Sovereign Subject Research Articles

Military refusers and the invocation of conscience: Relational subjectivities and the legitimation of liberal war

AbstractDuring the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals’ right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers tell. Focusing on the United States, it briefly sets out the normative context such soldiers faced, highlighting the distinction between permissible conscientious objectors and contemptible deserters. Drawing on Judith Butler, it then focuses on two refusers by reading their own accounts of themselves in their memoirs. Despite not being eligible under the regulations, both invoke their conscience to make their refusal intelligible. By listening to their detailed accounts, the article traces the production and disruption of their subjectivities in relation to the prevailing moral order. Although invoking conscience appears to provide the chance to embrace an authentic self in a bid to resist the problematic moral order, subjectivity remains fractured due to relationality. Put differently, the sovereign subjectivity required by liberal war is simultaneously undermined by it.

Toward Justice in History: Achievements and Challenges on the Seventieth Anniversary of Jeju 4.3

This year, as Jeju 4.3 met its seventieth anniversary, a wide array of events and activities are designed to inform the general public of Jeju 4.3 on a national scale, finally transforming Jeju 4.3 into a historical narrative that must be remembered by all Korean people. Furthermore, empathy for amendments of the Special Act aimed at a just settlement and healing including damage compensation spread, and the US responsibilities for the massacres of Jeju residents entered the sphere of public opinion. Along with such advances, various attempts to liberate the 4.3 discourse were forwarded, in the form of re-situating the Jeju residents at the time of 4.3 from victims to sovereign subjects in their community as well as in history. Now, the movement for truth and justice of 4.3 must move forward, with the seventieth anniversary as its foundation, by meeting the following challenges: search for specific methods for just settlement and healing; continuation of the success of nationalization; establishment and propulsion of mid-to-long-term plans for addressing US responsibilities; establishment of a system and activities that will continue the 4.3 movement through the coming generations; and locating the relevance of the spirit of 4.3 vis-a-vis liaison between this spirit and key issues at the current historical juncture.

Two Kinds of Awareness: Foucault, the Will, and Freedom in Somatic Practice

This essay identifies two kinds of awareness of one’s body that occur in a variety of literatures: awareness as psychologically or spiritually enabling or therapeutic, and awareness as undesirable self-consciousness of the body. Drawing on Foucault’s account of normalizing judgment, it argues that these two forms of awareness are impossible to separate, if that separation is into authentic versus extrinsic somatic experience. Nonetheless, awareness is an important component of embodied freedom, but a freedom understood with Spinoza and Nietzsche as grounded in necessity rather than only in the will, and with Arendt and Foucault as a practice rather than an achievement of a sovereign subject. Somatic practices grounded in awareness and acceptance of the body’s necessities, along with attention to the I-can (rather than the I-will) cultivate a form of embodied freedom that bridges care of the self and the political.

