Political Genealogy Research Articles

The Burning House: Revolution and Black Art

In a 1961 radio discussion about Black art and its relationship to Black nationalism, Lorraine Hansberry asked: “Is it necessary to integrate oneself into a burning house?” James Baldwin quoted Hansberry in The Fire Next Time without citing her—words that circulated widely in the Black liberation movement. Variously attributed to Malcolm X, Baldwin, and King, Hansberry’s role in this literary political genealogy has been unacknowledged. She was riffing on Malcolm X’s idea of Islam as a “flaming fire.” But he also developed his parable of the master’s house on fire after Baldwin quoted Hansberry’s words, using the burning house as a symbol of revolution, class struggle, and the relationship between property and citizenship rights in a racial capitalist system. That Malcolm X influenced the Black Arts Movement is widely acknowledged, but he also read, listened to, and conversed with leftist artists, writers, and intellectuals that influenced the development of his own thought and rhetoric. This article explores the call and response between these intellectuals, their critique of integration, and call for a radical Black art—looking at Hansberry’s seminal contribution to these debates.

Soundtracks of citizenship: social and political genealogies of Moroccan hip hop

ABSTRACTSince the 1990s, Hip hop created unique platforms for reclaiming the nation and forging citizenship desires. I explore this blending of citizenship desires into soundtracks and lyrics as a pedagogy of citizenship that hip hop artists activated through songs, role modelling, and the forging of creative spaces in which responsible citizenship is defined and enacted. I first highlight hip hop as a new field of identification and diasporic imagination for the first generation of Hip hop artists in the 1990s. Before analyzing the lyrics of a few tracks, I stress the social and political genealogy of Moroccan rap to illustrate the rappers’ articulation of national belonging in the context of Islamization of public discourse and the global fight against terror. Hip hop has shaped new spaces for the pedagogical enacting of citizenship engagements in music, fashion, and community engagement.

Blockchain as Res Publica: Towards a Political Genealogy of a Distributed Ledger

This paper focuses on the political genealogy of one of the most promising and influential IT technologies of our time: the blockchain (or distributed registry). We point at important commonalities between the principles of blockchain projects and models of republican governance. In contrast to techno-anarchist and democratic ideas, the republican genealogy of blockchain has so far failed to attract the attention of researchers. After examining the basic technical properties and ideological images of blockchain, we explore how the four main principles of classical republicanism (personal freedom and autonomy of the individual; civic virtues; common good; recognition of great causes) are realized in influential blockchain projects — Bitcoin (developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto) and Ethereum (developed by Vitalik Buterin). The functioning of blockchain nodes is supported by a community of miners, who are free, but at the same time agree to act for the development of a common thing. What the republic and the blockchain have in common is that it is impossible to have a community without cooperative action. At the same time, blockchain is a vivid illustration of Bruno Latour's argument on the role of non-humans in social relations: his code seeks to replace untrustworthy humans with rule-acting nodes, and to create a cryptographic society where untrustworthy human relations are replaced by computers' relations. This article is an invitation to begin a discussion of the political ideas that are embedded in new technologies and the models of governance that are mobilized through them, often without proper reflection on the nature of such ideas by their creators.

Sterowana promocja miasta. O politycznym rodowodzie „Ptolemeuszowej Kalisii”

A Manipulated Promotion of a City. From the Political Genealogy of the “Ptolemeo’s Calisia” Author of this contribution aims to offer a historical panorama of the so called „18th- Centuries of Kalisz”, a jubilee of this Polish town – claimed officialy to be the oldest in this country during series of events, organised in 1960. A deep background and goals of this politically-fueled anniversary can be traced in and reconstructed from archives, press reports and postwar city guides. A precisely prepared event, the jubilee is analysed in terms of critical gesture of local political elites and official discourse of historiography, aiming at critical discontinuation from the interwar legacy of Kalisz, a town restored and reconstructed after the Great War. Author presents various aspects of the 1960-anniversary of Kalisz as manipulations in social memory, discussing also investment campaign initiated by the socialist authorities in the 1960s and related to the jubilee. As a result of alliance between the local and state-dictated political discourses of the anniversary, Kalisz has still been “the oldest town in Poland”, despite the irrelevance of this claim to historical facts, obscuring the real urban legacy of the town.

