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The philosopher’s elusive subject : on the problem of the 'present' in the 'political'
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Nayar, Jayan (2013) The philosopher’s elusive subject : on the problem of the 'present' in the 'political'. Journal of Critical Southern Studies, 1 . pp. 23-59.
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Official URL: http://jcss.our.dmu.ac.uk/files/2013/08/JCSS-vol-1...
Abstract
Much Eurocentric critical political-legal philosophy begins with a disappointment
with the present, with totality-as-is and with the subject of the ‘political’. The
philosophical burden thus understood is to reclaim the ‘excess’ of totality for the
possibility of the ‘political’ as the ‘real’ of ruptural subjectivity, as a Becoming out of
the closures of present Being/Non-Being; Alan Norrie and Alain Badiou are,
respectively, representative of the ‘immanentist’ and transcendental versions of this
critical project of reclaiming the subject of philosophy from the closures of the
present. In this essay, adopting a lens of coloniality, I suggest that underpinning this
ontologic-epistemology of post-Enlightenment Eurocentric thinking is an assumption
of Nothingness that defines the originary-abject which requires the invention of the
philosophical problem, which requires the becoming-subject-in-the-political. I argue
instead that the present is defined not by absence/inexistence, not by NonBeing/Nothingness
outside of the political, but by Other/Different-Being whose
Exteriority is that which continues to be negated in theory-practice. Such a
perspectival shift points to the decolonial necessity of the negation of the ‘political’
itself, of the struggle for desubjectification
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Critical Southern Studies | ||||
Publisher: | Global Hands Publishing | ||||
Official Date: | August 2013 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 1 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 23-59 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) |
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