Critical Theory Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This essay argues that modern demagogy can be understood as a symptom of a kind of social pathology, combining Wendy Brown's account of neoliberal subjectivity with elements of Robert Pippin's interpretation of Hegel to do so. I begin by focussing on Brown's contention that neoliberal society has bred forms of individual subjectivity that are inherently attuned to right-wing rhetoric. Drawing on Pippin's reading of Hegel, the essay casts these modes of individual subjectivity as aspects of a flawed mode of collective subjectivity; the contemporary rise of demagogic politics is thereby presented as a symptom of a pathological failure of collective self-determinacy, caused by inadequacies within the normative structures that articulate social activity.

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- Critical Theory, Hegel, Robert Pippin, Araucaria

Indagare sugli esordi della prospettiva è possibile soltanto se si tenta di comprendere il modus operandi e la forma mentis di Brunelleschi. Ricostruendo la cornice concettuale possiamo attendibilmente azzardare quali siano state le strategie cognitive e quali le modalità operative che portarono, nella prima metà del Quattrocento a Firenze, a mettere in atto un sistema di rappresentazione spaziale che tutt’ora chiamiamo prospettiva rinascimentale. Cercheremo pertanto di dimostrare che Brunelleschi fu protagonista in un ambiente ove artisti, letterati e mercanti ritenevano i concetti di accertamento e dimostrazione, strettamente correlati all’esperienza concreta: un elogio del sapere pragmatico che anticipa, sotto l’aspetto della verificazione sperimentale, la scienza moderna. Fu proprio in seno a questo sapere pragmatico che prese corpo il concetto di verifica e dimostrazione e, nello specifico, il processo si realizzò nelle botteghe e nei cantieri degli architetti e degli artisti rinascimentali, le cui opere furono valorizzate dagli umanisti fiorentini ai fini di una glorificazione della storia cittadina. Non a caso Ernst Gombrich pose in evidenza che l’idea di progresso nacque nel quadro delle conoscenze applicative: è a partire da Brunelleschi e da Ghiberti che l’artista iniziò a lavorare come uno scienziato poiché le sue opere servivano anche a illustrare «in modo insolito e ingegnoso come il maestro risolve un problema artistico».

The article used curricular documents affiliated with 3 different subgenres of Catholic schooling. The author suggests a critical reading of these curricular materials for the purpose of better understanding the kinds of educational messages sent to students through a) the hagiography of saints affiliated with the schools as well as in the b) documents produced by religious orders for lay and avowed teachers meant to propagate a unique schooled experience. In the process, the author draws upon curriculum theory as a way to critique the largely unquestioned kinds of theology-as-pedagogy that become intrinsically influential for teachers and students.

- by Kevin Burke
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- Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Religion, Education

This introduction contextualizes and evaluates Herbert Marcuse’s the accompanying, previously untranslated review of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Marcuse’s critique of pragmatism is indebted to Max Horkheimer’s claim that pragmatism is an example of “traditional” theory and reduces thought to mere instrument in service of external ends. Unlike Horkheimer, Marcuse concedes that Dewey, unlike the logical positivists, attempted to develop a material logic of ends. However, he concludes that the attempt was ultimately unsuccessful. I place this conclusion in the context of Marcuse’s critique of technological reason. Lastly, I defend Dewey from the charge of crude instrumentalism and delineate Marcuse’s and Dewey’s critical disagreement on science’s capacity for self-reflection.

- by Phillip Deen
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- Critical Theory, Pragmatism, Herbert Marcuse, John Dewey

Book Review by: Pashew M. Nuri How unrelated or silly is but I got to tell that reading this book made me think this way: the depiction goes side by side with Orwell's Animal Farm where all the animals resisting the human superiority and control for them to be free and fearless of running their own lives themselves. It is disrespect to do this comparison animals versus humans though, but that the picture I was seeing in the journey of reading the stories in the book or in any other similar stories. Where the humans (in that case the students and teachers) are in combat of an unjust and unequal social or environmental issue that is affecting our very depth of life, that has become a block on my way and an hinderer of my progress.

