The inverted postnational constellation: Identitarian populism in context

As exemplified by the pan‐European ‘Identitarian movement’ (IM), contemporary far‐right populism defies the habitual matrix within which right‐wing radicalism has been criticised as a negation of liberal cosmopolitanism. The IM's political stance amalgamates features of cultural liberalism and racialist xenophobia into a defence of ‘European way of life.’ We offer an alternative decoding of the phenomenon by drawing on Jürgen Habermas's ‘postnational constellation.’ It casts the IM's protectionist qua chauvinistic populism as ‘inverted’ postnationalism, engendered through territorial and ethnic appropriation of universal political values. As such, inclusionary ideals of cosmopolitan liberalism and democracy purporting humanistic postnationalism have been transformed by Identitarians into elements of a privileged civilisational life‐style to be protected from ‘intruders.’ Remaining within the remit of the grammar of the postnational constellation, trans‐European chauvinism, we contend, is susceptible to inclusive articulation. Foregrounding radical emancipatory social transformation would however require not more democracy, but a principled critique of capitalism

What's in the Apartheid Analogy? Palestine/Israel Refracted

This article engages the analogy of Palestine/Israel to apartheid South Africa, and probes the political imaginary that contours this discussion while explicating the circumstances of its emergence. Accordingly, it contends that apartheid is not merely a system of institutionalized separation; rather, it organizes the facts and reality of separation(s) within a frame and against a background unity that effectively allows it to be perceived as such. To that end, the article explores four key factors that created background unity in apartheid South Africa: labor relations; political theology; role of language; and geo-political unit(y), and scrutinizes their political and experiential ramifications in Palestine/Israel

Gil Anidjar

While Carl Schmitt claims that the enemy constitutes “the political,” his various writings largely ignore the historical and discursive evolution of the enemy. Anidjar’s major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna. More specifically, Anidjar examines the ways in which Western Christendom’s theologico-political concept of the enemy came into being and how it has been reinscribed through its secularization(s)

Thinking the Muslim Question by way of Rethinking the Jewish Question: A Critique of Frankfurt School's Secular Analytics of Religion