The Psychosis of Power: A Lacanian Reading of Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme

In the mid-seventies, Paraguay was two decades into what would ultimately be the second longest dictatorship in its history, second only to the reign of its “founding father,” Doctor José Rodríguez Gaspar de Francia. The regime of Alfredo Stroessner justified its existence and articulated its continued role in Paraguayan politics on a genealogy of national identity that had its supposed roots in the Francia government, Francia’s political ideology and, in fact, in the historical person of Francia himself. In this essay I show how the great Paraguayan writer Augusto Roa Bastos’s 1974 novel, I, the Supreme, takes aim at the “kernel of the real” in the Stroessner regime’s political genealogy, using fiction to make evident its anamorphic manipulation of national and nationalist identity. By taking at its word the regime’s historical discourse, I, the Supreme reveals the psychotic logic animating its version of political power.

European Strategic Autonomy: The Test Case of Iran

Abstract The ideal of the European Union (EU) as a global peace and security actor is increasingly clashing with the reality of a multipolar world defined by militarised conflict, and a loosening of the formerly close trans-Atlantic relationship with the United States. European policy-makers have identified strategic autonomy as a possible remedy in the face of a growing number of internal and external security threats. This paper adds to the conceptualisation of strategic autonomy by contextualising its current usage and political genealogy. Empirically, European strategic autonomy is examined concerning the efforts to preserve the Iranian nuclear deal after the Trump administration had ceased US participation in May 2018. In particular, the paper assesses the European response to counter the re-imposed unilateral United States (US) sanctions against European individuals and entities by updating the so-called blocking regulation, and setting up a special purpose vehicle (spv) for facilitating trade with Iran. The results show that the European struggle toward achieving strategic autonomy has largely failed, but that it holds valuable lessons to approximate this ideal in the future.

Rancor: Sephardi Jews, Spanish Citizenship, and the Politics of Sentiment

AbstractIn 2015, Spain approved a law that offered citizenship to the descendants of Sephardi Jews expelled in 1492. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, and historical sources, I show that this law belongs to a political genealogy of philosephardism in which the “return” of Sephardi Jews has been imagined as a way to usher in a deferred Spanish modernity. Borrowing from anthropological theories of “racial fusion,” philosephardic thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century saw Sephardi Jews as inheritors of a racial mixture that made them living repositories of an earlier moment of national greatness. The senator Ángel Pulido, trained as an anthropologist, channeled these intellectual currents into an international campaign advocating the repatriation of Sephardi Jews. Linking this racial logic to an affective one, Pulido asserted that Sephardi Jews did not “harbor rancor” for the Expulsion, but instead felt love and nostalgia toward Spain, and could thus be trusted as loyal subjects who would help resurrect its empire. Today, affective criteria continue to be enmeshed in debates about who qualifies for inclusion and are inextricable from the histories of racial thought that made earlier exclusions possible. Like its precursors, the 2015 Sephardic citizenship law rhetorically fashioned Sephardi Jews as fundamentally Spanish, not only making claimsaboutSephardi Jews, but also making claimsonthem. Reckoning with how rancor and other sentiments have helped buttress such claims exposes the recalcitrant hold that philosephardic thought has on Spain's present, even those “progressive” political projects that promise to “return” what has been lost.