- by Pashew Nuri
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- Critical Theory, Teacher Education, Critical Pedagogy, Reading

How can we develop a political critique of urban form at the time of a tall building boom? Pointing to limitations of interpreting towers as representations of finance and power, I introduce an understanding of skylines as phantasmagoria of capitalist culture: a dazzling image that abstracts from the commodified urban landscape by promoting its further commodification. I show that both professionals who argue for and those who argue against the construction of tall office buildings in London approach the city’s ‘new skyline’ as an easily marketable visual reproduction that is defined as a compositional whole: a bounded composition with St Paul’s Cathedral at its centre. I claim that this approach and the widespread idea that commercial skyscrapers ‘destroy’ the historic cityscape assume an element of integrity that is ideological and which itself must be ‘ruined’. My argument for a shift of the ways in which cityscapes are viewed draws on Walter Benjamin’s critical montages and allegories. I explore his reading of ruins as emblems of the fragility and destructiveness of capitalist culture and his understanding of ruination as a form of critique. My argument for ruining the cityscape’s ‘beautiful appearance’ focuses on compositional wholeness and symbolic coherence. In so doing, I provide an interpretation of skylines that sheds light to the ways in which financial capitalism is justified by a specific way of viewing the city and the ways in which it is embedded in texts that are deemed to be socially meaningful.

- by Günter Gassner
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- Critical Theory, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Walter Benjamin

Seit den Erfahrungen der Gewaltexplosionen im 20. Jahrhundert erleben wir insbesondere nach den Anschlägen vom 11. September 2001 weltweit eine neue Dimension von Gewalt und Terror, wie sie Hannah Arendt in ihrer eindrücklichen und nachhaltigen Analyse der totalen Herrschaft bereits vor einem halben Jahrhundert antizipiert. Die globalisierte Zivilisation, so Arendts These, berge eine Destruktivität, die alle Zivilisation zu vernichten drohe, wenn nicht die zentralen Fragen der politischen Verantwortung ebenso wie die Folgen ihres Scheitern in die öffentliche Reflexion gerückt werden.
Einige der vielfältigen Aspekte des komplexen Zusammenhangs von Politik und Verantwortung, vor allem mit Bezug auf das Werk von Hannah Arendt, werden im vorliegenden Band behandelt.
Mit Beiträgen von Hannah Arendt, Margaret Canovan, Ronald Beiner, Jeffrey Newman, Richard J. Bernstein, Waltraud Meints, Nancy Fraser, Julia Kristeva und Albert Friedlander

Written by Joshua Lam (b. France, 1859(b. France, -d. 1941 Henri Bergson was a French philosopher of wide repute, whose ideas influenced writers and thinkers well beyond the purview of philosophy, including literature, visual art, psychology, theology, and the sciences. His writings and lectures were enormously popular during his lifetime, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927. His writings were especially important for modernist literature, and for the philosophy of pragmatism, particularly that of William James. Though his influence waned after his death, new generations of thinkers have reintroduced his ideas about agency, affect, embodiment, and temporality into new contexts, such as phenomenology, affect theory, film theory, new media, and cultural studies.

- by Joshua Lam
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- Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, Cultural Theory

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

- by Hunter Vaughan
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- Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Cultural History, Film Theory and Practice

In this book, I identify contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced. Philosophies that take vulnerability as a moral object contribute to rendering the political, as the site of a specific power and action, foreign to vulnerability. The notion of recognition offered by critical theory does not correct this deficit. Instead, I argue that vulnerability, as susceptibility to a harmful event, is above all a breach of normative expectations. I demonstrate that these expectations are not mental phenomena but are situated between subjects and must even be conceived as institutions. On this basis I argue that the link between the political and vulnerability cannot be reduced to the institutional implementation of moral principles. Rather I seek to rethink the political by taking vulnerability as the starting point and thereby understand the political as simultaneously referring to the advent of a world, the emergence of a relation, and the appearance of a political subject.

- by Estelle Ferrarese
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- Critical Theory, Political Philosophy, Political Theory, Precarity

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

- by Alyosha Goldstein
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- Critical Theory, History, American History, Cultural Studies

The discipline of disaster studies has been hesitant to critically interrogate dual discourses of vulnerability and ‘building resilience’ in a meaningful way as it continues to dominate research and practice. This is despite deep engagement within different disciplines to offer radical reconsiderations of these discourses. I use multi-year long autoethnographic immersion into the problematic of resilience. I integrate personal experience as a White, female scholar who studies disasters, with an almost decade-long project focused on the pre-and-post Katrina context of New Orleans bounce rap. I task what it means ‘to be resilient’ and who decides when groups have reached this state. I situate an empirical challenge to metanarratives of resilience and the colonialism they suggest, and also task resilience as constructed by elites and imposed on those decided as vulnerable. This work suggests a dramatic shift away from the building resilience discourse into meaningful engagement with the institutional neglect of the colonial present that fosters disaster in the first place.

