The aim of this article is to shift the focus from legal discourses on refugees rooted in victimization/securitization narrative, which dominate in the EU, to an alternative perspective on the relationship between refugeeness and law. Instead of the state-centred law’s discourse and its impact on the development of refugee subjectivities, the article turns to explore a refugees’ perspectives on law. After briefly discussing the dominant narratives as embedded in legal changes initiated during and after the so-called ‘migration and refugee crisis’ in the EU, the article turns to analysis of alternative narratives on migrants and refugees, in particular the narrative of generativity taking it beyond the constraints of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. In particular, the article discusses the impact of exile experience on conceptualization of the figure of the refugee by looking at work of scholars exiled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s: Hannah Arendt, Louise Holborn and Otto Kirchheimer. The analysis shows the importance of shifting perspectives – from the primacy of statehood and law to the primacy of the figure of the refugee – to gain more insight into the situatedness of law and its development in the context of asylum and mobility.
{"title":"From Law’s Discourse on Refugees to Refugees’ Discourse on Law","authors":"M. Kmak","doi":"10.33134/rds.346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.346","url":null,"abstract":"The aim of this article is to shift the focus from legal discourses on refugees rooted in victimization/securitization narrative, which dominate in the EU, to an alternative perspective on the relationship between refugeeness and law. Instead of the state-centred law’s discourse and its impact on the development of refugee subjectivities, the article turns to explore a refugees’ perspectives on law. After briefly discussing the dominant narratives as embedded in legal changes initiated during and after the so-called ‘migration and refugee crisis’ in the EU, the article turns to analysis of alternative narratives on migrants and refugees, in particular the narrative of generativity taking it beyond the constraints of methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism. In particular, the article discusses the impact of exile experience on conceptualization of the figure of the refugee by looking at work of scholars exiled from Nazi Germany in the 1930s: Hannah Arendt, Louise Holborn and Otto Kirchheimer. The analysis shows the importance of shifting perspectives – from the primacy of statehood and law to the primacy of the figure of the refugee – to gain more insight into the situatedness of law and its development in the context of asylum and mobility.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69505529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Published in 2017 and originally planned in as a 2020 summer break read, feminist philosopher Miri Rozmarin’s second book, Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts: On Vulnerability, Temporality, and Ethics, turned into an even more timely, provocative reading experience than initially expected because of the global eruption of the now so familiar-feeling COVID-19 crisis. [...]vulnerability is contradicted to the basic conditions for a person’s agency, and thus associated with the lessening of personhood. [...]an approach does not instantaneously label vulnerability as the negative mirror image of agency (and vice versa), but, based upon Levinasian theory, regards the phenomenon as a ‘sensitivity’ (50) that is typical for human intersubjective relations. Butler’s approach has mostly been spotlighted in Precarious Life ([2004] 2006)her post-9/11 book that articulates an ethics of non-violenceand later works (see e.g. Butler 2009;2016) in which the distinction between ontological precariousness and precarity, or the specific socio-economic and political conditions that have rendered certain subjects more vulnerable to injustice, poverty, and the like is made more intelligible.
{"title":"Book Review: Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts: On Vulnerability, Temporality, and Ethics by Miri Rozmarin, Peter Lang, 2017, 194 pages. ISBN 978-1-78707-392-0 (ePub) (also available in print, ePDF and mobi)","authors":"E. Geerts","doi":"10.33134/rds.336","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.336","url":null,"abstract":"Published in 2017 and originally planned in as a 2020 summer break read, feminist philosopher Miri Rozmarin’s second book, Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts: On Vulnerability, Temporality, and Ethics, turned into an even more timely, provocative reading experience than initially expected because of the global eruption of the now so familiar-feeling COVID-19 crisis. [...]vulnerability is contradicted to the basic conditions for a person’s agency, and thus associated with the lessening of personhood. [...]an approach does not instantaneously label vulnerability as the negative mirror image of agency (and vice versa), but, based upon Levinasian theory, regards the phenomenon as a ‘sensitivity’ (50) that is typical for human intersubjective relations. Butler’s approach has mostly been spotlighted in Precarious Life ([2004] 2006)her post-9/11 book that articulates an ethics of non-violenceand later works (see e.g. Butler 2009;2016) in which the distinction between ontological precariousness and precarity, or the specific socio-economic and political conditions that have rendered certain subjects more vulnerable to injustice, poverty, and the like is made more intelligible.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49044875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the figure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breathability in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in multiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its differential and differentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by suffocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination.