Addressing the political dynamics of radicalization leading to religious extremism in Bangladesh

When radicalization and religious extremism is predominantly perceived through the prism of ‘9/11’ and/or ‘Post-Soviet Muslim radicalization’, there is a danger of oversimplifying the phenomenon of extremism for majoritarian Muslim societies like Bangladesh. To understand the dynamics of religious radicalization, it is imperative to devise a political genealogy and identify both micro and macro level political drivers of radicalization by addressing the political histories, catalysts, and risk factors related to religious extremism. Considering the paucity of research on this particular area, this paper sets out to understand and address the political drivers that facilitate the process of radicalization leading to religious extremism in Bangladesh. Adopting qualitative approach, this paper has conducted content analysis of pertinent secondary sources based on predetermined sets of categories for analysis. The results indicate that explicit support by the military rulers for Islamic orthodoxy, culture of political opportunism in democratic regimes and weak governance are some of the major political drivers of radicalization and religious extremism in the country. At a regional and global level, insurgency and separatist movements in neighborhood countries, global political environment of confrontation between the West and the Muslim World and the identity politics altogether fostered radicalization leading to religious extremism in Bangladesh.

Theory Saves, But only Practice Pays Interest

Theory Saves, But only Practice Pays Interest Peter Hitchcock (bio) Can theory save the world? To answer what is not wholly a rhetorical question one could rephrase an old saw to the effect that: theory saves, but only practice pays interest. For theory, the theory/practice binary is obviously problematic while its solutions have a tendency to favor the former over the latter (even in ancient Greek philosophy the arguments over epistêmê and technê hardly resolve the dichotomy yet provide a base if not a form for contemporary debate). There is a long tradition in theory in which conceptual metaphors do the work of sublating the divide and the poetics of praxis shake crisis to its core. This does not blunt in any way the radical import of, for instance, theoretical practice, waywardness, intimacy, blur, and occasionally common or garden deconstruction, and neither does it undo the power of intersectional assemblages, co-constitutive subject articulation, and the dissidence of disidentification. The scene of theory is so bound to practice that terminological exuberance itself is no more than agential will, one where confronting inequality and injustice can hardly be faulted for an expression of force in the idea. I find so much theory of this kind inspiring I come close to producing another suspect indulgence, eclecticism, so here I hope that in this brief note I can suggest a political genealogy around the initial question that, even if it does not fully embrace logical consistency (which would be the third sin in this opening précis) it might nevertheless offer a challenge for further deliberation. Without recounting all of the reasons we need theory, one could start with the position that theory offers a basic abstraction on the Real in the service of transforming reality. This could mean confronting capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism and socio-economic hierarchies and discrimination of every stripe by beginning with aesthetics as itself a challenge. The invocation of the aesthetic seems at once out of joint, as if the cultural conditions of expression do not inflect, or are not inflected by the contradictions of socialization as such. Still, the extravagance of artistic practice is often limned to the luxury of theoretical articulation with both becoming a blot on the apprehension of real struggle. Much of the production of radical theory in our field seeks to save the world from such misconstrual. Yet, because this act is socially [End Page 543] and historically determined, one must also acknowledge that in this conjuncture, one marked by the crisis and dissolution of the Humanities in higher education as a viable arena of disputation, theoretical production can seem like arch and desperate pleading, or else demonstrate that the art of fiddling did not end with Nero's calculated obliviousness. The implications of the state of the humanities, or more accurately humanities and the state, mediate the very texture of theory today. There is a responsibility to theory and theorization now that defies the heyday of high theory when, for instance, significance was often reduced to strenuous delight in signification, a practice so precious that no etymological stone was left unturned. We cannot not continue this turning; indeed, cultural theorists are wont to announce new turns at every turn (the affective turn, the ontological turn, the ecological turn, etc.), all of which necessitate neological nuance and terminological titration. Yet responsibility to the present, if not to presence, presages theory highly sensitive to its place in meaningful discussion and disputation. Few would say cultural theory saves the world, but much of it provides succor and salience before the crises of the hour. Theory should be a luxury, a communal luxury, to borrow from the artists' declarations of the Paris Commune and Kristen Ross' more recent and related use of the term; but the state, fiscal, and institutional exigencies of the Humanities today urge something akin to practical reason, primed of course with anti-bodies unapologetically hostile to Kant. I cannot with good conscience implore my graduate students in literary study to focus on a feast of exquisitely phrased and virtue-laden samples of theory if these are not pinned to or imbricated with the outlook of the profession as a whole...

