Skip to main content
Log in

The Politics of Hope and the Other-in-the-World: Thinking Exteriority

Law and Critique Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The paper offers a critical interrogation of the politics of hope in relation to suffering in the world. It begins with a critique of the assumptions and aspirations of ‘philosophies of hope’ that assume a Levinasian responsibility for the suffering-Other. Such approaches to thinking hope reveal an underlying coloniality of ontology, of totality/exteriority, which defines Being and Non-Being, presence and absence, in totality. Consistent with past colonial rationalities, the logics of salvation and rescue define, still, these contemporary envisionings of the ‘white man’s burden’ in relation to the suffering Other. A decolonial ontology of Exteriority, of an incommensurable radical Other-Being against Totality, is instead presented. The focus here shifts from the passive suffering-Other that is the object of rescue, to the Radical Other that is the author of encounter. By returning Exteriority (the Radical Other-in-the-World) to theory and by opening up theory’s locations of enunciation, the implications of responsibility, in thinking hope, become open also to interrogation and vulnerable to unsatisfactory conclusions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. See for example, Aronson (1999), Jameson (2004), Couton and Lopez (2009), Misoczky (2007).

  2. See generally, Young (2004), Mignolo (2000), Smith (1999), Chakrabarty (2000).

  3. I use the term ‘we’ in this essay as a self-critical reference. I leave it to the reader, as a matter of individual self-judgement, as to whether membership within this referential ‘we’ is recognised or acknowledged. My aim is to invite critical reflection on the (‘our’) intellectual activity of thinking hope, on the assumptions that underlie our thinking in particular ways, and the implications of such orientations of thought.

  4. See for example, Atterton and Calarco (2010b). The collection of essays in this volume, on topics ranging from feminism’s futures, to global hunger, to environmental ethics, speak of the ways in which Levinas’s philosophy ‘for-the Other’ is sought to be channelled to contemporary issues, out of the impasse of more cynical and less hopeful philosophical times. See also, Peperzak (1995).

  5. See Simmons (1999), especially pp. 87–90.

  6. For a useful discussion of the significance of ‘persecution’ and ‘substitution’ in Levinas’ thought, see Bernasconi (1995).

  7. For an interesting excavation of the ‘actuals’ behind the ‘ideals’ of international law—on sovereignty, recognition, civilisation, etc., see Mielville (2005). See also, Anghie (2006).

  8. I am not entering here into an attempt to separate out suffering that is caused by ‘natural causes’ from that which is the consequence of the ‘human action/inaction’, not always an exact science in any case.

  9. For an interesting discussion, see Minkkinen (2008).

  10. A growing decolonial literature on what Walter Mignolo names ‘border thinking’ sheds considerable light on the limits of Eurocentrism as critical epistemology. Interestingly, this is literature that seldom finds mention, let alone serious consideration, in much critical Western contemplations on suffering and hope, telling, in itself, of the continuing coloniality of knowledge. For the historical context, political orientations, and substantive arguments of border thinking, see Mignolo (2000).

  11. See, Atterton and Calarco (Atterton and Calarco 2010a, b, p. x). This celebration of a Levinasian renaissance needs to be tempered however. Baxi’s observations are pertinent in this regard:

    Levinas constitutes an alien presence to both mainstream and subaltern legal theory and practice. Outside a niche of critical jurisprudential scholarship, the reception of Levinas in Anglo-American legal theory remains minimal. Even more disappointing is the fact that the field of professional legal ethics is as yet uninformed by Levinas. How may we understand this not-so-benign neglect? Is it because Levinas does not directly address the genre of the modern/postmodern forms of law and jurisprudence? Is it because Levinas’ meditations concerning justice seems, at first sight, unrelated to the theories of justice offered by, and since, John Rawls? Or is it the case that reading Levinas as re-engaging us all with an alternate imagination of reading law as another kind of ethical politics remains uncongenial to the legal-positivist style of doing jurisprudence? Or, further, is it the case that Levinas’ thought requires us to pursue some deep ways of ‘unthinking’ the forms of funded thought in doing political theory as well as ‘modern’/‘postmodern’ law and jurisprudence. …Or, finally, is it the case that Levinas’ single-minded focus upon our ‘infinite responsibility’ towards the suffering other seems to undermine apparent certainties about the production of globalizing law?’ (Baxi 2009, pp. 116–117) (emphasis in original, footnotes omitted).

