The sense of international and being-with-in-common

Abstract

Where do(es) international relations present? The discipline of International Relations (IR) avoids this question because the answer is so obvious. What constitutes the discipline of IR is an attempt to localize the place of international relations as a form of politics that has unique characteristics. These characteristics refer to the limits of politics. In this sense, international relations constitutes an outside of the political sphere within which the political self finds the certainties upon which its political self-understandings rely. It is a projection of the transformation of universal politics to the particular and internal, through the territorial mentality of the classical—in the Foucauldian sense, judicial-political—sovereignty theories. Following this tendency, political theory ignores international relations as an element of the ontological status of being-with, while for its part, the discipline of IR does not take account of the everydayness of being-with as a concern for international politics or attempt to translate our everyday encounter into the particular language of international relations. This project attempts to reverse this shared lacuna of both disciplines and tries to treat the international—as a sense which produces specific meaning of nearness and a particular version of being-inside—which operates in the ontological status of being-with. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries