Political Figuration Research Articles

Authorial Power, Authoritarianism, and Exiled Intellectuals: Syria and Turkey

How does a crisis of the state and its ‘emergency politics’ lead to a crisis of the intellectual, or what does it mean to be an intellectual in our contemporary conjuncture beyond Western clichés and the universalistic bias of their declinist arguments? In responding to these questions, we draw upon data collected from Turkish and Syrian academics living in exile to argue that the critical commitments exiled intellectuals presume are under threat as rising authoritarianisms take hold globally and advanced neo-liberal practices tighten their grip on universities. The promise of Said’s figuration of the ‘intellectual in exile’ and its political potential is also under threat as displaced scholars navigate democratic backsliding and structural precarity in the contemporary university and in the nation-states to which they have found themselves tied, eroding even further the conceptual idea of the critical intellectual and the potential power of the ‘post-colonial intellectual’. In our research, this crisis of the intellectual is recounted by exilics paradoxically in both the autocratic and the ‘nominally democratic’ higher education (HE) context where in some cases the very idea of the intellectual can represent, at least in part, a banal political figuration epitomised in what Nancy Fraser refers to as progressive neo-liberalism. This is largely so because both authoritarian and nominally democratic states, whilst different in political charge, are simultaneously invoking ‘states of emergency’ and culture wars that are eroding their own intellectual constituencies’ ability to disturb existing institutional norms and the taken for granted problems that emerge in everyday HE practices.

Antigone re-imagined: uprooted women’s political narratives

In this article I am thinking with Antigone, a political figuration that has been invested with many readings, interpretations and artistic expressions in feminist theory and beyond. The article draws on a research project of listening to migrant and refugee women’s narratives of displacement and travelling. What connects these stories via the figure of Antigone is women’s desire to tell their stories as an expression of their will to rewrite their exclusion from oppressive regimes, defend their choice of civil disobedience, grasp their passage, claim their right to have rights and affirm their determination for new beginnings. I argue that uprooted women’s narratives follow the Arendtian tripartite schema of political action by intervening in the ethics and politics of forced choices, becoming spectators of impossible actions and inscribing mnemonic traces in emerging decolonial histories and feminist genealogies.

Représentation et incarnation

La synodalité est une question théologico-politique qui concerne l’identité de l’Église, sa gouvernementalité et ses rapports avec son environnement politique et social. Entre les deux procédés traditionnels, dans la pensée et la pratique politiques occidentales, de figurer un ensemble social et de poser sa direction par un petit nombre, la représentation et l’incarnation, l’Église a toujours privilégié le second par rapport au premier. Pourtant, la synodalité n’ignore pas la procédure représentative mais selon des modalités qui rappellent moins le mandat libéral que les procédures médiévales de la pars pro toto . Elle présente ainsi l’esquisse d’une démocratie non pas procédurale mais substantielle qui peut apparaître comme un modèle de gestion et de figuration politiques surmontant la crise native et permanente de la représentation.

Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time by Jaime Rodríguez Matos

Reviewed by: Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time by Jaime Rodríguez Matos Alberto Moreiras Rodríguez Matos, Jaime. Writing of the Formless. José Lezama Lima and the End of Time. Fordham UP, 2017. 232 pp. It is difficult, certainly in less than 1250 words, to provide even a summary account of the complex arguments Jaime Rodríguez Matos presents in his Writing of the Formless. Let me take a risk, then, and venture a proposition that might cut down to some of the wiring: when, back in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time in which literature was still the uncontested queen of the humanities, we used to hear, or say, that Latin American authors, or some of them at least, were great because of their "transgression of the western frontiers of understandability" (1), did we really mean it? It was already ridiculous then to posit that the various episodes of magical realism in García Márquez, or the displacing pretensions of Carpentier's real maravilloso, actually challenged Western metaphysics, although a couple of notorious professors might not have refrained from doing so. But something else could have been said of, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, the best Julio Cortázar, the best José María Arguedas, and certainly José Lezama Lima: that their work did push the reader all the way to the limits of Western ontotheology, in various [End Page 807] and complicated ways. It was to be the task of the (Latin Americanist) critic to elucidate those literary stances and put them at the service of a postcolonial "critical regionalism" that might create an alternative for thinking. I think it is fair to say, even if it is also risky, that such a project was cut short by the advent of cultural studies. High theory, in the precise if rather infrequent sense of a radical and rigorous confrontation of the literary from philosophical positions, took a hit on the neck from which it may not have recovered. The notion of critical regionalism had its small death then. What Writing of the Formless manages is, however, much more than a resuscitation: the book is an intricate and precise demonstration of the fact that José Lezama Lima, writing as a Catholic, and writing in ambiguous perplexity within the political atmosphere of the Cuban Revolution, brings an epochal end to political metaphysics, brings an end to literature as an aesthetic supplement to political theology, brings an end to the poetic pretensions of filling in for the lost object, of offering an alternative to the abyss of ground that revolutionary modernity had bequeathed in disavowed nihilism. This does not mean that high literature is not possible after Lezama; only that no high literature after Lezama could survive its own preposterousness if it were to understand itself either as redemption or as a way into political redemption. Writing of the Formless limits its case to Lezama, whose work stands as a monumental metonymy for a Latin American "imaginary era" of the end of epochality itself. But there is, in principle, no obstacle for work on other writers to make its own case. It was perhaps Lezama's Catholicism that led him down a path that allowed him to ignore political theology—after all, for a Catholic, only God may command. After God's death, no commanding agency is meaningful. When you cut off the head of the king, whose legitimacy is God-given, nihilist disorder necessarily follows. The age of revolutions opens the age of a fundamental void in politics—there is no legitimacy for political figuration, pace Kant, or Weber, or even Gramsci (the Hegelian-Marxian paradigm may be seen as the ultimate attempt to contain nihilism within history as law and law as history). This is a void that cannot be denied, and yet most modern thinkers have made it their career to deny it, as a matter of their own survival. In the denial of the void, a lie—something planned and plotted as a lie, compensatory in nature for the absence of truth it dissembles—is enthroned as "the highest value," and that lie is called politics. In...

