Geographic Dialectics? Sheppard, Eric
Environment and planning. A,
11/2008, Volume:
40, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural ...geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian conception of the dialectic. This Hegelian imaginary reflects the intellectual history of radical and/or critical anglophone geography. Yet, dialectics can be read in a non-Hegelian, much less totalizing and ideological, and more geographical way. This broader reading opens up space for considering parallels between dialectics, the assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari, and aspects of complexity theory.
The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of Luc Boltanski’s account of the multifaceted relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries in modern societies. It is ...striking that, although this important aspect of Boltanski’s oeuvre has been commented on by several scholars, his principal contributions to this area of investigation have been largely overlooked and received hardly any serious attention by researchers in the humanities and social sciences. This paper is an attempt to fill this noticeable gap in the literature. Thus, rather than covering the entire breadth and depth of Boltanski’s writings, the paper will focus on the valuable insights his work offers into the relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries. To this end, the analysis is divided into two parts. The first part comprises an overview of Boltanski’s central theoretical contributions to our understanding of mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries. The second part offers some critical reflections on important issues arising from Boltanski’s examination of the relationship between mysteries, conspiracies, and inquiries – especially with regard to its limitations and shortcomings.
This paper deals with a research hypothesis tying the legacy of German idealism to the first foundation of Michel Henry’s “phenomenology of life”. Based on a series of archive documents, the paper ...reconstitutes the hermeneutical horizon in contrast with which the young Henry (1946–1963) defined his conception of phenomenology, philosophy, and religion, i.e., the French existential–Hegelian debate (Wahl, Kojève). The reconstitution of this dialogue between the young Henry and the French Hegelianism of the 20th century will provide the theoretical framework for the analysis of the “religious attitude” in Henry’s philosophy and in his attempt to rethink the transcendental connection between phenomenality and (philosophical) discourse.
Is self-consciousness a condition of possibility for knowledge? Does Kant's theory of self-consciousness commit us to transcendental idealism? How convincing is Kant's theory of self-consciousness? ...How should we understand transcendental idealism? What is Hegel's alternative? How do Kant and Hegel conceive of the beautiful? How do their conceptions of beauty relate to their metaphysics? In this volume, some of the world's most renowned Kant and Hegel scholars seek to provide answers.
At the heart of any theoretical problem of justice lies the problem of motivation: Even if we could conceive of a way to develop a comprehensive system of just laws, and even if we could rationally ...believe in the justice of these laws, how could we ever ensure that we—or anyone else—would be motivated to abide by them? By unearthing how the problem of motivation sways canonical discussions of justice, the article brings forth intrinsic similarities and differences in these discussions that are often overlooked in the literature. In particular, the article highlights intrinsic similarities in the analysis of the concept of justice in two central works that belong to the continental and the analytic tradition respectively and are otherwise rarely discussed together: Hegel’s Outlines of the Philosophy of Right and Rawls’s Theory of Justice.
The argument in Lukács: Praxis and the Absolute (López, 2019) suggests that Lukács’ attempt to supersede Hegel failed. Ironically, Lukács’ concept of praxis reproduces the logical structure of ...Hegel's bad infinity, concealing its own finite historical origins in October 1917 (and Lukács’ philosophical reflection thereupon) while also mystifying the conceptual-logical content of praxis itself. In short, Lukács’ concept of praxis is a mythology that relapses into the antinomies he identified and criticized in others. If Lukács’ philosophy of praxis is critically reconstructed in light of Hegel's speculative understanding of the infinite and the finite, Lukács’ concept of praxis may be recovered and reconstituted on a more rational basis. The resulting speculative concept of praxis makes it possible to overcome the interrelated pitfalls of nihilism and dogmatic positivity that Lukács referred to via Heraclitus. Further, this will assist the development of a more reflective, critical Marxist Hegelian concept of praxis that may better orient socialist practice and contribute to the reformation of Marxism that Gillian Rose called for in Hegel Contra Sociology (Rose, 2009).
This paper presents a novel Hegelian view of the relationship between aesthetics and democratic politics. My account avoids the drawbacks associated with approaches, such as Rancière's, that ...reconceive all of the political in aesthetic terms or, like Rockhill's, reduce the aesthetic to art. Instead, I maintain that the aesthetic is best understood as a distinct recognition relationship of individual freedom. My argument proceeds by highlighting shortcomings of Honneth's account of democratic Sittlichkeit and then addressing these impasses by integrating aesthetic freedom into the picture. The first two steps of my argument concern the fact that the form of life outlined by Honneth aspires to be a form of free life, yet his account of democratic Sittlichkeit gives rise to two dimensions of unfreedom. The first problem of unfreedom pertains to the scope of freedom. The relationships of freedom incorporated into Honneth's account fail to turn given social roles into the subject matter of a sufficiently unrestricted practice of freedom. The second problem of freedom concerns conformism. In a final step, I complete my argument that Honneth's account is unsatisfactory and incomplete by showing that aesthetic freedom is socially valid and thus ought to form part of our accounts of democratic ethical life.
This essay engages the debate around the Althusserian concept of the void, presented in "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter." While Althusser claimed that an aleatory void is ...needed for a structural transformation to take place, his commentators object to linking the concepts of the void and the encounter. However, both Althusser and his commentators rely on the concept of the pure void to explain such a transformation, an idea that Hegel rejects. This essay shows that Hegel's dialectics already provide a conceptual framework for grasping the transformation of social structures resulting from internal contradictions.
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