Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society

Alessandro Ferrara, Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023

Marjan Ivković — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editorial Introduction

Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky, Elisabeth Becker, Milica Resanović — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Editorial Introduction

Civil Society IV: Democratic Solidarity and the Non-Civil Scaffolding of the Civil Sphere

Galen Watts, Mervyn Horgan — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A defining feature of what Alexander calls Civil Society (CS) III is its separation—analytic and empirical—from the putatively non-civil spheres of the family, schools, and associational forms which lack public communicative intent and comprise CS I. While critical to the progress of CST as a research program, with this separation and delimited conception, civil sphere theorists may miss a key insight of CS I regarding the mutual interdependence of spheres. Although civil codes, institutions, and interactional practices may have their “natural” home in the civil sphere, their emotional and normative force, and their survival over time, depend upon their ancillary institutionalization in non-civil spheres. Families are key to democratic socialization. Schools cultivate democratic dispositions through citizen-formation, inducting students into their nation’s democratic traditions. And through civic action and civic interaction orders prejudices are challenged, and citizens become open to new forms of incorporation. Using the case of contemporary American democratic culture, we survey scholarship on political polarization and social capital’s decline in the US, and argue that the discord characteristic of contemporary America’s civil sphere arises, in part, from these non-civil spheres. That is, the erosion of democratic solidarity and basic norms of civility originate in democratic deficits in those non-civil spheres that scaffold the civil sphere.

Membership, Migration, and Inclusion in the Civil Sphere

Peter Kivisto, Giuseppe Sciortino — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we explore the intersection of migration, membership, and inclusion through Civil Sphere Theory (CST), the most powerful theory currently available for explaining social solidarity in modern, differentiated societies. While CST has amply proven its worth by deepening our understanding of social solidarity and civil repair within established polities, it has insufficiently addressed the boundaries that define inclusion and exclusion in the context of migration. We open the article by reconceptualizing immigration as the crossing of geographical, political, and symbolic boundaries. This perspective shifts the focus from linear processes of inclusion to the dynamic interplay between national membership, citizenship, and the civil sphere. Drawing on CST’s nuanced approach to cultural and social boundaries, the paper makes explicit how in the contemporary world, national and civil memberships are tightly coupled. Concerning migration, the civil sphere must consequently mediate between the formal inclusivity of liberal-democratic ideals and the bounded character of national belonging. We further advance a critique of CST’s limited attention to citizenship, emphasizing how citizenship remains a key conduit for universalizing national membership. To conclude, we identify the engine of potential membership change in the tension between social and symbolic boundaries embedded in differentiated societies. This approach bridges migration studies and cultural sociology, providing some preliminary insights into the mechanisms involved in civil incorporation.

The Civil Sphere and its Resilient Tribalist Discontents: A Muslim Ban Cloaked in Sacralized Binaries

Daniel Joseph Belback — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores how primordial, tribally rooted bonds become sacralized within the Civil Sphere (CS), challenging prevailing assumptions about the sphere’s inertial universal horizon. Through a structuralist- hermeneutic analysis of communicative and regulatory institutions surrounding the Trump Administration’s Muslim Ban (2017–2021), the study reveals how exclusionary, anti-civil policies become legitimized within ostensibly civil frameworks. Central to this dynamic is a paradox within the CS, wherein the discourse of liberty inherently justifies repression when targeted groups are represented as threats to democratic universality. This analysis demonstrates the persistence of a “tribal solidaristic horizon,” rooted in primordial ties to blood, land, and religion, strategically mobilized through civil motives, relations, and institutions to narrow solidarity. The Muslim Ban initially faced fierce opposition, characterized by widespread protests and judicial scrutiny framed by civil binaries profaning the ban as un-American, anti-democratic, and unconstitutional. Subsequent iterations adapted strategically to these cultural binaries, gaining legitimacy through orderly, procedural implementation. This strategic civil rebranding exemplifies how primordial ties—grounded in race, place, and religious identity—continue to shape and constrain the civil sphere, facilitating democratic backsliding through the relativization and manipulation of civil motives, relations, and institutions. Ultimately, the study extends Civil Sphere Theory by underscoring vulnerabilities to relativization of core cultural binaries, highlighting that resilience in democratic societies requires critical recognition of how civil discourses themselves can be co-opted to legitimize exclusion. The Muslim Ban case thus reveals significant deficits in universalistic CS resilience, signaling vulnerability to sustained exclusion despite apparent civil repair.