Anthropology and the Possibility of Hope

Anthropology and the Possibility of Hope1 Dermot A Lane There is a widespread recognition that anthropology is a factor underlying much of the social, political, economic and religious malaise of modern Ireland. Anthropology is the study of what it means to be a human being, an examination of what is at the core of human identity, an analysis of what promotes human flourishing, an exploration of human nature in the light of the social sciences, history, philosophy and religion. The surest sign of a deep crisis in anthropology is our contemporary inability to talk seriously about death in the public forum. The aim of this article is to construct an anthropology that builds bridges between human beings, that paves the way for a new dialogue between secularists and believers, that facilitates the formation of a coalition of hope among people of secular and theistic convictions. The article will seek to do this in four steps. Part One will show that anthropology is in crisis in a number of different disciplines. Part Two outlines some of the elements that could contribute to a reconstruction of anthropology in the twenty-first century. Part Three shows how a renewed anthropology could build bridges for a new coalition of hope among secularists and believers. Part Four concludes with a brief introduction to the shape of a theology of hope within this coalition. Anthropology – a contested area Anthropology is a thread running through many areas of life: ecology, economics, ethics, education, philosophy and theology. In ecology, Pope Francis and the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Paris both agreed in 2015 with the scientific view that the ecological crisis is caused mostly by human activity and certain expressions of anthropocentrism. Pope Francis is explicit in his criticism of what he calls ‘tyrannical’, ‘distorted’, ‘excessive’ and ‘misguided’ forms of anthropocentrism. Further, he points out that there can be no ecology without an adequate anthropology.2 In economics, Jeffrey Sachs, US economist and UN adviser, gave a key-note Studies • volume 107 • number 426 167 address on ‘Economics for the Common Good’to a conference in the London School of Economics, on 12–13 December 2016 . In his opening remarks he pointed out that ‘Economics went wildly off-track by a profoundly flawed model of human nature and a flawed model of human purpose’.3 In the area of ethics the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, has sought to open a national debate on ‘Ethics for All’. He has suggested that part of the problem has been the rise of ‘extreme individualism, grounded in a hegemonic version of the market without limit’. Further, he argues that the failure to ‘question the concept of individualism and insatiable consumption’ has been a contributing factor to our recent economic crisis.4 In the field of education, there is concern about the increasing influence of technology, metrics and managerialism at all levels of education in Ireland. A new emphasis is placed on production, where outcomes are prescribed in advance of the learning experience. A major difficulty with this approach to education is the presence of an anthropological reductionism which neglects areas such as the holistic development of students, interpersonal skills, collaboration, leadership, empathetic memory and the exercise of the creative imagination. In philosophy, modern and post-modern, anthropology has been, and continues to be deeply debated. Modern philosophy has been marked by a turn to the subject, and this has resulted in the emergence of the sovereign subject of modernity. The separated self was, and is, so strong, so confident and so independent that it became the ground of its own being: self-sufficient, selfdefining , and self-sustaining without reference to any reality outside itself. By way of reaction, post-modern philosophy radically deconstructed the self-sufficient subject of modernity. This programme of deconstruction can be summed up in the words of Michael Foucault: ‘Man is an invention of recent date’and will be ‘erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’.5 For some post-moderns the self is just a rhetorical flourish, a linguistic and cultural construct to facilitate the interaction of differences. Within Catholic feminist theology, there is a storm...

