Comment termine-T-on les querelles ? À propos du duel

This essay analyses duels in the early modern period (up until the early part of the nineteenth century), both as the ultimate form of quarrels, their natural conclusion under certain conditions, while duel is itself the object of intense polemics. A duel, which is organised by laws, regulates dissensus at the same time as it exacerbates this dissensus. It is through duels that dissensus in society appears, showing how social intercourses acknowledge disagreements between individuals and regulate ways of solving them. This essay analyses the form of the duel as the end of all quarrels. It then examines the controversies that surrounded duels. Finally, it examines the place of duel in literature, its poetic and dramatic function, in order to underline the ways in which the literary text contributes to a reflection on duels.     

The Artifice of Conviction,or, An Internal Geography of Responsibility

This essay addresses one of the defining characteristics of debates within human geography and across the social sciences during the last ten years: the encounter between traditional and postmodern discourses. It is argued that at least one issue has been unduly neglected: the material fact of groundless arguments. Alternatively portrayed as the father of all evils or celebrated as the liberation of scientific creativity, the groundlessness of arguments has to happen before it can be interpreted. The essay discusses examples of texts that accept the groundless happening of their claims head on. Through these examples, it is argued that possible lessons from the encounter with the so-called “postmodern challenge” include reconsidered notions of both scientific responsibility and argumentative materiality.     

The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History

Our respondents, North American and British alike, have provided a series of perceptive comments on our essay “A Peripheral Vision”. They are as wide-ranging as they are well argued and provide ample food for thought on the direction of Communist historiography, not only in Britain but in America and beyond. We want to thank all of them for their informed, often argumentative and sometimes critical collaboration, as well as Dan Leab, the editor of American Communist History, who has made this exchange possible.     

La retórica bajo el barniz de la lógica: Samuel Ramos y su discurso sobre la inferioridad mexicana

Samuel Ramos reflects on the essence of the Mexican people in the philosophical essay El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934). He emphasizes the sentiment of inferiority and the desire to hide this inferiority by camouflage strategies as a distinctive characteristic of the Mexican. This analysis of Ramos's Perfil unveils a discrepancy between the form that the author imitates—the scientific treatise—and the true argumentative constitution of his text—the rhetorical discourse. Along with the anti-rhetoric position of the rationalists, Ramos considers rhetorical argumentation as an inferior approach that has to be dissimulated and hidden under a layer of science.     

Intellectual Humility and the Ends of the Virtues: Conflicting Aretaic Desiderata

This essay demonstrates that disagreement about how to characterize intellectual humility masks deeper disagreement about the ends the intellectual virtues are meant to serve. This has been largely unacknowledged in discussions of intellectual humility, and of the intellectual virtues generally. Despite disclaimers, contestants often proceed as though there is an available unified account of the virtue that, with enough persuasion, all could be brought to accept. This essay contends a shared account is unlikely and therefore such persuasive efforts miss the point. What is needed, rather, is more attention to the kinds of desiderata that are being privileged in the various accounts: what are the conceptions of human nature and human flourishing driving different accounts? I use a simple method to make my case. I begin with the two best contemporary efforts to characterize intellectual humility. I show why each side's attempts to persuade the other are likely to fail. I then show that even if some unified account of intellectual humility could be cobbled together from these two proposals, it could not capture at least one historically influential account of intellectual humility, one found in the writings of Augustine. In a concluding section, I offer an interpretation of why the project of finding a shared account of intellectual humility seems sure to fail. I argue that liberal political commitments drive much of the contemporary discussion of the intellectual virtues, and the extent to which agreement seems attainable is correlative to the extent we are willing to allow liberalism to determine the desiderata for an account of the virtues.     

Partager et occuper l'espace public d'un quartier gentrifié : lecture de Jacques Rancière

This article attempts, based on the concepts and methods of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, to conceptualize the process of gentrification as a scene of sharing and disagreement, a scene in which the paradox of a limited access to housing and a shared occupation of public space occurs simultaneously. Three concepts of Jacques Rancière help us to encompass the scene of the disagreement of gentrification, as the partition of sensible, the equality of intelligence, and the dissensus.     