While Europe's "Jewish question" gained prominence in the nineteenth century and has become a cardinal ordeal for emancipatory thought and praxis, its "Muslim question" started to surface in the early 1980s and gelled in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks. Whereas the former reached an apotheosis in a genocide of European Jewry and a resolute exportation, and confinement, to Palestine, the latter is steadily brewing in Europe, and globally, and has not hitherto received satisfactory answers - nor any "final solutions." And yet, the ''Muslim question'' is an increasingly prominent cipher that signifies the construction and abstraction of Muslims and Muslimness in relation to their standing and integration within the secular Western polities and beyond, as well as the problematization of their political and epistemic statuses within the Western-styled secular public sphere. Prima facie, this study asks: is it possible to examine the "Muslim question" in Europe through the lens of the older discourse on the "Jewish question," despite the differences in group under consideration, gaps in time, discursive trajectories, and not the least the Holocaust? Building on multidisciplinary scholarship, I contend that, despite these variances, and the changing political contours, there are common and parallel European-framed grounds, tropes, and historico-political affinities between the "Jewish" and the "Arab/Muslim" figures. These, which unfolded over half a millennium (at minimum), make it hardly possible to understand the modern construal of their respective representations unless considered jointly. There are, furthermore, critical insights to be gained from studying the historical discourse surrounding the "Jewish question" to illuminate current discussions about, and analytical paradigms of, the "Muslim question." To that end, the study interrogates the epistemo-political effects of the racialized genesis and transmission of "religion" in critical Enlightenment thought - as a concept through which "Jewish being" has been apprehended - and the forms of their reception and elaboration in the Frankfurt School tradition more specifically. As a category, religion was uniquely distinguished from emerging and established modern notions of social life, especially starting from the latter part of the eighteenth century and through the intellectual consolidation and political ascent of the Enlightenment. Still, the contours of Enlightenment's notion of religion were essentially derived from early modern Western Christian (mainly Protestant) derivations thereof. The proliferation of "religions" in the secular age endowed the category of "religion" with multiple descriptive and normative attributes, and entrenched its status in juridical and legal edifices, social and political thought, and shaped concomitant discourses of emancipation. Whence, "religion" asserted itself as a world-embracing, secular, sphere of knowledge capacious of grasping various forms of life and traditions based on universalizable analytical precepts sourced from intra-Christian differences. In attempt to sketch the contours of a counter-model of the prevalent family of Enlightenment understandings of religion that sedimented in the last two centuries, the study revisits Karl Marx's analysis of the "Jewish question" as posed in the 1840s as an index to Enlightenment's problem of emancipation and religion: of the emancipation of, and/or from, religion. To that end, it argues that Marx's analysis suggests, counterintuitively, that the "Jewish question" is fact an ideological artefact of a substantive Christian question, and that "religion" is not an elementary basis for emancipation (and that emancipation is not itself not one but a bifurcated horizon: political and human). In short, rather than perceiving religion as a descriptive category, Marx demands that we understand religion as a mediational, re-descriptive, category, and critique its operations accordingly. The study subsequently proceeds with problematizing the descriptive validity, normative status, and socio-political valorization of religion in the Frankfurt School's tradition. More specifically, it scrutinizes Frankfurt School's reflexivity vis-à-vis its social (qua secular) imaginary and epistemo-critical apparatus with regards to "religion/religious" figures of thought and objects of analysis. To that end, it shows that early Frankfurt School's approach to the critique of religion is confounded by Weberian conceptual logistics, and thus does not correspond with the Marxian approach previously elucidated. Rather, it relies on Weberian Marxist lens which essentially does not challenge the descriptive normativity of the category of religion. Henceforth, the study contends that the critical apparatus of the early Frankfurt School is bent on reproducing an "emancipatory prejudice" when analyzing the oppression and domination that are associated with "religion/religious" objects. To remedy this deficiency, it argues for the incorporation of theologico-political lens in the systemic level of its critical instrumentarium, as a corollary to the economic-political one, for that would endow the ideologiekritik of "religion" with awareness to systemic forms of domination and social harm steeped in the operation of secular(ist) power. Having shown the early Frankfurt School's inherent Weberian Marxist secular schematics of religion the study focuses moves to address the post-secular turn that the tradition's most eminent second-generation theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has effected in its agenda and viewpoint. It sets to unpack and bring to light the tacit investments qua assumptions upon which Habermas's purportedly inclusive and pluralist framework relies. In this vein, it critiques his epistemological position on secular reason in three ways, arguing that: (i) there is a distinctive conserving power in Habermas's argument for the wider recognition of religion; (ii) it engages in religious boundary-drawing; and (iii) it amplifies the voices of the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage over others. In doing so, the study clarifies the limits of the emancipatory horizon entailed in Habermas's formulation of the post-secular society and argues that it ends up reinscribing the religious-secular binary. Lastly, the study dissects Habermas's engagement with the Jewish question in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its ramifications for the German Enlightenment tradition and identity. It contends that Habermas's unmitigated urge to salvage the Enlightenment tradition in its German formulation leads him to singularize the event of "Auschwitz" and its emblematic Jewish victim as the litmus test of any emancipatory social theory worthy of the designation "critical." Habermas's secular redemption of the "philosophical Jew" is met, however, by a lack of critical historical reading of the broader historical torment that brought Auschwitz into being. The study reads Habermas's silence on the history of real Jews, pre- and post-Auschwitz in the context of what he views as a relevant history for redeeming Germany's enlightened soul - German Jews as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought until the Holocaust and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in its aftermath. Habermas's post-Auschwitz Jewish question becomes then the question of enlightened conscientious Germans who want to endow their morality with political legitimacy regardless of the contemporary history of real, sovereign, Jews. This post-national German predicament, I argue, perpetuates Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice against the Jews - i.e., it reaffirms both the Orientalist framework that denied Jews collective identity and national consciousness in pre-Auschwitz Europe and the approval of the realization of Jewish national self-determination outside of Europe in the post-Auschwitz epoch. Habermas's interlocking of the post-Auschwitz Jewish and German questions leads to the extension of Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice to Palestinians and, effectively, to the denial qua sacrifice of their existence as a nation. In short, by continuing denying the ongoing impact of the legacy of European Orientalism and racialist enmity vis-à-vis the figures who it once constructed as "Semitic brothers" and affirming an enlarged yet exclusivist civilizationism (Judeo-Christian) stance as the moral backbone of the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas's post-national and post-secular theorizing end up short on delivering the emancipatory thrust needed to cater for the Enlightenment endeavor as an "unfinished project." Aside from the critically discussing the above thematics, the study has manifold implications. Theoretically, it enhances the analytical capacity of the critical method to analyze the conjoined social reality of religion and the secular(ist) bias of the Frankfurt School (and beyond). Practically, it dialecticizes the pervasive principle of epistemic ruptures and enables a bi-focal look on continuities and dis-continuities between religion and cognate analytical social categories. The political and normative implications of this study bring back the possibility of viewing the Muslim question as historical figuration of a stealthy Christian-European complex that for several centuries centered on the figure of the Jew. In other words, the study "re-Europeanizes" the vantage point from which the critique of the Europe's Muslim question should proceed and reaccommodates what appears as a sprawling global question to its still potent racializing European/Western trajectory

