Politics Of Identities

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Reflecting on European colonialism in 1950 - at a time when discussions about what we now know as the European Union emerged in western Europe, Aimé Césaire wrote, . . . Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible. This idea is fairly commonplace in much of the post-colonial world and it has some purchase within certain academic and intellectual circles elsewhere. And yet, in the process of denouncing the widely noted presence of racism in Hungary, thirty-six leading Hungarian intellectuals have, in a recent public document, felt compelled to thank France, and through France, a generic, trans-historical notion of Europe, for what they saw as the latter's profound, longue-durée goodness. It is partly my concern for the economic hardship, political marginality, cultural discrimination, and social exclusion faced by the Romanies of eastern Europe and partly the precision with which the Letter articulates the topos of west European moral superiority - a central pattern of European identity discourse - that prompts me to raise the following initial questions: How is it possible to denounce racism by referring to Europe, especially western Europe, the main historic source and promoter of racism as we know it today? What purpose does the genre of the open letter serve and how does it function? How does the signatories' implicit project of geopolitical self-positioning relate to the theme of the West as an object to be emulated, long dominant in the modern history of east-central European ideas of emancipation?

While the contemporary world has been heralded as being “post-racial”, we can look all-around to see evidence that this assertion is not only flawed but false. Religion is generally blamed as the key culprit for the escalating conflicts igniting the world over which threatens peace. Yet, rarely is secularism and the void created in its midst carefully analyzed in this context. The historical roots of this problem are more remote than postmodernism and modernism. However, secularism has fractured the way that human identity has been understood throughout time which eclipses the integral relationship between human diversity and religious pluralism.

After the end of the »Great Patriotic War« in 1945, statues of Red Army soldiers were erected in the entire sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. Mostly as monuments to the »Liberators from German Fascism« or the »Unknown Soldier«, they were to remember the heroic deeds of the soldiers during the liberation of Europe from the Third Reich. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the
newly independent states in Central and Eastern Europe re-interpreted the historical narrative of the »Liberation of Europe« and added suffering and loss under the Soviet occupation during and after WWII to their national historiographies, therewith challenging both the former Soviet interpretation of the 20th century history and the Russian interpretation of the past.

Some of these statues of Red Army soldiers, relics of Soviet iconography in stone and metal, still have their place in the urban landscapes of the post-Communist space. These monuments are surprisingly often called »Alyosha« by the local, mostly
Russophone population – a broad phenomenon in many countries which the author traces back to a popular Soviet song from the 1960ies. Beside the best-known and most conflict-laden case in the Estonian capital Tallinn, »Alyosha« monuments exist, for example, in Rēzekne (Latvia), in the Russian cities of Murmansk, Severomorsk, Krasnoyarsk, Nizhnevartovsk, and Kosaja Gora, in Kharkiv and Sumy (Ukraine), in the Bulgarian cities Sofia, Plovdiv, Ruse, and Burgas, but also in the German capital Berlin, the Austrian capital Vienna and the Norwegian town Kirkenes, a small settlement close to the Russian border.

Primary points of reference of this paper are the »Alyosha« monuments in Tallinn, Vienna, and Plovdiv regarding their potential for controversy in the respective countries. Since the early 1990ies, several conflicts arose around the »Alyosha« monuments and their antagonistic interpretations as liberators or
occupants. The focus here is on the politics of history of the different national governments in dealing with the Communist heritage, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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The history of Indian politics has different shades. One of these has been the identity politics. In every kind of identity politics, identities are created deliberately by the new leadership along the line of commonality in terms of factors like ethnicity, nation, language, castes etc, for either of the two purposes: either to assimilate myriad fractions of people under one identity and to claim a larger share of power and distributive resources, or to preserve the distinctiveness of a particular section of the society from being exploited by the others as well as to uphold their legitimate interest.
The history of the 19th century western Indian politics shows that in the 19th century Maratha Pradesh, the people of the lower castes emerged as a distinct social and political identity group which vehemently challenged the age old  Brahmanical social order and strongly voiced for their equal status in the society as well as equal share in development, power and resources, under the leadership of Mahatma Jyotirao Phule.
The study, therefore, presents a critical analysis as well as evaluation of Mahatma Phule’s contribution in the identity politics of the 19th century Maratha Pradesh. At the outset the study critically analyses Phule’s effort to create an `identity’- `Kshatriya identity’, then delineates his attempts to organize these lower castes Marathas along the line of that created identity by founding the first lower castes’ organization- the Satyasodhak Samaj, and finally presents an overall critical explanation of his politics behind such attempts.

Ethnic and religious issues have gained attention with the spread of globalization. Their divisive character and potential to create conflicts between different groups have been extensively studied since the end of the Cold War. Among discussions, Islam has attracted a particular attention from Huntington’s work on the ‘clash of civilizations’ to George W. Bush’s flashbacks to a ‘crusade’ against terrorists. However, could there be a link between what is in it essence an ‘abstract’ formulation, i.e. identity, and the very ‘real’ existence of threat to humanity from identity-based conflicts and its close relative, international terrorism?
When we think about the violent events, leading to the deaths of civilians, and their perpetrators, a connection is established all-to-easily between the use of terror and Islam. Although this shallow analysis focusing solely on the deeds of extremists and generalizing them to the whole Islamic world is misguided at the best, it nevertheless has its attraction in many parts of the world. Islam is sometimes used as a self-identification tool and psychological booster for extremist religious groups associated with threats directed at political, societal, economic and human security at the national, regional or global levels, it is clearly wrong to suggest that there exist a unified-monolithic Islamic civilization threatening the world. This chapter will look critically at the connection between Islam as a-religion and Islam as a threat in the globalized world where peoples’ resort to deeper religious and ethnic identities came to the fore.

