Gavin Rae

The purpose of this chapter is to show that Cornelius Castoriadis offers a particularly innovative response to the question of the socialised individual’s capacity to create newness. I first identify the conceptual apparatus that informs Castoriadis’s thinking, focusing on the notions of the radical imaginary, social imaginary, and radical imagination. I then describe how Castoriadis conceives of the subject in terms of a unified, albeit fluctuating, psychic monad that must be turned into a differentiated individual through a process of socialisation. Rather than annihilate the psychic monad, this process sublimates the psychic monad within the socialised individual, with the consequence that (1) it is necessary to find ways within each social imaginary for the psychic monad to express its radical autonomy, and (2) the individual is always able to “use” its chaotic psychic monadism originally and creatively. It is precisely because the sublimated primal unconscious continues to subtend the socialised psyche that the individual is always able to affect a fundamental rupture from its social imaginary/social unconscious with this rupturing permitting the creation of genuine newness and, indeed, being its condition; that is, it is only because of this rupture that something can be considered to be genuinely creative and new.

Carl Schmitt’s use of the friend–enemy distinction to define the political is intimately connected to the question of how to define who is a friend and who is an enemy. This article shows that Schmitt bases it on the perceived threat posed by another. Because the political is social, this means that the political decision is intimately connected to war, which leads Schmitt to offer a tripartite analysis of war grounded in different forms of enmity called classical, real or absolute. While a number of commentators have suggested that Schmitt’s insistence that the political is the most intense antagonism should lead him to connect the political with absolute enmity, I show that the Schmittian political is and must be located against a real enemy. This not only clarifies an issue in Schmittian scholarship but also provides insights into how warring states should treat their enemy.

Argues for a rethinking of sexuality as a constellation, rather than substantive identity Western thinking on sexuality has historically affirmed not only a binary division between two sexes, each of which is defined by unique fixed attributes that delineate its essence, but also a privileging of the masculine over the feminine and heteronormative relations over alternatives. By engaging with psychoanalytic theory, phenomenology, feminist and gender theory, and the new materialisms, Gavin Rae shows how this model came under sustained and heterogeneous attack in the twentieth century. Rather than affirm one of these critical trajectories, Rae rethinks the problematic by turning to Walter Benjamin's notion of concepts as constellations to develop an alternative model called sexuality as constellation. Gavin Rae is Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain.

There has recently been something of a resurgence of interest in the Derrida–Foucault debate, with this leading to a reassessment of its aims, content, and outcome. This article contributes to that endeavor by following Amy Allen's claim that the debate was not concerned with madness per se, but with a critique of reason. However, I depart from Allen's conclusion in two ways: First, Allen does not actually engage with the debate per se but sets out to offer arguments for why we should side with Foucault's approach. As such, second, Allen not only falls into the logic of binary opposition of winner and loser, but also returns us to and so restricts critique to the parameters of Foucault's thinking. In contrast, I argue that it is the disagreement itself that provides the ‘positive’ moment in the debate, insofar as it brings us to critique reason itself without necessarily restricting us to the parameters of either thinker. In short, the Derrida–Foucault debate continues to be of interest, not because of what it divulges about Foucault's History of Madness per se, but because the differences that are revealed between Derrida and Foucault stimulate a critique—understood in terms of a questioning of the conditions of possibility—of reason itself, including its composition and limit, as well as its relationship to its other, including the question of that other.

Philosophy across Borders brings into conversation geographically diverse theorists to question the meaning, purpose, and place of conceptual borders in philosophy. It shows how contemporary theory is constituted by a dynamic practice in which the boundaries created to define it are simultaneously overcome in their establishment. Philosophy has often taken itself to be distinguished from and superior to alternative ways of thinking. To do so, philosophical thinking has found itself rigidly affirming the need to think within borders to obtain conceptual clarity and certainty and/or secure its own independent existence. The chapters in this volume call into question the need to retreat behind demarcated boundaries that mark the domain of philosophy proper, to instead offer a performative account of how philosophy can creatively work across (geographical, cultural, linguistic) borders, without foreclosing that analysis conceptually. In so doing, the contributors tackle issues including the historical establishment of philosophical borders, the metaphysics of philosophical borders, the relationship between Western and non-Western thinking, the ethics of transgressing borders, and the political implications of Western rationality on and for non-Western societies. Philosophy across Borders will therefore be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy, aesthetics, critical theory, comparative philosophy, cultural studies, feminist theory, history of ideas, political theory, and postcolonial studies.