  12. The literature on ‘responsibility’ and global justice-type thinking, is indeed vast. For a flavour, see for example, Williams (2007), Young (2006), Linklater (2007), Huseby (2008), Caney (2005), and generally, Pogge and Moellendorf (2008).

  13. Quoted in Grosfoguel (2008, p. 4). A ‘point-zero’ perspective refers to a philosophical orientation that privileges the location of enunciation as universal (the ego-politics of knowledge), and which conceals the historical, social, gendered and ‘racial’ particularities of its enunciation (the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge). See also, Mignolo (2009).

  14. For this distinction between the real and the actual, see Alan Norrie’s elaboration of Roy Bhaskar’s ‘dialiectical critical realism’ in Norrie (2010), especially pp. 220–224.

  15. The title of Palagummi Sainath’s book of essays is indeed evocative, Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Villages (1996).

  16. I do not need to point the finger of accusation elsewhere, my own institutional location within a ‘corporate university’ serves as a exemplary ‘case-study’; we ‘offer’ postgraduate courses, with heavy emphasis on human rights and social justice, for which we seek students (or, more honestly, customers) the world over. We speak much about human suffering and the cruelties of globalisation, of neo-liberal capitalism and imperialism, of the commodification of everything and the need for ‘other’ knowledges etc., within our classrooms; this, at the same time as we talk of global recruitment strategies, competitors in the field, the profit viability of programmes, the imperatives of ‘funded’ research etc., in our university meeting rooms. Suffering, and the business of speaking-about-suffering, indeed, is treated as a business, to pay our bills and to generate a profit. For a more general discussion of the politics and coloniality of ‘knowledge’ and the corporate university, see Mignolo (2003).

  17. And that they struggle is another matter. Interestingly, whilst suffering is emphasised as the referent for repairing partial-totalities through inclusion, it is struggle that needs to be tamed—from a matter of ontological encounter (Other-Being) to one of pre-ontological desire (Non-Being/Becoming). Put differently, struggle becomes useful to suffering-based thinking only to the extent that it demands our attention towards intervention for the Other, not as a source of thinking itself.

  18. Whilst Spivak’s argument resolves that the ‘subaltern voice’ is incapable of comprehensibility within hegemonic communicative processes, it is something quite different to raise the question ‘what does the subaltern speak’ if we abandon the privileged locus of theory—of enunciation and comprehension—from hegemonic sites and languages (Totality as I call it) and locate theory instead in locations of Exteriority. A useful counterpoint to the views of subaltern voicelessness is Scott’s (1990) excavation of ‘hidden transcripts’.

  19. This is what Williams (2007) terms as the tendency of law to transform suffering to matters of ‘sufferance’ rather than ‘insufferability’.

  20. Whether of ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ within the Eurocentic theoretical spectrum makes little difference in this regard. For us ‘progressives’, critiques against the imperialism of the Right are well rehearsed. More interesting, however, are interrogations of the Eurocentric Left, its histories and legacies of ‘thinking for’; see for example, Santos (2006), and Jameson (2004).

  21. An impressive example of this is Huseby (2008) where suffering and its response becomes a matter of mathematical calculations.

  22. Beck argues that the task of ‘critical theory’ is to chart the realm of possibilities within the realities of the new ‘meta-game’ of cosmopolitan global politics. Fundamental to this task is to transnationalise the state, to inscribe within the global system the politics of real cosmopolitanism, a new sensibility that opposes the old of ‘nationalism’. Although his critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ is trenchant, it is unclear how his projections for transnationalised states would avoid the entrenched power disparities which perpetuate ‘fake cosmopolitanism’.