Between the state and the yard: gender and political space in Haiti

This article examines the gendered political geography of postcolonial Haiti. It draws from the author's long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Mouvman Peyizan Papay (MPP), a peasants' movement established in 1973, to highlight the experience of rural women on Haiti's high Central Plateau. It mobilizes foundational work in feminist geography to address a lack of attention to the political in analyses of gender and rural life in Haiti. In so doing, it shows how militant women question and challenge patriarchal power in their daily negotiation and transformation of political space. This article proposes that women's practices of economic and sexual autonomy enact a vision of liberation that seeks to resolve the tension between the anticolonial and patriarchal dimensions of political power in Haiti. It first traces a political genealogy of the postcolonial Haitian state, and then shows how women have long been active, if unrecognized, participants in left political struggle. Next, it looks more broadly at how patriarchal power inflects agrarian space through gendered norms of property and personhood. Finally, it proposes the lakou (yard) as a space of transformation in relations between gender, land, and capital, and shows how women have cultivated and defended political space between the state and the yard.

What the manifesto manifests: Fredric Jameson, Wyndham Lewis, and the problem with ‘An American Utopia’

ABSTRACT In his essay ‘An American Utopia’ (2016) Fredric Jameson advances a reflexive usage of the manifesto genre. Rather than simply announcing a new political agenda, Jameson uses rhetoric familiar from twentieth-century socialism to deliberately elicit a negative response from his readers. Using his writing to provoke and then point to a widespread aversion to group membership, Jameson situates himself in the aftermath of so many failed twentieth-century revolutionary traditions, and demonstrates, through his textual experiment, the coercive workings of an alternative strategy. In a play of manifestation, the manifesto manifests a reaction that it harnesses to illustrate its point. Rather than focusing on the universal army itself, I am interested in Jameson’s reflexive rhetorical strategy, a game of stimuli-and-response that itself has an artistic and political genealogy. From this perspective ‘An American Utopia’ is less like The Communist Manifesto, and rather more like Wyndham Lewis’s 1914 ‘Vorticist Manifesto’, a modernist precursor both to Jameson’s reflexive usage of the genre and its positing of a widespread, violent anti-sociality. I use this comparison between Jameson and Lewis as a vantage point from which some of the problems with Jameson’s innovative strategy can more clearly be discerned.

Estallido Social e Historia de las Mujeres: construcción de genealogía política feminista en Chile

El presente artículo analiza las implicancias del Estallido Social para la producción de Historia de las Mujeres, a partir del protagonismo del movimiento feminista y de mujeres en el desarrollo de las movilizaciones iniciadas el 18 de octubre de 2019 en Chile. El objetivo central, es reflexionar en torno a la reivindicación de la participación de las mujeres en las luchas sociales del pasado que surge en el movimiento feminista actual y la consiguiente interpelación hacia la historiografía chilena. En ese sentido, se plantea como hipótesis que la participación sociopolítica del movimiento feminista en el contexto del Estallido ha abierto perspectivas y desafíos para la investigación histórica con perspectiva de género, especialmente en lo que respecta a la reconstrucción e interpretación de la trayectoria de las luchas de mujeres en nuestro país, posibilitando la formulación de una genealogía política que otorgue sentido de continuidad al movimiento feminista en el contexto actual.

The policy shift towards citizenship education in Flanders. How can it be explained?

ABSTRACT In 2018 the Flemish Government agreed to introduce citizenship education for all students in secondary schools. This is new, since Flanders does not have an elaborated tradition of citizenship education. After a presentation of the political genealogy and the content of the new educational goals, the article analyses which theoretical framework can be used to explain this policy shift in Flanders. Conventional theories such as ‘interest groups’ and ‘rational choice’ do not serve the purpose. We argue that the policy transformation can better be explained by a combination of both the ‘path dependent explanation’ and ‘the paradigm creates politics approach’. While the paradigm shift has certainly played a big role, it does not offer the full explanation why Flanders formulated official learning goals for citizenship education. The path-way change has been initiated by a small reference in a parliamentary document to a European text in an early stage of the overall reform process of the educational goals in Flanders.

