1,720,963 research outputs found
Rethinking the Politics of Israel/Palestine: Partition and its Alternatives
No full textThis volume brings together the voices and views of leading Palestinian, Israeli Jewish and European intellectuals, politicians and activists, who propose alternative approaches and “out of the box” thinking on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More specifically, this unique volume aims to contribute to the emerging efforts of re-examining the current strategies and paradigms through proposing and exploring new perspectives, visionary discourses and alternatives to partition in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Put differently, it seeks to enrich European public discourse with original and refreshing views and alternative paradigms to settling this lingering conflict
Gil Anidjar
No full textWhile Carl Schmitt claims that the enemy constitutes “the political,” his various writings largely ignore the historical and discursive evolution of the enemy. Anidjar’s major contribution to modern political theology lies in responding to this lacuna. More specifically, Anidjar examines the ways in which Western Christendom’s theologico-political concept of the enemy came into being and how it has been reinscribed through its secularization(s)
Thinking the Muslim Question by way of Rethinking the Jewish Question: A Critique of Frankfurt School's Secular Analytics of Religion
No full textWhile Europe's "Jewish question" gained prominence in the nineteenth century and has become a cardinal ordeal for emancipatory thought and praxis, its "Muslim question" started to surface in the early 1980s and gelled in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 attacks. Whereas the former reached an apotheosis in a genocide of European Jewry and a resolute exportation, and confinement, to Palestine, the latter is steadily brewing in Europe, and globally, and has not hitherto received satisfactory answers - nor any "final solutions." And yet, the ''Muslim question'' is an increasingly prominent cipher that signifies the construction and abstraction of Muslims and Muslimness in relation to their standing and integration within the secular Western polities and beyond, as well as the problematization of their political and epistemic statuses within the Western-styled secular public sphere.
Prima facie, this study asks: is it possible to examine the "Muslim question" in Europe through the lens of the older discourse on the "Jewish question," despite the differences in group under consideration, gaps in time, discursive trajectories, and not the least the Holocaust? Building on multidisciplinary scholarship, I contend that, despite these variances, and the changing political contours, there are common and parallel European-framed grounds, tropes, and historico-political affinities between the "Jewish" and the "Arab/Muslim" figures. These, which unfolded over half a millennium (at minimum), make it hardly possible to understand the modern construal of their respective representations unless considered jointly. There are, furthermore, critical insights to be gained from studying the historical discourse surrounding the "Jewish question" to illuminate current discussions about, and analytical paradigms of, the "Muslim question."
To that end, the study interrogates the epistemo-political effects of the racialized genesis and transmission of "religion" in critical Enlightenment thought - as a concept through which "Jewish being" has been apprehended - and the forms of their reception and elaboration in the Frankfurt School tradition more specifically. As a category, religion was uniquely distinguished from emerging and established modern notions of social life, especially starting from the latter part of the eighteenth century and through the intellectual consolidation and political ascent of the Enlightenment. Still, the contours of Enlightenment's notion of religion were essentially derived from early modern Western Christian (mainly Protestant) derivations thereof. The proliferation of "religions" in the secular age endowed the category of "religion" with multiple descriptive and normative attributes, and entrenched its status in juridical and legal edifices, social and political thought, and shaped concomitant discourses of emancipation. Whence, "religion" asserted itself as a world-embracing, secular, sphere of knowledge capacious of grasping various forms of life and traditions based on universalizable analytical precepts sourced from intra-Christian differences.
In attempt to sketch the contours of a counter-model of the prevalent family of Enlightenment understandings of religion that sedimented in the last two centuries, the study revisits Karl Marx's analysis of the "Jewish question" as posed in the 1840s as an index to Enlightenment's problem of emancipation and religion: of the emancipation of, and/or from, religion. To that end, it argues that Marx's analysis suggests, counterintuitively, that the "Jewish question" is fact an ideological artefact of a substantive Christian question, and that "religion" is not an elementary basis for emancipation (and that emancipation is not itself not one but a bifurcated horizon: political and human). In short, rather than perceiving religion as a descriptive category, Marx demands that we understand religion as a mediational, re-descriptive, category, and critique its operations accordingly.