Cecília Meireles e sua atuação política na educação brasileira: literatura, jornalismo e feminino

O artigo é um recorte de tese de doutoramento e tem como objetivo compreender o contexto educacional brasileiro sob o viés literário e histórico, entre 1930 e 1940, período em que os processos de engajamento social feminino se refletem na figuração educacional e política do país, descrita na produção jornalística e literária de Cecília Meireles. Cecília publicou materiais pedagógicos como cartilhas e livros infantis, escrevendo diariamente no jornal Diário de Notícias, na seção Página de Educação, coluna Comentário, de 1930 a 1933, e posteriormente em 1941. Nossas fontes se pautaram nessas publicações, por ter embates, críticas, discussões e orientações aos educadores em defesa dos direitos da criança. Como resultado, almejamos compreender em que modo a literatura perpassa a produção escrita da autora, e quais as implicações a partir dos equilíbrios de poder existentes na figuração da política educacional brasileira.

The medium is the mob

Conventional narratives frame flash mobs as exemplary of the broader changes in politics, culture, and social relations brought on by new media technologies. Missing from these stories is an account of the mob itself. How do we make sense of the mob’s intensities, of the sublime power that emanates from the congregation of bodies together in space, and the ambiguities with which those intensities are received – without reducing these dimensions to the overdetermined power of a new medium? Using a broader theorization of mediation, I argue that the mob needs to be accounted for as a medium unto itself, that flash mobs present a complex ‘intermedium’ relationship between new media and the mob as a powerful but ambiguous social mediation, and that by attributing the apparent power to new media technologies, we risk undermining the efficacy of the mob as a political figuration.

The Crowd

What if we took the phrase la démocratie à venir at its word? In other words, what if we understood ‘democracy to come’ as the abrupt arrival of the people, as the instant in which a crowd floods in with overwhelming force? Reading Jacques Derrida alongside Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power, ‘The Crowd’ answers these questions by considering Derrida's ‘democracy to come’ in terms of political figuration rather than representation. Through the tropes of touch, masking and flight, this paper explores the play of distances that occurs between members in the crowd and in turn suggests an inextricable link between democratic thought, on the one hand, and, on the other, the metamorphoses that the crowd precipitates. Between fluidity and paralysis, individual and collective, this paper grapples with a surprising aporia—that democracy is the aristocratic secret of the crowd. ‘The Crowd’ was originally presented as ‘La Foule’ at the 2002 Cerisy Conference, La démocratie à venir (Autour de Jacques Derrida), which explored the political significance of Derrida's work.

O Consenso Indispensável: figuração do político no discurso de comandantes militares brasileiros: 1979-1988

This article aims to analyze the content of agendas issued by the Brazilian military ministers in the period of political transition (1979-1988), with the aim of checking these documents, permitting identification of a particular type of political figuration by military elites then. The work builds on formulations made by Marcel Gauchet, for whom the politic is an instance of human life that leads to the community and interdependence among individuals. Our analysis points out, in these speeches, a very limited vision of democracy, rejecting dissent and autonomous organization of social movements, and that would hinder the effective implementation of a democratic state in Brazil.

