Deconstructive vs Pragmatic: A Critique of the Derrida–Searle Debate

ABSTRACT

This article presents a critical account of the debate between Derrida and Searle in which I defend Austin’s and Searle’s pragmatic analysis of speech against Derrida’s complex deconstructionist approach. I first formalize Derrida’s argument, reducing it to its main tenets that can be positively identified and critically reviewed. On the basis of this formalization I argue that the apparent incompatibility between Derrida’s and Searle’s approach to language becomes clear once we formalize, according to their type and content, the three concepts of “intention” that are confusedly referred to under one and the same label in the debate. This formalization reduces and clarifies the obscurity associated with the Derrida–Searle debate, and helps demonstrating the shortcomings of Derrida’s position.     

Volksunruhen in Württemberg 1789–1801

The juridical force of time forms a critical, but hitherto unexplored part of Hugo Grotius’s discourse on the justice of war and peace. Grotius defines war as a span of time in which disputed rights and armed conflicts between states are examined in reference to temporal coordinates. This method allows him to adjust otherwise static laws to meet the demands of times and spaces in an increasingly expanded world. In doing so, Grotius is also able to reconcile multiple layers of laws in a temporal framework, which suspends one layer of law, to be revived at later times. Finally, cautious in the use of the language of time, Grotius admits both that right demands immediacy, and that justice suffers delays. By this nexus of delay (mora) and emergency (necessitas), Grotius warns against the abuse of ‘time’ as a legal concept to justify unlawful claims, which still rings with alarm today.     

Derrida’s Tense Bow

This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, I will argue that Derrida’s reduction of the great variety of moral-political and religious situations to one aporetic logic runs into conceptual problems and risks undoing the moral tissue that makes hospitality possible in the first place.     

Derrida’s Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for “deconstructing” Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the “paralogism.” I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida’s reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of “writing” (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure’s own notion of “linguistic value,” produced in a system of differences without positive terms.     

In the Shell of the Old: Anarchist Geographies of Territorialisation

Abstract: This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics, nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations. This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using examples from fieldwork with anarchist‐inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative politics as a means to re‐imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.     

‘Our ongoing fight for justice’: the pasts and futures of genocidio and justicia in Guatemala

ABSTRACT

After the abrogation of the guilty verdict against Efrain Ríos Montt, young people from the group Sons and Daughters of the Disappeared (H.I.J.O.S.) issued the following statement: ‘More than a failure, this can breathe life into our ongoing fight for justice’. While this affirmation seems at first eccentric, or incidental, this article demonstrates how H.I.J.O.S.’s claim situates the Ríos Montt verdict within a longer history of justice and genocide in Guatemala. First, I trace the history of the meaning of justice and genocide among urban ladino university students from the 1940s to the 1990s. Next, I discuss youth politics and culture in the postwar period and locate H.I.J.O.S. within this context. Finally, I demonstrate how H.I.J.O.S.’s ongoing fight compels us to rethink the meanings of justice. Against apparently objective sums of the dead and disappeared that might be calculated and have their debts settled, a call emerges for ‘justice-ongoing’ after the annulment of the Ríos Montt verdict, one that insists upon incalculability and the imperative to remember and to remain provoked. For H.I.J.O.S.’s justice-ongoing, the past is not merely passed.     

Hate-crimes as racial violence: a critique of the exceptional

Violence on the one hand is taken as something natural and normal. On the other hand, certain violent actions, such as hate-crimes, are portrayed as forms of exceptional violence, while systemic inequalities are rendered ordinary. In this paper, I de-naturalize the concept of violence through a critical evaluation of hate-crimes. I argue that the concept of hate-crimes has been, or is at risk, of being co-opted by a more sustained effort to ignore and downplay racial inequalities in society. Drawing on the philosophical distinction between ‘killing’ and ‘letting die’, I contend that an exclusive focus on individual-based hate-crimes deflects attention from the systemic, structural inequalities of society; and that a narrow conceptualization of violence (as direct, intentional action) conforms to a more expansive neoliberal promotion of a ‘race-blind’ or ‘colour-blind’ criminal justice system.     