  23. We may be generous to Levinas and view this problem of the passage as itself an imperative to ensure that the work of ‘rational management’ of responses to suffering be constantly checked by the pre-original ethical relationship of responsibility for the Other, or we may indeed wonder, in a somewhat more suspicious manner, if the Levinasian project was from its outset one that justifies a political negotiation of the ‘Third’, always susceptible therefore to discrimination by the judging ‘Self’.

  24. For a related discussion on ‘sustainable development’ and ‘security’, from the point of view of earlier traditions of intervention through ‘native administrations’, see Duffield (2005).

  25. Thomas Pogge, for example, begins an article on the ‘prioties of global justice’ as follows:

    As I look back on the post-Cold war period, the greatest surprise for me is that affluent states have done so very little toward eradicating global poverty. This is surprising because the conditions for a major effort seemed exceptionally favourable. … Maintaining healthy economic and technological growth throughout the period, the developed states thus had the power and the funds to make a major effort toward poverty eradication. However, no such effort took place. (Pogge 2001, pp. 6–7)

    Many, unlike Pogge, might find this rather unsurprising, thereby itself pointing to the need to think differently, perhaps.

  26. Also relevant is the analysis of Fischer-Lescano and Teubner (2004) on the emerging global realities of law and politics brought about by global law regimes of self-interested, horizontally-relating, transterritorial social-sectoral polities.

  27. Or as Douzinas (2007a) puts it: ‘institutionalised cosmopolitanism risks becoming the normative gloss of globalised capitalism at its imperial stage’ (p. 176).

  28. For a related elaboration of the coloniality of knowledge, see Mignolo (2002); also, Mignolo and Tlostanova (2006).

  29. Quoted in Mignolo (2002, p. 59).

  30. Quoted in Eaglestone (2010, p. 58). An example of how Totality constructs historical memory in its own image may be seen in Levinas’s assertion that ‘it is Europe which, alongside its numerous atrocities, invented the idea of ‘de-Europeanization’. This represents a victory of European generosity’! (ibid, p. 59). We might contrast this self-congratulatory appropriation of ‘generosity’ with a very different account provided by Gandhi (2007). Gandhi employs the ‘virtues’ of generosity and sacrifice, on the part of the ‘exemplary European’ and the ‘revolutionary non-European’ respectively, as the basis upon which a postcolonial theory may be founded and understood—the agreed position between the two being that it is necessary to overcome the ‘disease’ that is the colonial West. The coming together of these virtues then, as an ethics of ‘implacable dependence and intimate enmity’, signifies the ‘after colonialism’ (p. 108). It is striking how radically different this perspective on the relationality between the Self (of European thought) and its Other is from the Levinasian version in which generosity and sacrifice lack any historicity of conflict and oppositionality, but which instead lays claim to historical memory and imaginations of futures as entirely being within its own narrative.

  31. This has been the work of many of us who are critical of the ways of the world and celebratory of resistance; for a critique of intellectual appropriations of struggles, in this instance of the on-going Zapatista rebellions in Chiapas, Mexico, see Berger 2001.

  32. Bauman (2001), for example, fully cognizant of the colonial pasts of Other-ing, maintains a perspective on politics which ascribes to ‘the war of recognition’ the emancipatory path towards the distribution of an accounted place for all. The imperialism of recognition however—a taking into account that originates from the norm-alities of Totality as it is sought to be extended to the deprivations of exteriority—is not much considered by Bauman as this appeal that is made.

  33. It is interesting that the Other of Levinasian ethics and beyond never speaks the words ‘get out of my way!’ as an assertion of a different ‘march’ of history. This is the utterance of Exteriority, discussed below.

  34. This judgement indeed is a precarious one for certain suffering Others; Levinas, in a less ethical and more political moment reminds us (in connection with his non-condemnation of the massacre in Sabra and Shatilla by Israeli forces), ‘in alterity we can find an enemy’ (Hand 1989, p. 294). In this connection, we might understand Slavoj Zizek’s admonishment of Levinas’s prioritisations of the Other (although there is little to suggest that the fate of massacred Palestinians so informed his critique), insisting that it is the faceless Third that should define the task of justice—the Third as the one that the intimacy of the Self-Other banishes to injustice; see Zizek (2004a). The problem with Zizek’s reformulation of Levinas, however, is that the underlying location of the Self who thinks and judges is itself retained as unproblematic.

