Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity is a challenging consideration of what remains of ambitious Enlightenment ideas such as democracy, freedom and universality in the wake of relativist, postmodern thought. Do clashes over gender, race and culture mean that universal notions such as justice or rights no longer apply outside our own communities? Do our actions lose their authenticity if we act on principles that transcend the confines of our particular communities ? Alessandro Ferrara proposes a path out of this impasse via the notion of reflective authenticity. Drawing on Aristotle, Kants concept of reflective judgement and Heideggers theory of reflexive self-grounding, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity takes a fresh look at the state of Critical Theory today and the sustainability of postmodern politics.
Authenticity is one of the most crucial, but also most contested concepts in literary and cultural studies. Hollowed out by postmodernist theory, it paradoxically enough persists as an important backdrop for the discussion of literature, film, and the visual arts. The essays in this volume explore perspectives on authenticity and case studies dealing with »the authentic«. They thereby seek to show how the paradoxical persistence of authenticity in contemporary critical discourse can be turned into a fruitful point of departure for an analysis of literary texts, but also films, and the visual arts.
A proposal for negotiating the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity in critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical epoch. Today, such a concept of context-transcending validity is not easy to defend; the "linguistic turn" of Western philosophy signals the widespread acceptance of the view that ideas of knowledge and validity are always mediated linguistically and that language is conditioned by history and context. In Re-Presenting the Good Society, Maeve Cooke addresses the justificatory dilemma facing critical social theories: how to maintain an idea of context-transcending validity without violating anti-authoritarian impulses. In doing so she not only clarifies the issues and positions taken by other theorists—including Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Judith Butler—but also offers her own original and thought-provoking analysis of context-transcending validity. Because the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity is today an integral part of critical social theory, Cooke argues that it should be negotiated rather than eliminated. Her proposal for a concept of context-transcending validity has as its central claim that we should conceive of the good society as re-presented in particular constitutively inadequate representations of it. These re-presentations are, Cooke argues provocatively, regulative ideas that have an imaginary, fictive character.
The volume provides a critical assessment of the concept of authenticity and gauges its role, significance and shortcomings in a variety of disciplinary contexts. Many of the contributions communicate with each other and thus acknowledge the enormous significance of this politically, morally, philosophically and economically-charged concept that at the same time harbors dangerous implications and has been critically deconstructed. The volume shows that the alleged need or desire for authenticity is alive and kicking but oftentimes comes at a high price, connected to a culture of experts, authority and exclusionary strategies.
This text examines evil in the context of a post-metaphysical world, a world that no longer believes in a God. The question of how and why God permits evil events to occur is replaced by the question of how and why humans perform evil acts.
Iconic migrant writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri use their fictional worlds to articulate the ways in which existential “nervous conditions,” caused by violent postcolonial history, drive individuals to rework the critical notions of freedom, authenticity and community. This existential thread in their works has been largely ignored or left undeveloped in criticism. Although Rushdie has argued that they primarily write back to the imperial centre(s), in their signature novels, The English Patient, Midnight’s Children and The Famished Road, they respond to their conflicting cultural and ethnic heritages by dramatizing characters in traumatic struggles with belonging and affiliation. As a way of coping with their identity crises, most characters succumb to the political rhetoric of communalism. The central characters, however, are driven by a powerful desire for self-sufficiency. Yet, since this individualism clashes with their need for communal sharing, they enact a form of creative destruction of their singular selfhood and communal identity. They experience a certain plurality of singular selfhood and participate in forms of “inoperative communities,” which elicit bonds without ties and coexistence without the necessity of a common work and essence.
