Sergej Seitz

This article employs Bonnie Honig’s concepts of refusal and intensification to conceptualize the ancient practice of ‘parrhesia’ as a form of conflictual, political truth-telling. This entails envisaging political truth-telling as an intense, agonal practice that does not establish unalterable foundations but takes part in world-building practices. To this end, I first reconstruct parrhesia as an agonistic practice of truth-telling. Against this background, I take up Honig’s concept of intensification to make sense of parrhesia’s intricate political stakes with reference to Euripides’s Ion tragedy. Finally, I reenvisage the bacchants’ secession to Cithaeron against the backdrop of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the cynic tradition, where parrhesia turns into a subversive political practice of displaying and prefiguring other forms of existence and social relations.

For some years now, the significance of truth for politics has been intensely debated under the buzzword “post-truth.” However, this cannot hide the fact that political theory and philosophy have systematically neglected the relationship between truth and politics throughout their history. This article intends to remedy this desideratum by differentiating the various modes in which truth is referred to and invoked in the political field. To this end, the main strands of the post-truth debate are reconstructed and their shortcomings are pointed out. Second, based on a contrasting reading of Habermas and Foucault, possible starting points for systematizing the relationship between truth and politics are discussed. Third, and as a prolegomenon to such a systematization, the article proposes a cartography of political truth forms and relations along five fault lines: truth as foundation and de-foundation, truth as coercion and freedom, truth as virtue and scandal, truth as secret and transparency, and truth as knowledge and practice.

As Axel Honneth argues in his early essay “The Other of Justice,” Derrida and Levinas offer convincing arguments for offsetting practical philosophy’s traditional focus on justice with a focus on care. In Honneth, this leads to a strict dichotomy of justice (as equal treatment) and care (as singular responsibility). I show that Derrida and Levinas think of justice and responsibility not as dichotomic, but rather as aporetic. In all ethico-political conflicts, aspects of responsibility and justice are in play that are irreducible to, and in constant tension with, one another. Derrida and Levinas disclose a constitutive. This aporia opens up new perspectives on normativity.

As Axel Honneth argues in his early essay “The Other of Justice,” Derrida and Levinas offer convincing arguments for offsetting practical philosophy’s traditional focus on justice with a focus on care. In Honneth, this leads to a strict dichotomy of justice (as equal treatment) and care (as singular responsibility). I show that Derrida and Levinas think of justice and responsibility not as dichotomic, but rather as aporetic. In all ethico-political conflicts, aspects of responsibility and justice are in play that are irreducible to, and in constant tension with, one another. Derrida and Levinas disclose a constitutive. This aporia opens up new perspectives on normativity.

Judith Butler zählt zu den bedeutendsten zeitgenössischen Denker*innen im Bereich der Geistes-, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften sowie der Gender Studies und der Queer Theory. Darüber hinaus ist ihr Beitrag zur politischen Philosophie kaum zu unterschätzen. Dieser Band versammelt - neben einem Originaltext von Butler und einem Roundtable-Gespräch - Artikel ausgewiesener Expert*innen, die aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Dimensionen des Politischen in Butlers Arbeiten kritisch würdigen. Schwerpunkte sind das Verhältnis von Philosophie, Theorie und politischer Praxis, die Konstitution politischer Subjektivität, die Möglichkeiten politischer Handlungsfähigkeit sowie das emanzipatorische Potenzial performativer Körperpraktiken.