{"title":"(Im)possible Breathing: On Courage and Criticality in the Ghostly Historical Present","authors":"A. Athanasiou","doi":"10.33134/rds.337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.337","url":null,"abstract":"Written in the midst of a courageous collective response to antiblack police brutality in the US, this text tackles the figure of breathing as a performative embodiment of grammar and time through which the ongoingness of racialized breathlessness is articulated, dis-remembered, and dismantled. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, the text seeks to account for repeated and immeasurable (un)breathability in its particular implications in the histories of racial capitalism, and in multiform sites, geographies, and temporalities that underwrite the global present. In this sense, breathing is addressed through its differential and differentiating conditions of possibility induced and regulated by suffocating spatio-temporalities, as a way to attend to the question whether and how the biopolitical contingencies of vulnerability, weariness, and brokenness are taken up as situated knowledges of courage, critical response-ability, and radical political imagination.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43389404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper engages with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian marriage contract from an unconventional angle. After showing that the Hegelian argument uncovers a parallel between the sexual and the social contract in modern contractarian theories, I illustrate how Kant’s theory of marriage is consistent with his Republican theory and engenders the same conceptual difficulty, that is, a gap between the contracting individuals and the production of the common will. My goal is to suggest that, by illustrating how the logic of the sexual contract works, Hegel enables us to outline a very peculiar notion of ‘patriarchy’ that his ethical Aufhebung of the modern bourgeois family resolutely calls into question. As I will elucidate in the conclusion, this does not imply ignoring the patriarchal structure of the Hegelian family, but gives us the possibility to discriminate between two very different forms of patriarchy: whereas Hegel’s family relies on cultural and therefore conditional masculinist prejudices, the contractarian model is paradoxically indifferent to any such bias but establishes a deeper and more elusive form of patriarchal entitlement.
{"title":"‘Shameful is the Only Word for It’: Hegel on Kant’s Sexual and the Social Contract","authors":"Lorenzo Rustighi","doi":"10.33134/rds.329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.329","url":null,"abstract":"This paper engages with Hegel’s criticism of the Kantian marriage contract from an unconventional angle. After showing that the Hegelian argument uncovers a parallel between the sexual and the social contract in modern contractarian theories, I illustrate how Kant’s theory of marriage is consistent with his Republican theory and engenders the same conceptual difficulty, that is, a gap between the contracting individuals and the production of the common will. My goal is to suggest that, by illustrating how the logic of the sexual contract works, Hegel enables us to outline a very peculiar notion of ‘patriarchy’ that his ethical Aufhebung of the modern bourgeois family resolutely calls into question. As I will elucidate in the conclusion, this does not imply ignoring the patriarchal structure of the Hegelian family, but gives us the possibility to discriminate between two very different forms of patriarchy: whereas Hegel’s family relies on cultural and therefore conditional masculinist prejudices, the contractarian model is paradoxically indifferent to any such bias but establishes a deeper and more elusive form of patriarchal entitlement.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41408924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper examines the nature of the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as classificatory groupings, via an examination of this question in Aristotle’s zoology and metaphysics. Tracing the use of Aristotle’s logical categories of ‘genus’ and ‘species’ in his zoological works and contrasting this with the use of the terms in contemporary taxonomy, the paper shows that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are, in a significant sense, unclassifiable categories. Although Aristotle has no generic concept of ‘sex’ at his disposal, the paper shows how many English translations of his works introduce ‘sex’ as if in answer to the question of the nature of the categories of male and female. The paper then argues that the generic concept of sex covers over the problem of the classification of male and female in both Aristotle and contemporary biology (including botany, mycology and bacteriology), by introducing a classificatory genus (‘sex’) that does not in fact explain anything but rather (precisely in its trans-specific generality) needs explaining.
