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Monthly Archives: April 2006

Carl Schmitt

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The next symposium to take place at Long Sunday will be on the topic of Carl Schmitt’s “Theory of the Partisan”. It is tentatively scheduled for early June, possibly the first week. Because of the length of the essay, I’ve put the announcement out a bit earlier than the previous ones. If you’re interested in [...]

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Horkheimer

Thursday, April 20, 2006

From Max Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (pages 231-2): The inability to grasp in thought the unity of theory and practice and the limitation of the concept of necessity to inevitable events are both due, from the viewpoint of theory of knowledge, to the Cartesian dualism of thought and being. [...]

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Veridical

Thursday, April 20, 2006

For the past week or so, I’ve been reading and reading the so-called “preliminaries” section of my social theory comprehensive exam. I hope to start writing on this tomorrow or Saturday. The comprehensive is structured as a mock course proposal, syllabus, and the ‘complete text of the final lecture’. While a moderately silly format, it [...]

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Pedant

Monday, April 10, 2006

The primary virtue of that process known as “comprehensives” or “qualification” examinations in North American doctoral programs (in the social sciences and humanities) is that they force you to read things you wouldn’t otherwise bother to read or wouldn’t otherwise consider reading. Habermas is a good example. I’m not particularly interested in reading him and [...]

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“War, Right, Sovereignty – Techne”

Monday, April 10, 2006

Perhaps in a moment of self-flagellation, I’ve recently chosen Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural as bedtime reading. After suffering through the titular essay (I think Nancy’s analysis of “with” is essential to an understanding of the social — “with” being, of course, a mutant Durkheimian/Heideggerian moment in his thought, by the way), I finally made [...]

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Discovery (The Social II)

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

(Second in a series of short thoughts.) The discovery of society introduces a radical break into history. It is co-extensive with the destruction of what Michel Foucault calls the ‘classic episteme’ and the birth of the ‘modern episteme’; “it is a radical event that is distributed across the entire visible surface of knowledge.” Foucault’s periodization [...]

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The Social

Tuesday, April 4, 2006

Radical politics and neo-liberalism most fully interpenetrate one another in the figures of Ernesto Laclau and Margaret Thatcher. (One shudders at the thought of their bastard offspring — and rightly so, do we not find that figure in Tony Blair’s ideologue, Anthony Giddens?) Making parallel but inverse claims, both Laclau and Thatcher assert the death [...]

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