Hate, loathing and political theory: thinking with and against William Connolly

Refreshingly, William Connolly offers a different take on the connections between emotion and political values, judgments and actions. Specifically, his aim is to demonstrate how affect-imbued ideas (might) help to nurture the ethos of generosity he is seeking to affirm. He is thus concerned with how emotion and affect actively contribute towards the development of a particular normative project, rather than hindering it. As will become clear, Connolly’s point is not, however, that affectivity and emotion serve simply as auxiliaries to a rationally derived ethos, the ‘glue’ binding us to our political values and judgements. They are, rather, constitutive elements in the generation, nurturance and consolidation of that very ethos

Questions of visibility and the politics of the human

Questions of visibility and the politics of the huma

Rethinking the human in human rights

Rethinking the human in human right

Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability: precarious lives and ungrievable deaths

For a long time now I have been interested in what I see to be a particular tension in the work of Judith Butler. This is the tension between her explicit commitment to producing ‘ontology itself as a contested field’ by exposing how particular ontological claims are constructed and then circulate and Butler’s own unacknowledged ontological presuppositions. In previous work I have explored this tension in terms of the relation between agency and performativity-ascitationality in order to raise questions about Butler’s approach for an understanding of political intervention and change. Here my focus is somewhat different. I am interested in the ethics that Butler has begun to develop in writings such as Precarious Life, which will be my main focus, Undoing Gender and Giving an Account of Oneself. In short, this is an ethics, indeed a potentially global ethics, that issues out of a common human experience of vulnerability, and particularly vulnerability to violence. What interests me are the ontological assumptions that ground this ethics

Introduction

Introductio

Naming the dead and the politics of the "human"

The summer of 2014 saw several campaigns to name the dead of Gaza. This paper aims to explore these initiatives through the idea of the ‘human’; understood both in terms of grievability, as a life that matters, and as a ‘litigious name’ employed by subaltern groups to make political demands. My argument in this paper is that politically not all attempts at nomination are equivalent and that a distinction needs to be drawn between those carried out on behalf of the ‘ungrievable’ and those engaged in by them. Only the latter enables a critical politics of the human potentially capable of transforming the prevailing order of grievability in order to make their lives count. After exploring the interventions that occurred in Gaza in 2014, I turn to how the Western (and Israeli) media represent international deaths to consider what that reveals about the differential valuation of human life. To help make my case I elaborate the idea of an order of grievability. I then explore various attempts by others to name Gaza's dead, and the limitations of their ensuing politics, before finally examining the activities of Humanize Palestine as an example of a more radical, critical politics of the human

Performing radical democracy

Performing radical democrac

Performativity and performance

This article explores the concepts of performativity and performance in feminist theory. It begins by examining the idea of gender performativity in the work of Judith Butler, tracing its development from her earliest writings through to Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and showing how Butler’s initial argument draws from phenomenology, and from performance studies (where acts are understood in theatrical terms). This is followed by a discussion of gender understood ethnomethodologically as a type of routine performance or form of “doing”. The second half of the article focuses on linguistic theories of performativity, derived from J. L. Austin and Jacques Derrida, and how they have been used by feminists such as Catharine MacKinnon, Rae Langton, and Judith Butler to illustrate pornography and hate-speech. After a discussion of the performativity of pornography, the focus turns to citationality, resignification, and “talking-back”

Travelling theories

In an essay from 1982, the renowned cultural critic Edward Said explored the idea of travelling theory. ‘[I]deas and theories’, Said suggested, ‘travel – from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another’ though the ‘circulation of ideas’ takes different forms, including ‘acknowledged or unconscious influence, creative borrowing, or wholesale appropriation’.1 While they emerge from within particular traditions, and bear the traces of their historical and cultural conditions of production, theories are nevertheless mobile, exported to contexts diverse from their own. The ability of a particular theory or body of ideas to survive over time, or to gain influence in an historical epoch distinct from that in which it originated, might well be attributable to this capacity for travel

The place of ideas about property in political theory in Great Britain between 1750-1850 : with special reference to labour and value theories, and the distribution of wealth between classes

This dissertation is concerned with ideas about property presented in British political theory between 1750-1850. It focuses not only on the major traditions of Utilitarianism and Natural Rights, but, also, since there is an obvious gap in the literature, on those ideas about property implicit in classical political economy. The study begins with the theory of property advanced by Adam Smith, concentrating on the relationship between property and the stadial thesis, observing that this latter thesis represents a referential framework for Smith's ideas on property, with property differentiation a defining characteristic of each stage. Next we examine the links between labour, value, and distribution in Smith's economics, concluding that the ambiguities within Smithian value and distribution theory provide both impetus and material for the Ricardians' conception of value and distribution. We then examine the Ricardians' views on value and distribution, concluding that both represent empirical/explanatory theories, founded upon the assumed legitimacy of the prevailing property structure. This discussion is followed by an account of the Utilitarian theory of property, centring on the connections between security and equality. It is the same concern with security found in the Utilitarian thought, we conclude, that underlies classical political economy, and not notions derived from Locke as frequently asserted. Thomas Hodgskin's natural rights theory of property provides the substance of the next chanter. Here we illuminate the various senses with which Hodqskin invests the term "natural", and consider the tension between those Smithian and Lockean elements incorporated into Hodgskin's theory. The theories of just appropriation advanced by the anti-Ricardians, and their links with "exploitation", the exchange mechanism, and monopoly ownership of the means of production, are our next concern. Finally, we consider the various plans designed by the anti-Ricardians to reconcile labour with its product, which include am artisanal model, three communitarian schemes, and two proposals for monetary reform