Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature

Barbarian Memory will be of interest to a variety of early-period scholars. It urges us to recognize the paradoxical and conflicted narrative of history and religion that emerges when we cast into relief the matter of the barbarian as part of a cultural tapestry extending from the late antique to the early modern period. Birns uncovers a barbarian uncanny that re-shapes literary readings at the levels of both character and form. - Seeta Chaganti, Associate Professor of English, University of California, Davis, USA JV FF8807E4-9A84-42BD-9BE8-5771870C598F 693782 Electronic Book Text 595577 9781137348753 1137348755 Building Cosmopolitan Communities A Critical and Multidimensional Approach E.Book Building Cosmopolitanism 14/08/2013 08/14/2013 56A Politics - USA Academic A. Nascimento 41908 By (Author) Author Record 1 Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Washington [email protected] 56A Politics - USA Academic US Domestic Pal Scholarly E7 - Distributed to Vendors E3 - Basic Record Set Up JPA - Political science & theory; HP - Philosophy; HPS - Social & political philosophy; JFFS - Globalization POL010000; PHI019000; POL011000; POL033000 Politics - Political Philosophy, Theory and Thought Professional and Scholarly 48.33 90.00 Green EPUB EBook 256 0 sa 2015-06-08 17:31:06.873 Words All Formats Introduction 1. Plural Discourse Communities as Point of Departure PART I: A CRITICAL AND MULTIDIMENSIONAL APPROACH 2. The Transformations of the Critical Tradition 3. Discourse Philosophy as a Critical Framework PART II: COMMUNITIES, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND COSMOPOLITAN IDEALS 4. Individuality and Collectivity in Changing Concepts of Community 5. From Plurality to Global Human Rights Discourses 6. Cosmopolitan Ideals and the Norms of Universality 7. Cosmopolitan Communities under Construction Conclusion Building Cosmopolitan Communities contributes to current debates on cosmopolitanism by discussing the justification and application of norms and human rights in different communitarian settings. Reviewer: Eduardo Mendieta Based on what I received (a proposal, an introduction, and two chapters), I like to immediately recommend that this book be contracted and eventually published. There are many virtues to the project. First of all, the author is right that by now it is time to attempt to survey the variety of theories and discourses on human rights and cosmopolitanism. Evidently, there are some general overviews of 'cosmopolitanism' but some are already dated (Archibungi, Held, and the wonderful anthology Debating Cosmopolitics), or they are skewed towards one or another theoretical perspective. I was fortunate to hear the author at a professional meeting in which he offered a typology of discourse on cosmopolitanism that gave me the impression that the author is vastly and prodigiously informed and thus in a propitious place to offer this kind of survey and typology. Second, the author not only aims to offer this kind of survey and typology, but wants to demonstrate the distinct virtues of what he calls discourse theory (Apel and Habermas, and younger followers) in developing a normative theory of cosmopolitanism that takes the form of human rights. Third, and consequently, when the volume appears it will be a welcome contribution to that very distinct and comprehensive tradition that counts already three or four generations (depending if we add a younger cohort Amy Allen, Ingram, Forst, Mendieta, Pensky, et. al. ) that takes up where Benhabib, so to say, left off. Fourth, this is one of the very few books that offers a very thorough analysis and genealogy of the development of the 'discourse theory' paradigm by both Apel and Habermas. Generally, even Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, give the credit for discourse ethics and a discourse theory of democracy only to Habermas. Nascimento, in chapter 1 and 2, offers one of the best analysis of the philosophical entwinement between Apel and Habermas. Apel, Habermas senior, already in the fifties undertook a 'linguistic' transformation of transcendental philosophy, which laid down the foundations for Habermas' own linguistic turn after Knowledge and Human Interests. Discourse ethics, it has been argued, was originally formulated by Apel in the second volume of his monumental Transformation der Philosophie (1973, if not sooner, in the introduction to his Habilitation), which was made up of essay written over three decades. The first two chapters, alone, warrant the publication of this volume. Or rather, in those two chapters you can already apprehend the deep familiarity Nascimento has with the tradition. These chapters are extremely useful and they will be quoted repeatedly. Fourth, Nascimento brings the 'Discourse Theory' tradition into dialogue with some very recent and unfortunately neglected work the work of Dussel, for instance, is extremely important to understand some developments in Apel's own