{"title":"From Aristotle to Contemporary Biological Classification: What Kind of Category is “Sex”?","authors":"Stella Sandford","doi":"10.33134/rds.314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.314","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the nature of the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female’ as classificatory groupings, via an examination of this question in Aristotle’s zoology and metaphysics. Tracing the use of Aristotle’s logical categories of ‘genus’ and ‘species’ in his zoological works and contrasting this with the use of the terms in contemporary taxonomy, the paper shows that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are, in a significant sense, unclassifiable categories. Although Aristotle has no generic concept of ‘sex’ at his disposal, the paper shows how many English translations of his works introduce ‘sex’ as if in answer to the question of the nature of the categories of male and female. The paper then argues that the generic concept of sex covers over the problem of the classification of male and female in both Aristotle and contemporary biology (including botany, mycology and bacteriology), by introducing a classificatory genus (‘sex’) that does not in fact explain anything but rather (precisely in its trans-specific generality) needs explaining.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47779687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
By engaging with the historiography of German constitutionalism after 1949, this article reconstructs a profound change of the meaning of the concept of constitution. The constitution evolved from a rather formal and provisional instrument of government to the just value order of politics, which scholars worldwide have celebrated as the value model of constitutionalism. The article critically examines the democratic consequences of this justicization of politics and disentangles the relationship between law and politics within German constitutional thinking by tracing its traditions and transformations back to scholarly debates and early Constitutional Court’s landmark decisions.
{"title":"The Justicization of Politics: Constitutionalism and Democracy in Germany after 1949","authors":"V. Frick","doi":"10.33134/rds.312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.312","url":null,"abstract":"By engaging with the historiography of German constitutionalism after 1949, this article reconstructs a profound change of the meaning of the concept of constitution. The constitution evolved from a rather formal and provisional instrument of government to the just value order of politics, which scholars worldwide have celebrated as the value model of constitutionalism. The article critically examines the democratic consequences of this justicization of politics and disentangles the relationship between law and politics within German constitutional thinking by tracing its traditions and transformations back to scholarly debates and early Constitutional Court’s landmark decisions.","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44519899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This recent translation offers Reinhart Koselleck’s work in its most essayistic and speculative, but perhaps, also the most inspiring forms. Extrapolations, parallels, and analogies suggest themselves on nearly every page of this intriguing volume. In terms of implications and side steps, the content ranges from climate change and melting ice caps to railways and the experienced acceleration of time, and all the way to war memorials and the layered tranquility of cemeteries and mass graves. Primarily, however, the book offers a heavy dose of Koselleck’s Historik, or the theory of possible history. Or perhaps, to exploit Jacob Taubes’s characterization of Koselleck as a “partisan for histories in the plural,” cited by Niklas Olsen and others, we should characterize Koselleck as a partisan for possible histories. While this perspective arguably underlies in rudimentary forms, a large part of his work in general, here Koselleck expressly tackles some of the most fundamental questions in historical theory, including the following: How is history possible in the first place? How, exactly, are historical experiences conditioned by anthropology? How do individuals’ historical experiences turn into supra-human history or history as such? How can we combine the observations of history as both movement and repetition into a single coherent image? How should we understand the causal and temporal relations between historical events and their linguistic (re-)descriptions? How is historical time related to geographical or geopolitical space? And so forth. The volume thus further elaborates several elements that support Koselleck’s analyses in conceptual history and his political thinking, and it can be expected to be of interest to a wide audience in history, philosophy, political studies, cultural studies, and the social and human sciences more broadly. Sediments of Time is a representative selection – representative in the sense that it consists of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, published in Koselleck’s three late collections in German. With seven essays from Zeitschichten ,‘Temporal Layers,’ (2000), two from Begriffsgeschichten, ‘Histories of Concepts,’ (2006), and six from Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte, ‘On the Pankakoski, Timo. 2019. “Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and StefanLudwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. xxxi + 301 pages. ISBN 9781503605978.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22(1): 83–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.308 REDESCRIPTIONS