THE POLITICS OF DESPAIR AND THE CALLING OF HISTORY

What happens to history as a set of practices and intellectual protocols when the assumed subject of our historical narratives is not a product of the European Enlightenment? Such has been the question motivating much of Dipesh Chakrabarty's work for almost thirty years. This essay offers a largely chronological account of Chakrabarty's major works. It begins with his first book, published in 1989, which provided a culturalist account of working‐class history in Bengal. It then tracks his movement in the early 1990s toward a position positing radical disjuncture and even incommensurability between the worlds of Indian subalterns and Western moderns, and his subsequent attempts to soften and blur precisely this kind of disjuncture. Meditating on the problems posed by the experiences of subjects who did not live within the time of history led him to answer in the affirmative the question of whether there are experiences of the past that history could not capture. Soon thereafter, however, he drew back from the most extensive articulation of this claim, suggesting that the experiences of the non‐Enlightenment subject could function as a positive resource and not merely as the source of a profound and destabilizing critique. I argue here that this solution to the problem of incommensurability is not entirely satisfactory, for it relies implicitly on precisely the kinds of argumentative asymmetries of which his earlier analysis taught us to be wary. Chakrabarty himself, meanwhile, has continued to step further away from the radicalism of the early 1990s; his most recent book may be read as a defense of rationalist history in the face of contemporary threats posed by the rise of a politics of identity in India.     

Subaltern technologies and early modernity in the Atlantic World

Colonial Latin American and Atlantic-world scholarship that does not explicitly concern indigenous, black, and other subaltern individuals and groups continues to marginalize, if not completely ignore, them. This lingering, if often inadvertent, Eurocentrism endures, according to this essay, for several reasons, including a preoccupation with modernization, notions of ‘nature’ that make it easy to ignore ‘culture,’ and models of culture that presume fixed boundaries rather than permeability. This essay suggests that a focus on ‘technology’—capaciously defined to include phenomena such as hammocks and chocolate, as well as mining and storm management—is one way out of this predicament. Investigating the myriad technologies that dominated colonial Latin America reveals the centrality of subaltern actors throughout the region and the Atlantic world more broadly. It also affords a fruitful way to explore the relationships between material and symbolic culture in the context of an ‘entangled’ early modern world.     

可持续的国际领导权:来自968-1885年中越关系的经验教训

后冷战时代的重大挑战是世界秩序的可持续性 ,这种世界秩序并非建立在大国竞争基础之上 ,西方国际关系理论尚没有做好应对这一挑战的准备。笔者利用长达九个世纪的中国与法国殖民主义前独立的越南双边关系的实例 ,回顾了中国对于可持续的单极领导权的经验。认为这种持续不变的非对称关系不是征服和控制的结果 ,而是一种角色模式的演变。在这个模式中 ,双方都理智地确信其切身利益并没有受到威胁 ,维持这种关系对于双方而言都具有普遍的益处。基于角色的非对称关系既有弱点也有长处 ,虽然它不能被直接应用于现代 ,但它揭示出有关处理非对称国际关系的一般性经验教训。     

The tyranny of the definite article: Some thoughts on the art of intellectual history

This essay argues, following an insight of Burckhardt, that the philosophy of history is a ‘centaur’, and that it has a tendency to hinder rather than to encourage the practice of history. It challenges many of the presuppositions of Bevir's study, demonstrating that The Logic of the History of Ideas is not, in any meaningful sense, an historically minded work. The ‘logic’ of the essay looks to the arts, especially literature and music, as providing genuinely illuminating parallels to the discipline involved in the practice of intellectual history. History cannot be understood as a process of philosophical abstraction; pertinent examples are of its essence, and plurality is therefore central to its richly textured nature. It still has much to learn from the reflexive procedures of anthropology. By examining the idea of ‘tradition’ the essay demonstrates that ‘the past’ is never dead, and that the relationship between texts is a living process: the intellectual historian is him/herself an artist, and his/her task is no less demanding than that of the creative artist, and it is always humblingly provisional.     

