polylog 48
Winter 2022
Lara Hofner: Editorial
AUTORITARISMUS UND IDENTITÄTSPOLITIK
Herausgegeben von Hans Schelkshorn und Wolfgang Tomaschitz
Hans Schelkshorn und Wolfgang Tomaschitz
Autoritarismus und Identitätspolitik
The new politics of violence, exclusion and humiliation which is being played out in various religious spaces and idioms in India today cannot be understood without reference to the tactics of harassment by sample and tyranny by example in Narendra Modi’s India. The article tries to outline the essential operative means of this authoritarian agenda.
Jens Adam, Hagen Steinhauer und Shalini Randeria
Von Differenzlinien und moralischen Mehrheiten:
Majoritäre Identitätspolitiken als soft-autoritäre Herrschaftspraxis
This article examines the role of majoritarian identity politics in soft authoritarian attacks on democracy. Drawing on examples from France and Poland, we argue that in their struggle for cultural and political hegemony, right-wing actors use strategies like the demonisation of emancipatory politics, the problematization of difference and self-victimisation of »racial« or ethnoreligious majorities.
Highlighting three political buzzwords (namely séparatisme, islamo-gauchisme and wokisme), our first case study traces shifts in French public discourse towards a conjunction and normalization of islamophobe, racist and anti-intellectual stances. Ethnographic observations about recent anti-LGBT discourses and restrictive border policies in Poland showcase the mobilization of political affects to transform the body politic into an exclusive identarian moral community.
We close the article with a pledge to take seriously current attempts to redefine Europe as a closed formation with a fixed essence and stable identity.
Unterdrückung als kulturelle Besonderheit: Autoritarismus und Identitätsmanagement in China
»Chinese characteristic«, zhongguo tese, has become a key word of China’s political language. The more implausible it becomes to invoke historical materialism to justify its rule, the louder the Communist Party appeals to the peculiarity of Chinese culture. This makes China a prime example of the connection between political oppression and the construction of cultural identity. The connection is part of an ideological global system of complementarity of universal technical and economical imperatives on the one hand and relative different value orientations of the »cultures« on the other. This system has its roots already in the Chinese 19th century with the attempt to adopt Western »practical« knowledge while keeping the traditional authority structures as China’s cultural »substance« intact. The idea has been influential to this day. China streamlines its culture for an identity management that is to ban »Western« liberalism. It is intrinsically interwoven with authoritarianism. A pre-political identitity is manfactured absent a system of rule that would allow for identification by political participation.
This article deals with the ideological discourses that prepared the ground for the Russian army’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. One of these ideologies is the Eurasianism of the 1920–1930s, which was represented by prominent Russian intellectuals such as Nikolai Trubeckoj, Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Savickij and Lev Karsavin. At the turn of the millennium, it was above all Aleksandr Dugin who integrated Eurasianism into his extremist eclectic ideology. In Dugin’s Historiosophy, the East (with all its metaphysics) fights against the corrupt West. For him, Ukraine is only one scene of this great metaphysical battle. The writer Eduard Limonov and his younger successor Zachar Prilepin try to defend Russia mainly through actionism (on different levels). Prilepin fights as a soldier in Ukraine for his »great fatherland«.
The intentions of left-wing identity politics are noble and understandable: to get discriminated groups out of the shadow. But the question is, if this way of dealing with identity could lead to anything good. Our own identity can serve as a starting point for a policy of emancipation, but not as a final purpose. Identity is a matter of facts, while politics deal with values. For this reason identity is a dead end.
Zur Ideengeschichte einer »radikalen Politik« in Polen
The policy of the Polish Government, which is – following a legal decision by the European Court of Justice – violating the rules of constitutional democracy since 2015, is often taken as an example of global prevailing populism or the »seductive lure of authoritarianism« (Anne Appelbaum). Beside that other explanations comprehend actual tendencies in Poland as a specific middle-east european idea of nation, rather ethnically than politically framed. Andrzej Gniazdowski tries to go beyond these approaches by analysing the situation in a broader historical and theoretical context. By critically reconsidering Andrzej Walickis idea-historical view of the polish ›Sonderweg‹ to modernity, that traces back the political notion of nation to the tradition of the old Aristocratic Republicanism in Poland, Gniazdowski is interpreting this genuine oligarchic republicanism as a type of radicalism, understanding it as a secularized theological notion.
FORUM
Anarchie und Interkulturalität
Zur Aktualität Paul Feyerabends
What has anarchy got to do with intercultural philosophy? In this essay I show how anarchist
positions and theorems as they are developed within Paul Karl Feyerabend’s (P. K. F.) philosophy can for one be understood as the fundamentals of every pluralistic or anti-transcendental philosophy and for another that they can be used as a motivational source for legitimizing the basis of intercultural philosophy. The latter consists inter alia of the critical analysis of one’s own tradition’s criteria for evaluating others resp. the critical analysis of the practice of insinuating values on groups who »think differently« as well as the systematically underrepresented use of common-sense thought. I demonstrate that P. K. F., an almost forgotten Austrian philosopher, manages to anti-systematically introduce a variety of different philosophical criticisms. These focus primarily on the often-unquestioned disconnection between scientific method and humanistic values. I show how P. K. F. establishes an anarchistic way of arguing for one’s beliefs, without having to commit to certain logical consequences of one’s propositions. Lastly, I elaborate three entwined solutions by P. K. F. concerning philosophical problems such as the anticipation of the possible, learning and unity resp. the problem of universal conditions for understanding others.
Soziale Personen, soziale Ungleichheit und sozialer Tod
How might one make sense of the intimate but often assumed connection between social inequality and social death? In this paper, I offer an answer. It develops in stages. First, I set out in some detail an account of person prominent in sub-Saharan African thought systems, specifically the version of it found in the writings of Ifeanyi Menkiti. Second, I show how this account entails both that persons are social entities and that consequently they belong in a social ontology. Third, I suggest a perspective on Orlando Patterson’s notion of social death and then show how Menkiti’s account of persons as psycho-social entities can provide ontological grounding for the phenomenon of social death. Roughly, the overarching claim is that rather than merely disrespect their victims, oppressive forms of social inequality essentially depersonalise them in the sense at issue in Patterson’s social death.
BERICHTE
Namita Herzl
Tagungsbericht: Geisteswissenschaften – Eurozentrismus – Kritik.
Internationale Tagung vom 19. bis 23. Juli 2022 in Berlin
Miriam Feldmann, Lara Hofner und Lawanna Yoganathan
Tagungsbericht: Philosophie und Rassismus.
Internationale Tagung an der WWU Münster vom 6.-8. Oktober 2022
REZENSIONEN
Mădălina Diaconu
Die Tiere als unbequeme Subjekte für die Kolonialmacht.
Zu: Antoinette Burton & Renisa Mawani (Eds.): Animalia
Bianca Boteva-Richter
Vernunft und/oder Glaube? Interkulturelle Perspektiven eines schwierigen Verhältnisses.
Zu: Markus Wirtz: Religiöse Vernunft
Bianca Boteva-Richter
Be-Lehrung der Anderen – Herrschaft durch Wissen in der kolonialen Moderne.
Zu:: Claudia Brunner: Epistemische Gewalt
Jan Kerkmann
Zu: Iso Kern: Die Religion von Philosophen. Konfuzius, Sokrates, Epiktet, Montaigne, Pascal