Donato Tarulli

Dialogue, Difference and Voice in the Zone of Proximal Development

In recent years many similarities, especially centering on the notion of dialogue, have been noted in the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin and Lev Vygotsky. Although both attend to the dialogical character of speech and thought and the role of dialogue in the social constitution and genesis of mind, we argue that their understandings of dialogue are different in important ways. We consider the implications of such differences for a broader cultural-historical view of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) by focusing on three issues: dialogue, otherness and voice. These issues lead us to consider extending the domain of the ZPD to incorporate Magistral, Socratic and Menippean dialogues. These dialogues constitute three regions on a continuum with centripetal Vygotskian and centrifugal Bakhtinian poles, and each emerges at a different point of development of the ZPD. This broader perspective on the ZPD provides a medium for cultural and historical change as well as for individual socialization.

Immanent Law and the Juridical: Toward a Liberative Ontology of Human Rights

This article elaborates an ontology of human rights as immanent potential produced outside of modernist frameworks. We begin with a consideration of the political and juridical subject of human rights, the subjectus, whose relation to sovereign law is one of submission and supplication. We then examine three registers of “the law” that bear on the question of the subject, with a view to highlighting the distinction between law as a meditative, autopoietically sustained sovereign force, and as immanent production. Building on this conception of law as pure productivity, we propose an ontology of the subjectum for whom human rights are idiosyncratically produced acts of becoming or, in Spinozist terms, expressions of creative life force. While state and juridical forms may, through codification and re-presentation, attempt to contain and turn such open-ended possibility to their own ends, the material force of the subjectum, through its immanent expression of rights, carries the liberative potential to collapse sovereign force into its own expressive capacities. It is proposed, accordingly, that rights neither require nor depend on the ability to petition the state for legal status, but rather are produced within the forms of daily life of the multitude, that internally diversified social subject whose constitution and political action is premised neither on identity nor on appeals to sovereign power, but rather on what its singularities have in common.