Feminist Pornocracy? Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity

Feminist Pornocracy?Femen and The Politics of Resistant Nudity Dina Al-Kassim (bio) A scene at the April 2013 Hanover trade fair illustrates the peculiar symbiosis of pornocratic rule and struggle for celebrity enjoined by a global economy of sovereign subjectivity. Homogenizing market logics expressed as private sentiment and empowered agency feed the pornocratic economy by inflating and innovating the disciplinary imaginaries some mistake for liberty and sovereign intimacy. It was, recalls Shevchenko, a 24-year-old business studies graduate from … western Ukraine, "a very intimate moment." … "Suddenly there I was, looking into Putin's eyes, he into mine, just a metre between us before one of his men lunged to shield him from me and in those seconds I was just thinking to myself: "What a funny botox face—because of all the snips and tucks it's endured, it can't properly express what he's feeling." Alexandra Shevchenko (cited in Connolly) Femen activist Alexandra Shevchenko here gazes at the mirror image of a potential future self, one reflecting every surgical stay of mortality and of our being in common. As a major player among the "shock troops" of sextremism known as Femen, Shevchenko and the pornocrat share a moment of recognition in the public eye as she launches herself topless upon the Russian president in full view of the assembled media throng and to the contagious surprise of Europe's most powerful woman and national leader, German chancellor Angela Merkel. Cementing the public disclosure of their relation, the eye lock can be read as an index of a postsoviet identity in crisis, where personality and celebrity are sought as the other side of real poverty and an ossified gender system, conduit of trafficking and sex tourism without end by Femen's account. Cut off from its own expressive lexicon, the pornocrat's face beams back only images of bloated obscenity and grotesque invitation as Putin [End Page 111] "seems to push his chest out, raise his eyebrows and purse his lips, producing a double chinned smirk, while Merkel puffs out her cheeks and frowns as bodyguards pounce on Shevchenko and her four fellow Femen members, tackling them to the floor" (cited in Connolly). If Femen nudity primly stops at toplessness, their public materializations unleash the farcical element only ever loosely held in check by public figureheads who contend with the rigorous body discipline of public appearance. The Femen intervention exposes this fact before the cameras: "I had observed from a distance a group of suited men. The closer I got to them, I recognised the really small one amongst them was Putin. He was so puny, not like the macho pictures you see of him riding a horse bareback, or fishing barechested," she said. "And that was when I realised: now is the moment and started to charge. … I jumped over the fence, pumping my elbows out at my sides and undressing as I ran towards him, screaming: 'Fuck the dictator'" (cited in Connolly). Alternately tumescent and shrinking, fearsome yet fading, Putin appears less formidable when measured against the beauty system's exacting standards, and this fragilized masculinity, by turns ridiculous and obscenely leering, invigorates the Femen-ist who, seizing the opportunity to launch the insult, claims equality although only in the terms of erotic bondage. As one Femen-ist puts it, "We use women's sexuality as women's weapon" (Hutsol and Svyatski). Logics of saturnalian reversal or Bakhtinian carnivalesque fail to capture the restricted economy of Femen's pornocratic intimacy with heteropatriarchal power and the figures of sovereignty who front for it; for this we must reach into Achille Mbembe's notion of "commandment," a cycling entanglement of desire for glory wedded to a demand for absolute power, wherein the dominated "clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology … [while] power, in its own violent quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence" (133). Femen-ist nudity mirrors pornocratic vulgarity and machismo by borrowing its cheap lineaments to reproduce its logic of spectacular individuality, absolute agency, and freedom understood as the media capture of subjective singularity. Yet a Femen-ist is no libertine. "We were invited to Germany...

Kairos: On the Limits to Our (Rhetorical) Situation

In Ancient times and in the contemporary moment, kairos has operated as a keyword for theorizing rhetoric and its potential. Aligning ourselves with these endeavors we take stock of varying iterations of the kairotic not to artificially force a singular conception of the term, but to hold such resolutions at bay. We assess efforts to realign kairos with challenges to the ontological priority of rhetorical actors and trace recent theoretical articulations that further decenter human agency by relocating the kairotic in ecological/contextual forces. We assert the need to maintain invention and eventfulness as crucial elements of the kairotic so as to insist that rhetoric be understood as a practice that exceeds socio-anthropological “adaptation” to those conditions. Through a series of propositions we hold hope for an inventive and evental kairotic stance that likewise avoids naïve conceptions of sovereign subjectivity.

The Fear of Iconoclasm: Genre and Medium Transformations from Comics to Graphic Novels in Amar Chitra Katha, Bhimayana, and Munnu

The Indian graphic novel tells stories through indigenous or mythographic prisms. This implies frequently departing from the comic medium’s typical grid structure of regular panels interrupted by gutter space. The comic medium’s linear and sequential narrative is often identified by graphic novel theorists with an ‘Enlightenment’ logic inadequate to a vernacular reality. At the same time, in so far as it is about the life narrative of an iconoclastic individual, the graphic narrative cannot entirely avoid speaking the language of a rational and sovereign subject. I argue that the combination of an individual’s iconoclastic trajectory, along with the desire to iconize that very trajectory through a mythic or indigenous idiom, leads to conflicts between decisions made at the level of form and those made at the level of subject matter. This is further complicated by the comic medium’s penchant for dialectical reversals. While it is possible to read Amar Chitra Katha’s mythological tales as critical secular biographies, the graphic narratives Bhimayana and Munnu are so driven by illustration in the form of metaphors, puns and allegories that their visual component loses its narrative traction, becoming in many ways merely decorative and artistic.

