Raakalaisten ja narrien mielivallassa

Meidän herramme ja meidän häviäjämme

Luokkakonfliktin ytimessä ovat arvot. Virossa konservatiivisen kansanpuolue EKREn ja sosiaalidemokraattisen SDE:n välisessä konfliktissa kansaa jaetaan herroihin ja häviäjiin. nonPeerReviewed

Enduring the Autoimmune Aporia of Democratic Sovereignty

The aim of this article is to read Rogues, in order to show that Derrida is neither a philosopher of democracy nor a critic of sovereignty , but rather a thinker of democratic sovereignty. Taking my cue from his Aporias, I argue that democratic sovereignty is aporetically in excess over itself, for it is based on articulating the path through the im-possible passage from the unconditional injunction of the ‘promise’ to the exigency of sovereignty. That is why it can neither be absorbed into the conditions of any existing democracy nor abstracted into any pure identity of sovereignty. Political trends today fail in enduring the aprioricity of aporia, as neoliberals valorize the posited condi…

Thinking the Political with Jean-Luc Nancy

In this article, I argue that at the center of Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach to the political lies the thinking of subject as that of relation. Throughout the historical actualizations of, for example, the individual, the state, or the people as a subject, the problematic of relation is one that has retreated and now demands to be subjected to a retreatment. When the arche-teleological presuppositions that constitute subject as that which is given enter the phase of deconstruction, subject comes to present itself as nothing but the activity of relating itself to itself. I respond to Nancy’s call to invent “an affirmation of relation” by way of rethinking the logics of sovereignty and democracy.…

DIALECTIC AND SOCIAL HETEROGENEITY IN ERNESTO LACLAU

The present article aims to examine critically Laclau’s claim that the trend toward social heterogenization revokes the Dialectic, or, more specifically, the clear and strict line of demarcation between what falls within the Dialectic and what falls outside of it. Polemicizing with the assumption of this reading, I argue that the appearance of a radical heterogeneity rather exposes the undecidability of relations between the Dialectic and what is a heterogeneity. To undergo the experience of this relation means not only to confront something that dislocates the Dialectic, but also what makes it what it is. The concrete determination of this limit relation is precisely what is at stake in th…

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Lotman’s semiotic theory of culture or Laclau’s political ontology?

AbstractThe present article concentrates on the main discrepancies that should arise in the discussion between Lotman’s semiotics of culture and Laclau’s discursive theory of hegemony. Some significant – but still abstract – commonalities conceal fundamental disagreements which I would group around four topics. Firstly, Lotman’s semiotic method is at odds with Laclau’s ontological way of thinking. Secondly, although both Lotman and Laclau subscribe to the openness of signification, it is impossible to incorporate their accounts of this openness without loose ends. In order to substantiate this claim, I examine Lotman’s concept of “boundary” and Laclau’s concept of the “limit.” Thirdly, we s…