposing their socially constructed, binary-driven hegemonies, yet serving also as a source for recognizing potential alternatives. If my previous forays into the witchy worlds of the Grimms’ “Frau Trude,” ATU 334 (Turner 2012) and “Frau Holle,” ATU 480 (Turner 2015) prove anything, it is that the witch knew queer before queer was gay, or gay was queer. Seething with the unsettled debts of transgressive or unrecognized feelings and desires, witch stories disturb and often dismantle comfortably institutionalized ideas about convention, order, and control—control of women.Because witches are fundamentally characterized by their defiant failure to fit, they are woman always, but they are un-woman too—undisciplined, unnerving, unnatural. Thankfully, they are not normal; rather, they enjoy a transgressive jouissance—an ontological joy of difference from the heteronormative standard: the married, childbearing, second-class woman and second sex female owned by God's decree and husband's law. Witches revel in their contrary aspirations: they live apart; they eat children; they help young girls achieve a sense of their own personhood and agency; they are lesbian in their refusal to accept Oedipus as the father of all wanton desires. I could go on. And I will. Unnatural and abnormal, she dwells on the other side of the binary slash; also anomalous, ambivalent, liminal, magical, and shapeshifting, sitting at the crossroads of life and death on a throne of decaying garbage, she makes a claim for living beyond dualistic restrictions. Witches bitch the binary. Do they break it? Sometimes I think they do . . . Here, as likely you've already discerned and tweeted from the audience (Dom, I see you posting), I am interested once again in affirming the potential for bringing folk narrative interpretation closer to feminist and queer strategies for telling, reading, listening, and knowing. I uphold that a genuine connection exists between folklore and queerlore by underscoring the effectiveness of feminist and queer methods and theories to enhance our ability to read traditional stories in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the reverse also proves true: foundational folk narrative resources—from story collections to historic-geographic methods, from tale type and motif indexes to structural analysis—all these assets should be found on gender and literature syllabi universities-wide. I'm preaching to the coven here, I know, but it bears remembering: folkloristics alone in the humanities provides the evidence and the tools, too often under-utilized, even unrecognized in related fields, for demonstrating the social and artistic effectiveness of telling the same old story twice or 1,000 times and interpreting it differently over time and in different contexts. Let me count the ways I have successfully introduced the motif and tale type indexes to trans and gender queer students and artists seeking foundational support for their scholarship and works.In my own practice, those tools are effectively deployed for story interpretation opened up by the feminist and lesbian reading revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, under the umbrella of “reader response” theory, Bonnie Zimmerman's “perverse reading” (1993) invited the willful lesbian interpretation of literature against the grain of heteronormative convention. Once those doors of perception opened, there was no going back. Queer theory then added Eve Sedgwick's methods for what she termed “reparative reading” that consider “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003:150–1). Further, Tammy Clewell says that in reparative reading, Sedgwick finds an impulse “that seeks to move away from minimizing pain and toward maximizing pleasure . . . toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self’” (Clewell 2017:59).4 Let's extract some sustenance, shall we? Let's feed off some big questions about socially spurned, politically burned witches—the kind of questions a queer feminist folklorist asks.Why do witches fly? Where do they go? How does it feel to fly? What can be learned from the witch in flight? Why should we care? For me, these questions combine like glyphs on an endgame Rosetta Stone. And to approach deciphering them gestures toward another, greater question, one we all must ask: Why folklore?We'll leave that last anxiety-producing question aside for now to concentrate on the witch quandary. In the Western imagination, helped initially by the threatening pornographic visual culture of witches promoted in the engravings, woodcuts, and drawings of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Hans Baldung (1484–1545), our popular stereotype of the broom-straddling witch overrides (pun intended) her much older avian associations. Broom-flying witches hardly exist before they are shown in print after 1450, when Gutenberg's invention of the printing press allowed for widespread dissemination of their provocative deviant image. One of the earliest and best-known at the time is a tiny hand-painted illumination of two sorceresses, one on a broom, the other on a stick, depicted in the marginalia of Martin Le Franc's allegorical poem on the nature of woman, Le Champion des Dames, published in limited edition in 1451 (Zika 2007:63–4). But long before brooms, cooking sticks, and giant spindles were mounted lasciviously in nocturnal flights to meet-ups with the devil, witches worldwide flew with wings.5In the beginning was the witch, and the witch was a woman, but not only a woman. She was part bird. Take Lilith. Biblically referred to only once in Isaiah 34:14–15 in a list of creatures exiled to the