My Friend Wearing Girdles

Nationalism Social Sciences and the question of democracy

University of Paris Ouest Nanterre organizes on 16 and 17 December 2010 a symposium on "The humanities and social sciences from 0.1970 to 2010: Nanterre debate . My paper at the opening session, 16, from 9am to 11am, will focus on "human and social sciences and the question of democracy".

are summarized below:

If one were to characterize the work of thought in the years 1970, 1980 and 1990, we could argue as follows: theoretical thinking has developed in close relation with what was happening in the field social, and especially with the politicization of many areas of life and experience that had been until then excluded from the "political" legitimacy. This means, firstly, that the "know" there is inevitably constructed as "committed" (in different ways and often complex), from what one might call an "implication of the subject who writes in what he wrote. " And, secondly, it was necessary to turn its back on "transcendence" and "transcendental" to move decisively at the immanence and, consequently, he was necessary also to remove their hegemonic status major totalizing doctrines (Marxism, psychoanalysis ...) which tended to impose a way of reading not only unambiguous and consistent, but defined in advance and universally valid, the practices of social transformation.

It seems we are now witnessing various attempts to restore the "transcendence" and "transcendental" and to reinstitute the authority of new (or rather old) accounts as the law of the unit policy and theory. It is against this back it is urgent to reflect on the implications of the multiplicity unsurpassable social movements and the irreducible heterogeneity of temporalities policies. Can you think what stirred the social world and which underpins the formation of "groups" not in terms of convergence and unity or unification possible, but in those of diversity, differences and tensions and contradictions arising? And it does not dispense to face the formidable problem of the articulation of particular and general, local and the global?

This will enable us to ask again the question of radical politics, or, if preferred, of radical democracy.

(University of Paris Ouest Nanterre, B2, amphitheater Lefebvre, 16 and 17 December, from 9h to 19h. Admission is free but registration required).