The Future of the Witness: Nature, Race and More-than-Human Environmental Publics

Taking leave from obstacles to the creation of an 'environmental public' in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa and the political silencing and objectification of both nature and racialised subjects, this article interrogates and seeks to expand a specific figure: that of the witness. In the broader, global context of environmental violence, the witness – who, according to classical theories of testimony, is a sovereign subject who speaks in their own name – is considered in the context of constructed categories of active/passive and subject/object as these play out across race, nature and shifting conceptions of the human. The title, 'the future of the witness', prompts two questions: (i) In the context of (missing) environmental publics, in what ways we must reconceptualise the figure of the witness – on ontological, epistemological and political levels – as we move into the future? (ii) Faced with ever-escalating Anthropocenic destruction, is it possible for a witness to testify not only to past events and experiences, as per the generally accepted temporal schema of witnessing, but also to ongoing experiences that unfold into the future? In responding to these questions, it is argued (a) that the witness can no longer be considered as an isolated figure, but rather must be conceived as part of a testimonial constellation; and (b) that, in responding to ecological concerns, this constellation must be a more-than-human collective: an entangled form of sociality between humans and nonhumans that does not take recourse to modernist categories of 'human' and 'nature'. Moving, via South Africa, from the European Holocaust to global humanitarian and forensic practices, through European and North American science and technology studies as well as Amerindian thinking, the article gathers a generalised set of questions and propositions that might in turn be folded back into specific locales. Key is the classic postcolonial question of who ought to or has the right to speak in the name of whom. Where the witness is often denied self-representation or, more gravely, entirely absent or missing, the article surveys various practices of supplementary witnessing. However, such practices ofen find themselves caught within a representational dilemma whereby, despite the necessity of defending the rights of humans and nonhumans alike, 'speaking for' or 'giving voice' to dispossessed or missing subjects – including nature – runs the risk of further replicating the original colonial matrix of being, knowledge and power that is being contested. Drawing from aesthetic and speculative practices, the article asks what possible strategies might be available for navigating the challenges of representation and for conceiving of more-than-human environmental publics that contest the neoliberal indivisualization of responsibilty and actively bear witness both to unfolding environmental degradation and possible more liveable futures.

Accessible Utopia: Animating Mimicry in Stevens's Theory of Poetry

Accessible Utopia:Animating Mimicry in Stevens's Theory of Poetry Eugene Vydrin Rhyming for the later Stevens does the imagination's work. . . .1 —John Hollander, Vision and Resonance Romanticism is then when everything being alike everything is naturally simply different, and romanticism. —Gertrude Stein, "Composition as Explanation" "THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR" confronts the reader with a binary trope central to Wallace Stevens's poetry: the opposition between "things as they are" and "the blue guitar." To read the poem is to attend to its continuous sounding of its own rendition of the world, its attunement to how "A tune upon the blue guitar" renders "things . . . as they are"—"exactly" or otherwise (CPP 135). The partners in this dialectical duet are the sovereign subject and the intractable object, or, to use Stevens's own terms, "imagination" and "reality." The opposition between them, posed often and occasionally resolved only to arise again, suggests two possible roles for the lyric subject: the maker of a new world and the copyist of a preexisting one. Doubtless, we ought to heed the warning—issued, for example, by J. Hillis Miller—that Stevens's work refuses any universal metaphysics, particularly one that would assign the self any permanent role with respect to the world (257–58). Few readers of Stevens, I imagine, would demand such a thing. But the opposition itself as well as the choice, however impossible to make, between the agency of the imagination and the agency of reality—whether we understand this choice ethically (as Miller does) or phenomenologically (as, more recently, Simon Critchley does in Things Merely Are)—continue to frame philosophical interpretations of Stevens's work. Whether figuring a landscape or a figure within it, whether a placeless meditation or a meditation in a place, whether "Description Without Place" or "The Idea of Order at Key West," Stevens's poems continually reflect upon their own status as reflections of a reality outside them. The "sea" moving before the "she" of "The Idea of Order at Key West" is [End Page 191] before the lyric subject not only spatially but also temporally (CPP 105): it precedes the words that name, or sing, it. If that is indeed so, however sovereign the lyric speaker of the poem may be, or however generative the speech acts it performs, the world will always have precedence, and thus priority, over the word, the thing over the thought. To reverse this priority, it would seem, would require that the place—the landscape of sea, shore, and sky—be the result rather than the cause of both song and poem. And however deconstructively aware we may be of the undecidability of this question of priority, of the naïveté of asking which comes first, the question persists within the terms of an interpretation that distinguishes between art as creation and art as imitation, between romantic modernism and mimetic realism. In this essay, I would like to offer a model of mimesis that dispenses with the choice between creating and imitating by defining imitation not only as a creative act, but also, more radically, as an act that the self learns from the very reality it imitates. Rather than passively copying the world, imitation actively participates in its creation by repeating the very method by which the world creates itself. To understand the imagination's relation to reality in Stevens's poetry, we must see imitation not in opposition to the imagination but as its primary method, a method modeled on the structure of reality itself. What I propose, in other words, is an idea of imitation that is itself an idea of order. For such an idea of imitation we must look not to Aristotle's mimesis but to Walter Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty," or what in an earlier version he called a "Doctrine of the Similar," which, in several crucial aspects, bears a striking resemblance to the theory of poetry Stevens presents in The Necessary Angel. I propose that we read Stevens's theory of poetry as a theory of rhyme. Or, to be more precise, that we read the relation between the central terms of his poetics—reality and imagination (theorized...