desert, the King James Bible aligns her with the “screech owl,” alluding to night flights in search of prey. My old King James reads “yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place” (Isa. 34:14). This scant mention gave rise to numerous apocryphal stories assigning Lilith as the first wife of Adam, a “mistake” made by God. Though he created both from the same earth, she was not given equal rights or dominion. Angered, she refused to submit to Adam and flew away. Or, she was exiled by God and flew away to the Red Sea, or flew away and returned in vengeful attacks on Adam, Eve, and their progeny. Underscore or hashtag “she flew away.” She had wings, and when the patriarchal going got rough, she angrily fluttered off. Lilith's sisters include the Greek Furies and Sirens, hybrid bird-woman figures, both desirous and headstrong.6Not as old but old enough, the Russian fairy-tale character Baba Yaga retains bird-like qualities too. She lives in a house on chicken leg stilts and famously loves flying about in a mortar, using the pestle for a rudder and a broom to sweep her tracks. Dubravka Ugrešić links her origins to early Slavic and Russian tales and images conflating birds and women, including hens and magpies (2009:301–11).Remaining for the most part earthbound themselves, the Grimms’ fairy-tale witches still associate with birds and engage in magical avian transformations. The witch in “Jorinda and Joringle” (ATU 405) deserves special mention. A bit of an avian-a-holic who can turn herself into a night owl, she captured over 7,000 innocent young ladies and turned them into birds caged in her castle. In a local Russian legend, recounted by Ugrešić, witches about to be burned in Moscow by Ivan the Terrible turn into magpies and fly away (Ugrešić 2009:306). Folklorist Barbara Rieti's study of Newfoundland witch lore recounts a fisherman's boat being pursued by a crow. Having no luck getting a fish, he shoots and wounds the crow that he believes is a witch out to curse him. Later, he sees an old woman walking near the shore with her arm in a sling (Rieti 2012:1).These are but a few examples suggesting that in stories widespread over time, avian-female hybridity affords witches an essential means of flight. Part of the answer to why witches fly is because they possess the physical instrument—bird wings—to do so. But, of course, there's more. The very early association of women and birds poses ontological as well as utilitarian questions concerning the need for, or desirability of, flight. The figure of the winged witch captivates; her many stories reveal a complex, contradictory, and for me, a strangely consoling nature.I turn now to one such story I first read decades ago. From house to house, I have carted among my most precious possessions the beaten up, spine-broken book in which it appears because that same book is also my folklore touchstone. Américo Paredes published his edited collection Folktales of Mexico in 1970, one in the popular University of Chicago Press series “Folktales of the World,” edited by Richard Dorson. This was back in the day of incentivized folktale collections being published when widespread popular interest in traditional narratives followed on the heels of the 1960s folk song revival.I ordered the book as background reading for a yearlong excursion to Mexico in 1974—the life-changing journey that later brought me to folklore studies. I didn't know who Dr. Paredes was, but the book's back cover described him as a University of Texas professor who directed the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History. To this day, I can see myself reading that little bio and coming to a halt on the word “folklore.” That light that has gone bright for many of us, turned bright for me: “FOLKLORE,” I said aloud to myself, “maybe that's what I'm interested in.” It seems fitting to return to Dr. Paredes’ influence on me. Mexico's influence. Mexican American women's influence. That's where I started, and it's a great pleasure to round the bend of a full circle with you this evening by paying some dedicated attention to Paredes’ anthologized story called “The Witch Wife” (1970:27).Sourced by Paredes as a localized legend or caso (belief tale), the story is widespread in Greater Mexico, he says. The version Paredes published was originally collected by Jacob Pimentel S. in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on September 24, 1954. It was told to him by Efrain A. Paniagua, a 35-year-old schoolteacher, and subsequently published in an article “Creencias” ([1955:159]; see note in References Cited for Paredes tale is I'll give it to you “The Witch say that in the of San Cristóbal de Las there a and his The woman was a witch and she was her It was her to say some that made the from her but the Then she wings, and the go out flying through the In this she go out night and out at her found out she was him and that her out he to One night he in he was as his wife got out of and out into the got up too and followed in the he the from his and from her Then he her fly making a like he got over his he where the was, and he it up into with his Then he over it so it Then he back and in a and for the to this the before the and said the to make it back in But the not because it was The flew away. are the who see this being flying through the at and they say it and the tale a of witch found in of including Witch through the Witch followed by his wife is a and Witch who is out of is from it when or In the same collection, Paredes also us tales of witches with and of a witch who the of a Our witch wife tale links with such as “The found in A. of American