Eduardo Mendieta

This article deals with the concepts, processes, and antagonisms that are associated with the notion of postsecularity. In light of this article’s expanded interpretation of José Casanova on the secular and secularization, as well as thoughts on James A. Beckford’s take on public religions, five rubrics on the postsecular derived from critical theory and an understanding of ‘reflexive secularization’ are presented. This term focuses on secularization processes and how these practices unleash complementary as well as antagonistic tendencies, a confrontation of normativities and specific social-empirical challenges. From this basis it is argued that social-empirical analysis should focus on non-naturalistic relations between individuals occupying structurally equivalent positions in narrative networks. A plurality of normativities are seriously considered as ideas circulating through social relations where the critical competence of the participants of such communication processes are provoked to subvert anything – including any normative positionality – as taken for granted. Moves towards the decolonization of the secular/postsecular dyad are emphasized, with ramifications for thinking about the urban, which point to the universal and authentic foundations of the human condition that are brought into play.

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

This article focuses on Karl Jaspers’s notion of the Axial Age, some of its critical appropriation, and how in particular Habermas has returned to this idea, after several critical engagements with Jaspers’s work through his long scholarly productivity. The article, however, centers on Habermas’s selective and critical use of Jaspers’s notion in his own latest and extensive engagement with what he calls “a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking.” The goal of the article is to identify the ways in which Habermas is refurbishing Jaspers’s generative concept, but at the same time, how his work on postsecular consciousness opens itself to some liabilities by not taking enough distance from the concept.

ABSTRACT In this article I set out to develop an alternative analysis of national borders that grants them moral and politically normative standing while at the same time showing the limits of such merely normative analytics. The aim is to develop a genealogical analysis of the U.S. border, which is taken here as an exemplar of how not to implement borders. The first section develops what will be called here the “mobile panopticon,” one that colonizes the so-called heartland, making of all citizens potentially extraditable subjects. The second section argues that the assemblage of institutions that make of the border not simply a geographic marker has become deeply enmeshed with the United States' peculiar institutions of hyperpenality and criminal branding, thus leading to the expansion and exacerbation of what I have called the “ethnoracial prison industrial complex.” This analysis then offers warrants for the argument that the U.S. border is no longer a neutral arbiter of sovereignty but, instead, has become a “genocidal machine.” In the closing section an engagement with Casey and Watkins's recent work on the U.S. border offers a bridge to the genealogical claim that the U.S. border is in fact a thanatological dispositif.

Critical Theory and Animal Liberation is the first collection to look at the human relationship with animals from the critical or 'left' tradition in political and social thought. The contributions in this volume highlight connections between our everyday treatment of animals and other forms of oppression, violence, and domination. Breaking with past treatments that have framed the problem as one of 'animal rights,' the authors instead depict the exploitation and killing of other animals as a political question of the first order

The essay considers three classic definitions of philosophy, namely those offered by Socrates, Boethius, as semantically enriched by Montaigne, and Kant, in order to reflected on individual and collective death. Kant’s philosophical tool of the antinomies of reason is deployed to think through the antinomies of our pandemic in order to make clear that in a pandemic there is only collective, and not individual or even national, inoculation. The false dichotomies of physical versus social, embodiment versus virtuality, nationalism versus planetarization, and propaganda versus science, are discussed. Lady philosophy appears wearing blue plastic gloves.

Studies of affect and emotions have blossomed in recent decades across the humanities, neurosciences, and social sciences. In music scholarship, they have often built on the discipline's attention to what music theorists since the Renaissance have described as music's unique ability to arouse passions in listeners. In this timely volume, the editors seek to combine this 'affective turn' with the 'sound turn' in the humanities, which has profitably shifted attention from the visual to the aural, as well as a more recent 'philosophical turn' in music studies. Accordingly, the volume maps out a new territory for research at the intersection of music, philosophy, and sound studies. The essays in Sound and Affect look at objects and experiences in which correlations of sound and affect reside, in music and beyond: the voice as it speaks, stutters, cries, or sings; music, whether vocal, instrumental, or electronic; our sonic environments, whether natural or man-made, and our responses to them. As argued here, far from being stable, correlations of sound and affect are influenced by factors as diverse as race, class, gender, and social and political experience. Examining these factors is key to the project, which gathers contributions from a cross-disciplinary roster of scholars including both established as well as a wealth of new voices. The essays are grouped thematically into sections that move from politics and ethics, to reflections on pre-and post-human "musicking," to the notions of affective listening and music temporalities, to are examination of historical understandings of music and affect. This agenda-setting collection will prove indispensable to anyone interested in innovative approaches to the study of sound and its many intersection with affect and emotions.

ABSTRACT This article begins with a consideration of whether the January 6, 2021, attack on the United State’s Capitol building can be considered a form of “legitimate political discourse” and compares the insurrectionists to the Black Lives Matter protest movement. Both movements, as different and antithetical as they are, raised meta-questions about how it is that we establish by means of law the forms to express dissent. It is proposed that “constitutionalism,” namely, the doctrine that the primary means to create and sustain free institutions are constitutions, which were and are result of historical events, i.e., revolutions such as the French, the American, and Haitian, that nonetheless unleashed normative powers and aspirations. After an analysis of constitutionalism through the lens of the US Constitution, the text turns to an analysis of what here are called “constitutional deconstructions.” Six such deconstructions are discussed: of the written constitution itself, of the law, of rights, of the people, of the state, and finally, of the Supreme Court as the protector and ultimate reader of the constitition. In this last section, the 2021 Report of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States is considered.

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...

In this chapter I will bring together two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Rorty’s intellectual biography: on the one hand its consistency, loyalty, and deference to what I call his “vision,” and on the other, the expansiveness, capaciousness, voraciousness, and encyclopedic thrust of that vision. I argue that in contrast to many canonical philosophers, Rorty did not undergo a turn, a “Kehre,” a shift, a revelation, a Damascus moment. Rather, when reading his epochal texts, and numerous essays, one gets the impression of an Amazonian river widening its shores and drinking its tributaries, relentlessly moving forward following its own course. I thus argue that we think of Rorty, following Berlin’s famous allegory, as a foxy hedgehog, one that pursued one truth, while rummaging inquisitively along the plains and forests of Western culture. From Platonism to metaphilosophy, from metaphilosophy to post-philosophy, and from there to the project of a liberal utopia, which brings together what I called his Brechtian patriotism, with his honest, open, and sincere ethnocentrism, the Rortyan vision has been held steady by one thought: “There are only languages that serve some human purposes better than others. Human purposes and human languages change in tandem with each other” (Rorty 2010, p. 22). Another way of expressing this vision is to say that what makes humans a unique animal is that we can recreate ourselves by means of changing our vocabularies.

Rorty should be studied neither especially because of the faithfulness of his narratives of the historiography of philosophy, nor because of the correctness of his readings, but mainly because, as the great philosophers of Western philosophy, he offered us a grand meta-narrative. Rorty was a meta-philosopher for whom the most important meta-narrative of philosophy was the struggle against gods, fetishes and myths that subjugated and humiliated humans. At the same time, this meta-narrative has as a central column the centrality of the power of persuasion through the game of giving and receiving reasons, reasons that expand the circle of those that we should consider our dialogue partners. In the expansion of our circle of conversation the imagination has priority over reason.

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 ..