这个最新的译本提供了莱因哈特·科塞莱克最具散文性和思辨性的作品，但也许也是最鼓舞人心的形式。在这本引人入胜的书中，几乎每一页都有推断、类比和相似之处。从影响和侧面来看，内容范围从气候变化和冰盖融化到铁路和经历的时间加速，一直到战争纪念碑和墓地和乱葬坑的分层宁静。然而，这本书主要提供了大量科塞列克的历史学，或可能的历史理论。或者，为了利用雅各布·陶布斯(Jacob Taubes)对科塞列克的描述，即Niklas Olsen和其他人引用的“复数历史的拥护者”，我们应该把科塞列克描述为可能的历史的拥护者。虽然这种观点可以说是他的大部分作品的基本形式的基础，但科塞莱克在这里明确地解决了历史理论中一些最基本的问题，包括以下问题:历史最初是如何可能的?历史经验究竟如何受到人类学的制约?个人的历史经验是如何变成超人的历史或历史本身的?我们如何将对历史的观察作为运动和重复结合成一个连贯的图像?我们应该如何理解历史事件及其语言(重新)描述之间的因果关系和时间关系?历史时间与地理或地缘政治空间有何关系?等等。因此，该卷进一步阐述了支持科塞莱克在概念历史和他的政治思想的分析的几个要素，它可以预期是在历史，哲学，政治研究，文化研究，社会和人文科学更广泛的兴趣广泛的观众。《时间的沉淀》是一部具有代表性的选集——从某种意义上说，它包含了20世纪80年代和90年代的文本，出版于科塞列克晚期的三本德语文集中。其中七篇来自Zeitschichten，“时间层”(2000)，两篇来自Begriffsgeschichten，“概念的历史”(2006)，六篇来自Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte，“On the Pankakoski, Timo. 2019”。莱因哈特·科塞莱克，《时间的沉淀:论可能的历史》，肖恩·弗兰泽尔和斯特凡·路德维希·霍夫曼翻译并编辑。斯坦福大学出版社，2019。Xxxi + 301页。ISBN 9781503605978。”再述:政治思想、观念史与女性主义理论22(1):83-87。DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.308 REDESCRIPTIONS
{"title":"Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. xxxi + 301 pages. ISBN 9781503605978","authors":"Timo Pankakoski","doi":"10.33134/rds.308","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.308","url":null,"abstract":"This recent translation offers Reinhart Koselleck’s work in its most essayistic and speculative, but perhaps, also the most inspiring forms. Extrapolations, parallels, and analogies suggest themselves on nearly every page of this intriguing volume. In terms of implications and side steps, the content ranges from climate change and melting ice caps to railways and the experienced acceleration of time, and all the way to war memorials and the layered tranquility of cemeteries and mass graves. Primarily, however, the book offers a heavy dose of Koselleck’s Historik, or the theory of possible history. Or perhaps, to exploit Jacob Taubes’s characterization of Koselleck as a “partisan for histories in the plural,” cited by Niklas Olsen and others, we should characterize Koselleck as a partisan for possible histories. While this perspective arguably underlies in rudimentary forms, a large part of his work in general, here Koselleck expressly tackles some of the most fundamental questions in historical theory, including the following: How is history possible in the first place? How, exactly, are historical experiences conditioned by anthropology? How do individuals’ historical experiences turn into supra-human history or history as such? How can we combine the observations of history as both movement and repetition into a single coherent image? How should we understand the causal and temporal relations between historical events and their linguistic (re-)descriptions? How is historical time related to geographical or geopolitical space? And so forth. The volume thus further elaborates several elements that support Koselleck’s analyses in conceptual history and his political thinking, and it can be expected to be of interest to a wide audience in history, philosophy, political studies, cultural studies, and the social and human sciences more broadly. Sediments of Time is a representative selection – representative in the sense that it consists of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, published in Koselleck’s three late collections in German. With seven essays from Zeitschichten ,‘Temporal Layers,’ (2000), two from Begriffsgeschichten, ‘Histories of Concepts,’ (2006), and six from Vom Sinn und Unsinn der Geschichte, ‘On the Pankakoski, Timo. 2019. “Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, translated and edited by Sean Franzel and StefanLudwig Hoffman. Stanford University Press. 2019. xxxi + 301 pages. ISBN 9781503605978.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22(1): 83–87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.308 REDESCRIPTIONS","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42043557","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
