{"title":"Faith between reason and affect: thinking with Antonio Gramsci","authors":"Lukas Slothuus","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1934505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1934505","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article argues that faith is a crucial concept for understanding the relationship between reason and affect. By allowing people to learn from religious faith for secular ends, it can help generate political action for emancipatory change. Antonio Gramsci's underexplored secular-political and materialist conception of faith provides an important contribution to such a project. By speaking to common sense and tradition, faith avoids imposing a wholly external set of normative and political principles, instead taking people as they are as the starting point for generating emancipatory change. It also allows us to imagine the construction of alternative institutions (the Church provides an interesting model for challenging existing state authority). Theorists should therefore pay attention not just to the rationalist logic of discursive justification but also to the complex processes of social, collectively held emotions and how these influence political action as forms of affect. The article provides a detailed reconstruction of Gramsci's conception of faith and analyzes the instruments it provides for bridging the gap between reason and affect.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81850103","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":"Bridging the gap between affect and reason: on thinking-feeling in politics","authors":"Gisli Vogler","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1927782","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1927782","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article addresses the role of thinking in politics by engaging with two radically different literatures: theorizing on affect and sociological research into reflexivity through internal conversation. Brian Massumi and his fellow affect theorists have made an important contribution to dismantling overly rationalist conceptions of thought, by conceptualizing the embeddedness of humans in processes beyond cognitive control. At the same time, the turn to affect has been criticized for its ‘anti-intentionalist’ tendencies. These are said to undermine the role of ideas, beliefs, and judgements in politics. In response, the article turns to emerging debates on reflexivity. Associated with the work of Margaret Archer, they aim to formulate a middle ground between the entrenched positions of ‘rational’ deliberation and non-cognitive affectedness. Put in conversation, the two literatures point to the potential of affective thinking, or thinking-feeling, in politics. The article gauges the relevance by discussing the theoretical advancements in relation to leading scholar of protest and emotions, James Jasper.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90230635","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":"Revisiting the Habermasian charge of performative contradiction: deconstruction as a theoretical and normative project","authors":"Giorgi Tskhadaia","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1939081","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1939081","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Jürgen Habermas famously argues that reason cannot be rejected or criticized by employing its tools. In other words, every critique of reason has to put forward certain universal generalizations about reality. Based on this, he suspects a performative contradiction in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction – a claim which is largely dismissed by Derrida and his followers. Derrida aims at articulating the paradoxes inherent to being and justice, instead of proposing a general theoretical model of reality or a normative model of justice. In this article, I argue that there are certain generalizations at play in deconstruction. The standard Derridean interpretation of such generalizations is that they stem from the paradoxes which are at work in deconstruction. In contrast, I demonstrate that deconstruction’s belief in the paradoxes of being and morality are at least partially based on the generalizations that Derrida makes about reality. I argue that this does not deal a fatal blow to deconstruction, but requires the whole approach to assume a theoretical and normative character. I conclude that interpreting deconstruction as a theory and a normative project, rather than an atheoretical and anormative approach, will be beneficial for philosophy and political theory.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73023129","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":"The event and politics: a cartography of the Brazilian mass protests","authors":"M. Lock","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1907430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1907430","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT It is common to understand mass demonstrations, like those belonging to the new cycle of contentious politics, as disruptive political events. However, there is no consensus on how to define what political events are, let alone how to investigate them. Most frequently, events are romanticized and understood as great ruptures, which makes the concept problematic as a means to investigate these new political phenomena. In this article, through the systematisation of Deleuze's philosophy of the event, I advance a theoretical approach that enables us to analyse and map the complexity of political events like mass protests. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, I elaborate a cartography of the Brazilian protests in 2013.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89899137","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":"Monopolization, classification and symbolic violence: Pierre Bourdieu’s contribution to the analysis of State Nationalism","authors":"Joaquim Rius-Ulldemolins","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1929367","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1929367","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The study of nationalism is usually split into its macro-sociological dimension and the political and coercive aspects on the one hand, and into micro-sociological, psychological and symbolic aspects on the other. Pierre Bourdieu’s methodological structuralist approach and his concepts of habitus and doxa give us a better understanding of nationalism in its dominant form – State Nationalism. These concepts shed light on: (a) the framework and micro-dimension of The State’s monopolization of symbols; (b) the battle lines between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’; (c) hierarchicalisation; (d) the invisible way in which nationalism as the dominant ideology creates coherent cognitive systems that dovetail with the institutional structure. Thus one of State Nationalism’s greatest victories is to pass itself off as Universalist and disinterested. In so doing, it fosters symbolic violence and adherence to this doxa.