Eduardo Mendieta

The so-called War on Terror has given rise to a virulent discourse that demonizes all those who allegedly seek to do harm and kill Americans. A veritable bestiary of demonic and bestial creatures has been thus ensembled, constituting what one cannot but call an “imperial bestiary.” Here we do not so much consider the contents of this imperial bestiary, as much as seek to analyze its grammar, that is, the way it operates on certain moral assumptions that have very pernicious moral consequences. Reconstructing the work of some recent critical philosophers, a possible way to dismantle all bestiaries, whether imperial or colonial, is elaborated. The work of Mary Midgley, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway are brought together to develop what has been here called a politics beyond monsters, beasts, roguish animals, and infesting vermin that must be at best domesticated, and at worst exterminated.

Jorge Valadez’s important contribution to political theory in general, and multicultural citizenship in particular, is assessed from the standpoint of the duplicitous role ‘culture’ plays in contemporary political theory. After underscoring its virtues, the essay turns to a discussion of three major concerns that the book raises: its negativistic view of the culture of the oppressed; its anachronistic proposal about universal property rights; and the way the author might have to revise its view of the ethnogroups in order to deal appropriately with Latinos in the USA.

Arthur Schopenhauer, in an essay titled “On Authorship and Style,” included in volume 2 of his Parerga and Paralipomena, writes, “First there are two kinds of authors, those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and thus write for money.”1 Schopenhauer, however, changes his mind quickly a page later and writes: “Again, we can say that there are three kinds of authors; first those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even directly from the books of others. This class is the most numerous. Secondly, those who think while they are ..

Heidegger has been taken by many as a prophet of extremity, a nihilist, an existentialistic individualist, and a destroyer of normativity. This article offers a sympathetic reading of Brandom’s efforts to extricate Heidegger from such readings and to set out a way to read Heidegger’s philosophy of language and action that underscores their fundamental sociality and normativity. Herein it is shown specifically why Brandom must turn to Heidegger’s work as a testing ground for his own proposal of an inferentialist semantics. In tandem, Brandom’s Kantian reading of Heidegger is analysed and assessed. Key Words: Dasein • Martin Heidegger • language • normativity • objectivity • pragmatics • referential • Richard Rorty • semantics • sociality • world-disclosing.

María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.

Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft suggests that something like a critique of practical reason, or at least its foundations—from the perspective of transcendental semiotics—is in the works, and in addition that it is something possible, desirable and even necessary. The suggestion is that a semiotically transformed transcendental philosophy, as the theoretical aspect of a philosophical system, has its complement in a practical philosophy whose main tenets have come to be known as discourse ethics, or the discourse theory of ethics. Historically, Karl-Otto Apel was the first to formulate some of the main arguments of a communicative, discursive, semiotical, or pragmatic theory of morality, and he did so as far back as the late sixties and early seventies. In the United States, in contrast to European and Latin American countries where Apel's work is better known, Habermas' name is the one most frequently associated with the discourse theory of ethics. This state of affairs may be due to a dearth of translations of primary sources, though Benhabib's and Dallmayr's The Communicative Ethics Controversy provides an excellent selection of primary texts. Consequently, today in the United States we stand not only quite behind the times in terms of the primary sources of discourse ethics, but also of the growing secondary literature on the subject. Neither Apel, nor Habermas, can be said to provide the only discourse-ethical approach within philosophy and political theory, exhaust the consequences and possibilities of an application of discourse ethics by their respective attempts to link it directly to either a theory of politics, or a theory of the democratic state that is circumscribed by both a specifically German historical horizon and a European-First World outlook. Indeed what makes this book particularly interesting, helpful, and above all timely is that it makes a conscious effort to represent the various positions that fall under the rubric of communicative, or discourse oriented practical philosophy, and the many ways in which problems of practical philosophy can be approached—while it attempts to give us a distinct sense that this approach has in fact graduated to an international status, that is, that it is no longer, if it ever was, exclusively an affair of German philosophy.

We can now survey the ruins of a Babelian tower of discourse about cosmopolitanism. We speak of “elite travel lounge,” “Davos,” “banal” as well as of “reflexive,” “really existing,” “patriotic,” and “horizontal” cosmopolitanisms. Here, an attempt is made to extract what is normative and ideal in the concept of cosmopolitanism by foregrounding the epistemic and moral dimensions of this attitude towards the world and other cultures. Kant, in a rather unexpected way, is profiled as the exemplification of what is here called “imperial” cosmopolitanism, which is both blind and dismissive of its own material conditions of possibility. Then, through a discussion of the works of Nussbaum, Appiah, Mignolo, Butler, Benhabib and Beck the author elaborates a version of cosmopolitanism that is grounded, enlightened, and reflexive, which corrects and supersedes Kant’s own Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism, but in an age of cosmopolitization. Democratic iterations that are jurisgenerative are matched at the global level by cosmopolitan iterations that are both jurisgenerative and affect generating

But in the age of the disintegration of experience human beings are no longer subjectively disposed to letter writing. For the present it looks as though technology is eliminating the preconditions for the letter. Because letters are no longer necessary, given the speedier possibilities of communication and the shrinking of spatio-temporal distances, their inherent substance is disintegrating as well. Benjamin brought to letter writing an antiquarian and uninhibited talent; for him the letter represented the wedding of something in the process of disappearing and the utopia of restoration.In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private...

i want to begin by thanking my good friend Richard Hart for the invitation to be part of this wonderful panel in which we are honoring while also being challenged by the work of Charles Johnson to think differently about our discipline. I also want to thank the organizers of SAAP for hosting this important series of lectures, in which we are invited to engage the work of thinkers who challenge us to think differently because they either come to our problems from different disciplines and fields, or teach us to see their problems as ours. From the outset, I must admit my trepidation at engaging Johnson’s work, which spans nearly half a century and a variety of genres. Johnson began as a cartoonist, then became a...