It perhaps represents the inevitability of competing societal structures that the hegemonic inoperability of geopolitical necessities predicate a kinetic union, a polysemic space if you will, of the risks involved in resorting to binary prevarications with which social constructs are simultaneously articulated and textualized.
Even then, the probability of descending into absolutist historiography, highly questioned -- albeit not in frontal operative fashion -- by American pragmatists, be it James or Dewey, and finds renewed voice in their quite esteemed successor, the German Habermas -- seems to have disconcertingly found a heteroglossic frame in today’s paradoxically cacophonic auto-ethnographical narrative.
For indeed, the Other now represents the empiricist embodiment of the Kafkaesque, indicating progression away from the communitarian framework Hesse elegantly formulated: “Wenn wir einen Menschen hassen, so hassen wir in seinem Bild etwas, was in uns selber sitzt. Was nicht in uns selber ist, das regt uns nicht auf.”
But that is neither here nor there.
For the problem lies in an anachronism: of the discarded but annoyingly resilient Westphalian view of nationalism, an über-nationalistic prism, that resists the pluralist universality by which the new cosmopolitan is tolerantly and freely engaging communities across the globe.
To frame aspirationally, the “Other” is the “We” from which an interpenetration, an intercourse within the “Self,” which between (or the “Between”) the dissonant undercurrents from which fascism or totalitarianism draws its élan vital, makes possible the creation of a true international community in a post-Westphalian modernity.
But is that really the case?
I remember the time, entangled in salubrious thoughts, essentializing caffeine into a bloodstream wearied by night that followed day, of the difficulty delineating heuristically the varying contesting leitmotifs of sucrose empirically possible in existence.
For my act of choosing constitutes an act of quotidian violence, mutually constitutive with other social issues confronting our consciousness. Critical pedagogy invites to the avoidance of discrimination. But exactly making a judgment (rationality is beside the point) effectively makes that particular sucrosic sachet a part of my individuality and the remaining unchosen now identifiable as the “Other?”
Faced with the ethically indefensible, I opted instead to take the café in the plainest of noir. And yet, even then, such singular iteration is a metonymic positionality which Foucault reveals to us as a catch-22 problématique, the opposite of reconceptualizing civil society within imperialist patriarchal or phalocentric performatives.
And so it goes.
Verily, a post-colonial model avoidance of gender dislocation presents a nexus of contestation with public administration theory. It is vaguely Weberian, even Gramscian. Hegel himself was wont to say:
“Eine Idee ist immer eine Verallgemeinerung, und Verallgemeinerung ist eine Eigenschaft des Denkens. Verallgemeinert Mittel zu denken.”
But the phenomenology of Hegel perhaps breaks down into a series of post-industrial dialectics. But is that what he is really saying? And is that what we really want?
For if nation states are to transcend the postulated Westphalian thinking, this occludes the need for shared interests there being no Self to rearticulate that interest. That, from the cosmopolitan viewpoint, would be the ideal, leaving as it does the outdated Kirkian or Buckleyian ideas of statehood, which certainly has no place left in the post-modern world that we allege to inhabit.
But what of the new normal that is terrorism? The answer lies in the fact that such does not exist. There is merely the idea of terrorism, a product of potential social reality that canonically creates all categories of human contact.
Here, Derrida (as well as Lacan) demonstrates such to be a residue of the coercive neo/post-realism of Huntington. Of course, he cannot be right. Tautology (along with Marxist, feminist, and queer transnational studies) tells us categorically there is no “clash of civilizations.” Because there isn’t. Period.
The deontologicalism of metaphorical thoughts, Kantian as it may seem, is actually challenging in an intersubjective cognitive sense. Thus, the shootings in Dallas, the coup attempt in Turkey, “Brexit,” the tragedy in Nice, all calibrate a collective redefining, perhaps remapping, of diasporic democracy.
Indeed, a nuanced post-humanist reading of the varying multiplicity of diplomatic, legal, conflict resolution, or remedial options constitute a post neo-liberal line of inquiry addressed as a uniformly paradigmatic schema depending on the hermeneutic: a politico-historical approach or at best structural realism? Or post-post-structural modernistic realism?
Perhaps what is needed is an alter/meta-narrative to the nation-state, one that offers a systemic diffusion of the temporality and modalities of belonging.
Indeed, a precision-based model grounded on institutionalism is radically affective towards governance if tempered with the rejection of the bellicosal, substituted by overlapping subjectivities, cultural diplomacy and integrated soft power.
The foregoing would then result in the positive redefinition of Kant’s hardline philosophy of morals, whereby society’s desires and ends are categorically subjected to imperative criteria. Here, John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” serves as a lucid guide, although not more so when normatively considered in the Popperian sense of societal openness contextually understood...
And... I ran out of crap to write.