The study subsequently proceeds with problematizing the descriptive validity, normative status, and socio-political valorization of religion in the Frankfurt School's tradition. More specifically, it scrutinizes Frankfurt School's reflexivity vis-à-vis its social (qua secular) imaginary and epistemo-critical apparatus with regards to "religion/religious" figures of thought and objects of analysis. To that end, it shows that early Frankfurt School's approach to the critique of religion is confounded by Weberian conceptual logistics, and thus does not correspond with the Marxian approach previously elucidated. Rather, it relies on Weberian Marxist lens which essentially does not challenge the descriptive normativity of the category of religion. Henceforth, the study contends that the critical apparatus of the early Frankfurt School is bent on reproducing an "emancipatory prejudice" when analyzing the oppression and domination that are associated with "religion/religious" objects. To remedy this deficiency, it argues for the incorporation of theologico-political lens in the systemic level of its critical instrumentarium, as a corollary to the economic-political one, for that would endow the ideologiekritik of "religion" with awareness to systemic forms of domination and social harm steeped in the operation of secular(ist) power.
Having shown the early Frankfurt School's inherent Weberian Marxist secular schematics of religion the study focuses moves to address the post-secular turn that the tradition's most eminent second-generation theorist, Jürgen Habermas, has effected in its agenda and viewpoint. It sets to unpack and bring to light the tacit investments qua assumptions upon which Habermas's purportedly inclusive and pluralist framework relies. In this vein, it critiques his epistemological position on secular reason in three ways, arguing that: (i) there is a distinctive conserving power in Habermas's argument for the wider recognition of religion; (ii) it engages in religious boundary-drawing; and (iii) it amplifies the voices of the so-called Judeo-Christian heritage over others. In doing so, the study clarifies the limits of the emancipatory horizon entailed in Habermas's formulation of the post-secular society and argues that it ends up reinscribing the religious-secular binary.
Lastly, the study dissects Habermas's engagement with the Jewish question in the aftermath of the Holocaust and its ramifications for the German Enlightenment tradition and identity. It contends that Habermas's unmitigated urge to salvage the Enlightenment tradition in its German formulation leads him to singularize the event of "Auschwitz" and its emblematic Jewish victim as the litmus test of any emancipatory social theory worthy of the designation "critical." Habermas's secular redemption of the "philosophical Jew" is met, however, by a lack of critical historical reading of the broader historical torment that brought Auschwitz into being. The study reads Habermas's silence on the history of real Jews, pre- and post-Auschwitz in the context of what he views as a relevant history for redeeming Germany's enlightened soul - German Jews as leading exponents of Enlightenment thought until the Holocaust and the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine in its aftermath. Habermas's post-Auschwitz Jewish question becomes then the question of enlightened conscientious Germans who want to endow their morality with political legitimacy regardless of the contemporary history of real, sovereign, Jews. This post-national German predicament, I argue, perpetuates Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice against the Jews - i.e., it reaffirms both the Orientalist framework that denied Jews collective identity and national consciousness in pre-Auschwitz Europe and the approval of the realization of Jewish national self-determination outside of Europe in the post-Auschwitz epoch. Habermas's interlocking of the post-Auschwitz Jewish and German questions leads to the extension of Enlightenment's emancipatory prejudice to Palestinians and, effectively, to the denial qua sacrifice of their existence as a nation. In short, by continuing denying the ongoing impact of the legacy of European Orientalism and racialist enmity vis-à-vis the figures who it once constructed as "Semitic brothers" and affirming an enlarged yet exclusivist civilizationism (Judeo-Christian) stance as the moral backbone of the Enlightenment tradition, Habermas's post-national and post-secular theorizing end up short on delivering the emancipatory thrust needed to cater for the Enlightenment endeavor as an "unfinished project."
Aside from the critically discussing the above thematics, the study has manifold implications. Theoretically, it enhances the analytical capacity of the critical method to analyze the conjoined social reality of religion and the secular(ist) bias of the Frankfurt School (and beyond). Practically, it dialecticizes the pervasive principle of epistemic ruptures and enables a bi-focal look on continuities and dis-continuities between religion and cognate analytical social categories. The political and normative implications of this study bring back the possibility of viewing the Muslim question as historical figuration of a stealthy Christian-European complex that for several centuries centered on the figure of the Jew. In other words, the study "re-Europeanizes" the vantage point from which the critique of the Europe's Muslim question should proceed and reaccommodates what appears as a sprawling global question to its still potent racializing European/Western trajectory
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
What's in the Apartheid Analogy: Palestine/Israel Refracted
Full text linkThis article engages the analogy of Palestine/Israel to apartheid South Africa, and probes the political imaginary that contours this discussion while explicating the circumstances of its emergence. Accordingly, it contends that apartheid is not merely a system of institutionalized separation; rather, it organizes the facts and reality of separation(s) within a frame and against a background unity that effectively allows it to be perceived as such. To that end, the article explores four key factors that created background unity in apartheid South Africa: labor relations; political theology; role of language; and geo-political unit(y), and scrutinizes their political and experiential ramifications in Palestine/Israel
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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