Loyal Resistances to "the Spirit’s Tongue" [in: Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in Hebrew: A Symposium]

רב-שיח לרגל פרסום התרגום לעברית של הכרך הראשון של הספר פנומנולוגיה של הרוח לג. ו. פ. הגל. התרגום, שנעשה בידי רועי בר ואלעד לפידות ואשר ראה אור בהוצאת רסלינג, הוא אירוע אינטלקטואלי רב חשיבות והקריאה בו מעלה שאלות רבות שחוצות את תחומי הפילוסופיה, התיאולוגיה, המחשבה הפוליטית וחקר התרבות. פנינו לארבעה חוקרי הגל, ביקשנו מכל אחד ואחת מהם לכתוב מסה קצרה על הספר ותרגומו, ולאחר מכן כינסנו את ארבעתם לרב-שיח כתוב. המסות והשיחה נעות בין דיון בהגותו של הגל – בפרוצדורה הדיאלקטית, במקומו של האחר ובמעמדו של הידע המוחלט – ובין דיון באקטואליות של מחשבת הגל ברגע הפוליטי הנוכחי ובמשמעות תרגומה לעברית של הרוח האוניברסלית. ויכוח סוער ניטש על עצם האפשרות או הרצון ״לשוב להגל״ ולעשות זאת משמאל, על קיומם או היעדרם של דפוסי מחשבה הגליאניים בלב המציאות הפוליטית של זמננו, ועל הכרעות תרגום שונות. הדיון בספר ובתרגומו משתרגים זה בזה, כך שהדיון בתרגום של הגל לעברית הופך לדיון בעניינים שעולים בספר עצמו: השאלה מהו ספר זה בעצמו עוברת דרך השאלה מהו עבורנו, מיהו האחר שלו ומה הוא יכול להיות עבורו, והאם – כמו אצל הגל – כל אלה מתלכדים לבסוף

Review Symposium | Capitalism on Edge: How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia

Capitalism on Edge aims to redraw the terms of analysis of the so-called democratic capitalism and sketches a political agenda for emancipating society of its grip. This symposium reflects critically on Azmanova’s book and challenges her arguments on methodological, thematic, and substantive grounds. Azar Dakwar introduces the book’s claims and wonders about the nature of the anti-capitalistic agency Azmanova’s ascribes to the precariat. David Ingram worries about Azmanova’s deposing of “economic democracy” and the impact of which on the prospect of radical change she advocates. William Callison casts doubt over the empirical plausibility of Azmanova’s vision of crisis-free transition out of democratic capitalism. Eilat Maoz interrogates Azmanova’s emancipatory project from the historical standpoint of (de)colonization and global imperialism. In her reply to these criticisms, Azmanova accepts some and parries others, while bringing their points closer to her anti-capitalist vision

Online control of reaching and pointing to visual, auditory, and multimodal targets: Effects of target modality and method of determining correction latency

Movements aimed towards objects occasionally have to be adjusted when the object moves. These online adjustments can be very rapid, occurring in as little as 100 ms. More is known about the latency and neural basis of online control of movements to visual than to auditory target objects. We examined the latency of online corrections in reaching-to-point movements to visual and auditory targets that could change side and/or modality at movement onset. Visual or auditory targets were presented on the left or right sides, and participants were instructed to reach and point to them as quickly and as accurately as possible. On half of the trials, the targets changed side at movement onset, and participants had to correct their movements to point to the new target location as quickly as possible. Given different published approaches to measuring the latency for initiating movement corrections, we examined several different methods systematically. What we describe here as the optimal methods involved fitting a straight-line model to the velocity of the correction movement, rather than using a statistical criterion to determine correction onset. In the multimodal experiment, these model-fitting methods produced significantly lower latencies for correcting movements away from the auditory targets than away from the visual targets. Our results confirm that rapid online correction is possible for auditory targets, but further work is required to determine whether the underlying control system for reaching and pointing movements is the same for auditory and visual targets