- by Natalie D Baker
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- Critical Theory, Resilience, Autoethnography, Institutional racism

This essay introduces and theorizes the central concerns of this special issue, “Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism.” Financialization, debt, and the accelerated concentration of wealth today work through social relations already configured and disposed by imperial conquest and racial capitalism. In the Americas broadly and the United States specifically, colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. The conception of economies of dispossession introduced in this essay draws attention to the overriding importance of rationalities of abstraction and commensurability for racial capitalism. The essay problematizes the ways in which dispossession is conventionally treated as a self-evident and circumscribed practice of unjust taking and subtractive action. Instead, working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, this essay critically situates the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites predatory value in the historical present. Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, the essay gestures toward alternative frameworks for building collective capacities for what the authors describe as a grounded relationality.

- by Alyosha Goldstein and +1
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- Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Native American Studies

seminal notion of the nation as an "imagined community" (supplemented by the mass reproduction and circulation of printed literatures) has been almost indispensable for film scholars examining the intersections between film and the national imaginary. The connections between a collective imagination of the "nation" and a collective cinematic experience are almost too tempting to pass up. In fact, it could even be said that film scholars who took issue with the universalizing film apparatus theory of the 1970s popularized by Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz have profited from Anderson's work. According to Michael Walsh, the theoretical turn towards a film spectatorship grounded on local and/or national experiences has been more or less a response to the reductive tendencies of film apparatus theories (6). But this isn't to say that the theories of particularized film spectatorship have simply disavowed the psychoanalytic insights brought in by these earlier accounts. Rather, film apparatus theory has been appropriated and expanded to accommodate the specific historical and cultural contexts. However, even then, the newer critics carried on the sceptical tradition inherited from the earlier film theorists, preferring to read films as being complicit with their respective national imaginaries. Put differently, films are thus read as fantasmatic supplements to the ideologies of their respective national imaginaries. There is, however, little or no attempt to explicate the radical potential of films to challenge the orthodoxy of the national imaginaries which can be said to be the conditions of their productions.

- by Kenneth Tay
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- Critical Theory, Film Theory, Japanese Anime, Lacanian psychoanalysis

This artistic endeavor wanders from the observation that missionaries and philanthropists share a stream of ontological continuity that leads both to use vulnerabilities to draw victims into genocidal relationships that transmit Artificial-Domineering Worldview(s) (A.D. Worldview[s]) and an associated sickness of consciousness that causes people who contract the sickness to become de-spirited prey that loses its sovereignty. This wandering then explores contemporary religious and secular educational philosophies that symbolize the missionary and philanthropist archetypes/stories/characters. This wandering concludes that, while both the missionary and the philanthropist claim to be helping people towards virtue, the genocidal relationships missionaries and philanthropists form with beings who they relate to as prey (as it rather than who) cause the death of our goodly human nature and the potentials for social and environmental justice therein.

- by Luke Barnesmoore
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- Critical Theory, Christianity, Human Geography, Anthropology
- by Ryan Crawford
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- Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Theodor Adorno, Politics

A special issue for Issues in Teacher Education (ITE) that includes diverse ecocritical perspectives in teacher education.

- by John Lupinacci and +3
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- Critical Theory, Environmental Education, Teacher Education, Indigenous education

In contemporary classrooms, it is crucial for teachers to have a thorough understanding of sociological issues in education. Understanding Sociological Theory for Pedagogical Practices addresses sociological theory, highlighting its relevance to policy, curriculum and practice for the pre-service teacher education student. The book explores a range of sociological issues related to diversity, disadvantage, discrimination and marginalisation, contributing to the preparation of future teachers for work in a range of educational contexts. It seeks to dispel the traditional ‘one-size-fits-all’ notion of education, encouraging future teachers to think critically and reflexively in terms of creating a welcoming and equitable student environment through knowledge, inclusion and understanding. Understanding Sociological Theory for Pedagogical Practices is an invaluable resource for primary, secondary and early childhood pre-service teacher education students as they prepare to navigate the ...

- by Criss Jones Diaz
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- Critical Theory, Sociology of Education, Teacher Education, Poststructuralism

While " inclusion " has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship. Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations that was part of a shared policy shift toward " Termination " in the Anglo-settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the " civic inclusion narrative " in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization. Deloria's work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today's North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and sovereignty.

- by David Temin
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- Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Native American Studies, Political Philosophy

'@ is For Activism' examines the transformation of politics through digital media, including digital television, online social networking and mobile computing. Joss Hands maps out how political relationships have been reconfigured and new modes of cooperation, deliberation and representation have emerged. This analysis is applied to the organisation and practice of alternative politics, showing how they have developed and embraced the new political and technological environment. Hands offers a comprehensive critical survey of existing literature, as well as an original perspective on networks and political change. He includes many case studies including the anti-war and global justice movements, peer production, user created TV and 'Twitter' activism. "@ is For Activism" is essential for activists and students of politics and media. Note the version here is a pre-print proof which differs from the published version and should not be cited from.

