Political Theory

Titian's Rape of Europa is highly praised for its luminous colors and sensual textures. But the painting has an overlooked dark side, namely that it eroticizes rape. I argue that this is an ethical defect that diminishes the painting aesthetically. This argument-that an artwork can be worse off qua work of art precisely because it is somehow ethically problematic-demonstrates that feminist concerns about art can play a legitimate role in art criticism and aesthetic appreciation.

In the three articles I present here "Radical Imagination and the Social Institution Imaginary", "The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain", "Logic, Imagination, Reflection", Castoriadis is mainly concerned with the question of the emergence of new ontological creation of forms by analyzing the concept of radical imagination, a concept he borrows/constructs out of an engagement with works of Kant and Freud. There are some repetitions between the texts, so I will introduce the notion of transcendental imagination simply by way of Castoriadis analysis of Freud's notion of "dream". Dream A group of associative representations that is not determinable but elucidable, meaning in dream there is no strictly speaking one-to-one correspondence between what is represented and the representation, but multi-vocal or indeterminate relation between the two, overdetermination (a representation can represent several represented) /underdetermination (a given represented can be represented by more than one representation) The imagination at work in Dream is elided by a view of representation Representation as reduced to simply reproducing and recombining existing elements afforded by perceptual apparatus But two questions arise 1.Combination for what? (the problem of function) Psyche's original capacity to posit and organize images for kind of pleasure not reducible to organ sexual pleasure 2.Is the elements given? Where do they arise in the first place (the problem of given) There is no given immediacy of sensual impression as such, there is no such a thing as thing-in-itself-images do no not exist unless minimally organized, a kind of indistinguishability of our own conceptualizing activities and sensual intuition. Sensual impressoni are what they are because we already posit, and organize them as such, so instead of a picture of mind-world relation in which a given subject confronts a world and mirror the things in the world in her mind, the sensory data is always already conceptualized to an extent. This brings out the prominence of our doing, conceptualizing activities, in the otherwise passive reception of sense-data. Such conceptualizing activities, as the work of spontaneous imagination ,cannot simply be due to our interaction with the world and could be said to be self-posited. There does not entail a two step process of reception of matter and then making them into a certain form. The raw sensory matter is always already en-formed, and the form is always already en-mattered. Such work of spontaneous imagination is also present in living beings other than humans. They don't simply gather informational data from nature and then process them. Information is information as long as it is posited and created as such for a given living for itself, what information in-itself is what it is for a self. A living organism is able to form a world, as it were, out of a logic it institutes for itself. Representation for it does not mean a simple imaging that corresponds and mirrors, one to one, to existing objects in the world, as if a photo copy: "it is a matter of a presentation by and for the living being, by means of which the living being-starting from what are for it only mere

To dissect the urban process in all of its fullness is to lay bare the roots of consciousness formation in the material realities of daily life. It is out of the complexities and perplexities of this experience that we build elementary understandings of the meanings of space and time; of social power and its legitimations; of forms of domination and social interaction; of the relation to nature through production and consumption; and of human nature, civil society, and political life. 1

This paper explores the relationship of historical narratives to contemporary political theory by considering the merits of the rival theories of pluralism and democracy presented by John Rawls and Charles Taylor. While Rawls and Taylor appear to agree on the importance of an overlapping consensus, by situating the idea within their respective historical narratives of modern democracy and pluralism, this paper demonstrates how the two theorists differ in their understanding of the problem of pluralism and how it relates to modern democracy, resulting in competing conceptions of an overlapping consensus. Rawls’s historical account showcases the ability of once hostile religious doctrines to overcome their aggressive tendencies through the experience of well-functioning, mutually beneficial political arrangements over time. Therefore, Rawls’s idea of overlapping consensus seeks permanent arrangements to resolve the tension. In contrast, Taylor characterizes pluralism and modern democracy as in an enduring dilemma, produced by profound shifts in self-understandings, one that cannot be forever solved and thus requires repeated creative solutions. Therefore, Taylor’s conception of overlapping consensus is flexible, emphasizing dialogue and mutual understanding between citizens. Drawing on interpretivist approaches to social science, this paper argues for the possibility of evaluating these two narratives, arguing that Taylor offers a comparatively more compelling narrative on the grounds that it can better account for the conditions of modern democratic life and the sociological dynamics in contemporary Western religious belief, resulting in a more desirable means of addressing this form of democratic anxiety.

Many of the ideas central to Western politics can be traced back to ancient Greece, and more specifically, to the ancient Athenian city-state. Indeed, classical Athens is often referred to as the birthplace of democracy itself. From the eighth to the fifth century BCE, a series of legislative reforms and popular revolts alike saw power (kratos) wrested out of the hands of nobility and placed among the people (demos). Average citizens passed, voted, and deliberated on laws in the assembly and played an important role in deciding upon matters of right and wrong as jurors in the courts. During Athens' period of direct democratic government, Plato wrote his most famous tract, The Republic. Yet the canonical text has come to be known for its rebuke of, rather than celebration of, democratic rule. Plato's student Aristotle, for his part, was not himself a citizen of the famed Athenian city-state in which he wrote his Politics. What are we, contemporary readers, to make of these disjunctures? This course serves as an introduction to political theory as a sub-field of political science, as well as an introduction to ancient political thought. We will spend our semester reading Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics closely, paying particular attention to how it is that these thinkers view the relationship between justice and democracy. Is popular judgment in matters of right a crucible of democratic government? Can justice exist absent democratic governance? We will focus our attention on these questions in class, with some reference to contemporary issues. Our primary goal, however, will be to attend to the form and substance of the arguments put forward in these canonical texts. After surveying the arguments made for and against democracy by these thinkers and learning about the mechanisms of democratic government and popular judgment in ancient Athens, we will turn our attention to the thought of Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi. al-Farabi was an important interpreter of both Plato and Aristotle and is considered the father of Islamic political philosophy. In our last classes, we will think about the legacy of "the ancients" or "the Greeks" and learn about how it is that their texts were passed down to us by way of early medieval Islamic philosophers. In doing so, we will consider how the history of political thought is narrated and told, pondering upon the questions of justice that are raised by its telling.