Is it worst to be killed by a crazed mob wielding machetes or to die via conveyor belt and filing system? The Better Angels of Our Nature keeps falling victim to the halo effect, creating an aura around reason itself. The question, then, is whether the book should be viewed as a jewel in reason’s crown or as among its costume jewellery.

Il s’git d’une lettre aux pays membres d’Union Africaine.

The idea of a critical theory has colonized the social consciousness of academia, and become an integral part of the pursuit of higher knowledge. Competing ideas have thereby become standard bearers in that critical theory acts as a measure of true understanding . The only problem, however, is that many of the distinct theories similarly answering…[Read more]

Book Review: Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film (Andreas Huyssen)

In a recent essay in Rethinking Marxism, as part of a special issue on the legacy of Louis Althusser’s thinking,
Tyson E. Lewis takes up Althusser’s thinking on schooling, trade unionism, and seminars to delimit the concepts of
interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation respectively. While Lewis’s work is a crucial first step…[Read more]

The concept of the exception has heavily shaped modern political theory. In modernity, Kierkegaard was one of the first philosophers to propound the exception as a facilitator of metaphysical transcendence. Merging Kierkegaard’s metaphysical exception with early modern political theorist Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, Carl Schmitt int…[Read more]

The thirteenth century kabbalist Abraham Abulafia held Hebrew to be the divine language, designed by God as an ontological aspect of reality. Through meditating on and deconstructing names into their letters, one could then engage in the process of reunifying reality into the primordial Name of God, the Tetragrammaton. This paper offers an…[Read more]

Profile of the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance by Maggie Coughlin Worth in the Romance Writers of America newsletter, Romance Writers Report

How do we learn the link between speech and money? What is the process of formation that
legitimates the logic whereby speech is equivalent to money? What are the experiences, events, and subjectivities
that render the connection between currency and speaking/listening intuitive? As educators and researchers,
what do we do and say to shore up…[Read more]

Eine gerechte Verteilung von Gütern reicht nicht aus, um eine Gesellschaft gerecht zu machen. Gerechtigkeitstheorien müssen auch die sozialen Beziehungen in den Blick nehmen: Wirkliche soziale Gerechtigkeit herrscht erst, wenn es Institutionen gibt, die uns die Chance einräumen, soziale Anerkennung zu erfahren.

This is the introductory chapter to the monograph “Recht – Macht – Öffentlichkeit”, which investigates how to include the phenomenological dimension of the life-world in the analysis of the demoratic state. In Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law and democracy there is reason for such an extension, yet it is hard to carry out metho…[Read more]

This working paper examines the notion of “immanent critique”, a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique – a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members – from both external and…[Read more]

Although the critique of reification is a core commitment of critical theories, there is no widely accepted account of its normative foundation. In Lukács’s original analysis, this foundation is provided by a strong concept of practice which is, however, not acceptable from a contemporary point of view. I argue that the systematic character of re…[Read more]