Philosophy & Social Criticism

Habermas’ account of social identity is the most sophisticated among various deliberative and expansive democratic models and aligns with his long-standing theoretical commitment to communicative rationality that is tailored to the democratic organization of society. Taking a normative stance, he proposes a procedural account of social identity within communicative rationality, achievable only in modernity and deliberative democracy. We argue that his formulation of social identity is inadequate, given a problematic stage-based framework in his historical account of societal evolution and the insubstantial nature of social identity in his linguistic and procedural accounts of social identity. Nonetheless, Habermas’ approach can serve as a starting point to develop a more inclusive and empirically defensible conceptual framework for collective identity, grounded in robust institutional foundations and a substantive account of the political. Finally, by challenging Habermas’ separation of system and lifeworld, we argue that a rational social identity should be rooted in both domains.

Factionalism broadly describes the occurrence of conflicts between varying groups (or factions) within a social movement. Factionalism is often thought to be a negative feature of social movements. The goal of this paper is to (a) motivate the significance of the concept of factionalism for social and political philosophy and (b) give a definition of factionalism that captures the sense in which factionalism is a deep political problem. Specifically, the paper argues that factionalism is a form of anti-solidarity; factional groups are groups that, in virtue of their normal functionings, promote anti-solidaristic relations. Consequently, factionalism is particularly harmful because it has a transformative effect on movement actors: namely, it creates actors who are unwilling or unable to engage in collective political struggle. In a slogan: factionalism atomizes.

This article offers a critical phenomenological analysis of prevailing myths of menopause. By drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's conceptions of myths that essentialize existence, we have analyzed contemporary TV series in which menopause is portrayed. We identified the following myths of menopause: the myth of the liberated woman, the unnesting (s)mother, the old, ugly, and sexless witch, the mild, wise, and uncarnal woman. We first describe these myths and analyze how they may be interpreted as marginalizing in various and sometimes ambiguous ways. Then, we trace out two distinct ways in which some TV shows expose these myths as essentializing myths, which is important for allowing us to take a distance from them, and thereby to resist them. The first one is in line with what Beauvoir herself suggested as a fruitful dealing with myths: replacing mythical thinking with actual experiences. The second way is conceptualized on the basis of Irigaray’s thinking about mimicking myths. Such dealings with myths of menopause, we argue, may open the road to less marginalizing and more pluriform thinking about menopause.

Recent scholarship has repeatedly highlighted a significant flaw in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: its inability to account for acts of resistance in the Lager, or its aprioristic closure to the very possibility of such acts. As a result, instead of clarifying ‘the sense and reasons’ behind the behaviour of both executioners and victims of the Shoah, as his work initially sets out to do, Agamben’s analysis ends up rendering their conduct even more enigmatic and unintelligible. To address this lacuna in Agamben’s work, I draw on Foucault’s later studies on antiquity – precisely the so-called ‘ethical’ Foucault whom Agamben dismissed in favour of the ‘biopolitical’ Foucault. In doing so, I aim to bring to light a particular form of resistance described by Primo Levi in If This Is a Man: what he calls ‘moral survival’. Through this framework, I seek to partially reconstruct the rationality behind the conduct of those Häftlinge who, like Levi himself, attempted to resist the immanentizing pressure of the lex of the camp (i.e., the process of Muselmannization) by constituting themselves as the ethical subjects of their own moral acts.

Although it is well-known that Hannah Arendt gives a privileged role to action, her comments on the relationship between action and will(ing) have caused much confusion in the literature: commentators are split on whether her analysis of willing in The Human Condition (from 1958) and the essay “What is Freedom?” (from 1960) contradict or are complemented by her later analysis in The Life of the Mind (from 1978). I defend the latter position, but in contrast to others who have affirmed the same argument but focus on other themes to show it, I actually set out to show that Arendt offers a remarkably consistent analysis of the relationship between action and will(ing) throughout her work. To do so, I adopt a somewhat counterintuitive hermeneutical strategy by starting with her late analysis of will(ing) in The Life of the Mind (from 1978) where she most explicitly distinguishes between the historically dominant form of will(ing) of the liberium arbitrium and what I call natal-will(ing), before reading that distinction back into her earlier analyses of freedom in “What is Freedom?” (published in 1960), and action in The Human Condition (published in 1958). This hermeneutical strategy is underpinned by the claim that the distinction between two forms of will(ing) made explicit in The Life of the Mind is implicit to those earlier works. This shows that Arendt’s critique of will(ing) in her earlier works is a critique of the free will tradition, not willing per se, while her affirmation of action in those texts, implies the affirmation of the other form of willing, tied to natality and the power to begin anew, that she subsequently explicitly identifies in The Life of the Mind.

This article considers a 2010 government report on the South African visual arts industry. Using a Foucauldian lens, I show how it produces a discourse on ‘gender’ and ‘race’ where these terms function only as quantitative and statistical categories in an administrative and economic art world model. The report presents its findings according to four figures, namely, the ‘white male’, ‘white female’, ‘black male’ and ‘black female’, which I conceptualize as knowledge ‘avatars’ acting as placeholders that obscure the field’s complexity. Despite the use of ‘gender’ and ‘race’ terms identifying various issues in the field, the report’s recommendations to the government virtually ignores the race/gender imbalance so clearly revealed – it is simply folded out of sight or performed away discursively. This phenomenon is explained via Jennifer Tennant Jackson’s concept ‘the efficacity of meta-conceptual performativity’ – how discourses can push things away from the regular knowledge surface (the dispositif) into the ‘fold’.