However, in post-communist societies ethnic or national identity is above all a device for defining the community of the innocent and identifying the guilty who are responsible for 'our' predicament. p.174
"The self cannot be thought without the other, but rather is linked to the other in a relationship of mutual recognition and responsibility."
These writings are intended as a contribution to a renewed democratic discourse, one that can be disentagled from the disillusions bred by recent neoconservative rhetoric and the cheap flattery of cynical demagogues of right-wing populism. That discourse must confront the meaning of the state and of its cohabitation with corporate power. Facing up to the state means recognizing that the dominant forms of power in the society, both public and private, are inherently antidemocratic in their structure and objectives and that if democracy is to be practiced and extended, teh conditions of politics will have to be transformed. (1989)
...it would turn the genealogist of resentment on his head by exploring democratic politics as a medium through which to expose resentment and to encourage the struggle against it. And it would turn periodically to thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx...;to locate the myriad ways and means by which the twin drives to mastery and realization have lodged themselves inside modern formations; and to listen to subdued sounds of strife and resistance emanating from these integrated systems of modern thought. p.175
On the featured image Géricault, Théodore. The Raft of the Medusa. 1818–1819. Oil on canvas, 491 cm × 716 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.Museum Collection: Musée du Louvre, Paris - Department…
Conversely, a story only holds genuine meaning for us because it mirrors the actual structure of our lived experience. Every narrative relies on temporal coordinates—beginnings, crises, endings, and the weight of waiting—which directly correspond to our mortal condition.
I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings. p.47
