May 3, 2008
The lack of democracy in contemporary liberal democracy has given rise to many calls for the reinvention of the category of the political. Many say that this is an imperative and unavoidable task. Gabriel Riera, in this review of Antonio Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time, observes that::
Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics.
He adds that instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.
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