  35. This is in contrast with Norries elaboration of ‘ontological depth’ (Norrie 2005, especially pp. 163–168) which, whilst it is based on a recognition that being is historically contingent, is less able to interrogate the more fundamental contingency that the knowability of being-ness itself is born from a historical construction (and violence). Put differently, I am not simply I, contingent on the historical forces that impinge on me (totality-exteriority), but I (as an I that says I, asking the question who am I) am already a historically constituted knowledge-entity. It is this historicity that concerns an interrogation of ontology through the lens of Totality-Exteriority.

  36. We see this originary point with respect to Eurocentric thinking in both the philosophies of the status quo/domination and of critique. From Aristotle onwards, to Hobbes and Locke and their ‘social contracts’ and states of nature that have come to define conventional thinking about the landscape of the ‘political-legal’, to critical philosophers of Modernity such as Hannah Arendt who worried about the deprivations of the ‘expelled’, ‘natural’ human, and Giorgio Agamben’s equation of the ‘Banned’ homo sacer with ‘bare life’ as the other of sovereignty, they all begin by drawing a distinction between the political (being) and the non/pre-political (non-being), between zoe and bios, equating the condition of exteriority (either as non-qualification or as exclusion) as a condition of nothingness, requiring either separation, or integration.

  37. It is worth noting that within critical ‘Western’ philosophy, there is considerable grappling with the question of how to liberate the idea of the political from its apparent closure, increasingly witnessed, with the entrenchment of the consensus of capitalist, representative democracy. Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere are interesting examples. For both Badiou and Ranciere, the sensible, the present, the accounted for of contemporary politics is precisely that which is the negation of ‘politics’ as they view it; it is not the ‘art of living together’ (as Badiou puts it, referring to Hannah Arendt’s call for the politics of the right to rights) that is the relevant matter for philosophy. Instead, the philosophical question arises from an anticipation of the eruption of the super-numery—the ones who are not counted within the present, within the ‘consensus’ of the counted. From this eruption—the Badiouian Event, Rancierian dissensus—thus is born the ‘subject’. Whilst I agree with much of their analysis of the banality of the ‘present’ as it were, and with their affirmation of what might be regarded as ruptural politics, two limitations inhere in their attempt to reclaim the political. First, they are mistaken in regarding the ‘supernumery’, the excluded-from-totality, as being ‘unaccounted for’. My argument is that this exclusion is entirely within the frame of Totality. They, the uncounted, remain named by Totality, as the illegal (in the context of Badiou’s and Ranciere’s primary concern—the illegal immigrant). Exclusion, exteriority from totality as I put it, is not absence from Totality. Quite the opposite. The second limitation of their account of ruptural politics is the assumption, apparent in their accounts, that this rupture arises from an ontological nothingness, from Non-Being, unknown and unknowable. The philosophies of dissensus (Ranciere) and Event (Badiou) indeed point to a ruptural politics against totality. However, not quite in opposition to Totality as I understand it.

  38. See also, Esteva and Prakash (1998), and Esteva (2004).

  39. ‘Illegality’ represents the radical praxis of hope that defines, as perpetual instantiation, the border between Totality-Exteriority. And it is everywhere surrounding us as expressions of hope from the Exteriorities. For us philosophers of hope, as we celebrate past and present evental breaks and their protagonists, we confront Illegality—the abyssal ‘border’ name for ‘social movements’, revolution, protests etc. We also exalt Illegals—from Gandhi to Mandela, the Suffragettes’ to the Zapatistas, and recently, the uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’– significant as Illegals, outlaws, the Banned, ‘terrorists’ even, of their times and locations; for a discussion on the significance of ‘Illegality’ as praxes of the ‘Banned’, see Nayar (2011).

  40. The ‘debate’ about the future of ‘International Law’ given the ‘new’ imperatives of ‘global security’ is an interesting illustration; see Nayar (2008), Baxi (2005), Benedicto (2005).