Las metamorfosis del Príncipe

El Estado nacional latinoamericano de fines del siglo XIX organizó la vida pública colocando en ella nuevas formas de visibilidad. Asumió a las tecnologías como una policía de la mirada que impuso reglas modernas a los cuerpos, los paisajes y las ciudades. De esta manera las viejas funciones del príncipe barroco fueron asumidas por una gubernamentalidad escópica que centró sus esfuerzos en nacionalizar a las masas, a través de las imágenes y educarlas en torno a signos de decencia, control y orden. Se estableció un contrato simbólico entre la burocracia estatal y los aparatos ópticos permitiendo que la fotografía y el cine se convirtieran en los instrumentos de una estética y una subjetividad soberana.

Contingency, causality, complexity: distributed agency in the mind-game film

This essay complements my earlier symptomatic, sociological and economic reading of mind-game films (‘The Mind-Game Film’ 2009) with a reassessment of their status as a privileged (though minoritarian) object of study for contemporary cinema from a philosophical perspective. This essay also updates the analysis given in the 2009 essay, mindful that there have in recent years been a number of popular big-budget films that qualify as mind-game films. Finally, the essay presents twelve key features of mind-game films: (1) multiple universes, (2) multiple temporalities, (3) causality between coincidence and conjunction, (4) feedback: looped and retroactive causalities, (5) mise-en-abyme constructions, (6) the observer as part of the observed, (7) living with contradictions, (8) imaginary resolutions no longer dissolve real contradictions, (9) antagonistic mutuality under conditions of distributed agency, (10) agency – with the self, against the self, (11) time travel films as black boxes and (12) the mind-game film as pharmakon. Ultimately, mind-game films amplify ontological instability and dismantle both the sovereign subject and its antidote, the divided self of modern subjectivity, in view of accepting more complex but also self-contradictory, more limited but also more extended forms of agency.

“Castigar los crímenes de la anterior administración”. El juicio contra los miembros del Directorio y del Congreso en 1820.

Este artículo analiza el proceso que el gobernador de Buenos Aires, Manuel de Sarratea, instruyó en 1820 contra los miembros del Directorio y del Congreso. El propósito es mostrar las dificultades derivadas de la cuestión de cómo evaluar el desempeño de quienes habían ejercido el poder político en un contexto de “provisionalidad permanente”. Se estudian el formato judicial y el tipo de delito imputado a los acusados, los conflictos jurisdiccionales y las disputas entre las autoridades políticas involucradas. El juicio condensa los dilemas que caracterizaron a la crítica coyuntura de 1820: cuestionamiento de autoridades y superposición de sujetos soberanos.

LEGAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ACTS OF COOPERATION BETWEEN UKRAINE AND THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND THE WORLD BANK GROUP

The dynamic character of the development of Ukraine's relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG) necessitates a study of the legal nature of the acts, on the basis of which cooperation between Ukraine and international financial organizations is based. As of today, relations between Ukraine and the IMF are developing within the framework of the «Extended Fund Facility» Program, that provides long-term assistance in structural reforms realization aimed at overcoming the long-term difficulties with a balance of payments. The legal basis for the regulation of cooperation constitutes of two documents, namely the Letter of Intent, containing the Memorandum, and the decision of the Executive Council of the Fund. These acts provide a specific legal mechanism for cooperation between the IMF and Ukraine, which by their nature do not correspond to standard international agreements, respectively, they formally do not create legal obligations and are not binding. The letter of intent regulates an extremely wide range of issues and it is adjusted throughout the entire the «Extended Fund Facility» Program, which again confirms the different nature of such an act, because it is not agreed immediately as it is accepted in most international treaties. In addition, the cooperation is carried out within the framework of a four-year Program, therefore instability and unpredictability of public finances do not contribute to the production of traditional binding standards in the context of cooperation with the IMF. Cooperation between Ukraine and the World Bank Group takes place within the framework of the «Concept of the World Bank's Partnership with Ukraine for the financial years 2017–2021» (Concept), approved by the World Bank's Board of Directors on June 20, 2017. Having analyzed the acts in the sphere of cooperation with the WBG, it can be argued that legal instruments with different legal force are used. The concept of partnership, by its legal nature, is not an international agreement, that is binding on the parties, but it is of a recommendatory nature. Namely, agreements within the framework of this Concept can also be attributed to «soft law». However, Ukraine's loan agreements with IBRD have their own peculiarities, but the order of their conclusion is consistent with the general practice of adopting an international agreement, and the content of the agreement indicates that such a contract is a subject to mandatory execution. Thus, Ukraine is a sovereign subject of international law that independently develops a policy for the organization of the financial system that is directly implemented when drafting the Letter of Intent with the IMF, the Partnership Concept with the World Bank and loan agreements with the IBRD, as these acts are prepared by the Ukrainian side and if necessary consultations with the experts of the relevant Organizations are conducted. Having analyzed the legal framework for regulating of Ukraine's relations with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, it can be argued that these relations take place in different legal forms, which directly affects their implementation.

Rethinking Privacy: A Feminist Approach to Privacy Rights after Snowden

Tim Cook’s message to Apple customers, regarding Apple’s refusal to provide the FBI with a backdoor to the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, typifies the corporate appropriation of privacy rights discourse. In light of this appropriation, I propose a reconsideration of the sovereign subject presupposed by privacy rights discourse through a comparative approach to the US and EU’s treatments of privacy rights. I then apply feminist theories of the non-sovereign subject, which challenge liberal democratic discourse’s construction of the subject by emphasising social interdependence. I argue that critical scholars of surveillance and the digital economy need to address the fact that the digital economy is predicated on the subject’s non-sovereignty, where individuals can be fragmented and combined into the mass collection of data. I conclude with a discussion of how the non-sovereignty of the subject under commercial surveillance could also provide the grounds for the socialized redistribution of big data profits.

Ontología socio-corporal en la filosofía de Judith Butler. Para volver a pensar la acción política

La postulación de una ontología socio-corporal en el último recorrido intelectual de Judith Butler (2010) reside en un doble desplazamiento. Por un lado, rubrica una concepción de la materialidad que no escinde ni puede escindir al cuerpo de las significaciones sociales que asume. Por el otro, como corolario del primero y quizás más significativo, provoca un desvío respecto del clásico postulado del individualismo ontológico bajo la forma de una crítica al sujeto soberano. Sostenida en este doble desplazamiento, la ontología social corporal ofrece la posibilidad de leer aquí una idea clave para pensar la acción política en términos performativos, bajo la revisión de dos nociones centrales para esta ontología: la categoría de marcos (y la posibilidad de enmarcarlos) y la noción de precariedad a la hora de comprender a los cuerpos ya siempre en alianza.

