I was ploughing through some academic article on the political/legal philosophy of Jacques Derrida and Giorgoi Agamben and their relationship to Nietzsche on the plane last night. I was reading the article ('Spectres of Nietzsche: Potential Futures for the Concept of the Political in Agamben and Derrida' by Adam Thurschwell because of this post on The State of Exception, but I cannot recall where I found the article.
There was a passage I found interesting and puzzling. It talked about the absolute break between the ethical and the political in, I presume, late modernity. I say absolute because the sense of the passage and others similar to it was of an unbridgeable gap between the ethical relationship and any given form of politics. This absolute break, gap or gulf is accepted as a given by both Derrida and Agamben.
Why so I thought. Is it because of positivism? Or nihilism? Then I recall Menzies collection of War time speeches, The Forgotten People, with its appeal to people in small business or who come into politics as individuals, bearing particular character qualities.These people were of good character, they saw themselves as virtuous, and it was because they saw themselves as virtuous, as having particular character qualities that they believed that they were the backbone of the nation, and hence fit to govern and hold political power.
There is no great divide between ethics and politics there .
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 14, 2005 08:22 PM | TrackBack