Philosophy

The discourse of democracy,' Ferit Güven writes, 'is the continuation of a (neo)colonial world order' (p. xi). This is so because 'democracy manifests itself in the form of colonization of the future,' or as a discourse without alternatives (p. xiii). In 'colonizing the political space that is supposed to be open to the future,' democracy therefore occupies 'alternativity' as such (pp. 3-4). The idea of democracy, then, is 'tyrannical, in the sense that it expresses a desire for universality beyond its scope' (p. 2) by colonizing what is thinkable. Güven's objective in Decolonizing Democracy is to elaborate the basis for this claim by tracing intersections between democratic and postcolonial theory, both broadly conceived. Democracy, on Güven's rendering, takes on what Lewis R. Gordon calls a 'theodicean grammar.' Theodicy refers to the effort to reconcile God's goodness and omnipotence with iniquity. To 'demonstrate the compatibility of evil and injustice' alongside the existence of God, Gordon argues, we render its contradictions external (2013, p. 726). As democracy circumscribes the conceivable, political failing cannot be the consequence of the system's order; rather, it is an aberration or the result of poor execution. In other words, when democracy fails to fulfill its own promises, fault is externalized to preserve the category's coherence. The system's contradictions, then, are shifted to the limits of what Güven calls 'democracy in practice' (p. 10). Democracy, as a result, much like God, is not problematic. We are simply bad democrats. Democracy's colonial logic emerges here. Colonization, Güven writes, is a 'process and discourse of disciplining, ordering, rendering visible, unveiling, and making comprehensible' (p. 4). In positing itself as the standard of justification, democracy's internal logic produces a series of exclusions. The result is a paradox: 'democracy can only protect and has always protected itself undemocratically' (p. 13). This paradox emerges most forcefully when democracy is confronted with its oppositions, which it either incorporates in a way that leaves the system fundamentally intact, or expels because the excluded falls 'outside the rules of democracy' (p. 16). This works within a 'theodicean grammar.' When God is

Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of values offers an important account of contemporary culture. In this essay I will examine  Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil,  drawing out Nietzsche’s revaluation of values. This essay is intended to demonstrate the ethical consequences that arise from his critique. For the person living along with the author of this paper, Nietzsche’s prophetic warnings still carry great weight in any effort to understand and relate to the personal and political world. Democracy has, by and large, become the new political hegemon, and with it the attending notions of community and equality are utilized in speech with little reflection as to what their meaning. After first laying out Nietzsche’s method and mode of critique, the essay will provide an analysis of the real, ethical complications summoned to mind by Nietzsche, concerns either forgotten or rendered un-important by their immediate assumption in the “post-modern” present.

Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language offers a challenge to theories of the subject in psychoanalysis, linguistic theory, and in philosophy. Central to that challenge is Kristeva’s conception of negativity. In this article, I trace the devel- opment of the concept of negativity in Revolution in Poetic Language from its root in Hegel, to rejection, which Kristeva develops out of Freud. Both are crucial to the development of the material dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic that makes up Kristeva’s subject-in-process/on trial. I argue that a clearer understanding of Kristeva’s conception of negativity helps us to better appreciate the force of Kristeva’s challenge, both philosophically and politically. Finally I argue that Kristevan negativity also helps us to clarify the relation between the delimited space of politics and its conditions, laying the groundwork for constitutive exclusion as political critique and opening a space for the possibility of political re-constitutions.

In this paper, I investigate the political unintelligibility of the 1992 LA riots by arguing that those who participated in the LA riots are constitutively excluded by America as a political body, and that this renders them unintelligible as political agents, and the riot unintelligible as a political act. I interrogate the political unintelligibility of the LA riots and argue that the LA Riot and the figure of the rioter are the product of constitutive exclusion, and that race structures the operation of this constitutive exclusion.

Why are some claims seen or heard as political claims, while others are not? Why are some people not seen or heard as political agents? And how does their political unintelligibility shape political bodies, and the terms of political agency, from which they are excluded?

In this groundbreaking book, Sina Kramer uses the framework of constitutive exclusion to describe the phenomenon of internal exclusion -- exclusions that occur within a political body. More specifically, constitutive exclusions occur when a system of thought or a political body defines itself by excluding some difference (based on gender, race, class, sexuality, etc.) that is considered intolerable to the boundaries that comprise the body or system's political worth. This exclusion is not absolute, but preserves the very difference it seeks to repress in order to define itself against what it is not. Yet, as Kramer argues, if those who are excluded contest their repression, their political claims are deemed threatening and criminal. But can we ever be without constitutive exclusions? And can we avoid reinscribing them through critique? Kramer ultimately argues that to do justice to the excluded, to render those claims intelligible as political claims, instead requires the reconstitution of the political body on new terms.

Importantly, this book offers both a diagnosis and a critique of the concept of constitutive exclusion, articulating what counts as a political action and who counts as a political agent. Kramer takes up a range of cases -- including those of Antigone, Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and the Black Lives Matter movement -- to better understand who counts as a political actor, and how we understand political belonging and the contestation of exclusion. Excluded Within articulates who we are by virtue of who we exclude, and what claims we cannot see, hear, or understand.