The purpose of this paper is to engage with Jean-Paul Sartre's and Hannah Arendt's analyses of action. Although Arendt's analysis of action is well known and interest in Sartre's early analysis of action has recently grown, there has been little attempt to bring the two thinkers together on this topic. This is presumably because their respective positions appear to be antithetical and, indeed, Arendt's assessment of Sartre's philosophy was so critical. My guiding contention, however, is that the early Sartre and Arendt actually share a number of common positions regarding the question of action. By first outlining Sartre's analysis of action in Being and Nothingness, before turning to Arendt's discussions in The Human Condition and the essay “What is Freedom?” (from 1958 and 1960), I show that, although differences exist, their respective positions overlap on a number of important points, including a common critique of the free will tradition, both for its supposed dependence on arbitrariness and for reducing action to a mental activity, and their joint insistence that action entails a projection of the entire being of the individual that is grounded in a prior orientation (defined in terms of values for Sartre and a principle for Arendt).

Poststructuralism has long been acknowledged to offer a radical critique of the foundational subject as a precursor to affirming a constituted subject. Its detractors have however held that the resultant position cannot offer a coherent account of agency (strong version) or, alternatively, that while it may be able to account for non-subjective agency it is unable to develop a coherent explanation for subjective agency (weak version). Somewhat strangely, this issue has been largely ignored by commentators predisposed to poststructuralist thought. In contrast, this volume focuses on the works of Judith Butler, Cornelius Castoriadis, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, and Catherine Malabou, to show that the question of the subject is a key one for many poststructuralist thinkers, that they are aware of the problematic status of agency that arises from their decentering of the foundational subject, and that they offer heterogeneous responses to it. Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism will therefore be an invaluable resource for researchers and advanced students interested in philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, critical theory, history of ideas, feminist theory, and cultural studies.

Although it is well-known that Hannah Arendt gives a privileged role to action, her comments on the relationship between action and will(ing) have caused much confusion in the literature: commentators are split on whether her analysis of willing in The Human Condition (from 1958) and the essay “What is Freedom?” (from 1960) contradict or are complemented by her later analysis in The Life of the Mind (from 1978). I defend the latter position, but in contrast to others who have affirmed the same argument but focus on other themes to show it, I actually set out to show that Arendt offers a remarkably consistent analysis of the relationship between action and will(ing) throughout her work. To do so, I adopt a somewhat counterintuitive hermeneutical strategy by starting with her late analysis of will(ing) in The Life of the Mind (from 1978) where she most explicitly distinguishes between the historically dominant form of will(ing) of the liberium arbitrium and what I call natal-will(ing), before reading that distinction back into her earlier analyses of freedom in “What is Freedom?” (published in 1960), and action in The Human Condition (published in 1958). This hermeneutical strategy is underpinned by the claim that the distinction between two forms of will(ing) made explicit in The Life of the Mind is implicit to those earlier works. This shows that Arendt’s critique of will(ing) in her earlier works is a critique of the free will tradition, not willing per se, while her affirmation of action in those texts, implies the affirmation of the other form of willing, tied to natality and the power to begin anew, that she subsequently explicitly identifies in The Life of the Mind.

The Western philosophic tradition has tended to tie the question of action to that of freedom, with the relationship structured around the free will/determinism opposition. In contrast, I show that in Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers a stringent and radical critique of these approaches. I briefly outline the conceptual parameters of Sartre’s early ontology, before showing that he rejects the free will tradition because of its underlying conception of freedom and insistence that action is reflective and will-based. According to Sartre, consciousness is not a sum of parts, with one aspect (will) guiding the rest. Consciousness is a differentiated whole, divided between reflective and pre-reflective levels. Will is tied to the reflective level of consciousness and so cannot be said to be foundational given that reflectivity depends upon pre-reflectivity. Instead, it is an expressive effect of consciousness’s spontaneous, pre-reflective, projection of itself towards a particular end and value.

