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further, independent normative resources in order to have a certain substance, content and limits – and in order to be regarded as something good at all. In itself, therefore, toleration is not a virtue or a value; it can only be a value if backed by the right normative reasons. 9 For instance, one does not display the virtue of tolerance if one tolerates the intolerable or if one permits something that one disapproves of on grounds that are themselves morally objectionable. One cannot, therefore, arrive at any substantive value or virtue of toleration simply from
6.20.49. TWA (2) INTRODUCTION The present book has grown out of studies undertaken by the INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL RESEARCH during the past two decades. A large part of them was devoted to the scrutiny of ideologies, to what was later on recognised – under the name of “content analysis” – as an important part of social research. However, the tradition on which our previous studies in this field (dealing with philosophers, poets, novelists, popular
the world-disclosive nature of language it becomes possible to understand language in the wider sense of comprehensible articulation that I proposed in the preceding chapters. This makes it possible to understand music as language without falling into the trap – sometimes encountered in ‘new musicology’ – of trying to reduce music’s content to a verbal equivalent.1 How, though, are we to establish a useful contemporary, but historically informed, way of approaching the interaction between the verbal and the musical which does not lead to the kind of rigid divisions
initial thought is not foundational in the normal philosophical sense of being the basis which supports everything else. The initial thought is merely a passing stage in the real self-description of thought, and the movement is completed when the initial contradiction finally leads to a systematic account of all the relationships in thought. The essential idea therefore comes at the end, and the beginning is merely something indeterminate which must be overcome if thought is to have any determinate content. Whether this squares with Pinkard’s ‘communitarian’ immanent
Weber's key example of modern demagogy is Prime Minister William Gladstone, one of the first British leaders to navigate the consequences of the expanded (male) suffrage. His charismatic leadership skills entailed both ‘the firm belief of the masses in the ethical content of his policies and above all their belief in the ethical character of his personality’. 30 Weber's allied views regarding charismatic ‘leader democracy’ and its possible influence on the Weimar constitution have been endlessly debated in the wake of
-garde) modern, exploring the critical contours of a (contending, “primitivist”) modern, rethinking the content of tradition, and debating the nature of modernity. Imbued with specific spatial densities and tousled temporal energies, this has provided South Asian modernisms with their own twist, with discrete textures. We have discussed that a key characteristic of modernism at large has been to emphasize the
duty would require of us in any case, then (and only then) can the affect be permitted. In either case, in practical terms affective content is seen as extraneous to the need to obey the moral law, which for Kant must be rational through and through.10 The tradition of all dead rationalist philosophers weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. One of the reasons for my wanting to revisit early critical theory is to recall and mobilize certain moves against the anti-emotional core of the Continental philosophical and political tradition, many of which have
being. There is no overarching entity –be it language, human being, culture, God, etc. –to which other entities are subordinated, or from which they derive their content. Flat ontology simply points to a basic binary: either something is or it is not. Put differently, in adhering to the fundamental principle of non- contradiction, no object can be said to both exist and not exist simultaneously. So much for flat ontology. What is interesting is that the very flatness of this ontological view inflects the formal characteristics of much OOO/SR writing. For example
, each understood the necessity of maintaining a social-theoretical role for social institutions. Poulantzas's insistence on the class specificity of fascist ‘interpellation’ and the ‘class content ’ of his ‘elements’ maintained a formal role for mediation but risked the class reductivism Laclau correctly identified. Hall explicitly recognized Laclau's excess and instead expanded the Poulantzian itinerary of ‘apparatuses’ to recognize a role for (news) media whereby their ‘autonomy’ was far more than that of an ‘apparatus’ of even an expanded conception of ‘state
each. What is more, I believe this is a necessary intervention, because just as the political content of critical theory needs an affective supplement in order to be actualized, so theories of affect need to be mediated by political conviction and engagement, lest they become ahistorical and free-floating, betraying their much-vaunted materialist credentials by retreating to a naive idealism via the backdoor. Thoughts untimely: critical theory in the twenty-first century Before making a case for the importance of revisiting critical theory for and in the twenty