Folktales The witch story is also one of the greater of night hag and old hag some of which women who out of their My own limited of witch hope to do more in Presidential on stories of a who into your house as a of and the whose is not long to cover her turn now to Wife” with the of working a tale to for the question of witch flight. I from the of and whose structural to story analysis I continue to Our tale in are on and with and are of course, by not binary but For the tale a ontological How can a woman create a the tale in but as says of so we can say of tales such as this with any of we for the when the are binary this potential for including one that a aspect of feminist Paredes it is told by a to a I read it and “The Witch Wife” as a story of great interest for One of feminist analysis it into the patriarchal of stories at women's for For me, the central of this story is its of a witch woman who for her own Our interest in with my feminist and queer theory to that flight proves a to the female by the of out of the that her as a woman owned by a in day, she her and the not walking alone on the that in Mexican are the of a woman out of the witch wife to the by cover of her and once to its binary I that in both she to a is a and if she the earthbound as she all the She them into of her power to leave life to that other kind of of folk and tales give us of for The wife have been out for That she flew on a is in the was her . . . to herself using The also her within a of where she those In that we into the world of by witches across of traditional In a world that women and the power of a given evidence here, a woman to off the owned by and rise in the that to her me our wife have it both by day, by And that's her She some time in the night where her find and the binary she even her . . . her was to She around out most likely who enjoy such If only her had But his in on to his of the to made their This who he his wife by her with the into it with The of the by his and the in by he he the that her for him as a to all the and that women under the of very she to be the the but from it, our witch into know, I think him. Though this version of the story a to return to her does she also over not being to go back to him and the of I think is not an with The playing to the husband's sense of over his wife as he in the her return to the A different or as her this “The or flew away.” The story does leave her as an But does she that one she and the it and she still in to as in the Lilith do witches fly? Lilith and the Witch millennia that witches fly in to fly in the of and who of women as their The Wife” told in the of the seems more than the between and will help what seems like such an life and death to be in and tales the of a by at once making it a of her and her the the it is the of both and also a for and In her of her own the wife that which and female and the very of the physical and that in those the pleasure she in her and all its what it both and make women into objects by and be all of but a witch it with liminal, magical it can be for as the witch in Grimms’ “The at the (ATU in telling her young a to go to the take off her as and her own do your the witch In our by day, the her female but at it an for the witch of her to the it for to power up her This with a kind of that and by one is for the If I that we they are not at to a very different version of life and and are by a got witch on the the patriarchal and of woman. and she into the of her own she her own and desires. She a of what I'll the woman performance genres to by Richard Of interest is “what he calls the be referred to as the in the performance of in If that reads as the of the at then flying witches especially the potential for women's of the in that their and I am at I am and in the my is and for there be a better kind of from all flying around in the of is the for I know some of you to be know the witch wife is out there doing it for doing it for any who to fly with can in your and still the of understanding that a witch in flight a command performance and a flying as a kind of by equal and Our witch in flight the of She claim that can be no of and The witch commands an performance of with no in yet still a of up in the Let's fly with In the physical sense that most we feel her of recognizing it as to after she left her husband's of her she his and his A of of flight or sixteenth-century artists, such as the Dürer and witches in of wanton as the that their a for even as they a very threatening one to flying sisters could for by or wings, flight witch women from they those patriarchal to enjoy transgressive on the from her the witch wife what seems a by no a as her She as she to leave these different but related answers to our and in the through which the witch wife I us to go into the where this act of flight also a queer a from the of patriarchal and an of from the of binary or those our witch in flight is and out of not or her important Queer for a kind of queer it

In the text, I analyze Grobler᾽s strategy of countering skepticism. It boils down to two arguments, i.e. a performative contradiction and the use of the ceteris paribus clause. Another point is the concept of truth adopted by Grobler. Grobler is leaning towards the adjustment theory and aletic pluralism. I formulate critical remarks about truth as identity, the markup theory, super-conclusiveness, and finally truth as a regulative idea. I am also considering two additional requirements of Grobler, namely that the truth should be interesting and knowledge should have rich applications. I argue that the application requirement is always fulfilled.

