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Critique & Humanism | 32 | 2010 | Critique and sovereignty
Issue editors: Dimitar Vatsov, Boyan Znepolski
Issue: 2, 2010, pp.232, ISSN:0861-1718
About the strength and the weakness of academic social criticism
Boyan Znepolski
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
The article intends to study the critical potential of the critical sociology and the pragmatic sociology – the two most infl uential forms of social criticism in contemporary French sociology. Whilst in the 1970s sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu defined their position as critical sociology, in the 1980s some of their close followers, like Luc Boltanski, redefi ned their own position under the infl uence of pragmatism as pragmatic sociology. Sociology refused to play an overtly critical role and restricted itself to reconstructing the modalities of critique that social actors refer to in their everyday social practices. In his most recent publications, however, Boltanski went back to his first critical commitment trying to rehabilitate the ambitions of the critical sociology and leaving the impression it could be more appropriate in the context of contemporary societies. Our purpose is to make this two-sided transformation comprehensible by putting into question the underlying methodological and political arguments. The pragmatic sociology seems methodologically stronger yet politically weaker than the critical sociology. Moreover, it seems more legitimate but less effi cient in its critical effects. How could this dilemma of social criticism opposing requirements of legitimacy and requirements of efficiency be solved?
The ordinary: Critique’s new metaphysical instance
Milena Iakimova
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
The paper traces two versions of the “ordinary” as it functions within radical social critique and within pragmatistically reinterpreted critique, both of them suspending the privileged status of theorizing, though the former not yet abandoning it. Radical critique refers to the ordinary in the sense of the undefi ned, attributeless, unarticulated suffering. Thus the ordinary turns out to be equivalent to the figure of desire that should remain erotically unarticulated if it is to be the authentic source of resistance not twisted by power relations. Pragmatist social critique on the other hand, diagnoses the blindness of radical critique to the critical activities of the ordinary itself but runs the risk to uncritically reaffirm its claims. Why this is untenable is briefly demonstrated by reference to what I call “nationalism as usual” playing the part of a “critical moment” in present day Bulgarian society. The paper draws upon Stanley Cavell and Luc Boltanski.
What is ideology? Towards an analytical re-construction of a forgotten concept
Krassimir Stojanov
Bundeswehr University, Munich
The main purpose of the paper is to show how the concept of ideology can be actualizated by using some methodological merits of the contemporary analytical philosophy. The following four main features of ideological assertions can be identified as а result of the attempt to re-construct this concept in a new systematic way: (1) lack of dialogic openness; (2) “post-hoc” legitimatisations of pre-discursive opinions transporting particular political interests and power claims; (3) naturalizations of premises; and (4) obscuring the genetic link between the above-mentioned pre-discursive opinions, and particular political interests and power claims. These four main features of ideology have been illustrated by an analysis of justification patterns of members of the former communist Secret Services.
Between sovereign violence and human action: Giorgio Agamben and the critique of political sovereignty
Boyan Manchev
New Bulgarian University, Sofia
Today, the ascertainment of a ‘crisis of the political’ (that is, not merely a particular political crisis but a crisis of the overall model of representative democracy dominating in the last decades and, therefore, of an array of generally established political principles of modernity that until recently appeared to be unshakeable) is shared by an array of radical political philosophers and to a great extent coincides, though with a reversed evaluation, with the neoliberal diagnosis of the ‘end of the political.’ There could hardly be any doubt about the fact that this crisis is part and parcel of a much more global transformation (parallel to the process which is obscurely called ‘globalization’) that affects the forms of production and exchange as well as the social structures and practices, and public space reaching also the most intimate spheres of private being. This paper aims at proposing several theoretical hypotheses on the current crisis, which is undoubtedly connected to the crisis of modern conceptual regimes of thinking of the political, through the prism of some radical interpretations of Walter Benjamin’s political theses by Giorgio Agamben. The unprecedented interest towards the two volumes of Homo Sacer by Agamben has undoubtedly a symptomatic value for the critical thinking of contemporaneity. Hence, it is of a particular interest to subject his theses to a detailed analysis in order to see in which aspects they capture the symptom and in which aspects they do not manage to rise to the level of the critical gesture thereby becoming, due to this failure, a part of the symptom itself.
Violence and redemption
Vladimir Gradev
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
Is there a language of the victims? What is the hope for them? How to give them voice and justice without betraying them? From these questions emerges in filigree the moral and religious pathos guiding the work of Walter Benjamin. This paper, following
the famous essay Zur Kritik der Gewalt (“Critique of Violence”) and some other related texts, is trying to retrace the nucleus of the Benjamin’s refl ection through this problematic.
Biopolitics and sovereignty: Concerning the question of limits of judicial rationality
Martin Kanoushev
New Bulgarian University, Sofia
The article questions the key premises of the judicial theory of sovereignty. In this perspective, law is understood not as legitimacy that has to be stated but rather from the point of view of the procedures of subjection embedded in it. The aim is to avoid the issue of sovereignty and thus to allow the issue of domination to emerge. Instead of analysing power by means of the judicial system of sovereignty, state apparatuses and social ideologies, it is better to analyse it by means of the methods of domination, the forms of subjection and real oppressions. We do not comply with the triple precondition of law, unity and subject, which postulates sovereignty as a source of power and as a fundament of institutions, but apprehend the triple point of view of methods of domination, of their diversity and of their consequences, which make them a foundation of power relations; in other words, we deal with a sociological analysis of the constitution of subjects rather than with the genesis of the sovereign.