The Chinese Advantage in Emergency Law

Abstract This Article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it offers comparative materials for an informed discussion of COVID-determined emergency law in China and Italy by assessing its normative implications and political genealogy. On the other hand, it explores the essential contiguity between the ‘state of exception’ triggered by the pandemic and the possible geopolitical shifts in global legal hegemony in the actual phase of surveillance capitalism which is witnessing a decline of law as a form of social organization and its replacement by the predictive models elaborated by technology. In this respect, the traditional Western iconography has long described the Chinese legal tradition as a “law without law”, a despotic regime with intrusive population surveillance whose distance from the Western paradigm is deemed almost unbridgeable. And yet the legal response to coronavirus both in Europe and in the U.S. somewhat replicates the allegedly distant Chinese model in terms of restrictions and surveillance mechanisms which are being deployed to counter the crisis in the face of a formal commitment to the rule of law. This Article concludes that the emerging pre-eminence of the “rule of technology” over the “rule of law” in a critical event of historic proportions like a pandemic should and will set the future agenda of comparative studies in a double direction. On the one hand it calls for a truly critical reconsideration of role of law in society which in turn impels to rethink the hold of the liberal constitutional model and the obsolescence of traditional legal taxonomies. On the other hand, it might point to the emergence of an unexpected Chinese legal leadership, determined by the progressive undoing of the Western legal and political narratives whose backbone has been relentlessly eroded by decades of neoliberalism and populism.

Refashioning the Ethiopian monarchy in the twentieth century: An intellectual history

ABSTRACT This article traces the shift in the Ethiopian monarchical ideology from lineage as symbolic Christian filiation to dynasty as a political genealogy of sovereign power. From the end of the nineteenth century, and more prominently under Haylä Səllase, Ethiopian state sources started qualifying the Ethiopian ruling dynasty as ‘unbroken’ in history. A record of ‘uninterrupted’ power allowed the Ethiopian government to politically appropriate past glories and claim them as ‘ours’, thus compensating for the political weakness of the present with the political greatness of the past. The ideological rebranding of the Ethiopian monarchy in the 1930s brought Ethiopia closer to Japan, and the ‘eternalist clause’ of the Meiji constitution offered a powerful model of how to recodify dynasty in modern legal terms. An intellectual history of dynasty in the Ethiopian context sees the concept simultaneously associated with both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic political projects. The narratives of continuity enabled by the dynastisation of history were successful in invigorating the pro-Ethiopian front during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1936–1941), but served at the same time to reinforce domestic mechanisms of class, political and cultural domination.

Voicing Change. The Popular Subject of Protest Music in Revolutionary Cairo (2011-2013)

Since the outbreak of protests in January 2011, arts have been central to the ongoing Egyptian revolution. In this article, I focus on protest music in Cairo in between 2011 and 2013 as a way to capture a specific interplay of culture and political engagement. Through examples of protest music and chants, I unpack the cultural and political construction of el sha'ab (the people) as a process in flux throughout the ongoing protests. Performances of protest music and chants in the square voiced grievances and pride, built solidarity, and helped shape the ideal of a unified and leaderless collective we against the oppressive regime. Older and newly composed protest songs articulated a genealogy of the revolutionary subject that was at once cultural and political. The last section reflects on the post-2013 era, focusing on the different political genealogy deployed by the state to redirect the revolutionary popular will into an authoritarian project.

What Is “Labor” About Labor State Governments In Australia?

What Is “Labor” About Labor State Governments In Australia?

