Hegel and global politics: communitarianism or cosmopolitanism?

This article discusses Hegel’s views on global politics by relating them to the ‘communitarianism versus cosmopolitanism’ debate. I distinguish between three different theoretical positions and three different readings of Hegel, which I associate with the notions of ‘communitarianism,’ ‘strong cosmopolitanism’ and ‘weak cosmopolitanism’ respectively. Contrary to a commonly held view that Hegel is not a cosmopolitan thinker at all, in any sense of the term, I argue that he is best thought of as a weak cosmopolitan thinker rather than a communitarian or a strong cosmopolitan advocate of the idea of a world-state. In passing, the article refers to the relationship which exists between Hegel’s ideas and those of three Twentieth Century theorists who might be associated with these theoretical positions and these different readings of Hegel, namely, Carl Schmitt, Alexandre Kojève and Jurgen Habermas. The article also refers to the methodological problems which are confronted by readers of Hegel’s writings who wish to apply his ideas to the problems of global politics today. Here I refer to a distinction which I have made elsewhere between different kinds of reading, namely the interpretation, appropriation and the reconstruction of texts, which is especially relevant for readers of the works of Hegel

What is the Other of Europe?

Peer reviewe

Religion and Self: Notions from a Cultural Psychological Perspective

After a brief introduction of a cultural psychological perspective, this paper turns to the concept of self. The paper proposes to conceive of that reality to which the concepts of self refer as a narrative, employing especially autobiographies and other ego-documents in empirical exploration. After discussing some psychological theories about “self,” the paper points out that they may well be applied in research on personal religiosity

Authority, Autonomy and Automation: The Irreducibility of Pedagogy to Information Transactions

"This paper draws attention to the tendency of a range of technologies to reduce pedagogical interactions to a series of datafied transactions of information. This is problematic because such transactions are always by definition reducible to finite possibilities. As the ability to gather and analyse data becomes increasingly fine-grained, the threat that these datafied approaches over-determine the pedagogical space increases. Drawing on the work of Hegel, as interpreted by 20th century French radical philosopher Alexandre Kojève, this paper develops a model of relational pedagogy which highlights three points of incompatibility with a datafied learning environment reduced to finite measures. Firstly: Kojève’s accont of authority in Hegel posits two aspects to the mimetic relation between teacher and student: recognition and realisation, which belong to the ipseity or about-self-ness of the subject, and are incompatible with a general definition of data. Secondly, the Hegelian approach to human historical time, in particular the assertion that time and desire are begun in the future, not the past, renders it incompatible with mathematical time as used in data processing. Finally, from these it is possible to derive a distinctive notion of the work of pedagogy, grounded in Kojève’s realist reading of Hegel, irreducible to information processing. In consequence of this threefold irreducibility, the paper draws attention to a need for relations of human pedagogical work to be inherent in the design of educational technologies and highlights the dangers of presuming a machine intelligence model in the design of learning environments.

New Technologies’ Promise to the Self and the Becoming of the Sacred: Insights from Georges Bataille’s Concept of Transgression

This article draws on Georges Bataille’s concept of transgression, a key element in Bataille’s theory of the sacred, to highlight structural implications of the way the self-empowerment ethos of new technologies suffuses the digital tracking culture. Pointing to the original conceptual stance of transgression, worked out against prohibition, I first argue that, beyond a critique of new technologies’ promise of self-empowerment as coming at the expense of an acknowledgement of the ultimate taboo—death—is the problem of the sanitizing of the tension between the crossing of the line of the symbolic taboo and prohibition; this undermines a “libidinal investment” towards the sacred, which is central in Bataille’s theory. Second, focussing on “eroticism”, since this embodies the emancipative potential of the Bataillean sacred, I argue that while a fear of eroticism marks out the digital technological realm, this is covered up by the blurring of boundaries between pleasure, fun and sex(iness) that currently governs our experience with technological devices

Like a thief in the night : Agamben, Hobbes and the messianic transvaluation of security