The tyranny of the definite article: Some thoughts on the art of intellectual history

This essay argues, following an insight of Burckhardt, that the philosophy of history is a ‘centaur’, and that it has a tendency to hinder rather than to encourage the practice of history. It challenges many of the presuppositions of Bevir's study, demonstrating that The Logic of the History of Ideas is not, in any meaningful sense, an historically minded work. The ‘logic’ of the essay looks to the arts, especially literature and music, as providing genuinely illuminating parallels to the discipline involved in the practice of intellectual history. History cannot be understood as a process of philosophical abstraction; pertinent examples are of its essence, and plurality is therefore central to its richly textured nature. It still has much to learn from the reflexive procedures of anthropology. By examining the idea of ‘tradition’ the essay demonstrates that ‘the past’ is never dead, and that the relationship between texts is a living process: the intellectual historian is him/herself an artist, and his/her task is no less demanding than that of the creative artist, and it is always humblingly provisional.     

Containment and intensification in political war: Carl Schmitt and the Clausewitzian heritage

This article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse the other. Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and intensification arguments chronologically from the mid-1920s to the 1960s. Despite sometimes nominally rejecting Clausewitz’s famous thesis of war as the continuation of politics, Schmitt nevertheless affirmed the idea of war’s political nature. I conclude that Schmitt’s view can be read as a radicalized version of the Clausewitzian political theory of war rather than a strict deviation from it. This becomes evident as soon as we place Schmitt’s partly incoherent observations on Clausewitz in their argumentative contexts.     

THE CRISIS OF THE MOVEMENTS: THE ENABLING STATE AS QUISLING

The basic argument of this paper is that the anti-systemic movements political successes over the last century have turned out to be medium-term cul de sacs at the expense of the real longue duree purposes of the movements. The discovery of the enabling state by radicals towards the end of the nineteenth century has resulted in a Quisling in the anti-systemic ranks. This argument brings to the fore the anarchist critique which never accepted the enabling state as a legitimate part of the radical political repertoire. Nevertheless this essay is not a plea for a return to anarchist roots but rather attempts to reinsert anarchism, and feminism, into a single framework of anti-systemic movements alongside socialism and nationalism. As the state is being shown to be disenabling rather than enabling across the various zones of the world-economy it is argued that anarchist ideas deserve some priority as we revise radical political strategies.     

‘The Island Blazed’: A Blinding Light and Tiepolo's Hound

This essay is primarily a study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound as an affirmation of Caribbean, tropical, blinding light through an engagement with the life and work of Camille Pissarro. Conceived as such, the poem, I argue, proposes an “adamic” vision and imagination attuned with “Time” rather than “History” (the concepts are Walcott's), as well as an intensification of sensory-perception beyond vision. In order to better appreciate the historical and contextual relevance of Tiepolo's Hound, the essay provides first a general introduction to: (1) a nuanced understanding of light and its “otherness” emerging from modern physics; (2) some of the ways in which western capitalism and Cartesian perspectivism, as a hegemonic aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the West, have attempted to capture and control light and its “otherness;” and (3) the blinding quality of light in the tropical context, which repositions light as a force against any and all exploitative capitalist desires.     

TO THE PLANETARIUM—THERE IS STILL TIME!

This review essay examines James McFarland's Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now‐Time of History, which stages a comparative reading of the two thinkers’ works and argues that they shared a resistance to the conventions of nineteenth‐century historicism as well as a desire to attend not to causation as a force in history but rather to the importance of each individual “present.” Benjamin's term “dialectics at a standstill” is a formulation only a reader of Nietzsche could have produced, as McFarland ably demonstrates. This review essay also delves into Benjamin's own use of the “constellation” motif, identifying complexities McFarland leaves out of his account. Influenced by Nietzsche's own uses of astronomical and astrological motifs, Benjamin employed the image of the constellation as a symbol not only for temporality (say, of the time it takes for starlight to reach our planet). He also used it to examine our transforming relationship with the cosmos and with nature most broadly, and, in the famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” he used it as a figure for the proper relationship historians should establish between their own period and the past; this is what yields an understanding of the present moment as the Jetztzeit, the “time of the now” enjoying its own dignity beyond any causal relationship with the future it may have. However, and as this review essay suggests, Benjamin's uses of the constellation image, and of images of stars, telescopes, and planetariums more generally, were highly ambivalent. They can serve as indices of his shifting views of modernity and of his desire that modern experience, seemingly condemned to alienation, might be redeemed.     

