El antisemita, el liberal, la insolente y la amante. Luchas en torno de la disciplina y la autoridad en la formación del maestro argentino

Fil: Garguin, Enrique. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina.

Cuestiones de método en los estudios sobre tradición clásica : Problemas actuales, entre la violencia y la "neutralidad" liberal

Frente a la crisis actual de las humanidades, los especialistas en literaturas clásicas, a la hora justificar su disciplina, suelen adoptar una retórica liberal y humanista. Desde esta perspectiva, se supone que las clásicas son el medio de transmisión privilegiado de valores tales como la democracia, el pluralismo o el respeto por la diferencia. La presente ponencia discute contra estos postulados, y para ello analiza las relecturas de los clásicos por parte de las derechas francesas de la primera mitad del siglo XX. Se argumenta aquí que tales lecturas no deben ser simplemente descartadas como una falsificación ideológica, sino que deben hacernos reflexionar sobre el vínculo, a menudo elidido por el humanismo liberal, entre legado clásico y violencia

Doctrine and Tradition in Benjamin's early Thought : A relegated Chapter in the Study of his Reception of Kant

En el presente trabajo indagamos el significado de los conceptos de "doctrina" y "tradición" en las reflexiones de Benjamin hacia 1917, íntimamente vinculados con su recepción de Kant. Los escasos análisis de tal recepción relegan este aspecto. Intentamos mostrar que estos conceptos expresan un interés por la idea kantiana de unidad sistemática del conocimiento, y sostenemos que Benjamin reinterpreta tal unidad en términos mesiánicos: ya no como un supuesto necesario, sino como una exigencia de redención. Finalmente, exhibimos de qué modo estas nociones se hallan implícitas en el escrito "Sobre el programa de una filosofía futura"

El antisemita, el liberal, la insolente y la amante. Luchas en torno de la disciplina y la autoridad en la formación del maestro argentino

Fil: Garguin, Enrique. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación; Argentina.

Conjuring Canadas: Historians and the Quest to Define a Canadian Nation and its Past, 1920-1967

This dissertation examines the various ways in which Canadian historical researchers confronted the “Canada question,” namely the challenge of defining the basis of a unified national community. In doing so, it follows the scholarship and activities of a network of historians and intellectuals centred on the Canadian Historical Review, a quarterly publication founded in 1920. This study examines their scholarship with the aim of identifying not only the various solutions they posed to the problem, but also the philosophical undercurrents that informed their reasoning in the process. It also traces the rise of a rival network in the Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, a French-language historical publication founded in 1947 that by its very existence posed a significant challenge to the definition of the nation at the core of the Canadian Historical Review. This dissertation argues that the network bound together by the Review was engaged in a hegemonic project, one that sought to present a particular definition of Canada through a historical narrative that rested upon a liberal logic. Yet the greatest sustained challenge they faced in this endeavour emerged from Francophone historical scholars, who, although proposing vastly different Canadas to those imagined at the Canadian Historical Review, came under the sway of a number of liberal currents of thought as well. A detailed summary of the key traits of these liberal Canadas is found in the conclusion.

Resilience and the ‘everyday’: beyond the paradox of ‘liberal peace’

Over the last decade there has been a shift towards critical understandings of ‘liberal peace’ approaches to international intervention, which argue that local culture holds the key to the effectiveness of peace interventions. In this ‘bottom-up’ approach, peace, reconciliation, and a ‘culture of law’ then become secondary effects of sociocultural norms and values. However, these liberal peace critiques have remained trapped in the paradox of liberal peace: the inability to go beyond the binaries of liberal universalism and cultural relativism. This understanding will be contrasted with the rise of ‘resilience’ approaches to intervention – which build on this attention to the particular context of application but move beyond this paradox through philosophical pragmatism and the focus on concrete social practices. This article clarifies the nature of this shift through the focus on the shifting understanding of international intervention to address the failings of the ‘war on drugs’ in the Americas.

Law and Original Contract in the Republican Thought of Immanuel Kant

This article discusses the concept of right and its identification with the power to coerce, to show a reciprocity between the original contract and the right, as a manifestation of the reciprocity between moral law and freedom, as Kant states in its Second Critique. The demonstration of this view will allow a republican stance evident in the legal and political thought of Kant, since the right of a people can only exist while the town itself is unified to enact.

Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics and the Controversy of the Russian Propaganda Laws: is the IOC Buckling Under the Pressure of its own Incoherence in Thought?

The Sochi Winter Olympics were a triumph in the eyes of Russia and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Yet, a controversy around the introduction of anti-propaganda laws in Russia that had been criticised for being discriminatory marred the efforts of the IOC to fulfil its self proclaimed aspiration of ‘encouraging the harmonious development of man’. This article discusses the controversy utilising a legally pluralist approach to sports governance, and providing a critical reading of the practices of neoliberal globalisation that marked the issue of sexuality at the Sochi games. The paper argues that the legal influence of the IOC on domestic and international legal norms is contradictory and inconsistent. This, when considered alongside the aspirations of the IOC is significantly problematic and demonstrates the importance of investigating the underlying power structures of this influential international governing body.

The Essay as Art Form

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.