On Militantism in Thought: A Formal Consideration of Badiou's Political Subject

On Militantism in ThoughtA Formal Consideration of Badiou's Political Subject Jan-Jasper Persijn (bio) introduction The relation between philosophy and politics has always been a problem for philosophers rather than for politicians. Most importantly in his 1998 book Abrégé de Métapolitique, Badiou blames what he calls "political philosophy" for providing a legitimation of political discourse, insofar as every "political philosophy" necessarily comes to legitimate the State in the end. From within Badiou's philosophical system, the answer to this critique is well known: politics is one of those domains that condition philosophy by making it a retroactive moment of reflection that cannot but produce silence in the heat of political processes themselves—an idea that is most clearly articulated in his 1992 book, Conditions, but that appears throughout all of his work.1 The evident problem, then, is that it becomes hard for a philosopher to engage in politics in his function as philosopher. It has to be considered a matter of philosophical rigor that philosophy is structurally unable to produce political truths itself. However, I will argue in this essay that Badiou's philosophical system is to a certain extent conditioned by the particular form of his very own Maoist engagement. Therefore, I will follow his own logic as outlined here, that is, philosophy as conditioned by nonphilosophical truth domains. Hence, this essay applies an insight from within his theory to the historical elaboration of his system itself. In the first part of the argument, I will show how Badiou's Theory of the Subject (2009) forces the Lacanian legacy on the subject into a possibility of political emancipation. I will try to demonstrate that it is in this sense that he is able to implement his own Maoist convictions within the formal structure of his project. In a second part, I will examine the hypothesis that [End Page 27] this Maoist core is preserved in Being and Event (2005b), although the context and conditions of this book are significantly different. I will try to demonstrate a certain continuity between both parts insofar as the notion of "force" in the early work and the "event" in the later work are equally centered upon an inquiry into the subject. I will do so, however, within a limited scope, that is, without losing sight of the ongoing debates on this question of continuity in his work. In all this, it is my underlying motivation to understand all of the philosophical work of Badiou as a relevant unity, as it is suggested, following "a single idea," although crossing different philosophical territories, moments, and modalities (Badiou and Tho, 103). Insofar as the argument works, it becomes clear in what sense Badiou's philosophical inquiry reflects a certain (at least formal) Maoism—whatever that may mean for now—although still faithful to the idea that philosophy is unable to produce any truth itself. In this way, a question is addressed that Badiou asks himself as well: At bottom, what is the internal link between the traversing of the Maoist experience in all its dimensions and the arrangement of thought … ? And is this link of such a nature as to enable us truly and persuasively to isolate it, in the way I have attempted to do, starting in Being and Event, so as to reconstruct all the elements while separating them from their political genealogy? (Badiou and Bosteels, 298) the subject of force: a formal articulation It is the main aim of this first part to demonstrate how exactly a Maoist engagement can be read from the formal structure of Badiou's early philosophical project. Hence, I will point to a couple of significant moments in his early philosophical career that bear some importance for the investigation of this hypothesis. Hence, the general idea of my argument is centered upon the subject as pivotal point: insofar as its specific formal figure was, to a certain extent, "designed" to serve Badiou's political purposes, a certain militantism became formally inscribed in his philosophical system as well. More generally, this part investigates the relation between experience and thought: never "a question of history, or of historical facts" but "a matter of transmitting the...