The political and spatial reorganization brought about by the progressive consolidation of the Spanish Estado de las Autonomías (State of Autonomies) is in line with a model of 'multiple ethnoterritorial concurrence'. This model relates sociopolitical sub-state ethnic mobilization to the competitive interplay among Spanish regions and nationalities pursuing political and economic power, as well as the achievement of the legitimation for their institutional development. Ten 'axioms' 'premises', 'principles', and 'rules' are identified as being mainly responsible for setting the conceptual boundaries of the type of plural competition and solidarity put into play in decentralized Spain.

This research explores how political linkages between different Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and between CSOs and Parliament are established, formed, and operated, as well as their impact on democracy. The drafting of the Pornography Law, initiated by the Indonesian Council of Ulamas (Majelis Ulama Indonesia, MUI) which was deeply concerned by widespread pornographic content, is used here as a case study. This article finds that since the very beginning, CSOs and Parliament were vertically polarized into two blocs based on identity and ideology: the first consisting of Islamic groups and the second consisting of nationalist, non-Muslim, and adat groups. This research finds that identity remains the main machine driving Indonesian politics, jeopardizing the process of democracy. As this research also finds mobilization to be the basis of linkage between different CSOs and between CSOs and parliament, this article argues that participation as a key ingredient of democracy has been sidelined in the whole process.

Trava-se um diálogo crítico com as teses de Donna Haraway, problematizando as posições da feminista norte-americana em dois aspectos principais: a questão da identidade do sujeito cognoscente e a questão da tradução, isto é, do(da) destinatário(a) do conhecimento e, concomitantente, da lingua e da linguagem. Postula-se a necessidade de uma politica de identidade não-essencialista e não-totalizante, capaz de demarcar as diferenças e de fazer justiça à sempre contraditória e ambigua pertença do sujeito a múltiplos lugares de identidade, exemplificando-se com duas antologias que dão voz a «mulheres
do Terceiro Mundo nos Estados Unidos». Só essa política de identidade poderá constituir a base para intercâmbios e recíprocas contestações nas construções do saber feminista em cada um dos seus específicos espaços de articulação.

Following the September 11 hijackings in 2001, an incredible number of citizens all over the world were drafted for a global 'War on Terror'. Arjun Appadurai reads such transnational violence as symptoms of a larger and recurring reaction to fear. Communities' fears, doubts and their consequent violence are intensified by the increased capacity of globalization for transnational communication and migration. Mediaand specifically, the internetplay an important role in providing the divergent and divided flows of information and ideology that form or threaten collective imaginings. 1 Despite the scope of his considerations of ethnic media representations and information flows, Appadurai neglects the rise of participatory media alongside other advancements of globalization. This essay is mainly aimed at further developing Appadurai's notion of geographies of anger in relation to these media. If the War on Terror is a culmination of what Appadurai calls globalization's "darker side" of violence (Fear of Small Numbers 3), then the army recruitment game is its interactive equivalent. As a specific case study, this essay shall focus on the U.S. government-financed video game America's Army as a virtual geography of anger. Scrutinizing the game's depiction of violence, the self and the enemy, a central question to the essay is how the nature of participation and the select appointment of player agency affects and encourages players' virtual position within a simulated War on Terror.

At times, it proves to be difficult to find a balance between trying to build an academic career and conforming to existing evaluation criteria while also confronting and tackling hegemonic and institutionalized ideas of what constitutes good research. It’s a delicate exercise where the challenge to play the game while simultaneously trying to change the rules of the game, often leads to ethical, methodological and strategic dilemmas. Being involved in research on identity and a commitment in identity politics  shapes, questions, challenges, and redefines our own identity and touches upon the researcher’s body. Consequently, our personal and professional lives are intrinsically linked and the motivation to shape or change academic and political debates only grows stronger.

The workshop "Academia and identity - when research meets activism" held in March 2015 in Leuven, aimed to create a space to discuss these complex issues. This magazine collects the stories and reflections of the workshop's participants and provides insight into their balance between academic work at the one hand, and the commitment to the politics of identity on the other - in all its messiness and potential failure.

A presente Tese de Doutorado investiga algumas das relações entre arte, política e movimentos sociais que permeiam nosso presente, partindo de uma constelação insurgente composta por exposições, ações, trabalhos de arte e de ativismo ocorridos no Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo e Pernambuco, circunscritos no período entre 2004 e 2018. Em uma abordagem transversal de arte e política, cada um dos seis capítulos coloca um determinado elemento estético em cena: duas ações do coletivo Frente Três de Fevereiro (1) e uma do Política do Impossível (2); o coletivismo artístico em torno da ocupação Prestes Maia (3) e seu desdobramento na exposição Zona de Poesia Árida e no suporte instalativo Poética do Dissenso (4); duas performances de Elilson (5); dois trabalhos de Bárbara Wagner em colaboração com grupos de evangélicos neopentecostais (6). Partindo desta constelação, discutimos problemas como a poética da política, uma educação pelo silêncio, a crítica institucional e a institucionalidade crítica, uma política do luto e da memória, além de questões relativas a coletivos, minorias, alteridades, identidades e lugares de fala. Nos baseamos especialmente no pensamento de Jacques Rancière, amparado por autores como Bruno Latour, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler e Suely Rolnik. Assumimos uma abordagem fragmentária, que tangencia o método cartográfico de Suely Rolnik; as constelações benjaminianas; as cenas rancierianas; os traços barthesianos; e o composicionismo de Bruno Latour. Esta estratégia absorve certos modos de inteligibilidade comuns aos procedimentos de curadoria ou de montagem, em que a reunião de uma série de imagens singulares pode agenciar múltiplas possibilidades de sentido. Na presente Tese, ela permite a emergência de um presente composto enquanto um campo irresoluto de vibração dissensual.