S. TOME PRINCIPE 2003 - Panda Scouts s/s

‘Entrepreneurial science’ is not the most intellectually scintillating concept, but I chose it because it seemed politically urgent. So, what is ‘Entrepreneurial Science’? We can begin by asking: who is the entrepreneurial scientist? But for that, we will need to know: Who is the scientist? In his elegantly written book The Scientific Life (2008) . . .

For a medievalist, thinking about a political concept for our modernity is at the same time a curse and a moment of revelation. For some, the Middle Ages are just too far away, constituting a radical alterity. Others, like Hans Robert Jauss, view this alterity as an advantage, as something that could beget a new, fresher view on modernity. The Middle Ages . . .

What kind of work is needed to map the concept of bios? The word is ancient Greek. Its translation as “life” will be recognized as partial by most readers as a result of the ubiquity of the claim, made most forcefully by Giorgio Agamben (with acknowledged debts to Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault), that ancient Greek “life” is divided at its core into bios . . .

How—from the North—does one lose direction [comment . . . perdre le nord]? It is hard to keep count, from the perspective of the post-empire, of the number of objects to which “decolonization” is applied today. It is as if it were necessary to decontaminate profoundly toxic ways of being, of acting, and of thinking. Decolonization, as a concept . . .

I would like to consider what it would mean to enter the term “unmixing” into the political lexicon. It is neither keyword nor political concept yet but should certainly be the former, even if it cannot be considered the latter. I will begin this essay by laying out a historical narrative, then follow with a reading of some South Asian, Urdu, and English texts, and conclude . . .

The concept of agency is a fundamental one in political theory because agency is crucial to the coordinated activity that is a constitutive component of political life. Agency is especially central in theories of democratic politics because it is a precondition for collective self-rule, political contestation, and the pursuit of justice. As a political concept. . .

The last half-century has witnessed a striking upsurge in interest concerning questions about animals, ethics and politics. Yet philosophers and animal advocates have been surprisingly reluctant to treat the bare fact that a creature is an animal as morally significant. This article traces some of the most prominent attempts to think about animals as proper objects of. . .

Theodor Adorno famously concluded Minima Moralia with the cryptic suggestion that “the only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things from the standpoint of redemption . . . Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as. . .

I can say, perhaps a little playfully but not altogether inaccurately, that I’ve chosen to engage with the very first political concept—certainly in name, if nothing else. But as you will see my reading is precisely to demonstrate how, from its initial invocation (from its archē, as it were), this concept renders any notions of the first or of the one impossible, indeterminable, an-archic.

For the past two decades, the Hegelian concept Aufhebung keeps appearing in the elaborate literature written on the subject of archives. It describes archival work. Here is a late, characteristic example of this approach: “To archive is to put away, to shelter, to keep . . . The modality of Aufhebung, conventionally translated into English as ‘sublation’. . .

Neither powered up by a solid sense of (or even desire for) legitimacy, nor a control freak with regard to the possibilities of comprehension, I abide with the weaker neighborhoods of thought, where things do not always work out or offer the narcissistic comfort of landing in the vicinity of secured sense. This time, in order to get a running start on the motif. . .

“Better” words—that’s a claim we could understand; perhaps today we could generally endorse the idea that it’s better to have better words to hand than less-good ones (though we’d be hard-pressed to correlate an education, even or especially at an Ivy League school, with the “knowledge” or “having” of such better words). Some words are “better” than others . . .

The inclusion of blood in a lexicon of political concepts would seem to require the removal of two quite formidable obstacles. First, blood is not a concept. And second, blood is not political. I shall return to the first obstacle, but I should begin by deferring to understandable reservations with regards to the removal of the second. For who. . .

Is “bubble” a concept, except in the trivial sense in which every word ensconced in quotes becomes a concept, or rather a “concept”? More pertinently, is it a political concept? Is the philosophical exercise of making it a political concept a legitimate exercise, or, does such an exercise run the professional risk of philosophical facetiousness?

In Balibar’s 1985 Spinoza and Politics, he follows a complex and compelling trajectory through Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and the Ethics, to show how a political structure of democracy is articulated through the reflections on religion, specifically on God, law, nature, and love. Spinoza is said to lament the degeneration of religion into superstition on the . . .