Introduction: Desiring Politics and the Politics of Desire

What does thinking and acting with desire make possible that might otherwise and all too often be foreclosed? How might desire help orient action toward a horizon of becoming across which collective struggle can effect affective reparation and a more capacious politics? In some ways, desire seems to be taken for as much granted as space – that is, it's everywhere, but often difficult to articulate or analytically pin down. For us, what makes desire distinct, but not discrete, from the vocabulary of affect and emotion is that it operates as both absence and lack, on the one hand, and as a profoundly productive motor and motivating force, on the other. Desire moves in ways that presuppose, exceed, and complement the range of expressions that are taken up by scholarship in this journal. In this special issue, we privilege desire, in both senses, as central among the (dis)organizing, affective forces shaping political life.     

作为政治的教化

<正>一在当今世界,谁要把教化视为政治的主要任务,一定会被指控为前现代的专制思维,因为在许多人眼里,现代性的一个突出特征就是世俗化过程,而世俗化最基本的要求就是政教分离。尽管政教分离的 "教"不是教化之 "教",而是宗教之 "教",但很多人会从作为一个政治概念的教化想到宗教对人思想的统治。在他们看来,教化就是统治者用自己的意识形态来统一人们的思想,以维护他们的     

Better Identity Politics

Suchet's paper is an inspiring demonstration of the power of openness and vulnerability. It offers a clinically daring and theoretically far-reaching account of the transformation that can sometimes occur in the psychoanalytic relationship. My commentary focuses on two of the paper's major threads: the interplay of subjective experience, intersubjective space, and collective forces, and the ethical dimension of the psychoanalytic project. From the outset, the meeting between Ara and Suchet is not only a meeting of bodies and minds, but also a meeting of collective histories and politics. Suchet finds, and in her account powerfully demonstrates, that addressing her patient's trouble requires an exploration of how collective traumas and political narratives infuse the possibilities of intersubjective exchange and subjective meaning. In my commentary I trace and elaborate on the trajectory of this analytic process, contemplating the ways in which identities and identifications involve both familial and social attachments. I attempt to highlight Suchet's contribution to our understanding of how what happens, and is made meaningful, in the register of collective identification and experience, forms the very substance of subjective and intersubjective life, and should be therefore formulated as an intrinsic aspect of the analytic endeavour. Turning to Suchet's engagement with the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I consider her drive to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of psychoanalytic discourse. Following the same drive, I add some ideas developed by Theodor Adorno, as means of illustrating the trouble and the potential for reconciliation inherent in the experience and politics of identity.     

Politics and Generosity

ABSTRACT This paper argues that generosity as a moral virtue is only consistently and fully possible to practise in the kind of polity that upholds natural individual human rights, including the basic negative right to private property. The paper sketches a characterisation of generosity and explains the sense in which it can be a moral virtue. Some of the assumptions underlying the concept of moral virtue are considered and it is argued that contrary to some recent claims, it is possible to conceptualise as well as to practise moral virtues in our age. Yet it is also shown that certain political prerequisites are necessary for practising generosity. Furthermore, it is shown that there cannot be any generosity involved in a polity in which one is forced to share one's wealth with those who might be the beneficiaries of generous conduct. Finally, it is argued that even in a polity with a very limited government some acts of official generosity are possible.     

Experiments as Politics

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the political nature of laboratory experiments. Such experiments can be construed as paradigms of power, open to construction and debate, where different agents and interests are involved in a process of struggle over both (re)presentation and substance. Experimenters should take a reflexive perspective on their own role and power in producing results, and they should recognize that participants in experiments take into account power relations and accordingly modify behavior that is visible or accountable to powerful others (the "panopticon"). This argument is illustrated by recent research on intergroup behavior, which suggests that biases often taken at face value reflect strategic responses to the situation that balance social reality with social resistance.     

The Politics of Exclusion

Starting as a movement based on the discoveries of a genius, psychoanalysis aspired to be a science. A deeply subjective method of data gathering, it had to transform new findings into its founder's objectively coherent theory or revise it and challenge the founder. Exclusion from the group emerged as scientific judgment and punishment. From early on, when Freud barely distinguished between disagreement and enmity, assessment of new ideas was entwined with narcissistic conflicts. Exclusion not only maintained the relative coherence of the theory—a reasonable, laudable goal—but led to an enhanced in-group motivated to maintain the theory and a devalued out-group that would need to turn the tables. The way was paved for fortification of established ideas and overidealization of new ideas. But the decision by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA) to accept only physicians for psychoanalytic training extended exclusion to group membership. The result was the establishment of training outside the official APA/International Psycho-analytical Association umbrella. Formation of nonestablishment psychoanalytic institutes not only allowed more heterogeneity of ideas during the rule of orthodoxy but introduced seemingly less hierarchical organizational structures. Ideas embodied in these structures are now advocated by those who find hierarchy too oppressive. The paper ends with an examination of some of these ideas.     

Abstractions and Metaphysical Politics

Books reviewed in this article:
David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse     

The Politics of Science

ABSTRACT The myth that there is no politics of science is dangerous as it prevents the important and urgently needed institution of some democratic control of the existing system of politics within the commonwealth of learning. Feyerabend's attack on science makes sense only when understood in this way.     

The Politics of Masochism

This essay explores why people sometimes act against their economic interests, and, more particularly, why people sometimes knowingly and intentionally support economic inequality even though they are disadvantaged by it, a phenomenon I call masochistic inegalitarianism. The essay argues that such behavior is an inherent and widespread feature of human nature, and that this has important though previously overlooked practical and theoretical implications for any conception of distributive justice. On the practical side, masochistic inegalitarianism suggests that any theory of distributive justice with more than the most modest egalitarian aspirations is inherently self-defeating (or at least self-limiting) because it will naturally produce the background conditions necessary to trigger masochistic behavior among the very people it is designed to assist. On the theoretical side, masochistic inegalitarianism suggests that there are serious problems with any theory of distributive justice based on the idea of hypothetical consent. This is because people with masochistic tendencies would be unlikely to consent to the distributive arrangements these theories have presumed, and the arrangements to which they would be likely to consent would allow a far greater degree of economic inequality than we are prepared to acknowledge as intuitively just. Either we must rethink our intuitions, or, as I contend, there is something about masochistic inegalitarianism that robs hypothetical consent of its moral force.