Despite Jean-Paul Sartre and Cornelius Castoriadis placing the imagination centre stage in their respective conceptual theories, little work has been done to bring them into conversation on this issue or, indeed, any other. This is perhaps not surprising given Sartre’s early work on this topic has tended to be downplayed in favour of his affirmation of freedom, while Castoriadis not only denigrates Sartre’s thinking generally and his account of the imagination specifically but also posits their relationship as one of opposition. In contrast, this article brings them into conversation on the question of the imagination to call into question Castoriadis assessment of their relation. To do so, I outline Sartre’s position in The Imaginary, showing that Castoriadis assessment of Sartre’s notion is based on a problematic, if common, misunderstanding of Sartre’s notion of nothingness and its relationship to creativity. Having overcome the opposition that Castoriadis affirms between their respective positions, I argue that, while there certainly are differences between their positions, there are also important points of agreement and overlap between them, especially regarding the constitutive role that the imagination plays for consciousness, and the relationships between the imagination and freedom and the imagination and creativity, that point to a shared and original approach.

This article defends Ernesto Laclau against the charge that his work, manifested most clearly in On Populist Reason, affirms an authoritarian politics to account for the genesis of collective identity. To outline this, I read Laclau’s thought through three logics – termed the logics of universal imposition, negation, and symbolic mediation – to argue that he rejects the first but adopts the latter two, with the logic of symbolic mediation being particularly important. Rather than unity resulting when distinct groups agree over a positive meaning of a signifier or when it is imposed on them by an authoritarian leader, Laclau claims that unity depends upon the existence of empty signifiers that lack substantial meaning. Engaging with the structure and functioning of this lack, I utilize Laclau’s notion of ‘constitutive distortion’ to highlight an often overlooked structural component of his account that I call ‘misunderstanding’. Rather than a negative occurrence, misunderstanding is a fundamental and positive condition of collective identity because it permits the various groups to affirm different, even contradictory, positions regarding the meaning of empty signifiers (permitted by the fundamental lack of such signifiers), all the while (through the shared but mistaken belief that they agree over its meaning) binding each group into a collective identity. This misunderstanding, which must remain hidden from the participants of the collective identity, is a fundamental condition of the process through which collective identity is created and sustained because it permits the various groups to believe that they share a collective identity while maintaining the heterogeneity that is necessary, on Laclau's telling, for the continued existence of the collective.

This chapter explores the ways in which Jacques Lacan and Cornelius Castoriadis understand the role(s) that violence plays in the formation of the individual. While the majority of the literature tends to focus on their accounts of the symbolic and imaginary to highlight the differences between them, this chapter claims that a different and more harmonious relationship appears once we focus on their respective claims regarding the roles that violence plays in relation to the formation of the individual. For Lacan, violence appears via the process through which the child enters the symbolic realm by learning to talk and use language. Far from being a negative occurrence, however, such violent imposition serves to create a fully functioning (adult) individual. Castoriadis comes to a similar conclusion, albeit from a different ontological background. Whereas Lacan affirms the primary importance of symbolic differential relations, Castoriadis claims that the psyche is structured from and around a monadic core. Lacan and Castoriadis agree therefore that violence is fundamental to the formation of the individual, but they seem to disagree on whether it entails a symbolic or social form of violence. By way of conclusion, however, I undermine this apparent binary opposition by showing that, for Lacan, the symbolic is inherently social and, for Castoriadis, the social is linked to symbolic relations. As a consequence, both agree that violence is key to the formation of the individual and is socio-symbolic in nature.

While Carl Schmitt is one of the main proponents of the question of the political with the consequence that his thinking on the subject has garnered much attention, not only is the question of the political in Gilles Deleuze relatively underdeveloped, but there has been virtually no work done on the relationship between the two. The orientating contention of this paper is that thinking the question of the political from the works of these two, very different, thinkers will not only start to bring these two thinkers together but, in so doing, will allow us to better understand their individual thinking in a way that draws out conclusions regarding the nature of the political. While Schmitt’s friend-enemy division is the normal focus of analyses, I will focus on the role that violence and territory plays in fostering and sustaining this distinction to suggest that Schmitt’s famous distinction actually points towards the intimate relationship between the political, violence, and territory. Having made this connection, I then turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze who, I argue, maintains that the political is linked to pre-individual processes of territorialization and signification. The conclusion reached is that thinking the political from Schmitt and Deleuze reveals that it is intimately connected to violence, territory, and signification, which are primordially determined by ever-changing pre-individual, socio-linguistic relations specific to each society. It is to this pre-individual, socio-linguistic field that attempts to answer the question of the political should attend.