I visited Oodi, Helsinki’s new central library, shortly after it was opened to the public in December 2018. The building has been praised for both its architectural innovativeness and for the way in which it redefines the whole notion of a public library. The ‘Ode’ is a threestory construction made of wood, steel and glass that cost 98 million euros to build, furnish and equip. It hosts computer workstations, meeting rooms, recording studios, a cinema, a kitchen, a gaming room, 3D-printers, CDs and, yes, some books too. Walking around, I could see how the library’s various services corresponded with the interests of different visitors, including those who were there just to while away the time in the spacious interiors. Among this last group of visitors was a small gathering of Romani people who were there to seek shelter from the biting cold outside. Bonnie Honig’s Public Things is about the ability of projects like Oodi to bring together a multitude of actors with different needs and desires, but without reducing them into one. For those familiar with Honig’s work, this short book resembles her previous major publications in at least three ways. First, and quite obviously, the book deals with democracy and politics. But rather than pursue further the expressly agonistic themes of politics that have been central in her work from Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993) to Antigone, Interrupted (2013), here Honig is more concerned about the prerequisites of democracy in contemporary times. More specifically, the book is about the objects and spaces that make democracy possible, but that are under constant threat in what we can, perhaps, shorthand as neoliberalism. Think of, say, a public library. Not necessarily as a building, a service or a collection, but rather as something marking the ‘publicness’ of spaces and fora that democracy requires. Second, as in most of her books, Honig delivers her own arguments mainly by engaging with a number of other authors and texts. These include familiar names such as Hannah Arendt, but some more unexpected conspirators as well. Honig has always managed to weave her more unexpected characters into the mix with delightful ease, and in Minkkinen, Panu. 2019. “Bonnie Honig, Public Things. Democracy in Disrepair. Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society. Fordham University Press, 2017. 154 pages. ISBN-13: 9780823276400.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22(1): 68–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.307 REDESCRIPTIONS
{"title":"Bonnie Honig, Public Things. Democracy in Disrepair. Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society. Fordham University Press, 2017. 154 pages. ISBN-13: 9780823276400","authors":"P. Minkkinen","doi":"10.33134/rds.307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.307","url":null,"abstract":"I visited Oodi, Helsinki’s new central library, shortly after it was opened to the public in December 2018. The building has been praised for both its architectural innovativeness and for the way in which it redefines the whole notion of a public library. The ‘Ode’ is a threestory construction made of wood, steel and glass that cost 98 million euros to build, furnish and equip. It hosts computer workstations, meeting rooms, recording studios, a cinema, a kitchen, a gaming room, 3D-printers, CDs and, yes, some books too. Walking around, I could see how the library’s various services corresponded with the interests of different visitors, including those who were there just to while away the time in the spacious interiors. Among this last group of visitors was a small gathering of Romani people who were there to seek shelter from the biting cold outside. Bonnie Honig’s Public Things is about the ability of projects like Oodi to bring together a multitude of actors with different needs and desires, but without reducing them into one. For those familiar with Honig’s work, this short book resembles her previous major publications in at least three ways. First, and quite obviously, the book deals with democracy and politics. But rather than pursue further the expressly agonistic themes of politics that have been central in her work from Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (1993) to Antigone, Interrupted (2013), here Honig is more concerned about the prerequisites of democracy in contemporary times. More specifically, the book is about the objects and spaces that make democracy possible, but that are under constant threat in what we can, perhaps, shorthand as neoliberalism. Think of, say, a public library. Not necessarily as a building, a service or a collection, but rather as something marking the ‘publicness’ of spaces and fora that democracy requires. Second, as in most of her books, Honig delivers her own arguments mainly by engaging with a number of other authors and texts. These include familiar names such as Hannah Arendt, but some more unexpected conspirators as well. Honig has always managed to weave her more unexpected characters into the mix with delightful ease, and in Minkkinen, Panu. 2019. “Bonnie Honig, Public Things. Democracy in Disrepair. Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society. Fordham University Press, 2017. 154 pages. ISBN-13: 9780823276400.” Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 22(1): 68–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.307 REDESCRIPTIONS","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44213767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Parliamentary “Theatre”, Dignity and the Public Side of Parliaments","authors":"H. te Velde","doi":"10.33134/rds.313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.313","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"69505479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The newly launched book series on European Conceptual History, published by Berghahn Books, is the latest initiative in the ongoing attempt to renew conceptual history as an academic field. “This series”, so the web page states, “focuses on the notable values and terminology that have developed throughout European history, exploring key concepts such as parliamentarianism, democracy, civilization, and liberalism to illuminate a vocabulary that has helped to shape the modern world.” Three volumes have appeared to date: Parliament and Parliamentarism, European Regions and Boundaries, and Basic and Applied Research. A volume on Democracy in Modern Europe is forthcoming. Conceptual History in the European Space is meant as the lead volume to this series. It is edited by three well-known scholars in the field – Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden and Javier Fernández Sebastián – and contains ten chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion) authored by specialist conceptual historians. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the most important theoretical, methodological and thematic contributions to the field in what the introductory chapter, authored by Steinmetz and Freeden, labels the “post-Koselleckian era” (which seems to be the period from around 2000 onwards). The essays are not divided into thematic sections, but address a range of different issues, including temporal, spatial, rhetorical, ideological and linguistic dimensions of conceptual history. Some of the included texts are derived from research projects and publications that have already become classic contributions to conceptual history. Jörn Leonhard’s discussions of the possibilities and pitfalls of the comparative dimension of conceptual history draw on his famous study of the meanings and transfers of the concepts of “liberal” and “liberalisms” into various European languages in the eighteenth century. Helge Jordheim’s elaboration of Koselleck’s theories of historical times as encapsulated in the catchword “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” into a more detailed framework to ana-
{"title":"Conceptual History in the Post-Koselleckian Era","authors":"N. Olsen","doi":"10.7227/R.21.2.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7227/R.21.2.6","url":null,"abstract":"The newly launched book series on European Conceptual History, published by Berghahn Books, is the latest initiative in the ongoing attempt to renew conceptual history as an academic field. “This series”, so the web page states, “focuses on the notable values and terminology that have developed throughout European history, exploring key concepts such as parliamentarianism, democracy, civilization, and liberalism to illuminate a vocabulary that has helped to shape the modern world.” Three volumes have appeared to date: Parliament and Parliamentarism, European Regions and Boundaries, and Basic and Applied Research. A volume on Democracy in Modern Europe is forthcoming. Conceptual History in the European Space is meant as the lead volume to this series. It is edited by three well-known scholars in the field – Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden and Javier Fernández Sebastián – and contains ten chapters (plus an introduction and a conclusion) authored by specialist conceptual historians. The aim of the volume is to represent some of the most important theoretical, methodological and thematic contributions to the field in what the introductory chapter, authored by Steinmetz and Freeden, labels the “post-Koselleckian era” (which seems to be the period from around 2000 onwards). The essays are not divided into thematic sections, but address a range of different issues, including temporal, spatial, rhetorical, ideological and linguistic dimensions of conceptual history. Some of the included texts are derived from research projects and publications that have already become classic contributions to conceptual history. Jörn Leonhard’s discussions of the possibilities and pitfalls of the comparative dimension of conceptual history draw on his famous study of the meanings and transfers of the concepts of “liberal” and “liberalisms” into various European languages in the eighteenth century. Helge Jordheim’s elaboration of Koselleck’s theories of historical times as encapsulated in the catchword “synchronicity of the non-synchronous” into a more detailed framework to ana-","PeriodicalId":33650,"journal":{"name":"Redescriptions","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43212225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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