The New Global Public: Surveillance and the Risks to the Civil Sphere

Jessica Dawson — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (1984), a galactic civilization built a super computer to answer the meaning of life. The answer, when given, is famously “forty-two”, a once both nonsense answer and one that has taken on great cache as a marker of insider nerd knowledge. Ask a computer to define the civil sphere, it would likely be able to define the binaries of hermeneutic code but it would be unable to explain why these things are meaningful to different groups. The context would escape it. This paper argues that the meaning making that results from the binary codes of the civil sphere are not compatible with a society compressed into numbers and in fact, the binaries of computer code distort meaning making into its opposite. The global nature of the public sphere through connected communications and smart devices inverts the civil sphere into making it (i.e. repressive) by enabling surveillance by anyone anywhere in the globe and therefore removing it from local context bound together by shared beliefs. To accommodate the impact of commercial surveillance enabled data collection on the civil sphere, the theory of the civil sphere must expand to consider the consequences of data collection and ordinalization through commercial surveillance – how are the binaries of the civil sphere transformed by the binaries of life reduced to data?

Rehearsing Civility: Bridgebuilding in Polarized America

Emily B. Campbell — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last decade, ever-increasing polarization has exacerbated political divisions threatening both the civil sphere and democracy itself. In the United States, concern over democracy’s future has led to the growth of self-described bridgebuilding organizations. Bridgebuilding brings people from across the political aisle together for dialogue with the aim of lessening polarization. This paper examines bridgebuilding through a detailed case study of one such organization. Drawing on observation, interviews, and participant surveys, the study describes the motivations and experiences of bridgebuilders. The paper finds that bridgebuilding allows participants to “rehearse civility” experiencing the civility and goodwill they crave in their own lives and desire for the broader society in a relatively safe and controlled setting. Rehearsing civility invites participants to invoke the civil— reaffirming social bonds, speaking to a broader sense of goodwill, in turn rehumanizing their political opponents. Though not without its limitations, the growth of bridgebuilding highlights a deep desire for civility and the experiential and affective pleasure it allows. Civility as mutual regard and as bonds to democratic institutions is considered.

The Potential for Civil Resilience. Staging Inequalities in a Stigmatized Neighborhood

Anna Lund, Rebecca Brinch, Ylva Lorentzon — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Currently, Sweden is a society marked by growing anti-immigrant sentiments and residential stigmatization. As a result, the symbolic and social gaps between in-groups and out-groups are widening. Consequently, interactions that could foster empathy and solidarity across differences have become increasingly fragile. However, artistic initiatives that counter anti-civil forces are emerging. This article focuses on theater and social inclusion by examining three interconnected elements: meaning, communication, and social change—and how they can serve as a form of civil resilience through critical reflection and recognition processes. Thus, we illuminate how theater can become a venue for social inclusion for a young, ethnically diverse audience by activating symbolic structures of meaning and emotions that recognize the inequalities present within marginalized groups and their experiences. This is achieved by investigating the professional and dramaturgical strategies employed by an artistic team establishing a new theater in a stigmatized neighborhood north of Stockholm and their efforts toward social cohesion. The analysis identifies dramaturgical strategies involving emotions, authenticity, and bodies, along with other professional strategies that work transformatively within the theater and the community, resulting in theatrical communication that allows for psycho-social identification for the audience and critical self-analysis for theater professionals, thereby holding potential for civil resilience.