The theological turn in studies of Carl Schmitt is pronounced. This paper does not challenge this turn, but questions what theology means for Schmitt. Specifically, it challenges the assumption that Schmitt's political theology is grounded in divine revelation. By distinguishing between “theology in the sense of divine revelation” and “theology in the sense of epistemic faith,” it argues that Schmitt's political theology is epistemic in origin. Schmitt's political theology is not rooted in faith in divine revelation, but in the narrower notion that human cognition is, ultimately, rooted in faith not reason, revelation, or common sense.

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.

ABSTRACT Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as the hinge uniting her so-called early and later works and the ethical and political dimensions of her thinking. From this premise, I maintain that Butler affirms that these frames are conditioned by power relations and contingency, points to the existence of multiple frameworks that simultaneously compete against one another, and insists that frames are culturally specific and determining of the categories that identify what counts as a legitimate life for a particular community and the ways in which each life is to be treated. By highlighting the social, performative, and normative dimensions of epistemic practices, Butler offers an epistemology based in the construction of contingent and contestable frameworks and shows how the contestation between distinct frameworks conditions the ethical-political life of each community.

In this book, Gavin Rae analyses the foundations of political life by undertaking a critical comparative analysis of the political theologies of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas. In so doing, Rae contributes to key debates in contemporary political philosophy, specifically those relating to the nature of, and the relationship between, the theological, the political, and the ethical, as well as those questioning the existence of ahistoric metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological foundations. While the theological is often associated with belief in a fixed foundation such as God or the truth of a religion, Rae identifies another sense rooted in epistemology. On this understanding, the ontological limitations of human cognition mean that, ultimately, human truth is based in faith and so can never be certain. The argument developed suggests that Levinas’ conception of the political is grounded in theology in the sense of religion, particularly the revelations of Judaism. For this reason, Levinas claims that the political decision is based on how to implement a prior religiously-inspired norm: justice. Schmitt, in contrast, develops a conception of the political rooted in epistemic faith to claim that the political decision is normless. While sympathetic to Schmitt’s conception of theology and its relationship to the political, Rae concludes by arguing that the emphasis Levinas places on responsibility is crucial to understanding the implications of this. The continuing relevance of Schmitt’s and Levinas’ political theologies is that they teach us that, while the political decision is ultimately normless, we bear an infinite responsibility for the consequences of this normless decision.

This article defends Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler against the long-standing but recently reiterated charge that they affirm a linguistic idealism or foundationalism. First outlining the parameters of Lacan’s thinking on this topic through his comments on the materiality inherent in the imaginary, symbolic, real schema to show that he offers an account built around the tension between the real and symbolic, I then move to Butler to argue that she more coherently identifies the parameters of the problem before offering an explanation based on paradox. With this, both offer a forceful rebuttal of linguistic idealism, a far more complex analysis of the materialism–signification relation than their new materialist critics tend to appreciate, and innovative but often-ignored “new” materialisms of their own.

In the early and often ignored 1934 essay ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism’, Levinas identifies a historically dominant form of politics rooted in the ontological reduction of the other to the same that provides intellectual justification for physical violence against the other. The ethical relation aims to overcome this political violence by thinking from the alterity of the other. The turn away from the political to the ethical does, however, lead to a problem – the third – that cannot be resolved by the ethical relation and so necessitates a return to the political. The political returned to is not the same as that left, but privileges the ethical relation and involves decisions about how to realize a prior norm: justice. This has given rise to debate in the literature regarding the relationship between the ethical and political that pits an oppositional account against an entwined one. I defend the latter, but argue that it depends upon two issues that are problematic for Levinas’s attempted overcoming of ontological forms of violence. Specifically, his claim that this form of politics entails a ‘good’ form of violence, and insistence that the political decision required to realize the ethically inspired conception of politics is compatible with his theory of substitution. I argue that the former undermines his claim that an ethically inspired politics is fundamentally different to an ontologically inspired one, while the political decision upon which his ethically inspired politics depends is incompatible with his notion of substitution.