Abstract
This chapter outlines the concept and contemporary importance of political anthropology, attempting to understand and address the backlash against inclusive liberal values on this basis. “Political anthropology” refers to an understanding of political activities and notions belonging to the political sphere—such as “justice,” “rights,” etc.—on the basis of philosophical anthropology, classically conceived in terms of conceptions of human nature. Although classic and modern thought has traditionally grounded its analyses of the political with reference to human nature, the mainstream of contemporary thought has—for good reasons—largely abandoned this approach. Abandoning this strategy has itself often been understood as a precondition for justice, a line of thought associated with liberalism.
This chapter is based on the conceptual framework developed and materials included in R. Clancy, Towards a Political Anthropology in the Work of Gilles Deleuze: Psychoanalysis and Anglo-American Literature, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2015 and “Civil religion as an antidote to political conservatism and religious fundamentalism? Navigating the course between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism,” Europeana, forthcoming.
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Notes
- 1.
Although this perspective is evident throughout, see especially Book 1, Chapter 7.
- 2.
Again, although this perspective is evident throughout, see especially, Book 1, Part Two. For a discussion of these points and their contemporary significance, see Hadley Arkes First things: An inquiry into the first principles of morals and justice, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986. 12.
- 3.
This perspective is also, of course, evident in the thought of Rousseau—especially the Social Contract—although in a much different form from thinkers in the liberal tradition. For a discussion of these themes in Rousseau’s thought, see R. Clancy “Civil religion as an antidote to political conservatism and religious fundamentalism? Navigating the course between inclusive universalism and exclusive particularism,” Europeana, forthcoming.
- 4.
Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010. 34.
- 5.
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 76.
- 6.
Michael J. Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. 4.
- 7.
On this, see Isaiah Berlin’s classic formulation and defense of negative rights and freedom in “Two Concepts of Freedom.” Four Essays on Liberty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. 118-172.
- 8.
“The Priority of Right and Ideas of the Good.” Collected Papers. Ed. Samuel Freeman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. 450.
- 9.
“Liberalism and Public Morality.” Liberals on Liberalism. Ed. Alfonso J. Damico. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986. 143.
- 10.
Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 159.
- 11.
A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. 13.
- 12.
Additionally, see his subsequent discussions of education, which further bring out Rawls’ paternalism (Theory of Justice, 469-70).
- 13.
Again, the neutrality at the heart of a liberal conception of justice thus implies a conception of human nature as rational, disinterested, and risk avert, where the integration of individuals into community is based on mutual aims and shared interests, where people naturally tend toward agreement through discussion. Although dialogue and communication are less pronounced in Rawls’ earlier work, they seem to figure more prominently by the time of Political Liberalism. Of course, dialogue and communication lie at the heart of Habermas’ political and ethical work, much of which is indicative of and has contributed to recent liberal thought. See especially Habermas 1984 and Habermas 1998.
- 14.
“What’s Wrong with Negative Liberty?” Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
- 15.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), for example, is often explained in terms of its attempts at establishing an older, more traditional form of Islam, insofar as it attempts to strictly enforce Sharia law. G. Wood, “What ISIS really wants” The Atlantic, March 2015 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
- 16.
For an understanding of religious fundamentalism along these lines, see K. Armstrong, The battle for god, New York, Ballantine books, 2001.
- 17.
See S. Amin and S. Hossain, “Women’s reproductive rights and the politics of fundamentalism: A view from Bangladesh”, in The American University law review 44 Spring 1995 and R. Feldman and K. Clark, “Women, religious fundamentalism and reproductive rights”, in Reproductive health matters, Volume 4, Issue 8 November 1996.
- 18.
In the case of Rorty, this program could be characterized as one where people engage politically, recognizing these engagements as ultimately groundless. In the case of Derrida, such a program could be characterized as “let’s wait and see,” recognizing that one’s political commitments are tentative and always in need of further revision. See, for example, Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989 and Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994, respectively.
- 19.
For a discussion of these issues in a philosophical context, see Rudi Visker’s “In Praise of Visibility.” Levinas Studies vol. 3, 2008. 171-191. Much of the work of Visker and Paul Moyaert explores precisely these issues in the context of Levinas’ philosophy and Lacanian theory.
- 20.
“State multiculturalism has failed, says David Cameron.” BBC News: UK Politics. 5 February 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994
- 21.
See Badiou’s relatively accessible—albeit incomplete—account in Ethics. Trans. Peter Hallward. New York: Verso, 2002. 40-44. In that work, Badiou explains his own “hostility to contemporary consensus on questions of democratic-liberal procedures, human rights, and our much-vaunted respect for cultural difference” (107). Describing the “political act,” Žižek says, “the unity and law of a civil society is imposed onto the people by an act of violence whose agent is not motivated by any moral considerations” (Žižek 2010, 32). This perspective fuels his endorsement of Leninism: “With Lenin…the point is that revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: one should take responsibility for the revolutionary act” (Žižek 2010, 33).