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience

The Humanization of Economic Life: The Legacy of Martin Buber

In this article, I explore how our economic life can be reconciled with Martin Buber’s norm of dialogical life or communion. Known for his lifelong advocacy of dialogue between persons and between nations, Buber has tirelessly emphasized the necessity of restoring immediacy between fellow beings. Every human being is called to communion with his and her fellow beings. Such fellowship is the precondition for a truly human life. Given the technological and bureaucratic organization of our political and economic lives, this fundamental need is not being fulfilled. Instead of communion, it is the will to dominate and objectify that is fostered and normalized. The transcendence of this inhuman condition is what is entailed by the transition to the I-Thou relation. I here explain what it means to approach someone as a Thou, Buber’s reconceptualization of love, and the relationship between unified souls and a wholesome economy.

ATTITUDES TO FUTURITY IN NEW GERMAN FEMINISMS AND CONTEMPORARY WOMEN’S FICTION

Drawing on Clare Hemmings’ work on feminist narratives, this article explores attitudes to the future in recent German-language pop-feminist volumes, including, amongst others, Meredith Haaf, Susanne Klingner and Barbara Streidl’s Wir Alpha-Mädchen: Warum Feminismus das Leben schöner macht [We Alpha-Girls: Why Feminism Makes Life More Beautiful] (2008) and the feminist memoir Neue deutsche Mädchen [New German Girls] (2008) by Jana Hensel and Elisabeth Raether. After analysing the rhetoric of linear progress deployed in these texts and the ways in which their authors consign second-wave feminism to the past in the name of a normative future, I go on to examine future-thinking in two complex first-person novels: Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill (2010) and Antonia Baum’s Vollkommen leblos, bestenfalls tot [Completely Lifeless, Preferably Dead] (2011). I demonstrate how these novels invoke a sense of disorientation and asynchronous temporality that is productively queer. Their disruptions of time and space, of language and form, combine with decentred central protagonists to throw doubt on the figure of the coherent sovereign subject who lurks persistently behind the new German feminists’ configuration of the self-empowered “individual.” Finally, this paper contends that the queer refusal of normative futures enacted by the novels allows the opportunity to imagine alternative modes of being that are potentially politically transformative.

To Be Good Is to Do the Truth: Being, Truth, the Good, and the Primordial Conscience in a Thomist Perspective