The article addresses the reinterpretation of the problematic of security in the messianic turn in contemporary continental political thought. I focus on Giorgio Agamben's reinterpretation of Hobbes's Leviathan in Stasis, which restores an eschatological dimension to this foundational text of modern security politics. Hobbes's commonwealth has been traditionally read as a secularized version of the katechon, a force that restrains the state of nature while drawing on its resources. Instead, Agamben argues that for Hobbes, the state is neither the analogue of God's kingdom on earth nor the katechon that delays its arrival, but the profane power that will disappear when the kingdom of God is established on earth. It is thus in principle incapable of attaining the peace and security that it claims to provide, perpetually producing insecurity and violence in the guise of protection. In Agamben's reading, it is precisely this failure of the state's security apparatuses that assists the advent of the messianic event in an oblique fashion. The exposure of this failure does not aspire to the improvement of the apparatuses of security or resign us to inescapable insecurity but only affirms the need to render the present apparatuses inoperative, bringing forth a future without them.Peer reviewe

"Outside, it is snowing": Experience and finitude in the nonrepresentational landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet

Copyright © 2008 PionRomanillos J L, 2008. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 26(5) 795 – 822 DOI: 10.1068/d6207This paper presents and explicates the anonymous and impersonal spatialities tentatively mapped in the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Emerging from the kinds of landscapes and visualities articulated, these spatialities are at odds with the kind of anthropocentrism characteristic of phenomenological narratives of spatial experience that would start from an apparently stable human-subject position. It is argued that his body of literature dismantles the anthropocentric narratives and biographies that would produce in both the space of the world and the ‘phenomenological subject’ an unwarranted depth and naturalism. Importantly, and reflecting the theoretical turn towards the being of language, Robbe-Grillet questions the legitimacy of linguistic subjects to capture the spaces of the visible. As such, it is argued that his literature reflects an experience of the critiques of phenomenology. Importantly, this ‘critique’ goes hand in hand with the kinds of spatialities and landscapes that are rendered in the novels—the indefinite perspectives they open up, the paradoxical visualities they sustain or deny, and the disorientation they inject into the heart of spatial experience. These literary effects produce a nonanthropocentric and nonpersonal spatiality which, although contributing to an erasure of the ‘subject’, at the same time expose and open up a sociospatiality based on singularities, intensities, and finitude

Geography, death and finitude

publication-status: PublishedRomanillos J L, 2011. The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published Environment and Planning A, 2011, Vol. 43, Issue 11, pp. 2533 – 2553 DOI: 10.1068/a4474Copyright © 2011 PionDespite growing interest in the geographies of death, loss, and remembrance, comparatively little geographical research has been devoted either to the historical and cultural practices of death, or to an adequate conceptualisation of finitude. Responding to these absences, in this paper I argue for the importance of the notion of finitude within the history and philosophy of geographical thought. Situating finitude initially in the context of the work of Torsten Hägerstrand and Richard Hartshorne, the notion is argued to be both productive of a geographical ethics, and as epistemologically constitutive of phenomenological apprehensions of ‘earth’ and ‘world’. In order to better grasp the sense and genealogy of finitude, I turn to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Georges Bataille. These authors are drawn upon precisely because their writings present powerful conceptual frameworks which demonstrate the intimate relations between spatiality, death, and finitude. At the same time, their writings are critically interrogated in the light of perhaps the most important aspect of the conceptual history of finitude: the way in which it has been articulated as a site of anthropocentric distinction. I argue for a critical deconstruction of this anthropocentric basis to finitude; a deconstruction which raises a series of profound questions over the ethics, normativities, and understandings of responsibility shaping contemporary ethical geographies of the human and nonhuman. In so doing, I demonstrate the geographical importance of the notion of finitude for a variety of arenas of debate which include: phenomenological understandings of spatiality; the biopolitical boundaries drawn between human and animal; and contemporary theorisations of corporeality, materiality, and hospitality

The Irredeemable Debt: On the English Translation of Lacan's First Two Public Seminars

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Psychoanalysis and History . The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/pah.2017.0214Drawing on archival sources and personal recollections, this essay reconstructs the troubled history of the first robust attempt at making the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan newly available to an anglophone readership, after his death in 1981. It details how the project was initiated by John Forrester as part of a large-scale initiative to generate translations of both Lacan’s own texts and seminars, and various books written in the Lacanian tradition. If, almost seven years after it was conceived, Forrester’s project only resulted in the publication of English translations of Lacan’s first two public seminars, the essay demonstrates that this was not owing to disagreements over the quality of Forrester’s work, but because of two consecutive sources of resistance. External resistance from publishers first led to the initial project being reduced to the translation of two seminars, whereas internal resistance from Lacan’s son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller to Forrester’s vision of presenting the seminars with a full scholarly apparatus subsequently brought about delays in its execution