后现代、现代性重建与中国的现代性问题

后现代主义对现代性的批判为人们提供了一个理解现代的有益视角,它有利于揭示现代性充满矛盾和悖论的一面,促使人们加强对现代性的反思并发掘其尚未释放的理性潜能,从而实现现代性的重建。就中国的后现代主义者而言,他们对现代性的批判过多地集中于剖析其“西化”本质,忽视了现代性的某些普遍内涵,使中国的现代性问题局限于中西对立的二元视野。客观地评价中国的现代性,就应当突破上述理论框架,认识到现代性中所包含的普遍性与特殊性之间的张力,同时借鉴后现代主义的建设性作用,努力实现现代性的解放功能。     

Fenced In: Intimacy and Mobility in Highlands Papua New Guinea

This paper is organised around the analysis of an ‘event’; a truck trip from Kwima, a Maring speaking settlement in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, to Banz in the Wahgi Valley and an evening spent on the road. The event forms a standpoint from which to assess the impact of the decline of civic space, and faltering legacy of colonial governmentality, in the Jimi since 1980. I describe the emergence of new forms of mobility based around the nexus between local forms of business and trucks. In particular I focus on new and anxious forms of masculine inside relationships, understood as a transformation of a habitus of intimacy, round which such mobility is built. I argue that this transformation should be understood in terms of the dialectical relationship between business as an expansive profit oriented project on the one hand, and its anchoring in clan defined space on the other. At the same time the event provides a vantage point to reflect on the nature of long‐term fieldwork, the methodological significance of the subjectivity of the ethnographer, and the nature of ethnographic error.     

From “Holocaust” to “Rational Choice”: Generational Change in Political Science

Abstract

David Walsh has demonstrated a unique gift for reading modernity sympathetically, for discerning within it a certain luminosity, in fact a distinctly Christian luminosity, without losing sight of modernity's darkest possibilities. In the magisterial concluding volume of his trilogy, he seeks to elaborate a “coherence” of modernity that is revealed not in concepts but only “through existence itself.” Finally, though, Walsh's enthusiasm for a purely open and therefore purely formal understanding of practical existence, articulated through brilliant, original, and remarkably comprehensive readings of the greatest authors of the continental tradition, seems to me to draw him very far away indeed from actual moral and political practice, and thus from the reality of our human condition. A truer and more truly “performative” attention to “the nature of practice itself” would be less inclined to praise pure freedom or openness and more solicitous of the actual horizons of common worlds, including implicit metaphysical and hierarchical elements.     

The Impact of the First World War and the Polish-Soviet War on the ‘Culture of Suffering’ in Post-1914 Polish Fiction

ABSTRACT

Using Jeffrey C. Alexander’s theory of cultural trauma, this article focuses on the three major types of narratives of suffering which appeared in Polish fiction, after Poland regained political independence in 1918, outside the strong myth-creating narrative of the Polish Legions’ role in the war for independence. It argues that Polish post-1918 fiction developed these three major paths in the face of suffering inflicted on Polish lands, during WWI and Polish-Soviet War. These paths were to: 1) continue the narrative of Polish suffering within the framework of heroic, and selfless, sacrifice for Poland that has been well established since Romanticism; 2) present suffering as the universal fate of humanity outside the notion of national identity, due to the monstrosity of modern bureaucratic systems wherein human beings are treated as objects; and 3) present suffering as the result of modern warfare, but told outside of “patriotic phraseology” – thus suggesting a growing need as to finding a solution to national conflicts outside narrowly defined identities.     

Pascal’s modernity

Pascal can be readily inserted into familiar characterizations of the emergence of modernity (man’s alienation from the cosmos). He himself theorized the proper relationship between innovation (legitimate in the physical sciences) and traditional authority (legitimate especially in theology). While accepting the mechanistic philosophy and in particular the rigid Cartesian distinction between immaterial and corporeal substance, he registers its divergence from our spontaneous understanding of experience; we find him encountering the view of one of his religious mentors that Cartesian science has deprived the cosmos of its spiritual significance as an image of the creator. His relationship to Latour’s conception of (non-)modernity is considered. Though many of his attitudes are uncongenial to modern secular humanism, his theologically-motivated rejection of the concept of nature as normative has surprising echoes in aspects of twenty-first century thought and culture.