Month: March 2006

  • Natural Law, Divine Rights, and the political theology of Carl Schmitt

    Antoinette points out that property law is an innovation required by feudalism, insofar as the monarch and his lords required a means to transfer use and possession of the land to the peasantry while maintaining their fundamental sovereignty (understood by the phrase, “Every man’s home is the King’s castle.”) She suggests that the capacity to…

  • If I could do one thing other than write my dissertation…

    …it would be to run deliberative polls, or to assist in running them, or just to participate in one. Some questions for Professor Fishkin: how much does this cost? Do you generally run polls on public or private money? My idea is to get a bunch of rich philanthropists into a deliberative poll about deliberative…

  • On the title “Liberal”

    I can never decide whether to call myself a ‘liberal.’ A lot of the time, you’re only presented with two options, and I think in those situations it’s okay to glom on to some basic party affiliation: Democrat/Republican, leftist/rightie, progressive/conservative, etc. But when you’re writing about yourself, you’ve got the power to present yourself in…

  • Skin to Skin: Between Logos and Flesh

    Sometimes when I read too much I get very quote heavy; rather than letting my own voice through in my writing, I can’t think of a better way to say it than the way I just read it. So when Merleau-Ponty explains the problem with Husserl’s project in two pages in the midst of The…

  • Whether building fortresses, and many other things that rulers frequently do, are useful or not

    From the NYRoB: “A critical mistake was made,” observed the American security analyst Anthony Cordesman as early as September 2003. “By creating US security zones around US headquarters in Central Baghdad, it created a no-go zone for Iraqis and has allowed the attackers to push the US into a fortress that tends to separate US…

  • States as persistent political entities

    What is the relationship between the state of things and the political State? This is Badiou’s question, after you take away all his mathematical obfuscations. Machiavelli suggests the initial connection: starer, the verb for persistent existence. From this we derive the ‘state,’ the thing that lasts beyond particular politicians. Politics, after all, doesn’t mean what…