To Be Good Is to Do the Truth:Being, Truth, the Good, and the Primordial Conscience in a Thomist Perspective1 For Richard Schenk, O.P., on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday The Dominant Self-Image of Late Modern Humanity: The Sovereign Subject In the early decades of the twenty-first century, an observant spectator might perceive the striking ambiguity that haunts the self-image of late modern humanity in the Western Hemisphere. The rapidly accelerating progress of the scientific penetration of the natural world and the ensuing technological domination of the whole planet seem to have advanced humanity into a quasi-divine position, into a collective Demiurge. Sovereignty, once upon a time an exclusive attribute [End Page 53] of divinity, seems now to fall to humanity collectively, and to each individual human subject in rather far-reaching specific ways. In the affluent parts of the Western Hemisphere, subjective sovereignty is exercised by way of the unfettered rule of one's will over (ideally) everything exterior to one's will, from myriads of consumer goods to varyingly branded identities and, last but not least, ideological and religious affiliations. The precious and tenaciously defended privilege of subjective sovereignty is, of course, choice. The scope of choice is seen as directly proportional to the degree of subjective sovereignty—an increase in the former indicates an increase in the latter. However, the interpretation of reality that the natural sciences communicate to the public presents a jarringly different picture—a picture that puts into question the very possibility of subjective sovereignty. The human mind is understood as an epiphenomenon of the brain's neurological processes, and human choices are predicted with statistical precision and unmasked as ultimately driven by nothing other than the interests of the "selfish gene." According to the naturalist savants of the most advanced life-sciences, humans are nothing but highly sophisticated primates that will eventually be transparent without remainder to the scientific gaze and, therefore, open to comprehensive governance by way of the most advanced psychological and technological means of manipulation. Thus, the modern subject vacillates between two competing self-images. On the one side, we find the gnostic angelism of the putatively disembodied sovereign self that may submit to its will an absolutely malleable and fluid exteriority. And on the other side, we find the materialist animalism of a super-primate that is the accidental product of the intricate interplay between random genetic mutation and specific ecological niche preferment. The extremes touch each other insofar as trans-humanism (an outgrowth of the fantasies of the sovereign self) and post-humanism (the reductive understanding of the human being as super-primate) coincide in their de facto erasure of the embodied rational being, the animal rationale. As always, so also in our contemporary context, deeply shaped by the utopian pretenses of trans-humanism and post-humanism, sovereignty has two aspects: the sovereign agent and the objects upon which sovereignty is exercised. The interminable struggle in late-modern technologically advanced, economically consumer-capitalist, and politically putatively liberal societies of the Western [End Page 54] Hemisphere is to avoid at all costs being subjected to—and thereby objectified by—the sovereignty of others and simultaneously to maximize one's possibilities of exercising subjective sovereignty. In our robustly secular and deeply skeptical Western societies, subjective sovereignty is the one transcendence the modern subject remains certain of, since it is self-produced. This particular form of transcendence is a decidedly immanent transcendence, for its outer horizon is death. Death defies all strategies of maintaining or increasing subjective sovereignty—albeit with one significant exception: the unique strategy of folding death into the last act of one's own subjective sovereignty by sovereignly determining the terminus of oneself and the subsequent annihilation of one's body. It is this deeply ironic, yet equally deeply consistent, consequence that betrays the profound pretention and falsehood of the self-image of subjective sovereignty. The Metaphysics of Being and Its Three Fundamental Premises Regarding Being, Truth, and the Good2 What might be the cure from this pervasive but profoundly false self-image? I would submit, in all due modesty, that the only lasting cure will be nothing...

TRADITION, MODERNISM, AND APARTHEID

In this article it is argued that apartheid, as idea-historical phenomenon, needs to be understood against the background of a short comparison between modern and premodern thought. Apartheid was, in many respects, a theoretical and practical manifestation of modernism. As such, it was by no means a modern anomaly, or a phenomenon that contradicted the fundamental assumptions of modern philosophical and political thought. The first section of this article addresses only a single aspect of traditional thought, namely the idea of being understood as circular event. Traditional thought understood being as emanating from, and returning to a first principle, namely the Good (Plato), the One (Plotinus), or God (Aquinas). The ensuing section discusses only a single aspect of modernism, namely its understanding of being not as circular event, but as a neutral, spatial, and linear grid upon which reality can be mapped. Once mapped on such a grid, according to modernism, being can be experienced as a “standing reserve” (or as an always available resource) to be controlled and used at will by the modern subject. In the third section of this article, it is argued that apartheid was made possible by the above ontological presupposition. According to the apartheid state, being could, in principle, be spatialised on a neutral grid, and thus directed and controlled from the vantage point of the sovereign subject. The concluding section focuses on the much-discredited community, the Afrikaners. Despite disclaimers among Afrikaners, the heavy burden of the apartheid legacy rests squarely on their shoulders. However, it will also be argued that Afrikaners, if given the opportunity, may provide us in future with important examples of a politics that moves beyond the spatialising and geometrising ambitions of the modern state. In a hermeneutical re-appropriation of their own pre-modern tradition, Afrikaners may, in collaboration with other communities, help show a way toward a traditional politics of place (rather than the modern politics of space).