  41. Aronson’s conclusion is reached subsequent to a consideration of the fate and consequences of thinking hope in the Western philosophical tradition. Aronson is right, however, in that he recognises the imperative of ‘abandoning not only the specific hopes made obsolete during the century but also its kind of hope’ (p. 490).

  42. By way of example of such disappointment is Zizek’s anxieties of the ‘ambiguous’ nature of the rebellion of the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico:

    ‘we encounter here the same ambiguity: are these autonomous spaces [reclaimed by the Zapatista communities] germs of the organization-to-come of the entire society, or just phenomena emerging in the crevices and gaps in the social order? Marcos’s formulation that the Zapatistas are not interested in the Revolution but, rather, in a revolution that makes revolution possible is deeply true, but nonetheless profoundly ambiguous. Does this mean that the Zapatistas are a “Cultural Revolution” laying the foundation for the actual political revolution… or does it mean that they should remain merely a site of resistance, a corrective to the existing power (not only without the aim to replace it but without the aim to organize conditions in which this power will disappear)?’ (Zizek 2008; p. 310, emphasis mine)

    That, perhaps, the very essence of the Zapatistas’s philosophy of hope which defines their politics is the rejection of these tired (lost) causes of Western/colonial promises of hope is entirely lost to Zizek’s frame of vision and understanding. Nandy’s insight is wholly apt here:

    ‘These self-expressions [of spontaneous defiance and rebellions of the oppressed] are not usually cast in the language of liberation; even less frequently can they be accommodated in a proper theory of liberation… we, standing outside, can try and translate these self-expressions into our language and construct for ourselves a theory of liberation out of the primitive, populist theories of oppression and spontaneous acts of subversion, but these are our needs, not theirs.’ (Nandy 2007, p. 228 emphasis in original).

  43. See in this connection, Dussel’s (2005) emphasis on ‘solidarity’, as being with the Other, in contrast to the modernist understanding of ‘fraternity’.

References

  • Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  • Alston, Philip, and Gerard Quinn. 1987. The nature and scope of state parties’ obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Human Rights Quarterly 9(2): 156–229.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Anghie, Antony. 2006. The evolution of international law: Colonial and postcolonial realities. Third World Quarterly 27(5): 739–753.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Aronson, Ronald. 1999. Hope after hope. Social Research 66(2): 471–494.

    Google Scholar 

  • Atterton, Peter, and Matthew Calarco. 2010a. Editors’ introduction: The third wave of Levinas scholarship. In Radicalizing Levinas, ed. Peter Atterton, and Matthew Calarco. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Atterton, Peter, and Matthew Calarco. 2010b. Radicalizing Levinas. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Zygmunt. 2001. The great war of recognition. Theory, Culture and Society 18(2–3): 137–150.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Utopia with no topos. History of the Human Sciences 16(1): 11–25.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baxi, Upendra. 1998. Voices of suffering and the future of human rights. Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems Fall; 125.

  • Baxi, Upendra. 2005. The ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war of terror’: Nomadic multitudes, aggressive incumbents, and the ‘new’ international law. Osgoode Hall Law Journal 43(1 & 2): 7–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baxi, Upendra. 2009. Judging Emmanuel Levinas? Some reflections on reading Levinas, law, politics. The Modern Law Review 72(1): 116–129.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beach, Dennis. 2004. History and the other: Dussel’s challenge to Levinas. Philosophy & Social Criticism. 30(3): 315–330.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Beck, Ulrich. 2005. Power in the global age: A new global political economy. Trans. Kathleen Cross. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Benedicto, Bobby. 2005. Reimagining the intervention narrative: Complicity, globalization, and humanitarian discourse. Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture 9(1): 105–118.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berger, Mark T. 2001. Romancing the Zapatistas: International intellectuals and the Chiapas Rebellion. Latin American Perspectives 28(2): 149–170.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bernasconi, Robert. 1995. “Only the persecuted…”: Language of the oppressor, language of the oppressed. In Ethics as first philosophy: The significance of Emmanuel Levinas for philosophy, literature and religion, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Biko, Steve. 1979. (A. Stubbs C.R (ed)), I write what I like: A selection of his writings, London: Heinemann.