work during the 90s. In addition, the engagement with the work of figures like Mignolo, Appiah, Nussbaum, and Benhabib, makes this an important contribution to a truly global and post-Eurocentric type of cosmopolitanism. Fifth, the book is based on primary knowledge of the key texts (in German), which makes this also a distinct work that does not rely on translations, which sometimes are highly edited, delayed and not widely available. In this sense, this is a very scholarly work, without being scholastic, pedantic, or arcane and obtuse. Sixth, the book is not simply a historical reconstruction, or exegesis. It aims to develop an original normative proposal: namely that the linguistification of Kant's deontological ethics, by the discourse theory tradition, is and can be a philosophical approach that allows us to mediate between the claims of local and distinct historical ethical communities and the universal claims of human rights that are grounded on the norms already implicit in human communication, or what Habermas calls 'communicative action.' Another way of putting Nascimento's argument is that discourse theory provides us with the philosophical tools that can mediate between the ethical claims of historical communications and the justice claims of humanity at the global level, which are crystallized or given legal and political force in globally recognized human rights. Yet, another way of putting Nascimento's argument would be to say that discourse theory provides for a dialectical mediation between discourse of application and discourses of justification. When we invoke human rights we do so from the standpoint of very distinct ethical traditions facing very distinct challenges and prejudices (Eurocentrism, sexism, racism, etc.), but as soon as we have made appeals to human rights we have entered a realm of norms, a space of reasons, in which we are justifying how to challenge and overcome our own ethical shortcoming. The dialectic between ethical discourse of application and the moral discourse of justification has been nicely thematized by Benhabib in terms of what she calls 'cosmopolitan iterations,' by which she means that cosmopolitanism is never one, and it is never complete. We appeal to it as an asymptotic ideal, but from our ethical locus, but as we do so, the ideal itself gets iterated in new, more cosmopolitan, more concrete, but also at the same time, more universalizing forms. To use a phrase from Benhabib's mid-nineties work: cosmopolitanism is to globalized humanity what the perspective of the 'generalized Other' is to the post-conventional moral subject, namely the horizon of a universality to come, a universality under construction. In my comments thus far, then, I have addressed implicitly several more concrete, let us call the pecuniary concerns. This book is sui generis. It offers something that its siblings don't offer. So, while you could put it on the same shelf as works by Archibungi, Held, Appiah, Gould, Nussbaum, it can't be replaced by any of those. In 2012 there will appear a volume edited by Gerard Delanty, titled Routledge Handbook of Cosmpolitanism Studies, which I think will augment interest in works like those proposed by Nascimento. Still, his book has its very unique place on that shelf. I think that the audience is going to be interdisciplinary and will cut across levels of expertise. I think that some sections of it can be profitably used in upper division classes in philosophy and political theory. It surely would be a nice text to use in graduate seminars. Scholars in the fields of contemporary social theory, critical theory, German philosophy, globalization theory, would want to read it, or at least, should be aware of it, and have it as a resource. I think that any good university library should have it. I imagine that it would be very favorably review in major journals of political philosophy and journals such as Constellations, Radical Philosophy, Notre Dame Philosophical Review, European Journal of Philosophy, Political Theory, etc. As someone who is familiar with the work of the Frankfurt School and has followed many of these debates, and thus, have read and being exposed to some of Nascimento's work, I am very confident, first, that Nascimento is amply and thoroughly qualified to carry out this project; and second, that he already has a substantive part of the manuscript ready (or drafted), and thus, can see him sticking to the time-line he has laid out for Palgrave. In what remains of my reader report I like to offer some suggestions for revisions, and execution. I think the present title is verbose and convoluted. I suggest something more terse and succinct: Cosmopolitan Communities: Values, Norms, and Human Rights. I think the triad in the subtitle is clear values refer to ethics, norms to justice and morality, and human rights refers to how we institutionalize global norms that transcend and sublate the tension between ethics and justice, application and justification. I take it that 'Cosmopolitan