In the new world of work and organizations, creating and maintaining a positive identity is consequential and challenging for individuals, for groups and for organizations. New challenges for positive identity construction and maintenance require new theory. This edited volume uncovers new topics and new theoretical approaches to identity through the specific focus on positive identities of individuals, groups, organizations and communities. This volume aims to forge new ground in identity research and organizations through a compilation of new frame-breaking chapters on positive identity written by leading identity scholars. In chapters that build theoretical and empirical bridges between identity and growth, authenticity, relationships, hope, sustainability, leadership, resilience, cooperation, and community reputation and other important variables, the authors jumpstart an exciting domain of research on new ways that work organizations are sites of and contributors to identities that are beneficial or valuable to individuals or collectives. This volume invites readers to consider, "When and how does applying a positive lens to the construct of identity generate new insights for organizational researchers?" A unique feature of this volume is that it brings together explorations of identity from multiple levels of analysis: individual, dyadic, group, organization and community. Commentary chapters integrate the chapters within each level of analysis, illuminate core themes and unearth new questions. The volume is designed to accomplish three objectives: To establish Positive Identities and Organizations as an interdisciplinary, multi-level domain of inquiry To integrate a focus on Positive Identity with existing theory and research on identity and organizations To map out a vibrant new research territory in organizational studies . This volume will appeal to an international community of scholars in Management, Psychology, and Sociology, as well as practitioners who seek to generate positive identity-related dynamics, states and outcomes in work organizations.
"Mazzone has focused our attention on an important and underappreciated topic; the way hypocrisy suppresses the complaints of the oppressed and poses a particular threat not just to our politics but to democracies as a whole. The topic could hardly be more urgent." -- Ekow N. Yankah, Thomas M. Cooley Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, USA Unconfessed by definition, hypocrisy is one of the most used and abused polemical categories, even today, to denounce the "masked cynicism" of certain social actors, especially when they hold public office. But has hypocrisy always been just that? Should we really always be wary of it and challenge its every manifestation? What forms of hypocrisy can we distinguish? What kind of relationship exists between hypocrisy and the lack of self-critical attitude of those who are used to challenge the conduct of others? And above all: what relationship exists between this common vice, democratic politics and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination? These are just some of the questions that inspire this philosophical journey back into the history of one of the most chameleonic concepts of Western culture. In Mazzones conception, democratic hypocrisy includes argumentative strategies used by institutional actors to refuse any kind of responsibility when their decisions, actions or roles are called into question by the protests of citizens in a democratic context. He reveals the relationship that exists between such apologetic narratives and the institutional reproduction of different forms of oppression and domination. Ultimately, the book urges civic vigilance against underhand wannabe authoritarians, who as a group are evolving to find new ways to trick people into opposing democracy. Leonard Mazzone is Research Associate in Social and Political Philosophy at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Florence, Italy.
This volume presents new essays on the theory and practice of recognition. In order to retain its overall plausibility as a critical social theory, contemporary recognition theory needs to be able to successfully combine theory with real-life perspectives, in both contemporary and historical contexts. Contemporary recognition theory has developed into an established and active multidisciplinary research programme. The chapters in this volume have two main purposes. First, they engage in theoretical development of the contemporary theories of recognition. They explore the conceptual histories and the environments of recognition, as well as the connection between recognition and authenticity, emancipation, and social ontology. Second, they connect the theoretical insights of contemporary recognition with analyses of contemporary and historical social practices. These contributions explore themes such as populism and polarization, models of harmful invisibilization and social ignorance, the problem of evil and suffering, and social justice phenomena such as the #MeToo movement. The Theory and Practice of Recognition will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in social and political philosophy, social ontology, political theory, and sociology.
The central claim of this comparative study of Kant and Kierkegaard is that the aesthetic experience of the sublime is both autonomous and formative for extra-aesthetic ends. Aesthetic autonomy is thus inseparable from aesthetic heteronomy. In Part I, through an examination of Kant’s Critique of Judgement and his essays on the French Revolution, the Kantian sublime is shown to conflict with our existing cognitive, moral and political frames of meaning, at the same time that the engagement of the aesthetic judge (Chapter 1) or the enthusiastic spectator (Chapter 2) with this conflict furthers our pursuit of cognitive, moral and political ends. The Kantian sublime is built on the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, which nevertheless has non-aesthetic value. Part II argues that certain aesthetic and ethical-religious figures in Kierkegaard’s work can be shown to be transfigurations of the Kantian sublime, despite the absence of the term. Antigone and the silhouettes from Either/Or embody what I coin the tragic sublime and sublime grief. The God-man in Practice in Christianity is interpreted as a sublime image of contradiction. The figures are submitted to aesthetic representation, while their contradictory interior lives are unrepresentable. The Kierkegaardian sublime is built on a radical critique of aesthetic autonomy, whose failure serves the end of ethico-religious self-formation.
