Political Theory Commons^™

Civil War And Power: A Theoretical Inquiry, Can Guven

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a theoretical project that explores the conceptual nexus between civil war and power. It maps out a lineage of thought which posits civil war as a framework for explicating politics, not as a pre-political stage of savagery or a deteriorated condition of the socio-political order. Starting with Michel Foucault’s radical yet short-lived civil war thesis, which situates civil war as the matrix of relations of power, this investigation traverses the work of several theorists and philosophers who have drawn on, or departed from, this line of thought. It critically evaluates Giorgio Agamben’s use of the concept …

Beyond Pathology: Specters Of Suicidality In The Queer Community, Alison E. Parks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the psychic effects of a life haunted by proximity to suicide. Beginning with demographic data indicating that the queer community has experienced disproportionately high rates of suicide in the U.S. since nationwide data collection began in the 1960s, my dissertation’s argument is twofold. First, suicidality shapes the experience of being queer. Second, the queer community’s history of association with suicide has shaped its relationship to death and morbidity. Therefore, in order to better address the issue of suicide in the community, a new approach is required that considers this history’s entanglement with systemic power relations and the …

Economies Of Security: Foucault And The Genealogy Of Neoliberal Reason, Marshall Scheider

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

Michel Foucault is well-known for his theorizations of institutional power, normativity, and biopolitics. Less well-known is the fact that Foucault developed his analysis of biopolitics in and through his historical investigation of neoliberalism. Today, while critique of neoliberalism has become a commonplace of humanities discourse, and popular resistance to neoliberalization rocks the southern hemisphere, it remains unclear that the historical specificity of neoliberalism is well-understood. In particular, the relation between classical liberalism and neoliberal governance remains murky in popular debate. As Foucault powerfully illustrates, this relation is far from clear-cut, and neoliberalism is not reducible to a simple extension of …

Cyborgean Horizons: Gender, Disability And Technology In Olympic And Paralympic Sport, An Intersectional Approach, Stephanie O'Neill

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper examines two types of embodiment and its verification in the context of contemporary sports: sex/gender-verification testing in the Olympics, and the International Paralympic Committee’s multi-tiered grading system for assessing disability, the premises of which raise important questions for feminist and disability theory, as well as for the increasing and increasingly integrated role that technology plays in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. I outline the 80-year history of policing the gender binary in international sport and its controversies, with particular attention to the Castor Semenya case, and the implications for intersex and transgender athletes. I examine the history …

Kennan And The Neglected Variable In Post-Socialist Societies: The Loss Of Honest Dialogue And The Need For Empathy, Joan Davison

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes the symbolism of George Kennan’s famous “X” article relative to the challenges of contemporary post transitions. It unpacks recent political discourse, discussing the critical application of practices such as thinking with your heart, parrhesis of the significance of uncertainty and reflection for question is: What would Kennan write in an X Article to states in transition paper employs both the definition suggested by Michel Foucault who understood it as “fearless speech” and Eric Voegelin who closely follows Plato’s meaning linking it with “heart” (dis)order of representatives of a society.

Scatter 1: The Politics Of Politics In Foucault, Heidegger, And Derrida [Table Of Contents], Geoffrey Bennington

Philosophy & Theory

“Bennington’s Scatter 1 is a sophisticated, detailed, and strikingly original demonstration of the political efficacy of deconstruction. As always with Bennington, to read him is to undergo an education in reading.” —Robert Bernasconi, Pennsylvania State University

Foucault, Power And The Modern Panopticon, Connor Sheridan

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Evolving Standards Of Decency: The Intersection Of Death Penalty Theory And Supreme Court Jurisprudence, Rachel S. Sullivan

Senior Independent Study Theses

The American death penalty must be abolished in order to establish a more just system of punishment. This thesis examines the arguments of eight political theorists and their connections with five essential Supreme Court cases on capital punishment in order to determine the Court's theoretical view of the American death penalty. This theoretical view is that justices who affirm the constitutionality of capital punishment use philosophical theories, while justices who critique capital punishment rely upon context-dependent analyses. If the Court ever rules that capital punishment is unconstitutional in all circumstances, these latter theories will be dispositive.

Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, And The Politics Of Critique, C. Heike Schotten

Political Science Faculty Publication Series

Despite appearances, Agamben’s engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics but ra-ther a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fun-damental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault’s most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault’s commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to “insurrection”—not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection—even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes …

Against Totalitarianism: Agamben, Foucault, And The Politics Of Critique, C. Heike Schotten

C. Heike Schotten

Eucharist And Dragon Fighting As Resistance: Against Commodity Fetishism And Scientism, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

This paper examines two practices – the Roman Catholic Practice of Eucharist and the game Dungeons and Dragons – to show how social critique can be mounted from within a practice. It begins by relating Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of tradition to his earlier analysis of ideology and to the notion of ideology in general. The paper then tackles two dominant forms of ideology – Commodity Fetishism and Scientism – and shows how both Eucharist and Dungeons and Dragons promote critical thinking to resist those ideologies. In the process, it denies the Althusserian-Foucauldian analysis of ideology as mere materiality and defends …

Life Beyond Politics: Toward The Notion Of The Unpolitical, Inna Viriasova

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This study presents a critique of post-foundational political thought, suggesting that it lacks a positive account of the unpolitical, of a radical outside of politics. I argue that political thought that oscillates around the distinction between “politics” and “the political” is correlationist and totalizing, resulting in the forgetting of its “Great Outdoors.” This critique is advanced through a close analysis of texts by Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Against this background stand out Massimo Cacciari's and Roberto Esposito's categories of “the impolitical,” and Giorgio Agamben's notion of “bare life.” “The impolitical” is positively …

Eucharist And Dragon Fighting As Resistance: Against Commodity Fetishism And Scientism, Jeffery L. Nicholas

Jeffery L Nicholas

This paper examines two practices – the Roman Catholic Practice of Eucharist and the game Dungeons and Dragons – to show how social critique can be mounted from within a practice. It begins by relating Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of tradition to his earlier analysis of ideology and to the notion of ideology in general. The paper then tackles two dominant forms of ideology – Commodity Fetishism and Scientism – and shows how both Eucharist and Dungeons and Dragons promote critical thinking to resist those ideologies. In the process, it denies the Althusserian-Foucauldian analysis of ideology as mere materiality and defends …

Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram

Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.