Foucault and the liberal idea of civil society
Momchil Hristov
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
By force of a certain liberal reflex in both, the political theory and its everyday avatars, we are used to oppose civil society to the state. And by this, we see traditionally the strong civil society as a basis for a healthy democracy. This article aims to problematize such a presupposition by turning its attention to the recently published lectures which Foucault delivered at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 –Security,territory, population, and mainly Birth of biopolitics, where he analyses liberalism not as an ideology but as a specific political rationality linked to a number of governmental practices focused on the population understood as a multitude of entrepreneurial subjects. Although Foucault himself is not primarily interested in the liberal idea of civil society, an attempt is made to show that his reflections on “liberal governmentality” offer important insights which allow us to think of civil society not as a sort of natural resistance to the supposedly artificial state repression but as a governmental object in a specific political technology of individuals, which renders the ultimate subject of liberalism – homo oeconomicus – governable.
Intentions and promises in politics
Hristo Todorov
New Bulgarian University, Sofia
My interest focuses on three different types of human approaches towards the future: predicting, intending, and promising. I try to formulate explicit understandings of predicting, intending, and promising. By predicting, we form an idea of the events we expect to happen. Insofar as predicting involves events that have not yet occurred and cannot be described, all predictions about them are uncertain. When the occurrence of particular events depends on how we ourselves will act, we develop a peculiar readiness to act in a particular way. Intention consists in this readiness to perform a given action. The only way others can learn that someone intends to perform a particular action is if the person declares this intention. Declaration of an intention for action entails no obligation to perform the action. Such an obligation arises only if one makes an utterance of another type, namely if one makes a promise. There is not merely an intention to perform a particular action but also a stance that this intention is so serious that the promiser is ready to suffer possible sanctions if he or she fails to perform as promised. Promises play an important role in democratic politics on at least three different levels – constitutions, programs of political parties and election programs. Finally, I examine the effects of the unfulfi lled promises in politics.
The performative: Sovereign power instead of resistance (Butler, Austin, Derrida)
Dimitar Vatsov
New Bulgarian University, Sofia
What is proposed here is a search for a basic concept of power on the micro level of our speech acts. Before being codified in some stable power relations or contexts, before being objectified in different forms of domination and/or violence, power has to be analysed on the level of our immediate performatives, where the struggle for power-codification could be followed in vivo. A task like this requires a conceptual shift: the illocutionary force of our speech acts has to be re-interpreted as their immediate evaluative force, i.e. as illocutionary power. Taking into account Derrida’s critique of Austin’s theory of speech acts, we should recognize that the performatives are not singular or atomistic speech acts. Nor are they pre-determined by some already given contexts or procedures. They are embedded into a citation, tracing signs, without any fi nal or autonomous signification. And yet, the performatives have their specific kind of sovereignty. It is not the sovereignty of the ‘act’ itself but of the act’s performance. The actual (in the sense of ‘on-going’) performance has its immediate force that is irreversible and in addition is not citable. Evenin the case of a direct citation, the citing performance sediments into an irreversible arrow, immediately re-ordering and re-evaluating all the points in its trajectory. The performance does not fulfi ll a perspective, but irreversibly sediments into a perspective. This effect of virtuosity of the immediate performance could be called a power effect. Because it demonstrates not only how we make things with words, but also how we re-evaluate the value of the things made through words. If the on-going performance is such an immediate source of micro power, then its role is not only to be resistant and ironically subversive to the already existing macro codifi cations of power and domination. The performatives have their own sovereign power capable of direct affi rmation and re-affi rmation of the intersubjective frames of our experience.
The right against the weak: Two fables about the contemporary regimes of sovereignless sovereignty
Todor Hristov
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
The paper proposes an approach to sovereign performatives capable of taking into account their ambiguous articulation as speech acts that are both self-empowering and bound to certain conventions. The basic idea of the approach is to develop a weaker interpretation of the concept of performative convention detachable from the normative example of the legal rules and therefore applicable to common sense speech acts where conventions are often unclear and underdefi ned. The advantages of the approach are demonstrated by a discussion of the performative constitution of the right against the weak, which is often invoked today by political actors insisting on the need to empower one or another enlightened and benevolent elite over the irrational multitude.
Austin and Mauss with Derrida: Gift and speech acts
Darin Tenev
Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia
If we assume with Deyan Deyanov that there is an essential link between the logic of the gift (as developed by M. Mauss) and the speech act theory, and furthermore if we focus on the non-classical problematic of what Todor Petkov called ‘molecular performatives,’ we could re-inscribe the Derridean account of the gift in this problematic in order to shed some light on the process of constitution of the molecular performatives. According to Derrida, the gift exceeds the gift-exchange (gift – counter-gift) and at the same time is constitutive for exchange in general. In its movement, it restricts itself letting the very event it brings about be forgotten. Now, if we look at the molecular performatives, we could analyze their inventiveness even at everyday level and at the same time, due to our retrospective point-of-view, they will always seem to follow rather precise rules and conventions. Thus, while on the one hand, they seem to remain in the circle, on the other hand, they should have transcended the circle every time a performative series occurs. Derrida could help with the articulation of the immanent contradictory character of the molecular performatives and with the retracing of the way they restrict themselves.
Paul Ricoeur, The struggle for recognition and the economy of gift
Bulgarian translation