- by Joss Hands
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- Critical Theory, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, Globalization
- by Nicholas Baer and +1
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- Critical Theory, Intellectual History, Aesthetics, Media Studies

This article explores the use of the methodology of portraiture and the analytic framework of critical race theory (CRT) to evaluate success and failure in urban classrooms. Portraiture and CRT share a number of features that make the two a viable pair for conducting research in urban schools. In combination, portraiture and CRT allow researchers to evoke the personal, the professional, and the political to illuminate issues of race, class, and gender in education research and to create possibilities for urban school reform as social action.

- by Thandeka Chapman
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- Critical Theory, Education, Research Methodology, Educational Research
- by Sjoerd van Tuinen and +1
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- Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, Posthumanism, Spirituality

Estudio crítico del barroco en España

- by ANTONIO OLEAGA
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- Critical Theory
- by Abu Salah Salah
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- Creative Writing, Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, History

Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault are widely accepted to be central figures of post-war French philosophy. Philosophers, cultural theorists, and others have devoted considerable effort to the critical examination of the work of each of these thinkers, but despite the strong biographical and philosophical connection between Foucault and Deleuze, very little has been done to explore the relationship between them. This special issue of Foucault Studies is the first collection of essays to address this critical deficit with a rigorous comparative discussion of the work of these two philosophers.

- by Nicolae Morar and +2
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- Critical Theory, Discourse Analysis, History, Cultural History
- by Nicholas D Hartlep
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- Critical Theory, Teacher Education, Critical Pedagogy, Urban Education

Considerations on the actuality of the notion of work in literary studies.

- by Fabio A Durao
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- Critical Theory, Textual Criticism, Literary Theory

This essay was published in The Bible and Early Trinitarian Theology, edited by Christopher A. Beeley and Mark E. Weedman, for the CUAP Studies in Early Christianity (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2018); this is the uncorrected proofs. Exploring the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the Son's relation to the Father, and the agency of the Holy Spirit, it is one of five essays suggesting Johannine contributions to trinitarian discussions in the early church.

- by Paul N Anderson
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- Critical Theory, Religion, Christianity, Comparative Religion

Este ensaio pretende reavaliar a crítica de Machado de Assis a O Primo Basílio, de Eça de Queirós. Nesta releitura, o ano de 1878 é considerado crucial na internacionalização do sistema literário lusófono. Assim, propõe-se a releitura da dura crítica de Machado ao romance de Eça a partir dessa premissa. A consequência principal da crítica machadiana teria sido o resgate, deliberadamente anacrônico, da técnica clássica da aemulatio, reinventada sob a forma de uma "poética da emulação".

This paper aims to concretize this notion of literary theories being in dialogue by exploring the intertwining of the Marxist theory, mainly depending on Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin’s theories, and Freudian psychoanalytic theory, based on Sigmund Freud’s writings, in Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible” with focus on Reverand Parris as a representative of the Bourgoise and John Proctor, Abigail Williams and the people of Salem as representatives of the Proletariats. “The Crucible” portrays the Marxist ideology of class division, yet more importantly, it traces religion, a concept long debated among the Marxists, as the trigger to the class struggle. The characters in the play have taken to 2 extreme measures for power attainment; Hysteria, triggered by the Id, and revolution, triggered by the Superego. This is what this paper aims to explore further with taking

- by Bassant Ayman Ahmed Abdil Alim
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- Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Drama

