THE SAD RIDER A Decade since DerridaChamberlain, L.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732638
This guest column marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Jacques Derrida. The journal in which it appears, Common Knowledge , was not especially receptive to deconstruction during Derrida's lifetime, but Lesley Chamberlain in retrospect sees reasons to reconsider his role in intellectual history now. The delicacy of Derrida's mission, she argues, has been misunderstood. He is best placed in the company not of the “deconstructionists” who thought to follow in his footsteps but, rather, in the company of the moralistic and theologically minded German philosophers and thinkers who inspired him, from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. A personal fear of being pinned down, coupled with his tragic Jewish witness to a philosophical quest for certainty gone astray, led the “Sad Rider,” one of many possible Derridas, to want to “erase” as much as he wanted to write — despite which, he was not spared being turned into an industry.
NIETZSCHE AND/OR/VERSUS DARWINBabich, B.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732650
This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche's thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel — names commonly associated with Darwin — they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche's thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation of Darwin's views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin's class-based racism, but Nietzsche's argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average (rather than of the exceptional) man. This insight drives Nietzsche's view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Übermensch , which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian (second century) and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources.
Introduction: The Undivided Big BananaPerl, J. M.;van der Dennen, J. M. G.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732686
In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal's editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012). Whereas Diamond's theme is that modern states can learn much about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peace-keeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess.
PEACE AND WAR IN NONSTATE SOCIETIES An Anatomy of the Literature in Anthropology and Political Sciencevan der Dennen, J. M. G.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2732698
This monograph-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means” reviews and assesses the state of ethnographic and political scholarship concerning how nonstate, tribal societies deal with peacemaking and peacekeeping. A central argument is that the condition among nonstate societies was and is neither one of permanent war nor one of permanent peace but one of permanent peacelessness . Nonstate societies recognize the danger of warfare and take measures to reduce its likelihood, or at least try to mitigate its destructiveness. This article treats the politics, strategies, and practices of peacemaking in tribal societies throughout the world, as well as the full spectrum of attempts at war mitigation.
HARD, SOFT, AND FUZZY HISTORIOGRAPHYPocock, J. G. A.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2733013
In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (2013) and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” (2011 – 13). Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation” that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart “popery and arbitrary government” and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy from the borough, county, and clerical elites that had brought it back to power and regarded restoration of the Church of England as their instrument and identity. The king thus had his own reasons for upholding the liberty of conscience, and so James II can be found using the language of a skeptical Enlightenment, while at the same time affirming the absoluteness of his authority and incurring the suspicion of popery. How “toleration” of Catholics and dissenters came about in Britain must be told by narrating the “hard” histories of various state structures, but there is a larger and “softer” history of Enlightenment to be extracted from that of the European ancien régime, in whose history and downfall “British history” has a part that can be narrated in both “hard” and “soft” terms. The recent revisionist accounts of James II — of which Sowerby's is said in this review to be among the best — offer the king a new role at that regime's beginnings. This review concludes by arguing that the pursuit of history as it has come to be practiced is among the “softest” modes of explanation — since it consists of the unending and unlimited pursuit of the contexts in which actions, words, and processes have been situated and need to be studied — and that the more there are of these, the more meanings the actions may bear and the fewer reasons there are for the use of Occam's razor. “The notion of ‘fuzziness’ ” does not disturb historians, as it does scholars in some other disciplines, since historians have at their disposal an established contextualist “means of navigating it.”
INSISTENCE AND RESPONSE On Ethnographic ReplicationMiyazaki, H.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2733063
This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge . Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen's emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography as response . The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author's own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer's cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise.
WORKING WITH THOSE WHO THINK OTHERWISEVerran, H.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2733075
This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” ( Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Helen Verran, Richard Rottenburg, and Hirokazu Miyazaki. Verran's response clarifies the stance that she takes in her work, and especially in her book Science and an African Logic (2001), toward critique. Here she argues that critique involves grasping the difference between entities in the here-and-now, while conventional analysis in the social sciences explains away difference in the here-and-now by relocating it to an ideal realm. She explains that the method she has developed is a form of infra critique — a way of “doing difference” that keeps it present, particular, and localized. Her essay concludes that the shift to infra critique requires that the “good faith analyst” make her own ontological commitments explicit and accept responsibility for making judgments.
EXPERIMENTAL ENGAGEMENTS AND METACODESRottenburg, R.;
2014 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2733087
This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” ( Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Richard Rottenburg, Hirokazu Miyazaki, and Helen Verran. Rottenburg's response clarifies the key argument of his book Far-Fetched Facts (2002 in German, 2009 in English), situates it in a biographical and political context of despair and hope, and extends it in ways stimulated by Jensen's article and by reading in the sociology of critique that Rottenburg has done since writing the book. He here reformulates the main argument of his book as concerning the indispensable necessity of what Nietzsche calls “legislated language,” along with its performative effects and insurmountable fallibility. By situating that argument in a biographical and political context that the book does not emphasize, and by explaining the “plot” of the book, Rottenburg emphasizes that Far-Fetched Facts was intentionally and principally written from a perspective that does not allow the maintenance of a clear-cut distinction between fact and value and that, therefore, is a contribution toward a methodology of hope. This essay moreover indicates ways in which Far-Fetched Facts is linked to developments in the French pragmatist sociology of critique, which offers a compatible and, at the same time, well-established language to make similar points. This sociology starts from the assumption that practices of ordering depend on the establishment of forms for commensuration, classification, qualification, valuation, and calculation of equivalence that imply reference to realities “out there” and to perceived common goods. A convention (or the element of a “metacode”) is a temporarily established, dynamic, and reflexive material-semantic form that enables interpretation and evaluation. By raising expectations of how things must be done in order to pass as appropriate, valid, and legitimate, conventions facilitate cooperation, yet at some stage in their lives conventions become controversial and need to be replaced. In order to communicate and to coordinate actions, conventions and metacodes are as indispensable as they are fallible, Rottenburg argues, and instead of being replaced by “good faith” and “hope,” conventions and metacodes actually depend on them.