Philosophy & Social Criticism

In this paper, I want to look at some questions that arise when we try to abandon the conceptual and political framework of the nation-state. Is it impossible to conceive the unity of the state apart from the unity of the nation? Are shared political values insufficient to account for the existence of bounded states and special duties to one's own country? In the first section I will discuss the view that the idea of the modern state is incoherent and that it tacitly relies on the social idea of membership provided by the nation. The following section will give an alternative to the nationalist account of the exist ence of bounded communities and suggest why Habermasians and Rawlsians are right in thinking that the shared value of justice can be sufficient for political unity. Finally, I give a brief indication of the rel evance of this discussion to the idea of European Union.

Our essay examines Levinas's ideas of time and their relation to his ethical discourse. We read 'his' texts deconstructively and show how the notions of time and of the ethical are closely inter connected. We argue that Levinas deconstructs the concept of time, as it is traditionally developed by Western philosophy, and that this concept is part and parcel of and cannot be detached from his philo sophical venture. By following two major shibboleths, jouissance and language, we trace the deconstructive effort of Levinas to dismantle Western philosophy's traditional conceptualization of time. Our dis cussion points not to the failure of Levinas's toil but rather to the aporetic structure of his itinerary and to the ethical significance of this aporia.

Foucault's theory of disciplinary power and Bourdieu's theory of symbolic power are among the most innovative attempts in recent social thought to come to terms with the increasingly elusive character of power in modern society. Both theories are based on cri tiques of subject-centered analyses of power and offer original accounts of modern social institutions. But Foucault's critique of the subject is so radical that it makes it impossible to identify any deter minate social location of the exercise of power or of resistance to its operations. Bourdieu's theory of practice in terms of the symbolically mediated interaction between the habitus and social structure avoids these problems by connecting relations of domination both to identi fiable social agents and to the institutions of the modern state. However, Bourdieu's strategic model of social action remains too narrow to allow for the possibility of autonomous agency and an emancipatory political praxis. The theory of symbolic power must be supplemented by a normative conception of practical reason if its emancipatory potential is to be realized.

This essay discusses Walter Benjamin's development of 'dream' as a model for understanding 19th- and 20th-century urban culture. Following Bergson and surrealist poetics, Benjamin used 'dream' in the 1920s as an heuristic analogy for investigating child hood memories, kitsch art and literature; during the early 1930s, he also developed it into an historiographic concept for studying 19th- century Parisian culture. Benjamin's interpretative use of the dream cuts across Ricoeur's distinction between the hermeneutics of 'recol lection' and the hermeneutics of 'suspicion'. The political dream analyst seeks to discharge the 'fatal powers' of the ideological dream, while at the same time fostering the experience of waking in which dream elements may recollectively be grasped. Benjamin extends this dialectic of dreaming, interpreting and waking to the relation between historical epochs and the tasks of the materialist historian. Puzzling out the recent past's dreamlike rebuses may serve in the task of a present historical awakening.