Divergent desires for the just transition in South Africa: An assemblage analysis

In this paper I establish a ‘just transition assemblage’ as a theoretical and empirical case-study to explore the plurality of justice in South Africa's energy transition. The coal phase-out is complicated by the legacies of apartheid, poverty, inequality, unemployment and structural crisis in the state-owned power utility. This transition is loaded with expectation but there is no consensus on what would qualify it as ‘just’. This assemblage analysis clusters desires around two distinct post-carbon imaginaries. The first is an ordering of desires for justice in a diffuse, distributional sense, targeting greenhouse gas emission reductions and looking to smooth the negative impacts of the transition. I label this approach ‘net justice’. This targets more justice overall in defined political spaces, and contrasts with the second orientation around recognising, reconciling, and addressing specific injustices. These desires are distinguished by a contrasting purpose of renewable energy and differing attitudes to its appropriateness or fit. There are incoherent spatial effects, where net justice is shown to be a territorialising project whilst specific injustices need to be de-territorialised. Emphasising desire shows how material and history are enrolled and enlivened, contributing to post-carbon imaginaries. This approach enables injustice and net justice to be understood as conceptually distinct, despite seeming unified calls for a just transition. The primary contribution of this paper is to show how in some cases, popular uses of the terms justice and injustice refer to different things. It forces attention on the question of: ‘justice for whom?’     

Care‐full Justice in the City

Feminist theorists in geography and beyond have long been calling for an ethic of care to be considered alongside justice as a normative ideal that can assist us in repairing our world. In urban theory this call has largely remained unheard as an ethic of care remains absent from theorisations of what comprises a just city. In this paper I argue for care to be considered alongside justice as an equally important ethic in our search for justice in the city. I develop the concept of care‐full justice, which assists us in negotiating the inherent tension between the normative and situated in the search for the ideals, and actually existing expressions, of justice and care in the city. I demonstrate the generative potential of this concept and argue that it enables us to re‐think what cities can be and to reveal times and places where this is the case.     

Warlords and Holymen. Scotland AD80-1000

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it—an understanding profoundly indebted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action.     

Youth,Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden,New Jersey

The concept of “territorial stigmatisation” identifies the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalised places. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with a food justice organisation in Camden, New Jersey, to examine youth's responses to territorial stigma. The analysis demonstrates how Black and Latinx youth rewrite the story of Camden in a way that locates the “good” within it, using narratives of the city's prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatised place. I argue that the perspectives of youth illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the blemish of place in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. The article contributes to a growing literature examining the strategic responses of those who dwell in pathologised places. Because youth are uniquely situated within the production of place, their perspectives offer important insights in this process.     

Ghostly real estate: Haunting,debt and capitalist realism in Milan

Ghosts and analogous supernatural entities are pervasive cultural objects. Anthropologists have delved into the religious, social and cultural value of these presences in depth. However, the discipline does not seem to have dedicated enough energy to interpreting this phenomenon in late capitalist societies. Nevertheless, the relationship between ghosts and capitalism constitutes an object of great interest. The real estate sector seems to be particularly suited to investigating the logic of haunting in contemporary societies. Haunting, which gives rise to ghosts, is a compelling category for understanding power relations and economic brutality. Following Derrida, ghosts are relations that mediate different temporalities in the present. In the cases of the foreclosure I ethnographically observed in Milan, those peculiar relations are debt relationships. Judges and justice system actors who oversee the procedures, aware of the presence of ghosts, act in the awareness that this haunting can in no way be resolved, following a logic that Fisher has defined as ‘capitalist realism’.     

Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World

Abstract: Who counts as a subject of justice? Not so long ago, it was widely assumed that those “who counted” were simply the citizens of a bounded territorial state. Today, however, as activists target injustices that cut across borders, that “Westphalian” view is contested and the “who” of justice is an object of hot dispute. This new situation calls for a new kind of justice theorizing, whose contours I sketch in this essay. Arguing, first, for a reflexive mode of theorizing, I introduce the concept of “misframing”, which can subject the Westphalian “who” to critical scrutiny. Arguing, second, for the necessity of a substantive normative principle to evaluate competing “who’s”, I introduce the “all‐subjected principle” as superior to three better known alternatives: namely, membership, humanism, and the all‐affected principle.     

L'illusion métabiologique

In this article, I explore the complex and unappreciated relationship between the moral and political thought of Cicero and Adam Smith. Cicero’s views about justice, propriety, and the selfish love of praise find new expression in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. I illustrate the important ways in which Smith adopts – often without attribution – Cicero’s precepts and moral judgments. I then go on to demonstrate how Smith strips those Ciceronian conclusions from their original justifying grounds in teleology and natural law. In their place, Smith injects his own psychology based in sentiments as a new account of why it is that we prefer virtue and justice to their opposites. By exploring this relationship, I hope to shed light on an important dynamic whereby modern thought has creatively adapted classical moral and political concepts.     

The tourist landscape paradox

This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. Putting into practice two alternative conceptions of landscape at once—a ‘Vidalian’ landscape-as-essence and a ‘Cosgrovian’ landscape as ‘way of seeing’—the tourist inevitably falls into an intriguing epistemological trap. Tourists' embodiment of the landscape experience becomes an attempt to evade that trap. In this paper, I note how this is exemplified in the ways in which tourist rhetoric frames the idea of Morocco and, in particular, the Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, the most ‘landscaped’ (and photographed) tourist site in the Maghreb. To help unpack this paradox, I take a brief look at what tourists actually do in the Jamaa el Fna, in order to reproduce, in place, their landscape-driven idea of Moroccan cultural space. The spatial practices of most tourists in that iconic place reveal, indeed, that the landscape paradox that drives tourist readings of the Jamaa el Fna cannot be avoided, but only endlessly performed, for this paradox is constitutive of the very formation of the Modern travelling European subject.     

Precious work: white anti-racist pedagogies in Southern Arizona

Social justice activists come to Southern Arizona to involve themselves in humanitarian aid projects that address human rights issues emerging from border securitization processes. Over time, many of these activists connect with other social justice projects, leading to the existence of rich and dedicated networks of activists in Tucson, Southern Arizona’s largest city. Subsequently, we see the development of activist ventures orienting themselves around racial justice, through which white people work to educate other whites about white supremacist society. This paper explores the ways that white activists negotiate whiteness and privilege within Tucson’s activist networks by employing deliberately anti-racist critical pedagogies. Through excerpts from interviews and reflections on experiences as a participant observer from 2013 to 2015, I discuss the figure of the white anti-racist activist. In particular, I examine the paradoxical process of becoming anti-racist, through which white activists work to address problematic aspects of their own and others’ socialization as white subjects within the hierarchy of white supremacist society, a process that necessarily coexists with the knowledge that one cannot ‘unwhiten’ oneself, and many problematic behaviors remain.     

Time and the spectral other: Demonstrating against ‘Unite the Right 2’

Recent public protests against right-wing politics in the United States have often demonstrated a sense of surprise at the recurrence of racist, anti-Semitic and fascist ideologies and movements which ought to belong to the past. Using insights from Walter Benjamin, Johannes Fabian and Jacques Derrida, the authors analyze the recent gathering of thousands of counter-demonstrators at the ‘Unite the Right 2’ rally in Washington, DC and discuss how political and moral enemies are rhetorically consigned to another time. The temporality on display at this demonstration was more complex than linear, progressive time. Instead, it consolidated events from the past, present and future into a sense of eternal and recurrent victory. They argue that this temporality is an expression both of Derrida’s ideas about spectrality and Tanya Luhrmann’s analysis of the moral psychology of faith.     

Land reform in South Africa and the colonial present

This paper develops Derek Gregory's concept of the ‘colonial present’ by demonstrating how the colonial present in rural South Africa in general and around land reform in particular has conditioned land reform outcomes. My development of the concept departs from Gregory's in two key respects. I argue first that, by viewing it in relation to the geopolitics of capitalism, it can be applied to places beyond the immediate influence of US military power; and, second, that social forces which might begin to undermine the colonial present should be examined. My empirical materials draw upon primary research on the emergence of government-sponsored partnerships between restitution beneficiaries and agribusinesses in northern Limpopo. I use the materials to argue that partnerships have emerged given white farmers’ near-monopoly on skills and the persistent power of traditional leaders, two features of South Africa's colonial past whose importance today is suggestive of a colonial present.     

论中国特色社会主义的公平观

胡锦涛同志在党的十七大报告中提出,在新的发展阶段继续全面建设小康社会、发展中国特色社会主义,必须坚持以邓小平理论和“三个代表”重要思想为指导,深入贯彻落实科学发展观,构建社会主义和谐社会。构建社会主义和谐社会要求保障社会公平正义。实现社会公平正义是中国共产党人的一贯主张,是发展中国特色社会主义的重大任务。本文认为,只有马克思主义的公平观才是真正建立在科学基础之上的公平观,只有坚持马克思主义中国化的最新公平观,才能构建中国特色的社会主义和谐社会。