The veiled woman troubles feminism and secularism in much the same way. Both feminism and secularism face a problem of finding a position that respects individual autonomy, and simultaneously sustains a conception of politics freed from heteronomous determination. This article gives an account of what is being resisted and by whom in modes of politics which seek to produce an autonomous subject emancipated from ‘other laws’(heteronomy). It also draws on Jean‐Luc Nancy in order to consider what has been termed the problem of Islam in Europe as a wider juridical and political problem centred on the significance of affect as heteronomy. It thus explores the tension between piety and polity.
Abstract, This paper begins with the paradoxes that accrue around the appearance of Robinson Crusoe and his "Man Friday" within recent judgments relating to the Chagos Archipelago. These references are understood as revealing the complex of anxieties and limits that are the final legacy of these rulings. In particular, we trace the ways in which À through Daniel Defoe's iconic characters À these judgments enact a troubling retreat from review of executive action, and a fuller withdrawal of sensibility from situations of "otherness" that both bear and cannot bear analogy to that of Friday. The paper then more briefly considers a similar complex of anxieties and limits, retreats and withdrawals enacted by recent judgments relating to Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. This allows us to suggest that between these two series of highest court rulings, the Anglophone common law is currently constructing the Indian Ocean as an offshore: a site excised from judicial review, and a site in which certain figures À peoples, individuals À are not considerable in both senses of the word. But in fathoming this, we turn to Derrida's insights on sovereignty to argue that, far from being new, this construction of a common law of the Indian Ocean tells us about the affront of an archaic sovereignty that always already determines and is determined by law. Across the arguments of this paper, these perceptions of judgment, geography and sovereignty are enabled by literature, and specifically by reading the return of Crusoe and Friday in a recent novel form (by J. M. Coetzee) that also broaches the limits of judgment and recognition, but through a kind of vigilant silence À an abstinence À that craves an alternative commonality: and in this very longing, resists the silencing complicities of the UK and Australian judgments with the disembodiment of a littoral nomos, offshore.
A conceit is afflicting the liberal left. The once reflexive adjustments of civilizational logics, suspicions about theories of universal progress, and the disposition to challenge the Washington consensus on social, economic, and political affairs is now undergoing a steady reversal. A universalist liberal ideology has been re-asserted. It is not only neo-con hawks or Blairite opportunists that now legitimise wars for democracy. Alarmingly, it is a generation of political thinkers who opposed the Nixonian logic of war (wars to show that a country can 'credibly' fight a war to protect its interests Much horror and suffering has been unleashed on the world in the name of the liberal society which must endure. However, when suicide bombing and state-terror are compared, the retort is that there is no moral equivalence between the two. Talal Asad in * Senior Lecturer, Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NS, UK. E-Mail: s.motha@kent.ac.uk. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Faculty of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, in January 2008. I benefitted enormously from questions and comments at that seminar. My special thanks to Deepak Mehta, Pratiksha Baxi, and Upendra Baxi for enriching that discussion. Brenna Bhandar, Peter Fitzpatrick, Ian Wollington, and Anastasia Vakulenko commented on earlier versions. The anonymous referees made extensive and generous suggestions for which I am very grateful. James Martel's encouraging and incisive comments were invaluable. Any errors are mine.1 Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York, Norton and Co, 2003) "Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the "anti-war" movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there are no opponents on the Left. We reject, similarly, the idea that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right. Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms. Conversely, we pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progress". by the 1970s, not to repeat the error of blindly following a scientific discourse that promised to produce a utopia -whether this was 'actually existing socialism' or the purity of 'blood and soil'. But now, a deadly politics, a thanatopolitics, is drawn out of a liberal horror and struggle against a monolithically drawn enemy called Islamic fundamentalism.What is new is that Islam has replaced communism/fascism as the new 'peril' against which the full spectrum of liberalism is mobilized.Islamist terrorism and suicide bombers, a clash between an apparently Islamic 'cult of death' versus modern secular rationality has come t...
This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog's Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Y outh League are placed in the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present-the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog's approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to postcolonial becoming.
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