The rise of the far right is threatening the antifascist consensus that helped rebuild Europe and the world following World War II. Discourse studies have done much to further the understanding of the success as well as the fallacies of the discourses of far-right movements and have provided the means by which to comprehend right-wing communicative strategies. However, it has also been said that the reactions of the democratic majority and the mainstream media have contributed—mainly involuntarily—to the success of right-wing politics. The role of the reactions of society, the democratic majority and the mainstream media in trying to counter right-wing discourses is widely underexplored. The aim of this contribution is to understand the diverse material and symbolic effects of certain practices of political contestation. It aims to help elaborate counterstrategies against the threat of the far right and to present communicative strategies against hate. With the help of such diverse authors as Foucault, Goffman or Habermas, we will show how democratic positions seem to be in an ideological dilemma in which the speech acts that try to counter far-right discourses very often produce the opposite effect. The article can help to overcome the pitfalls and performative contradictions of some discursive practices especially in public communications.

What should the EU do about the fact that some Member States are backsliding on their commitments to democracy, supposedly a fundamental value of the EU? The Treaty provisions under Article 7 TEU are widely criticized for being ineffective in preventing such developments. Are they legitimate? I argue that the ultimate sanction of Article 7 TEU falls into a performative contradiction, which undermines its ability to coherently defend fundamental values. Instead, expulsion from the EU is the appropriate, coherent and legitimate final political sanction for democratic and rule of law backsliding by a Member State. The argument has the following steps: In Part 1, I argue that the current Article 7 framework for responding to democratic and rule of law backsliding in the EU is normatively problematic, in that the mechanism currently in the Treaty undermines the values it purports to defend; in other words, it falls into a performative contradiction. It is undemocratic to deprive Member States of their right to vote in the Council while holding them subject to Council decisions. However, Part 2 studies relevant philosophical arguments from an adjacent literature on criminal disenfranchisement, concluding that allowing backsliding Member States to keep their voting rights in the Council also taints the democratic character of Council decision-making. In Part 3, I consider the resulting paradox in light of the literature on militant democracy. Could militant democracy justify Article 7? I argue not; even if we accept the hypothetical justifiability of militant measures, they are not legitimate here since a democratically acceptable alternative exists that would safeguard the democratic character and legitimacy of Council decision-making: expulsion from the Union. I also address a central objection to an expulsion mechanism—that it would require treaty change and is therefore practically impossible.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Frank Wilderson's Afropessimism as a analytic contains philosophical contradictions that can be resolved through currents in Afrofuturism. The article argues Wilderson's use of Orlando Patterson's concept of social death results in a performative contradiction as its claims deny the very possibility of their justification. The result is the inability to substantiate that Blackness as coterminous with Slaveness. The article then argues that Wilderson's Afropessimism is better understood as a mythology rather than an analytic. Interpreted as myth, Afropessimism can articulate the grammar of Black suffering through a religious consciousness rather than scientistic or philosophical reason. Afrofuturism serves as a resource in this task by creating images of the past and present simultaneously within consciousness. The claim is evidenced through engaging Amiri Baraka's The Slave and Octavia Butler's Kindred.