On Militantism in Thought: A Formal Consideration of Badiou's Political Subject

On Militantism in ThoughtA Formal Consideration of Badiou's Political Subject Jan-Jasper Persijn (bio) introduction The relation between philosophy and politics has always been a problem for philosophers rather than for politicians. Most importantly in his 1998 book Abrégé de Métapolitique, Badiou blames what he calls "political philosophy" for providing a legitimation of political discourse, insofar as every "political philosophy" necessarily comes to legitimate the State in the end. From within Badiou's philosophical system, the answer to this critique is well known: politics is one of those domains that condition philosophy by making it a retroactive moment of reflection that cannot but produce silence in the heat of political processes themselves—an idea that is most clearly articulated in his 1992 book, Conditions, but that appears throughout all of his work.1 The evident problem, then, is that it becomes hard for a philosopher to engage in politics in his function as philosopher. It has to be considered a matter of philosophical rigor that philosophy is structurally unable to produce political truths itself. However, I will argue in this essay that Badiou's philosophical system is to a certain extent conditioned by the particular form of his very own Maoist engagement. Therefore, I will follow his own logic as outlined here, that is, philosophy as conditioned by nonphilosophical truth domains. Hence, this essay applies an insight from within his theory to the historical elaboration of his system itself. In the first part of the argument, I will show how Badiou's Theory of the Subject (2009) forces the Lacanian legacy on the subject into a possibility of political emancipation. I will try to demonstrate that it is in this sense that he is able to implement his own Maoist convictions within the formal structure of his project. In a second part, I will examine the hypothesis that [End Page 27] this Maoist core is preserved in Being and Event (2005b), although the context and conditions of this book are significantly different. I will try to demonstrate a certain continuity between both parts insofar as the notion of "force" in the early work and the "event" in the later work are equally centered upon an inquiry into the subject. I will do so, however, within a limited scope, that is, without losing sight of the ongoing debates on this question of continuity in his work. In all this, it is my underlying motivation to understand all of the philosophical work of Badiou as a relevant unity, as it is suggested, following "a single idea," although crossing different philosophical territories, moments, and modalities (Badiou and Tho, 103). Insofar as the argument works, it becomes clear in what sense Badiou's philosophical inquiry reflects a certain (at least formal) Maoism—whatever that may mean for now—although still faithful to the idea that philosophy is unable to produce any truth itself. In this way, a question is addressed that Badiou asks himself as well: At bottom, what is the internal link between the traversing of the Maoist experience in all its dimensions and the arrangement of thought … ? And is this link of such a nature as to enable us truly and persuasively to isolate it, in the way I have attempted to do, starting in Being and Event, so as to reconstruct all the elements while separating them from their political genealogy? (Badiou and Bosteels, 298) the subject of force: a formal articulation It is the main aim of this first part to demonstrate how exactly a Maoist engagement can be read from the formal structure of Badiou's early philosophical project. Hence, I will point to a couple of significant moments in his early philosophical career that bear some importance for the investigation of this hypothesis. Hence, the general idea of my argument is centered upon the subject as pivotal point: insofar as its specific formal figure was, to a certain extent, "designed" to serve Badiou's political purposes, a certain militantism became formally inscribed in his philosophical system as well. More generally, this part investigates the relation between experience and thought: never "a question of history, or of historical facts" but "a matter of transmitting the...

Secularism, race, religion and the Public Instruction Act of 1880 in NSW

PurposeThrough a political genealogy, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the institutionalisation of the so-called “secular principle” in NSW state schools in the late-nineteenth century, which is commonly assumed to be a historical moment when religious neutrality was enshrined in public education, was overdetermined by the politics of racialisation and ethno-nationalism.Design/methodology/approachThe historiographical method used here is labelled “political genealogy”. This approach foregrounds how every social order and norm is contingent on political struggles that have shaped its form over time. This includes foregrounding the acts of exclusion that constitute any social order and norm.FindingsThe secular principle institutionalised in the NSW Public Instruction Act of 1880, far from being the “neutral” solution to sectarian conflict, was in fact a product of anti-Catholic sentiment fuelled by the racialisation of Irish Catholicism and ethno-nationalist anxieties about its presence in the colony.Originality/valueThis paper makes clear that “the secular” in secular schooling is neither a product of historical and moral “progress” from a more “primitive” state to a more progressive one, nor a principle of neutrality that stands outside of particular historical and political relations of power. Thus, it encourages a more pragmatic and supple understanding of “the secular” in education. It also invites both advocates and critics of secular education to adapt their arguments based on changing historical circumstances, and to justify the exclusions that such arguments imply without recourse to transcendent principles.