  • Caney, Simon. 2005. Justice beyond borders: A global political theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial thought and historical difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chatterjee, Deen K. 2004. The ethics of assistance: Morality and the distant needy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Couton, Philippe and Lopez, Jose Julian. 2009. Movement as Utopia. History of the Human Sciences 22(4): 93–121.

  • Craven, Matthew. 2007. The violence of dispossesion: Extra-territoriality and economic, social and cultural rights. In Economic, social and cultural rights in action, ed. Mashood A. Baderin, and Robert McCorquodale. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2007a. Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges. Review, XXX(1), at http://www.ces.uc.pt/bss/documentos/AbyssalThinking.pdf.

  • de Sousa Santos, Boaventura (ed.). 2007b. Another knowledge is possible: Beyond northern epistomologies, London: Verso.

  • Douzinas, Costas. 2007a. Human rights and empire: The political philosophy of cosmopolitanism. Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish.

    Google Scholar 

  • Douzinas, Costas. 2007b. The many faces of humanitarianism. PARRHESIA 2: 1–28.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dower, Nigel, and John Williams. 2002. Global citizenship: A critical introduction. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Duffield, Mark. 2005. Getting savages to fight barbarians: development, security and the colonial present. Conflict, Security and Development 5(2): 141–159.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Dussel, Enrique. 2003. Philosophy of liberation. Trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky. Eugene: Wipf and Stock Pub.

  • Dussel, Enrique. 2005. From fraternity to solidarity. Trans. M. Barber and J.S. Wright (Towards a Politics of Liberation), at http://www.enriquedussel.org/txt/From%20Fraternity%20to%20Solidarity.pdf.

  • Eaglestone, Robert. 2010. Postcolonial thought and Levinas’s double vision. In Radicalizing Levinas, ed. Peter Atterton, and Matthew Calarco. Albany: State University of New York Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Esteva, Gustavo. 2004. Back from the future. Paper presented at the Schooling and education: A Symposium with friends of Ivan Illich. Milwaukee. 9 October 2004.

  • Fanon, Frantz. 2001. The wretched of the earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin Books.

  • Fischer-Lescano, Andreas, and Gunther Teubner. 2004. Regime collisions: The vain search for legal unity in the fragmentation of global law. Michigan Journal of International Law 25: 999–1046.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freire, Paolo. 1974. Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gandhi, Leela. 2007. Postcolonial theory and the crisis of the European man. Postcolonial Studies 10(1): 93–110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grosfoguel, Ramon. 2008. Transmodernity, border thing, and global coloniality: Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial studies. Eurozine, at http://www.eurozine.com/pdf/2008-07-04-grosfoguel-en.pdf.

  • Hand, Sean. 1989. The Levinas reader. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huseby, Robert. 2008. Duties and responsibilities towards the poor. Res Publica 14(1): 1–18.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools of conviviality. New York: Harper and Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Illich, Ivan. 1981. Shadow work. London: Marion Boyars.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jameson, Fredric. 2004. The politics of utopia. New Left Review 25: 35–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levinas, Immanuel. 1998. Entre nous: Thinking of the other, 91–101. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Linklater, Andrew. 2007. Distant suffering and cosmopolitan obligations. International Politics 44: 19–36.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2004. The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge. City 8(1): 29–56.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mielville, China. 2005. Between equal rights: A Marxist theory of international law. Leiden: Brill Pub.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter D. 2000. Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter D. 2002. The geopolitics of knowledge and the colonial difference. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101(1): 56–96.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter D. 2003. Globalization and the geopolitics of knowledge: The role of the humanities in the corporate university. Nepantla: Views from South 4(1): 97–119.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter D. 2009. Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society 26(7–8): 159–181.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mignolo, Walter D., and Madina V. Tlostanova. 2006. Theorizing from the borders: Shifting to geo- and body-politics of knowledge. Eurpoean Journal of Social Theory 9(2): 205–221.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Minkkinen, Panu. 2008. The expressionless: Law, ethics and the imagery of suffering. Law and Critique 19(1): 65–85.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Misoczky, Maria Ceci. 2007. The Crisis of Power and the Futures of Hope, RAC (Revista de Administração Contemporânea) 11(3): 249-267.