Communities' is both a descriptive and an ideal - -there are some communities that are more cosmopolitan than others, and no community is completely cosmopolitan, but if they subscribe to the norms of human rights, they can be on the path to cosmopolitanism. Here one could paraphrase Kant. We don't live in an enlightened age, we live in an age of enlightenment, that is, we don't live in a cosmopolitan global (or world) society, but in an age of cosmopolitanisms. Now, let me go by the chapters I was sent: Introduction. First, when Nascimento says that Apel and Habermas subscribe to three paradigms: metaphysical, epistemological, and discursive, he has to be careful. Apel has since his earliest work offer a fascinating, provocative, and original thematization of the history of philosophy in terms of three paradigms, which can be discerned from the standpoint of linguistic philosophy itself. Here one would have to discuss Apel's transcendental semiotics and the triadic dimension of the sign (semantics, syntactics, pragmatics). In other words, Apel's history of philosophy follows from his semitics. Habermas' is not committed to such a theory. In fact, Habermas has developed a distinct philosophical position, called 'postmetaphysics.' One can read Habermas book Postmetaphysical Thinking as a muted and indirect attack on his friend's position. Nascimento has to discuss briefly this book and how it can be read as a critique of Apel's high regard for a high view of philosophy. It is unfortunate that Nascimento has not paid enough attention in this intro to the powerful and innovative work of Pensky, whose The Ends of Solidarity offers an analysis that is in synchrony with his own. Additionally, it can help with the last section of chapter two, on the dialectic between discourses of justification and discourses of application. The author should refer to the wonderful essay by Matthias Kettner in Rasmussen's Handbook of Critical Theory, in which he lays out the relationship between Apel and Habermas. The author uses the formulation 'globalization from below' (a wonderful phrase by the way), but he misses the opportunity to link it with one of the aims of this book (as I see it), namely a cosmopolitanism of the subaltern. Mendieta, following Dussel, Appiah and Mignolo, in fact has argued that it is the subaltern, the colonized other, the wretched of the globalized planet, who have made cosmopolitan the Davos man, the privileged sons of the imperial metropolis. Following Benhabib, we could say: if there is only cosmopolitanism as a ceaseless process of cosmopolitan iterations, then, cosmopolitanism belongs to the 99% of the planet those who clamor for a world in which many worlds can thrive, but in justice and mutuality. Thus, to a globalization from below there corresponds a cosmopolitanism of the wretched of the planet. Chapter one. Awesome chapter. The author should consider adding a reference to Ernst Bloch, whose Natural Law and Human Dignity was very important to developing a proto, or ur-version of a cosmopolitan discourse, already in the sixties. Habermas was deeply influenced by it. And has rescued it again in his recent work on 'Human Rights as a Realistic Utopia.' The critique of Adorno, the alleged culprit for turning critical theory into aesthetic theory, has to be tempered. Adorno was one member of the Frankfurt School. There still remained Horkheimer, Marcuse, and of course Kirchheimer, Neuman, and Lowenthal. These were hardly narrowly focused on aesthetics. Furthermore, that the last book we got from Adorno was his Aesthetics was not his fault, nor his intent. He wanted to do an ethics, which was already implicit in his Negative Dialectics, and in his Aesthetic Theory. Additionally, Aesthetic Theory is hardly simply an aesthetics: it is also a critique of reason. In fact, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory are two sides of the same coin. Adorno's lecture courses from the sixties indicate that he was hardly and narrowly concerned with aesthetics. The biggest and most important suggestion about this chapter is that Nascimento flip the order of presentation between Habermas and Apel. Chronologically, philosophically, and theoretically, Apel came before. So, Nascimento should transition to a discussion of Apel after Kant and Marx, before moving on to Habermas. The obvious link here is Peirce's semiotical transformation of Kant, which Apel introduce in his two-volume edition of Peirce's writings. AFTERALL, the linguistic transformation of Frankfurt Critical Theory was enabled by Apel's pioneering work of Austin, Wittgenstein, Searle, Morris, and of course Peirce. It was at the urging of Apel that Habermas read the pragmatists. Chapter 2: The discussion of Apel's dissertation is very nice. The author may want to look at Mendieta's discussion of this work in Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy, and link it as well to Apel's own critique of Heidegger in volume one of Transformation der Philosophie. Nascimento shou...