"Krisis" special issue on Civil disobedience
"Most political theorists seem to agree that civil disobedience consists in intentionally unlawful and principled collective acts of protest that have the political aim of changing specific laws, policies or institutions. Civil disobedience is therefore to be distinguished from both legal protest and »ordinary« criminal offenses or »unmotivated« rioting, but also from conscientious objection and full-scale revolution. In practice, however, these boundaries are politically contested and probably cannot be drawn as easily as theory suggests."
[*Krisis* (tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie) komt uit met een themanummer over burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid, allicht relevant gezien wat lopende zaken en discussies in Nederland. Hoofdzakelijk in het Engels, in .pdf te lezen op: http://www.krisis.eu/#htmlpart=issues.php?issue=2012,%20Issue%203 . (Of als die link breekt, ga via de homepage naar jaargang 20102, nummer 3: http://www.krisis.eu/ .) ]
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Krisis 2012, issue 3 is now online. Click here to see it:
http://www.krisis.eu/index_en.php#htmlpart=issues.php?issue=2012,%20Issu...
In this issue:
A dossier on civil disobedience:
Some of the most prominent theories of civil disobedience, e.g. those of
Rawls and Habermas, highlight its primarily or even exclusively symbolic
character. This, however, seems to reduce civil disobedience to a purely
moral appeal. On a theoretical as well as on a practical level we are today
faced with the question whether civil disobedience requires a moment of real
confrontation for it to be politically effective. It seems that civil
disobedience does in fact have an irreducible symbolic dimension, but that
it cannot be reduced to this dimension, because without moments of real
confrontation it would also lose its symbolic power and turn into a mere
appeal to the conscience of the powers that be. The articles in this special
section highlight various of the challenges and possibilities the theory and
practice of civil disobedience is confronted with today, from the question
whether Paraguayan campesinos have a right of necessity also to uncivil
actions via the political potential of the apparently criminal behaviour of
marginalized migrants and the effects of 'hermeneutic invisibility' on the
public nature of civil disobedience to the effects rise of 'art activism' on
the relation between the social and the artistic and the situatedness of the
bodies of protesters in relation to changing police tactics.
In 'The Misadventures of Critical Thinking' Jacques Rancière explores the
anti-emancipatory effect of an artistic and theoretical critique that
specializes in unmasking how all attempts at critique are always already
anticipated and incorporated by 'the system', suggesting that we should
instead focus on what he calls 'scenes of dissensus'. As Joost de Bloois
argues in his comment on Rancière's text, however, this analysis might not
only underestimate the complexity of this unmasking critique, it also seems
to run into some of the same problems it diagnoses.
In our interview with Wendy Brown we discuss the emancipatory potential as
well as the theoretical and political limits of the notions of democracy and
communism, the paranoid practice of walling with which states seem to
compensate their waning sovereignty, the Occupy movement and the danger of
Oedipalization, the varieties of secularism, and the responsibility of
teaching.
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Table of Contents:
Special issue: Civil disobedience
Robin Celikates and René Gabriëls
Civil disobedience. Dilemmas of political resistance and protest
Alejandra Mancilla
Noncivil disobedience and the right of necessity. a point of convergence
Jacquelien Rothfusz
Awor nan ta yama nos criminal! (And now they call us criminals!). Civil
disobedience and the Dutch-Caribbean Top 50
Martin Blaakman
Civil disobedience in a distorted public sphere
Tom Grimwood and Martin Lang
Militant Training Camp and the Aesthetics of Civil Disobedience
Tina Managhan
Kettling and the 'Distribution of the Sensible'. Investigating the
Liminality of the Protesting Body in a Post-Political Age
Interview
Robin Celikates and Yolande Jansen
Reclaiming Democracy. An Interview with Wendy Brown on Occupy, Sovereignty,
and Secularism
Dossier Rancière
Jacques Rancière
De beproevingen van het kritische denken
Joost de Bloois
Kritiek in krabbengang. Over Jacques Rancières 'De beproevingen van het
kritische denken'
Reviews
Tamar de Waal
Spatial segregation and inequality
Gijs van Oenen
Participation as if things mattered