John Rundell

Strangers, Citizens and Outsiders: Otherness, Multiculturalism and the Cosmopolitan Imaginary in Mobile Societies

This article deploys a double conceptual framework. One frame is positioned through the ideas of absolute strangers and outsiders. The other frame develops out of, though is distinct from, the first, and refers to the disaggregated forms of modern citizenship. The citizen-as-absolute-stranger in addition to accruing political rights may also accrue social, economic or identity rights, or traverse wider relations between him or herself and other absolute strangers in either national or international settings. It is in this context that outsiders are configured - aliens who have no national-juridical status

Origins of modernity : the origins of modern social theory from Kant to Hegel to Marx

Civil Society as the Public The Dialectical Anthropology of Freedom The Science of Society From the Politics of Strangers to the World of Estranged Needs The German Ideology and the Paradigm of Production The Paradigm of Class Action Marx Against Marx Running on Time.

Imagining cities, others Strangers, contingency and fear

This paper explores the constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. The paper’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the city. It begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to the ideal of the metropolis and the counter-ideal of the stranger. The stranger invariably accompanies the image of the city, as someone who comes to it from the outside. This co-existence between integration and the experience of being outside generates the inner tension or unease of city life, especially when we are all strangers.

The Erotic Imaginary, Autonomy, and Modernity

Modernity holds out both a promise and a loss for love. The promise is contained in modernity’s horizon of freedom, a horizon from which love can be viewed as a movement in the social relations of intimacy from singular or mutual enslavement to mutual autonomy. From the position of love’s loss, there is a perception that in the modernity of this fin de siecle love is in deep crisis, along with all other forms of associations that humans establish with each other and with nature. Cultural images of love, or at least of intimate life, emphasize broken marriages, unhappy and temporary heterosexual and homosexual relationships, emotional dysfunction or collapse, loneliness and despair. Left to themselves, the men and women who inhabit the sphere of intimacy appear to be bereft of the necessary emotional resources that enable them to come together for any length of time. The contemporary experience is, thus, not of love. Love is the catch all phrase for relationships bereft of love, or of solitary individuals who mourn love’s loss, often in the inarticulable void of grief.

From The Shores Of Reason To The Horizon Of Meaning: Some Remarks On Habermas' And Castoriadis' Theories Of Culture

It has been extensively argued that Marx came up against the problem of the patterns of interpretative self-understanding when addressing the nature and dynamics of both class contestation and social change. He was in each case confronted by the internal limits of his theory construction-the paradigm of production-which circumscribed the way in which worldviews or &dquo;cultural interpretative systems&dquo; 1 were constituted and analyzed by him. This is a limitation that has now once again pre-occupied social theory in a systematic way, notwithstanding systematic treatment of this problem-&dquo;what is culture?&dquo;-by some of sociology’s other founding figures, in particular Durkheim and Weber. The problem of the role of culture can be presented by wccy of the following thesis: society is constituted as a series of objectivations that

Citizens and Strangers: Cosmopolitanism as an Empty Universal

This paper approaches the issue of cosmopolitanism from the vantage point of hospitality. The notion of hospitality throws into relief some issues that are at the heart of political cosmopolitanism, but cannot be addressed by it. This is because these issues do not necessarily revolve around the category of the citizen (however extended), but around the categories of stranger and outsider. The paper critiques the tendency to conflate the categories of the stranger and the outsider and goes on to argue that the standard cosmopolitan extension of democracy to international contexts risks reproducing the exclusion of “outsiders” by nation-states, even democratic ones.

Slave to the rhythm or love, sex and the dialectic of freedom

Current changes in the intimate sphere are denoted by an expansion of emotional vocabularies, of freedom in sex and sexual preference, and the extension of sexual life with neither inhibition, nor obligation, nor marriage for both women and men. This reading of the works of Jean-Claude Kaufmann and Niklas Luhmann suggests that the result of this current revolution of the intimate sphere is mixed. A new differentiated form of the intimate sphere has developed with an internal distinction between sex qua leisure and committed love-relationality. Although sex qua leisure is mediated by the new communications technology, this technological mediation is not what is important here. Rather, the actions are configured and mediated by the neo-liberal paradigm by all participants. Leisure-sex is simply a game that combines autonomy, leisure, power and rational choice – a combination that is open to men and women alike. But there is still love, and in ways that enable it to be expressed beyond traditional forms. From the position of committed love-relationality, rather than marriage, love is between people – but it is a different between to the one of leisure sex. Love is double-sided: whilst heightening a sense of self-orientation, one is also focused on an other. Love involves all kinds of complexity in the everyday because it involves the well-being of an other or others – with joys and heartaches, responsibilities and conflicts.

Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy

Claude Lefort’s Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy accompanies his past interrogations of totalitarianism, his commitment to democracy, and his engagements with the works of Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Toqueville.1 It also joins those studies that have interrogated the nature of the Soviet system, and that notably include Richard Pipe’s Russia Under the Old Regime, Raymond Aron’s Democracy and Totalitarianism, Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller and György Márkus’s Dictatorship Over Needs, Johann P. Arnason’s Th e Future that Failed, François Furet’s Th e Passing of an Illusion, Martin Malia’s Th e Tragedy of Communism and even cinematically Testimony and Th e Lives of Others.2 Although some of these works were written prior to the self-instituted demise of the Soviet system in 1991, it is always a danger to impute a teleology, even a negative one with its hope of collapse, when generating a critique of totalitarianism. Perhaps, and drawing on Malia’s title, there was never, for Lefort, a tragedy, or an illusion (Furet) in any meaningful sense, but rather the creation of a completely new system that ushered in a diff erent modernity from the one usually associated, teleologically or otherwise, with markets, democracy and the imputed ideas of freedom and progress. Lefort’s study, fi rst published in French in 1999, and begun initially as a review of Furet and Malia’s own studies, attempts to comprehend and reconstruct the uniqueness of this new and d iff erent modernity,

Imaginings, Narratives and Otherness: On the Critical Hermeneutics of Richard Kearney

Richard Kearney is a member of the generation of Irish intellectuals who have come to prominence in the wake of Ireland’s gradual emergence from its years of national self-enclosure. Ireland’s embrace and support for the then European Economic Union in 1973, and its ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, represent its own escape from this legacy, and from its historical subordination to, and dependence on the UK. This orientation towards Europe is part of Ireland’s post-imperial and post-national sensibility. Richard Kearney’s work embodies this postnational sensibility and European orientation, and is represented especially by his Postnationalist Ireland (1997). In his more recent Strangers, Gods and Monsters (2002a), this orientation is given greater critical voice in addressing the forms of demonization towards others, strangers and outsiders that have occurred in the current period. Accompanying his critical engagement with contemporary Ireland, Kearney has also critically engaged with the French hermeneutic,

György Markus: On the constitution of cultural modernity

Dictatorship Over Needs (Markus et al., 1983), the swan song of the Budapest School, opened at the same time a new stage in the lives and work of the group’s members, four of whom, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher, György and Maria Markus, arrived in Australia in 1978. György Markus’s path to the break with the Soviet system took him from Moscow, where he studied philosophy at the Lomosov University from 1952 to 1957 and met his future wife, back to Budapest and a position as lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Budapest University from 1957 to 1965 and a Research Fellowship at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 1958 to 1973. From 1973 to 1977 György and the other members of the School were unemployed, a situation that could only be resolved through emigration. György and Maria Markus arrived in Sydney in 1978 via a visiting professorship at the Free University in West Berlin. In their Preface to Dictatorship Over Needs, dated Melbourne, December 1980, Heller, Feher and Markus trace their path from internal dissidence to overt opposition to the really existing socialism of the Soviet system from the Hungarian Revolution to expulsion from the Party in 1968 as punishment for their open letter of protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the loss of their positions in 1973. The genesis and writing of Dictatorship Over Needs sprang from and completed the learning process that had forced them to progressively shed any illusions as to the reformability of the Soviet system of power. They had long clung to the belief that they represented the true interests of the system. It led them, however, to demand the kind of structural changes incompatible with the survival of the system, as the invasion of Czechoslovakia and suppression of the reform movement within the Czechoslovak Party and society demonstrated with all finality. There could be no question now of distinguishing between