The article sets out from Kant’s Critique of Judgement, more specifically from its particular novelty: the notion of the reflective power of judgement grounded in its transcendental principle as an independent cognitive power. Based on Kant’s reflective power of cognition, the article elaborates the issue of the multiple and the articulation of the relationship between the singular, the particular, and the universal, which is crucial for understanding Europe as a multinational political formation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41820461
Confronted by the hegemonic nominalist discourse characterised by its privileging of the multiple over the One and difference and/or otherness over the Same, the paper sets out from the assumption that the subversive gesture today consists in rehabilitating these two discredited philosophical notions: the One and the Same. This essay aims at contributing towards an understanding of this thorny issue, and in particular at looking at the political and theoretical impasses associated with the production of the universal in an infinite universe, a universe without a beyond. By teasing out the gist of the conceptualisations of the One and the Same, provided respectively by Lacan and Badiou, the paper argues that the contemporary politics of emancipation can fully deploy itself in the domain of the inconsistent, non-totalisable real of the social only by starting with an axiom that equates the One and the “for all”. By developing what the author proposes to call the aleph of emancipation, contemporary theorisation of emancipation can reply to the persistent misunderstanding of the status of the universal in the not-all universe by some of the most perspicacious theorists, such as J.-C. Milner, F. Regnault, and G. Agamben.
COBISS.SI-ID: 42598189
The article considers the dynamics of mass migrations as could be observed in 2015 and 2016 in the context of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe. Departing from Agamben’s critique of the concept of human rights and the nation state, the author points out that the current refugee crisis has revealed an older contradiction between the concept of nation (deriving from the Latin verb naquere, “to give birth”) and the territorial presence of stateless people. This presence manifests the contingency of the biopolitical link between nation (birth), territory, and nation state. The massive presence and movement of stateless people within the territories of European nation states can thus be read as a peculiar type of the state of exception which Agamben has called (in accordance with Walter Benjamin) the messianic event. This exceptional event suspends the sovereign power of the nation state.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41426989