  • Nandy, Ashis. 2007. Shamans, savages and the wilderness: On the audibility of dissent and the future of civilizations. In Asking we walk: the South as new political imaginary, ed. Corinne Kumar, 220–236. Bangalore: Streelekha pub.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nayar, Jayan. 2008. Between hope and despair: The Iraq war and international law futures? In The Iraq war and international law, ed. Phil Shiner, and Andrew T. Williams, 329–348. Oxford: Hart.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nayar, Jayan. 2011. Thinking from the ban. In Asking, we walk: The South as new political imaginary, ed. Corinne Kumar. Bangalore: Streelekha Pub.

  • Norrie, Alan. 2005. Law and the beautiful soul. London: Glasshouse Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Norrie, Alan. 2010. Dialectic and difference: Dialectical critical realism and the grounds for justice. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peperzak, Adriaan T. 1995. Ethics as first philosophy: The significance of Emmanuel Levinas for philosophy, literature and religion. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pogge, Thomas, and Darrel Moellendorf. 2008. Global justice: Seminal essays. St.Paul: Paragon House.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pogge, Thomas. 2001. Priorities of global justice. Metaphilosophy 32(1/2): 6–24.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pogge, Thomas (2008) World poverty and human rights: Cosmopolitan responsibilities and reforms. 2nd Aufl. Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Robinson, Andrew, and Simon Tormey. 2009. Resisting ‘Global Justice’: disrupting the colonial ‘emancipatory’ logic of the West. Third World Quarterly 30(8): 1395–1409.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sainath, Palagummi. 1996. Everybody loves a good drought: Stories from India’s poorest villages. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.

    Google Scholar 

  • Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2006. The rise of the Global Left: The world social forum and beyond. London: Zed Books.

  • Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: Hidden transcipts. London: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmons, William P. 1999. The third: Levinas’ theoretical move from an-archical ethics to the realm of justice and politics. Philosophy & Social Criticism 25(6): 88–104.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simon, Jules. 2009. Making ethical sense of useless suffering with Levinas. In The double binds of ethics after the Holocaust: Salvaging the fragments, ed. Jennifer Geddes, John Roth, and Jules Simon, 133–154. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Linda T. 1999. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the subaltern speak? In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. Cary Nelson, and Lawrence Grossberg. London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tahmesabi, V. 2010. Does Levinas justify or transcend liberalism? Levinas on human liberation. Philosophy and Social Criticism 36(5): 23–544.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wheeler, Nicholas J. 2000. Saving strangers: Humanitarian intervention in international society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, Andrew T. 2007. Human rights and law: Sufferance and insufferability. Law Quarterly Review 122: 132–157.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wolcher, Louis E. 2003. Ethics, justice, and suffering in the thought of Levinas: The problem of the passage. Law and Critique 14(1): 93–116.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation: An argument. The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–337.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, Iris M. 2006. Responsibility and global justice: A social connection model. Social Philosophy and Policy 23(1): 102–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Young, Robert J.C. 2004. White mythologies: Writing history and the West, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zizek, Slavoj. 2004a. A plea for ethical violence. The Bible and Critical Theory 1(1): 1–15.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zizek, Slavoj. 2008. In defence of lost causes. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Alan Norrie, Flavia Gasperetti, Upendra Baxi, Sam Adelman, Raza Saeed, Abdul Paliwala and Dwijen Rangnekar for their generosity in conversation on the themes considered here, and for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. A further note of thanks to Raza Saeed for his help in preparing the essay for publication.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jayan Nayar.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Nayar, J. The Politics of Hope and the Other-in-the-World: Thinking Exteriority. Law Critique 24, 63–85 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9115-8

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-012-9115-8

Keywords

Navigation