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair.

ABSTRACT Jürgen Habermas famously argues that reason cannot be rejected or criticized by employing its tools. In other words, every critique of reason has to put forward certain universal generalizations about reality. Based on this, he suspects a performative contradiction in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction – a claim which is largely dismissed by Derrida and his followers. Derrida aims at articulating the paradoxes inherent to being and justice, instead of proposing a general theoretical model of reality or a normative model of justice. In this article, I argue that there are certain generalizations at play in deconstruction. The standard Derridean interpretation of such generalizations is that they stem from the paradoxes which are at work in deconstruction. In contrast, I demonstrate that deconstruction’s belief in the paradoxes of being and morality are at least partially based on the generalizations that Derrida makes about reality. I argue that this does not deal a fatal blow to deconstruction, but requires the whole approach to assume a theoretical and normative character. I conclude that interpreting deconstruction as a theory and a normative project, rather than an atheoretical and anormative approach, will be beneficial for philosophy and political theory.

ABSTRACT This article highlights the poetics of Syrian poet Muḥammad al-Māghūt ̣(1934-2006) as forging a poetic identity enacted as a series of performative contradictions between the empirical and the poetic selves in what amounts to a discourse of “rhetorical sincerity.” This poetic discourse employs a variety of devices to communicate that the irreducibility of Arab life can be contained neither in the polished spheres of art nor in political speech-making. By situating personas close to commonalities of human struggles without subtracting critical distance, al-Māghūṭ negotiates a modernistic consciousness with values of ṣidq (sincerity) and aṣāla (authenticity). Part one develops the concept of poetic sincerity and delineates al-Māghūt'̣s cultural battles. Part two examines al-Māghūt'̣s rhythmic irregularities in “al-Qatl” (The Killing) as a key component in accomplishing the non-literary task of his ṣidq. This interpretation will hopefully elucidate the rationale behind al-Māghūt'̣s import for later poetic generations.

Political constitutionalism emerged on the Chinese academic scene in the mid-2000s as a countermovement to the rights-based, court-centered, and textual mainstream in Chinese constitutional scholarship. On the surface, it has launched a biting and sophisticated critique of academic and institutional Westernization and reasserted a sense of Chinese constitutional particularity. However, contrary to its intellectual self-representation as a genuinely Chinese phenomenon, the movement’s academic formation, methodological agenda, and theoretical vocabulary are inseparable from global ideological trends and draw heavily on European and American precedents. Consequently, the movement is troubled by a set of performative contradictions. These include the contradiction between its transnational genealogy and nationalist agenda; its pluralist theoretical makeup and anti-pluralist political rhetoric; as well as its putatively value-neutral sociological methodology and the politically selective application of said methodology. These antinomies, I argue, speak to the recurring dilemmas of “national” self-assertion in a globalized world.

This article is dedicated to the metaphilosophical pessimism of C. McGinn. McGinn is known as a main proponent of “new mysterianism” in the contemporary analytic philosophy of mind. According to mysterianism, we can’t solve the mind-body problem because of the natural cognitive limitations on our side. McGinn’s view on the nature of philosophy is the component of this conception. In general, mysterian metaphilosophy didn’t get enough coverage in the research literature but it deserves a bigger interest. McGinn argues that philosophy is actually a combination of unsolvable problems. He identifies the scientific/philosophical demarcation criterion as the potential solvability for the human mind. However, this metaphilosophical position faces serious difficulties. At first, if the objections of U. Kriegel and D. Dennett are right and the mysterian cognitive closure thesis is not sufficiently proved, then the termination of research on a number of philosophical issues may also be an unreasoned decision. Secondly, there is a threat of performative contradiction. But we could try to explain this contradiction by considering the style of analytic philosophy itself which is characterized by dialogical form and free dealing with the ideas considered as possible options. In the article, the standard methods of historicophilosophical investigation are used including the comparative analysis and the principle of objective analysis of a text in the work with sources.