The e aim of this article is to cultivate Schmitt’s concept of the political, employing a funcional-systematic framework which was formulated in German sociology and social philosophy. By way of Luhmann’s systems theory and Habermas‘ systemising reconstruction of Weber’s conception of spheres of value, a model of intensity is worked out, which is constituted by two concepts: differentiation and politicisation. Whereas the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann is significant for the final delineation of the political as a system, Habermas’s Kantian differentiation of culture grounds the semantics of politicisation. This semantics also exploits considerations about re-distribution and recognition, with particular attention on Nancy Fraser’s “perspectival dualism”. The reason for cultivating Schmitt’s concept of the political is to develop the political as an independent concept which is an alternative to a conception that concentrates the political in politically active or activated civil society.
Readers of Levinas are often puzzled by the move from the ethical to the political. The ethical relation is that of the face-to-face. It is marked by inequality and exclusivity. The political, however, is characterized by equality and universality. Since the Enlightenment, its ideal has been a justice that is no respecter of persons; the touchstone of the political has been equal justice for all. How, then, are we to move from the ethical to the political? Does Levinas provide us with a way to mediate between the two? The very notion of mediation presupposes that there are levels that intervene between the individual and the political. For Levinas, such levels are provided by the family. This, I argue, is the import of Levinas’s account in Totality and Infinity of the erotic origin of society. In the final sections of this article, I draw out the implications of Levinas’s account of fecundity for the concept of the political.
The paper discusses the uses of the concept of the political in both feminist political theory and mainstream postfoundational political theory, and its implications for feminist political theorizing today. In feminist theory, the concept primarily emerged as a counter -reaction to the disputed foundations of feminism, the subject of women. The political was identified with contingency and contingent foundations; however, no thorough exploration of the term was carried out within the field of feminist theorizing. The mainstream postfoundational political theory rests in identifying political difference, i.e. a difference between the ontic level of politics and its foundations on ontological level. I introduce Mouffe’s notion of agonism as an exemplary normative theory of political difference. Next to it I juxtapose Jacques Rancière’s approach which attempts to undermine the distinctions on which ontological political differences are based. His account of politics seems to point beyond ontologization of politics and, instead, focuses on the immanent plane of politics, in which the given, the visible can be merely recomposed. In conclusion I link his account to that of Linda Zerilli’s political judgment, and argue for a feminist political philosophy and theory without the need for a purified founding concept of the political., Ľubica Kobová., and Obsahuje bibliografii