H07(a) - Conditions of Emancipatory Politics
Date: Jun 2 | Time: 03:15pm to 04:45pm | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Benoît Morissette (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Loralea Michaelis (Mount Allison University)
A Hermeneutics of Emancipation: Reading and Writing the Political with Miguel Abensour: Paul Mazzocchi (York University)
Abstract: While Miguel Abensour's work has had an important influence on utopian and democratic theory, scholars have have largely ignored the specific manner of reading and writing the political that informs Abensour’s work and its approach to the tradition of political philosophy. This paper explores Abensour’s hermeneutics of emancipation. Combining a dialectic of emancipation and a new understanding of the political function of “utopian” texts, Abensour charts an alternative reading of the history of political thought. This begins with his critique of Plato’s 'Republic' for inaugurating not the tradition of “political philosophy” but the sovereignty of philosophy over politics. Informing much of the Western tradition, this anti-politics is defined by two traits: the introduction and domination of politics by a logic foreign to itself (truth/philosophy) and the establishment of an increasingly rationalized command-obedience relationship. But, against this, Abensour discerns subversive traditions of political thinking and being that challenge the political’s dependence on the state and its rooting in the command-obedience relationship and emphasize the centrality of division/plurality and equality to the political: so-called "primitive societies," the Cleisthenic reforms in Athens, Machiavelli, La Boetie, More, Marx, the Paris Commune and council democracy. The paper aims not only to elucidate this alternative history of political thought, but to explore the consequences of a hermeneutics of emancipation and its import for thinking the possibilities of politics today.
Between Ambiguity and Emancipation: The Category of Labour/Work in Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse: Omar Garcia (University of Toronto)
Abstract: This paper aims to trace both the shifting location and importance of the category of work/labour in the critical theory developed primarily by T.W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Despite having set out in the early 1930s to articulate a theory of modern industrial societies capable of shedding light on the complex interplay between economic life (work and the work relation), psychology, and culture, Adorno and Horkheimer are primarily known for their work on culture and (ir)rationality. Much less attention has been paid to their analyses of economic life. In contrast, the importance of the category of labour in the work of Marcuse is more concretely tied to the possibility of subversive emancipation. The paper has two aims: first, it shows that the category of labour in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer rests on a fundamental ambiguity in a way it does not in Marcuse’s. In the former’s oeuvre, labour plays only an ambivalent, now central, now peripheral role. To account for this difference, I argue that while Adorno and Horkheimer abandoned the subversive potential of work owing to their pessimistic views of the possibility of challenging the strictures of modern industrial society, Marcuse theorized the category of labour as a site of potential liberation.
Subjectivity in Participatory and Radical Democracy: a Phenomenological Critique: Victor Bruzzone (University of Toronto)
Abstract: As demonstrated by recent “trust in government” surveys (See: Gallup, 2017), there has been a steep decline in trust of democratic institutions and governments. Scholar-activists like Martina Sitrin and Dario Azzellini argue that this loss of confidence is nourishing the seeds of growing global movements against hierarchy and representational democracy. In their place, “horizontal assemblies are opening up new landscapes… of autonomy and freedom” (Sitrin and Azzellini, 2014: 5-6). These movements share a common commitment to consensus-based, anti-institutional, horizontal decision-making (Tufekci, 2017). The theoretical arguments underpinning these movements are usually derived from participatory (Pateman, 1970) as well as radical democratic theory (Hardt and Negri, 2017; Laclau and Mouffe, 2014; see also: Vick, 2015).
My paper focuses on a neglected variable associated with these theories and movements: the subjectivity of political action and inaction. Indeed, the kind of political engagement required by these theories seems to imply an under-theorized account of subjectivity, one that is perpetually politically mobilized in a civically virtuous way (that is, an attitude of respect for the common good and fellow citizens). My paper does two things. First, I construct an account of subjectivity implied by participatory and radical democratic theory and argue that it relies on many dubious assumptions. Second, I apply the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that his account of subjectivity as the habit-body reveals the deeper conditions of political inaction as well as offers a more promising foundation for progressive political action, and a democracy more likely to address deficits of trust.
On Marx's Theory of the Contrast between Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism: Paul Gray (Brock University)
Abstract: “I am a citizen of the world,” Marx would often say. And yet, his relation to this cosmopolitan sentiment is quite ambiguous. While Marx seems to embrace certain aspects of cosmopolitanism, he rejects the premises upon which it had been established, whether it is the Stoic’s Natural Law ethics or Kant’s idealist ‘perpetual peace.’ Indeed, Marx argues that the globalizing tendencies of capitalism are “cosmopolitan” in a “cynical” and “anti-human” form, but that they create the conditions for a genuine cosmopolitanism. Marx develops a vision for society based in communal property ownership, republican civic participation, and, most important for our purposes, a confederalist social structure in which all that could be decentralized would be. Marx also supports national liberation and independence as long as they are rooted in a broader internationalism. But he overestimates the extent to which national identities and loyalties wither away among the globalizing tendencies of capitalism. And though Marx praises capitalism for its universalizing tendencies, for the way in which it “batters down all Chinese Walls,” the actually existing socialism that acted in his name has certainly put up its share of walls. If a communist cosmopolitanism is not doomed to take the form of the World State that Marx rejects, the questions of territoriality and nationality must be reconsidered.