‘TIPNIS somos todos’: Discourse of Indigenousness within and beyond a national civil sphere

Danny Daniel Mollericona Alfaro — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper explores the intersection of indigeneity, environmental conflicts, and global solidarities. Adopting a theoretical framework from the Strong Program of Cultural Sociology, this research examines how indigenous groups contesting environmental threats invoke a deep structure of discourse to cultivate solidarity beyond their communities at national and international levels. The TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure) conflict, where lowland Indigenous groups marched against a state-backed highway project, serves as a case study. Employing a hermeneutic approach, this study analyzes 160 op-eds and editorials from Bolivian newspapers, revealing how public discourse framed indigenous resistance within a moral structure of collectivist, environmental, and non-liberal motives. The findings contribute to understanding how the Indigenous Sphere interacts with and challenges frameworks of democracy and solidarity.

Pregled tribina i konferencija u Institutu za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju za 2024. godinu

Maja Pupovac, Tijana Uzelac — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From the Activities of the Institute / Iz rada Instituta

The End of Art, Modernism and Postmodernism

Gustavo Torrecilha — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article tries to offer a contribution with regard to the understanding of the periods of modernism and postmodernism in the arts through a Hegelian point of view. Based on Hegel’s thesis about the end of art, the article tries to show how modernism can be seen, at the same time, as both the realization and the negation of this end, for modernist art embodies the reflective character demanded by the modern spirit and at the same time it tries to resist the loss of relevance of art in the modern world. This type of art, thus, tries to be more than just an aesthetic experience by seeking to influence life and society and to reclaim for itself the primary role of expressing the truth. Postmodernism, in turn, as the negation of modernism, fully carries out Hegel’s reading on the art of his own time, accepting this loss of relevance and turning to representations that no longer have the goal of being spirit’s highest mode of self-apprehension. Postmodernism has, however, two possible readings: it can either be seen negatively, as an art that has become sterile and that demands to be accepted by institutions and the market, or positively, as an extension of the freedom achieved by modernist experimentations to every artistic production without being limited by a programmatic view. Both these readings show the intrinsic contradictions of artistic postmodernism and the role of philosophy in apprehending it.

From the Postmodern to the Metamodern: The Hegelian Dialectical Process and its Contemporarization

John David Vandevert — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article posits that postmodernism and its focus on disenchantment, subjective experience(s), and the argument for the incoherency between modernist conceptions of truth, reason, universality, progress, logic, and knowledge are exhausted and have been transcended by a flexible successor. Named “metamodernism,” this new modality addresses the polemics left in the wake of postmodernism like alienation, hyperindividualism, and the breakdown of collectivity and unity. As such, metamodernism represents a more awakened sense of the modernist search for meaning and progress, albeit supplemented with self-conscious awareness of the goal’s seemingly unattainability. However, this renewed interest in reestablishing truth, certainty, assurances of identity, self-realization progress, and reinstatement of usable modes of I/We integrality is hardly new at all. Instead, this burgeoning “metamodern” development represents the rekindling of the “negative dialectic” as previously outlined by G. F. Hegel, but now with a heightened focus on its “positive” development, that is speculative philosophy and the pursuit of sublated individuality-in-unity. In this article, I will explore this argument in four sections. I will outline Hegel’s process of alienation to reunification as elaborated in “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” the “Science of Logic,” and the “Encyclopedia of Logic.” Next, I will explore how postmodernism buckled under its contradictions, introduce the philosophy of “metamodernism,” and argue for a Hegelian reading by focusing on three elements: Ironic Sincerity, Becoming, and Self-Renewal. While only looking at three aspects of a much broader fabric, metamodernism as a cultural shift is not estranged from postmodernism but is instead given life through it.