For more than a decade, criticisms levied against Muslims and Islam in Western European countries such as France and the Netherlands have been shielded under the auspices of a call for increased security and a desire to protect liberal secularism. An example of this can be found in the recent move by the Dutch cabinet to implement legislation to ban the burqa in public places such as schools, hospitals, government buildings, and public transportation. The proposed Dutch ban follows the French parliament who implemented similar legislation in 2011 restricting the presence of discernible religious symbols such as burqas and niqabs from the public sphere. In a statement to the press, Prime Minister Mark Rutte, explains the proposed ban " had nothing to do with religion, " but rather it is intended to help facilitate " recognizable communication " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). He clarifies " In a free country like the Netherlands, everyone has the right to dress how they choose, no matter what others think. That freedom is only limited in situations when it is essential for people to look at each other " (qtd. in " Netherlands Plans "). In this statement the restrictions placed on full face-veils are steeped in concerns of contemporary cultural conflict, inflamed by language that claims that Muslim immigrants to the Netherlands need to be better integrated. In France and the Netherlands, full face-veils have become symbols of " religious extremism " that are actively legislated against. As such they are tied to a series of judgments and evaluations that situate them as objectionable cultural objects and indicative of problematic immigrant groups. Defined as " extremist " or " politically dangerous " this vision of full face-veils is based on normative conceptions of the subject. When considered in relation to the secular, violence is done to those who are visibly different, marked by religious symbols that are understood through binaries such as objectionable/unobjectionable, Western/Eastern, Islamic/Christian, religious/secular further problematizing them. These schisms have intensified in the aftermath of 9/11 and the global war on terror creating a rift between secular and religious worldviews. There is no greater symbolic target of this schism between the secular and the religious than the burqa. The polarization of these two groups, secular and religious has gained further strength when they are posited in relation to the nation state. Within this context secularism is invoked as that which protects the state, defines it, and transforms practices related to public and private life via institutions. This paper explores the invocation of normative dispositions of secularism and security in light of the increasing restrictions placed against Muslim women in the public sphere in France and the Netherlands within dominant discourse. Drawing from the draw work of Saba Mahmood, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad I explore how bodies are marked as " different " within public spaces, through a discussion of the schism between the secular/religious. Such an examination is significant as these legislations are some of the most prohibitive in the West.

- by Lara Mazurski
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- Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, Literary Criticism, Judith Butler

Law here, law there, law everywhere. The first nine months of the Trump administration have thrust questions about the force of law, legal strategy and tactics, and the role of judges in the United States' much-vaunted system of constitutional checks and balances to the fore of public attention. Debates about legal statutes, precedents, and institutions have raged intensely and with near-

- by Umut Özsu
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- Critical Theory, Constitutional Law, Marxism, International Law

What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to this issue, "Marxism and Intersectionality" serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression.

- by Ashley Bohrer
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- Critical Theory, Feminist Theory, Marxism, Queer Theory

Jürgen Habermas und Talal Asad zählen zu den bedeutendsten Protagonisten des Diskurses um die postsäkulare Gesellschaft. In der vorliegenden Arbeit unternehme ich eine vergleichende Lektüre zentraler Schriften beider Autoren. Dabei versuche ich, möglichst präzise zu beschreiben, wie Habermas und Asad einen neuen Blickwinkel auf die Verhältnisbestimmung von Religion und Gesellschaft in der Gegenwart freigeben und plausibilisieren.
Einen zentralen Stellenwert schreibe ich der Tatsache zu, dass hierfür von beiden der Begriff der ‚Übersetzung‘ herangezogen wird. Ziel der Untersuchung ist es folglich, erste systematisierende Vorstöße bezüglich des Begriffspaars ‚Religion übersetzen‘ zu leisten. Dabei gilt es ein Bündel an Forschungsfragen zu beantworten: Wie wird der Begriff der Übersetzung verstanden? In welcher Art und Weise kommt Religion im Werk der Autoren zur Sprache? Auf welche Aspekte der Religion soll sich die Übersetzungsleistung beziehen? Wer sind die Subjekte dieser Übersetzung? Und schließlich, welche Chancen und Probleme bringen die beiden Ansätze für eine politiktheoretische Perspektive auf religiös-gesellschaftliche Fragestellungen mit sich?

- by Andreas Menne
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- Critical Theory, Religion, Sociology of Religion, Philosophy Of Religion
- by Pierpaolo Antonello
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- Critical Theory, René Girard

A fil rouge goes through Habermas's decade long research. It is the idea that Reason and rationality permeate human societies and may lead human action towards emancipation, if aptly elaborated through the filter of theoretical reflection. Theory must pick up on this rational core and turn the intrinsic rational potential inherent to modern societies into a self-consciously pursued 'project of enlightenment'. This introduction to the special issue 'Habermas, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Theory and Practice' shows how Habermas's work in different scientific domains contributes to the construction of the 'project of modernity' from the many angles that such a complex project requires. The public sphere is, in Habermas's theory, the societal domain in which communicative interactions have a chance to make Reason come to bear on human societies and lead them on the path to social and political emancipation. The contributions to this special issue focus therefore on the public sphere and illustrate the evolution of the concept in Habermas's work and its relation to democracy at national and supranational level.

- by Gabriele De Angelis
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- Critical Theory, Jurgen Habermas, Public Sphere, Democracy
- by Sandro Chignola
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- Critical Theory, Michel Foucault