Antigone, Deportee

This paper reads Sophocles’ Antigone as a text about deportation, which is to say, about the “forcible removal” of non-citizens from a given polity. Developed from a seemingly small shift in the play, namely Creon’s decision not to kill Antigone in one fell swoop as announced in the edict but to place her in a subterranean chamber (866) subject to a “living death” with some food rations, this reading proposes that the cave-space is not merely a site for just or unjust punishment (and certainly not for a mitigated sentence), but a legal and political figuration underpinning sovereignty’s putatively “blameless” ( hagno[s] , 889) rupturing of a person’s juridico-political existence.

"We Are the Disease"

Starting from the importance of the figure of the parrhesiastes—the political and therapeutic truth-teller—for Foucault's understanding of the care of the self, this paper traces the political figuration of the analogy between philosophers and physi - cians on the one hand, and rhetors and disease on the other in Plato's Gorgias. I show how rhetoric, in the form of ventriloquism, infects the text itself, and then ask how we account for the effect of the contaminated philosophical dialogue on our readerly health. Is the text placebo, vaccine, or virus? All of these options, I argue, complicate Foucault's prescription for parrhesia, requiring us to think anew the continuing political ramifications of the metaphor of care.

Civil–military relations and political order in Guinea-Bissau

ABSTRACTSince independence in 1974 the military of Guinea-Bissau have succeeded in controlling the political system, even attempting to impose their rule directly in the aftermath of the 1998/9 war. What makes the analysis of civil–military relations and political order in contemporary Guinea-Bissau particularly challenging is the overlapping of political, ethnic and personal considerations of the politico-military elite and their fluctuating and ambiguous short-term alliances. Guinea-Bissau's armed forces include an amalgam of veterans, claiming historical legitimacy from the liberation war, and officers who use their positions for personal gain rather than furthering democracy and national interests. This article examines the logic of civil–military relations against the heterarchical political figuration and the specific character of the politico-military elite of Guinea-Bissau.

‘Civilised Games’?: Beijing 2008, power politics, and cultural struggles

This paper, first published in 2005, examines the tensions and key groups involved in the cultural struggles that underpinned the awarding of the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing. In doing so, attention is drawn to broader questions concerning global sport and Olympism, globalization and geopolitical issues, and Sino-Western civilizational struggles. The impact on global sport of the intercultural relations evident in the ‘flame relay’ prior to the games in 2008, and evident in the Beijing Olympics themselves, is yet to be fully assessed. While the security arrangements surrounding mega-events, such as in the lead up to London 2012 have become ever tighter, such issues are symptoms of these wider set of dilemmas regarding global relations. These dilemmas concern the emergent global, cultural, economic and political figuration of the twenty-first century. Insights to such issues can be gained from a process-sociological perspective – the study of London 2012 may well prove no exception.

Politicians, bureaucrats and a voluntary sports organization – the power play of Norwegian sport policy in the matter of anti-doping

The aim of this essay is to understand the tripartite relationship between politicians and bureaucrats in the public sector and the leadership in voluntary sport organizations. In so doing, we conducted a case study of a specific incident in the history of sport policy, based on written texts (newspaper articles and books) as well as interviews (personal information) from those involved. With Elias's game models as the theoretical framework, we analyse the case where the General Director of the Department of Sport Policy (DSP) expressed his personal/political opinion about anti-doping in public, and played the game in two figurations. First, the game was played in the sport figuration, where the General Director's competitors were the leaders of the voluntary sport organization (the Norwegian Olympic Committee and Confederation of Sports, NOC). Second, the game moved up a level and was played in a political figuration, where the General Director's competitors were the political leadership in the DSP. While the Director General was used to playing one to one, the combination of a union sport figuration and the formal power in the political figuration led to an outcome that no one had intended, namely the resignation of the Director General.

La Turquie et l'Europe : incarnation de l'État et représentation de la société au XXe siècle

<titre>Turkey and Europe: Embodiment of the State and Representation of Society in the 20th Century </titre> In the debate surrounding Turkey&#8217;s integration into the EU, the country is often presented as an imperfect democracy, with a democratization process hindered by the Turkish state itself. Drawing both on Ottoman history and political philosophy, this article argues that the object to be examined with respect to its degree of democracy is less the state per se than its relationship to Turkish political society. This relationship is structured more around an opposition between the rulers and the ruled &#8211; an Ottoman legacy &#8211; than around distinctions derived from the theory of representation, in contradistinction to modern democracies. In fact, the very nature of the Ottoman state &#8211; defined by an original combination of dynastic legitimacy, autocracy and elite reproduction &#8211; isolated the Sultan&#8217;s Empire in its final years from the trends toward democratization that European political societies were experiencing. Analyzing the elements of continuity between the republican and imperial states and societies &#8211; revealed by the recent Ottomanist historiography &#8211; leads to emphasizing the extent to which the still perceptible Ottoman political figuration has paved the way for the construction of Kemalist state nationalism and has limited the emergence of a democratic culture of representation that conditions its integration into the EU.