The Forgetting of Hegel in Ernesto Laclau: An Unfortunate Disengagement

Martin Retamozo — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Ernesto Laclau criticises Hegelian dialectics for allegedly introducing the logic of necessity into Marxism, which, he argues, hinders the consideration of contingency. This article examines Laclau’s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics across various works and scrutinises his exploration of the concepts of determination, negativity, and contingency. Revisiting these concepts may offer a non-deterministic understanding of dialectics more aligned with post-foundational political thought, thereby facilitating reflection on social ontology and antagonisms. Introduction

An Absolute Hegelianism for Postmodern Times: Hegel with Lacan after Bataille and Derrida

Rutwij Nakhwa — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the Hegelian dialectical procedure of determinate negation in the Phenomenology of Spirit through the lens of “failure” in light of its critique by post-Hegelian thinkers, primarily Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. Further, this paper shows how the notion of failure remains important in the thinking of both Hegel and Bataille and discusses the Hegelian “labor of negative” as a Beckettian “failing better” in its resonance with Lacanian psychoanalytic praxis. In so doing, this paper highlights how the post-Hegelian praxis of psychoanalysis and even the “anti-Hegelian” thinking of Derrida and Bataille share certain conceptual operations with Hegel’s philosophy. The paper goes on to trace the limitations of Bataille’s and Derrida’s critiques of Hegel, especially through Bataille’s notion of “sovereignty” that he opposes to “lordship,” which he views as the central concept of Hegelianism. The paper argues that most critics of Hegel (including Bataille and Derrida) misread his notion of “absolute knowing” due to a misunderstanding of the radical difference between the transitions within the Phenomenology and the culmination of this series of transitions in absolute knowing. Through dispelling this misunderstanding, the paper argues that absolute knowing remains a crucial conceptual operator to cut through the impasses of postmodern thinking.

Lyotard versus Hegel: The Violent End of Postmodernity

Andreas Herberg-Rothe — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In the final phase of the Cold War, Jean-François Lyotard popularized the end of modernity and the dawn of a new era, “postmodernity”. But postmodernism is already over again. In the resurgence of the great empires and civilizations that perished in European colonization and European-American hegemony, the rise of the “others”, a new epoch of history is emerging that will define the entire 21st century. Lyotard’s position is characterized by three different approaches that seem to flow into each other but need to be separated: A critique of Hegel with the core assertion that Auschwitz, as a symbol of infinite suffering, abrogated his philosophy of history, and the extension of this critique to the great narratives of modernity. This is followed by a meta-discourse on the great narratives of history on the basis of linguistic-philosophical considerations (in fact a meta-meta-narrative) and, finally, the construction of an alternative great narrative, that of the individual, particular, other, of postmodernity. This latter is only ostensibly not an alternative construction because it is intimately connected to the critique of grand narratives. In all three subfields, Lyotard has made groundbreaking considerations – but their immediate connection has reversed these advances. Lyotard exchanged a totalizing discourse of the absolute through a similar totalizing discourse of the particular. We not only need a radical reversal of the concepts of Western modernity, but also of those of post-modernity and re-invent a kind of different dialectics. It must be granted to Lyotard that an abridged interpretation of Hegel could support his critique. However, it is completely disputed whether Hegel’s approach is based on a closed or an open system. The thesis presented here is that Hegel’s approach is both open and closed at the same time. A simple and illustrative example is a sine curve on a slightly rising x-axis. This wave model is closed on the y-axis, but completely open and even infinite on the x-axis. Critics and proponents of Hegel’s philosophy of history misunderstood his approach as a closed system and derived from it an “end of history” (Marx as well as Fukuyama). With Hegel, however, it can be argued that we are at the violent end of postmodernity. I wanted my text not only to attempt a critique of Lyotard and a reconstruction of the Hegelian method, but also to lay out the consequent substantive perspectives, even if they are necessarily not yet fully elaborated. In addition, I see Lyotard as an outstanding representative of post-structuralism, with whom he shares comparable problems, so that I make cross-references to similarities in this position, even if I do not treat them separately here.