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1929367","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72451755","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":"Punitive futurity and speculative time","authors":"J. Elliott","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1905679","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1905679","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay examines longstanding, widely circulated arguments regarding blocked futurity in relation to emerging forms of temporal experience associated with financialization. From ambivalent conservative accounts of the ‘end of history’ to the grim repetition diagnosed on the Left as ‘capitalist realism’, divergent accounts of post-1960s culture have focused on what I call ‘static time’, or an experience of time in which human agency is no longer operative because meaningful change cannot be created. Although versions of static time continue to proliferate in academic discourse, liquidity and financialization produce forms of individual temporality that operate very differently. When we make the conceptual parameters of static time explicit, I suggest, it becomes more possible to read for the forms of temporalized human action that these parameters may prevent us from noticing. These forms include what I call suffering agency, or the experience of individually chosen, consequential human action as horrific and unwelcome, and life-interest, or the production of individual binary decisions made in relation to survival. Rather than being inaccessible or unshaped by human efficacy, the future here bears down in the form of negative results directly caused and deliberately chosen by the individual in question. In this form of ‘punitive futurity’, individuals experience temporalized forms of distress keyed to the willed unfolding of their own choices over time. By reading punitive futurity in relation to what Lisa Adkins calls ‘speculation as a rationality’, I argue that this temporal form serves as an increasingly crucial means by which individuals experience their subjection within contemporary capital.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87217151","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":"The asset economy: conceptualizing new logics of inequality","authors":"L. Adkins, M. Cooper, M. Konings","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1904429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1904429","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper argues that asset ownership is becoming more important than employment as a determinant of class position. The introduction considers this claim with respect to Piketty’s contribution, arguing that the latter is too focused on the growth of wealth at the very top. The first section draws on the work of Hyman Minsky to outline the logic of assets. We differentiate our approach from competing perspectives that tend to overemphasize the orthodox image of the market and in particular the idea that liquidity is an inherent aspect of financialization. Such perspectives neglect that participation in the asset economy often involves (and regularly necessitates) making highly illiquid investments. The subsequent section advances a new analytic of class and inequality, and the last section develops this further in a more philosophical register to consider how the temporal logic of the asset economy is shaping new life-times. The conclusion reflects on the political implications and prospects of the asset economy.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77848182","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":"Resisting assimilation – ethnic boundary maintenance among Jews in Sweden","authors":"David Grobgeld, Moa Bursell","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1885460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1885460","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article evaluates Andreas Wimmer’s theory of ethnic boundary making by applying it to the maintenance of Jewish ethnic identification in Sweden, as expressed in interviews with Swedish Jews. Wimmer proposes that ethnic conflict routinizes and entrenches perceptions of ethnic difference; we argue that the antisemitic persecutions of the twentieth century have entrenched the perception of the ethnic distinctiveness of Jews among Jews themselves. These persecutions also contribute to alienation from Swedish society, which does not share the same frames of understanding. These factors motivate the interviewees to maintain the ethnic boundary between Swedes and Jews and guard it against assimilation. We propose a nuancing of the debate between instrumentalist and primordialist conceptions of ethnic identity by arguing that while our interviewees express a taken-for-granted view of their ethnic identities, they advance ethnic discourse strategically in order to protect the Jewish community from losing its distinctness, especially through assimilation.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82370174","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":"Reinstating and contextualizing religion in the analysis of Islamist radicalization in the West","authors":"Jeppe Fuglsang Larsen","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1885050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1885050","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Research on Islamist radicalization has been characterized by different analyses of why some people become radical Islamists. Structures such as social, economic and political marginalization are often understood as root causes of radicalization. In critical theorizations of radicalization, religion is often mentioned as a component; however, its role is often downplayed. This article focuses on the debate surrounding explanations of Islamist radicalization processes and discusses different approaches to reinstating religion in the analysis. The article introduces and develops the sociology of religious emotion (Riis and Woodhead 2010) as a not-yet-employed theoretical perspective in radicalization research. Instead of understanding radicalization as explained primarily either through structural social and political conditions or through specific interpretations of Islam, the tradition would allow us to understand religious emotions as formed within the social context. The article thus accentuates the importance of grasping the interplay between the social and societal context and specific interpretations of Islam. The application of the sociology of religious emotion and its underlying broad conception of religion thus offers a promising theorization of the role of religion in Islamist radicalization in the West that can help broaden the analytical scope.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76556217","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":"Making the Amazon a frontier: where less space is more","authors":"A. Ioris","doi":"10.1080/1600910X.2021.1884579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2021.1884579","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Frontier-making has always been fundamental for the circulation and accumulation of capital. The perennity of frontier-making is not only due to the demand for minerals, land or other resources, or because frontiers represent fresh market opportunities, but crucially because it operates as compensation for the saturation of the existing capitalist relations in core areas. At the frontier, the conventional sequence of time and space is suspended and reconfigured, allowing room for the decompression of tensions and contradictions. Consequently, spatial frontiers function as a mirror, where the most explicit features of capitalism are vividly exposed. This article examines the meaning and immanence of spatial frontiers, considering them as a laboratory of historical and geographical agency. It entails a reflection upon the necessity, the configuration and the contestation of spatial frontiers, paying particular attention to the economic and territorial incorporation of the Amazon region and the prospects of political resistance.","PeriodicalId":42670,"journal":{"name":"Distinktion-Journal of Social Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2021-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90073792","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}