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Rereads classical figures in continental thought, takes up current topics in the legacy of political theory, and analyzes and evaluates Foucault's work as a prime manifestation of the complicated modern interface between truth and power, institution and liberation.
The task of reinterpretation arises from recognition, within continental philosophy, of a certain abandonment of political philosophy for historicism or a scientistic search for laws. Contemporary debate over the death of the possibility of the subject now focuses on the links among knowledge, virtue and power. As a result, the ancient problem of the institution of the form of the political becomes linked with struggles intrinsic to the task of representation and recognition. The problem now becomes one of understanding the meaning of judgment, autonomy, and consensus in the midst of the fragmentation of the hierarchies that structure the political, and have structured the thinking (from Plato to Hegel) that we identify as metaphysical. Such fragmentation doubtless is the ancient inheritance of democracy, but now without the metaphysical assurance of a transcendental authority, whether resident in nature, community, or the monarch as embodiment of the sacred. Perhaps it is in Foucault's work, more than anywhere else, that the investigation of the complicated modern interface between truth and power, and institution and liberation, occurs.
In reinterpreting the political, recognition of ideological forces in the legacy of modernity in its theoretical and institutional forms cannot be escaped-particularly in recognizing the underdetermined character of the subject matter. This collection represents rich examples of such reinterpretations. It begins with rereading the classical figures in continental thought and then takes up current topics in the legacy of political theory. The final section provides analyses and evaluations of Foucault's work.
"…anyone interested in what continental thinkers provide in terms of new concepts or ideas for addressing political problems and issues should read the articles in this collection." — Philosophy in Review
Introduction: The Question of the Political
I. Reinterpretations
1. Keirkegaard on Authoring and Identity fron the Perspective of Havel's Existential Revolution and Nonpolitical Politics
2. A Nietzchean Defense of Democracy
Lawrence J. Hatabi
3. Husserl's Göttingen Years and the Genesis of a Theory of Community
R. Philip Buckley
4. Edith Stein's Phenomology of the State
Mary Catherine Basehart
5. Beauvoir and the Roots of Radical Feminism
Margaret A. Simons
6. Action, Passion, and Responsibility: Levinas's Circumcision of Consciousness
Robert D. Walsh
7. Lyotard's Kantian Account of the Subline and Democratic Discourse
Patrick F. Mckinlay
II. Theory and Politics: On the Fragmentation of the Political
8. The Circle of the Origin
Fabio Ciaramelli
9. Fichte, Habermas, and Luc Ferry
John Doody
10. Rights, Narrative, and Legal Practice
David M. Rasmussen
11. Reconsidering the Limits of Democracy with Castoriadias and Lefort
Steven Hendley
12. Against Dialoque
Michael Murray
13. Decentered Autonomy: The Subject after the Fall
Axel Honneth
14. American/French Intersections: The Play of Race/Class/Politics in Irigaray
Ellen T. Armour
III. A Cas in Point: The Uses of Foucault and the Legacies of Enlightenment
15. Beheading the King: Foucault on the Limits of Juridical Thought
Lawrence Hass
16. Power: Method of the Deployment of Sexuality
John Carvalho
17. Beyond Pluralism: Foucault's Strategic Counter to Heterosexist Categories
Ladelle McWhorter
18. Of Perestroika, Glasnost, and Badgers: Barthes and Foucault on Power and Discourse
Nancy J. Holland
19. Truth and Power in Foucault
James L. Marsh
20. Expert Discourse of Critique: Foucault as Power/Knowledge
Linda Alcoff
List of Contributors
Index