no longer Wagner as the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur
The key moment of any theoretical – and indeed ethical, political, and, as Badiou demonstrated, even aesthetic – struggle is the rise of universality out of the particular lifeworld. The commonplace according to which we are all thoroughly grounded in a particular, contingent lifeworld, so that a…
One is tempted here to use that old Levi-Straussian term ‘symbolic efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses an actual efficiency of its own.
not really sure what it means here tbh
Isn’t one of the topoi of Western liberalism the elevation of the Other as leading a life that is more harmonious, organic, less competitive, and aiming at cooperation rather than domination?
‘Postcolonial’ critics like to emphasise the insensitivity of liberalism to its own limitation: in defending human rights, it tends to impose its own version of them onto others. However, the self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of…