Yoram Hazony and Leo Strauss on the Relation between Philosophy and Revelation

This essay challenges Yoram Hazony's ostensible correction of Leo Strauss's account of the tension between philosophy and revelation in Hazony's book The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture. While Hazony persuasively demonstrates the value of the Hebrew Bible, notably the half that he calls the “History of Israel,” as a work of rational political theory, emphasizing the difference in function between the Torah and the Christian “New Testament” (which serves chiefly to “bear witness” to particular events, rather than account for the permanent character of human and political life), he wrongly accuses Strauss of sharing the position of the radically antiphilosophic Christian theologian Tertullian that the Bible and classical philosophy are “absolutely oppos[ed],” even though Strauss, unlike Tertullian, takes the side of philosophy rather than the Bible in this conflict. Contrary to the impression Hazony conveys, Strauss readily acknowledged that the believer, no less than the philosopher, is obliged to make use of reason in his quest for truth and noted the critical areas of agreement between the Torah and classical philosophy. He simply emphasized the conflict between philosophy's reliance on reason as the ultimate guide to truth and the dependence of the Bible on belief in divine revelation, a dependence that Hazony implausibly seems to deny. And Hazony's challenge to the very distinction between reason and revelation threatens to weaken our appreciation of both sides of this tension, which Strauss identified as the source of the West's “vitality.”     

Artistic Critiques of Modern Dictatorships

Under a political dictatorship it is primarily from the margins that an artistic critique can be articulated, as suggested by the examples presented in this article from Romania and Chile during the 1970s and 1980s. By focusing on their threefold marginality—of the artist, the art form, and the subject of art—and by applying to them Jacques Rancière's concept of dissensus, the analysis of artistic variants of marginality sheds light on the relationship of art and politics in totalitarian regimes.     

The right to life movement: sources,development, and strategies

This article considers the history of the anti-abortion movement by first reviewing and assessing current images and interpretations of the movement, including the negative images used by the mass media as well as the interpretation which categorizes the movement as one of moral and political conservatism and that set out by Kristin Luker which sees the conflict between anti-abortion and pro-choice women as being between women who have lived radically different lives. The second section of the essay sets forth an explanation of the social sources and context of the pro-life movement, which is diverse and complex because it is embraced by those who see abortion as a civil rights question, as a family values issues, as a class/cultural issue, as a Church-related issue, as a gender issue, as a right-to-life issue embracing euthanasia, or as a movement of political conservatives. The institutional origins and development of the movement are explored in the next section. The next two section are devoted to two phases of the movement's search for a strategy. The first phase involved an attempt to use educational materials designed to reveal the reality rather than the abstract aspects of abortion. After Roe vs. Wade, attaching a "Human Life Amendment" to the constitution became a strategic goal. The second phase involved attempting to reverse the Roe decision by gaining the appointment of pro-life jurists to the Supreme Court. The pro-life movement entered national politics through the efforts of Catholic Bishops, the emergence of the New Right, and its own increasing political sophistication. The final section of the essay considers the situation after the Supreme Court's decision in Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services, which allowed states to restrict abortion. This decision precipitated a decline in support for the anti-abortion forces because the American public would rather have completely free access to abortion than a complete ban. The movement continues to have strength, however, and will likely neither ultimately succeed nor completely disappear from the political landscape.     

The Christian Peace of Erasmus

The aim of this essay is to show that Erasmus’s concept of peace should be understood as a form of irenicism rather than pacifism. I argue that Erasmus’s basic claims on war and peace do not qualify him as a pacifist, first of all because his concept of peace is non-universal: it is exclusively Christian since it does not include Muslims and Jews unless they have converted to Christianity. Secondly, Erasmus’s willingness to fight the Turks and his call for a Christian war against them suggests that he was not a pacifist. Since the peace Erasmus preached for was exclusively Christian, it cannot be identified as pacifism in its accepted universal sense, but rather as a commitment to the peace of Christendom, and therefore his concept of peace should more precisely be described as irenic. By shedding new light on Erasmus’s notion of war and peace, this essay suggests that his alleged religious tolerance should be considered anew.