- 22.
See, for example, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books, 2008 and Daniel Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1995.
- 23.
Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. New York: Harper Perennial 2007. 169 ff. See my comments on this in “Review of A.C. Grayling’s Ideas that Matter: The Concepts that Shape the 21 st Century.” Metapsychology Online Reviews vol. 15 issue 13 March 29, 2011. http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=6008&cn=394.
- 24.
See Žižek’s discussions of multiculturalism in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 2002, as well as the New Americanists on their critique of liberal humanism and its complicity with a conservative ontology.
- 25.
“Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being – a relationship which is itself one of Being.” Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 32.
- 26.
This is already apparent in Being and Time when he writes, “Dasein has grown up both in and into a traditional way of interpreting itself…Its own past – and this always means the past of its ‘generation’ – is not something which follows along after Dasein, but something which already goes ahead of it” (41). This perspective becomes much more explicit in his later works such as “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology.” Included in Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.
- 27.
See, for example, E. Beardsley, “After Paris Attacks, Voltaire’s ‘Tolerance’ Is Back In Vogue”, www.npr.com, February 15, 2015 http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/02/15/385422239/after-paris-attacks-voltaires-tolerance-is-back-in-vogue
- 28.
Again, for a much fuller discussion of this point, see Clancy 2015.
- 29.
For empirical, social scientific findings regarding these dynamics in social identity theory, see N. Ellemers, R. Spears & B. Doosje “Self and social identity”, Annual review of psychology, 53, 2002, 161-186 and R.J. Fisher The social psychology of intergroup and international conflict resolution, New York, Springer-Verlag, 1990. With regard to the way this dynamic plays out in Chinese studying and working abroad, see H.C. Hail, “Patriotism abroad: Overseas Chinese students’ encounters with criticisms of China”, Journal of studies in international education, January 12, 2015, 1–16, and Tajfel 1978.
- 30.
- 31.
Given its specific conceptual history, the term “essence” here is probably inappropriate, although Sartre never himself ceases to use it. Hence, his dictum that “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept.” Existentialism and Human Emotions. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel, 2000. 35.
- 32.
Describing the role of nothingness, the way nothingness acts as a condition of human existence, see Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1978. 138.
- 33.
See Deleuze 1991.
- 34.
For a similar understanding of human life with regard to the distinction between work (werk) and labor (arbeiten), see Arendt 1998.
- 35.
“We do not here acknowledge any difference between mankind and other individual natural entities.” A Theologico-Political Treatise in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise. Trans. R.H.M. Elwes. New York: Dover, 2004. 201. “[M]an…is part of nature, and…ought to be referred to the power of nature” (Political Treatise, 292). On this point, Deleuze writes that man “thus loses in Spinozism all the privileges owed to a quality supposed proper to him, which belonged to him only from the viewpoint of imitative participation” in God (Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 183). In the case of Deleuze, the political consequences of these commitments only become clear from a certain perspective, only after Difference and Repetition and the Logic of Sense and at the beginning of his collaborations with Guattari, in terms of his critique of psychoanalysis and praise for Anglo-American literature. Again, for extended commentaries on these points, see Clancy 2015.
- 36.
Deleuze writes that the “difficult part is making all the elements of non-homogeneous sets converge, making them function together” (Dialogues, 39).
- 37.
Rancière writes that the “foundation of politics is not in fact more a matter of convention than of nature: it is the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order. Politics exists simply because no social order is based on nature, no divine law regulates human society” (Rancière 16). “This means that politics doesn’t always happen – it actually happens very little or rarely” (Rancière 17).
- 38.
- 39.
- 40.
See especially Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity. Generally translated into English as either non- or effortless action, Slingerland examines descriptions of wu wei in Confucian, Daoist, and Zen texts—similarities in and differences between uses and understandings of this term in these traditions.
- 41.
- 42.
This thesis was first put forward in Clark and Chalmers 1998. See Nöe 2009, 81-82 for a discussion of its relation to theories of embodiment and consciousness. See Aydin 2013 for an excellent discussion of the relation between the extended mind thesis and technology, as well as Hansell and Grassie 2011 regarding the relation between technology and human nature from a variety of perspectives.
- 43.
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Clancy, R.F. (2016). Making the Case for Political Anthropology: Understanding and Addressing the Backlash Against Liberalism. In: Winkler, R. (eds) Identity and Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40427-1_6
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