Böcker av Toula Nicolacopoulos

In advancing the political project of autonomy, Castoriadis raises the fundamental question: what ought we to think? Following an interpretation of his elucidation of the connections between time, history, and the groundlessness of the world and society, this study argues for a broadening of Castoriadis's question, something which enables attention, not just to the subject matter of thinking, but also its form and the thinker's situatedness. While Castoriadis's insights may be usefully deployed both to expose the limits of inherited thought, which privileges the power of receiving meaning and value over creation and creativity, and to explore the interaction between politics and philosophy, his own approach may well represent the other equally problematic side of the Platonic tradition he criticizes. Consequently, Castoriadis's notions of radical democratic subjectivity and autonomous thinking, both of which respond to the 'ought' question, may inadvertently conform to a mode of being that can do no more than protest the dominant formalism characterising the modern Western world. At the core of this limitation lies a decisive issue for philosophy: whether the enactment of thinking is informed by the historical irruption and retreat of the visionary collective.

There is today a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural recognition of the need to reconceptualize the complexities of the global reality. In this study the authors present the view that a rethinking of Hegel's concept of Civil Society has the potential to meet this need. They argue that the standard interpretations of Hegel are largely misplaced and that a properly systemic reading of the concepts of Civil Society, the State and their relationship, has the potential to shed new light on our understandings of the normative implications of global processes ranging from the effects of economic globalization to the global activism of NGOs and social movements, to international relations and the question of global governance. The authors also engage with discussions of (global) civil society from a range of disciplines and cultural and intellectual traditions to illustrate the benefits of rethinking the Hegelian concept of Civil Society.

Without exception, everyone is called upon today to construct his/her patriotic identity as a response to the supreme imperative of our shared whiteness: 'act as if the land were initially without owners'. For white Australia, this imperative is more primordial than the usual formulation of the call to patriotism: 'be prepared to sacrifice yourself for your country', since patriotic sacrifice presupposes that one already has a country to which one is devoted. The imperative of whiteness touches the depth of our ontology since it is from this that the white collective springs as the creator of the white Australian nation-state. White Australians perpetually enter the world in so far as we faithfully obey the imperative to act as if the land were initially without owners and it is through this imperative that we cover over the question, 'where do you come from?', posed to us by the defiant resistance of Indigenous sovereign being. White Australia is therefore unavoidably implicated in the perpetuation of the nation that must act 'as if ...' or what we call the 'hypothetical nation'.

This study presents an original interpretation of the meaning and complex inter-relationship of the concepts of love, sexuality, family and the law. It argues that they should be understood as forms of interplay between the subjective and the objective, necessity and contingency and unity and difference. A comprehensive elaboration of these forms is to be found in Hegel's Science of Logic-the conclusions of which he used to organise his ethical and political thought. The argument is introduced with a discussion of the relevance of Hegel's speculative philosophy to modernity. The authors then explore the relationship between thought, being and recognition in Hegel's philosophical system and offer an interpretation of the Science of Logic. This interpretation forms the basis of a re-assessment of Hegel's treatment of love, sexual relationships, the family and law. A Hegelian account of familial love is employed to review recent debates within a range of discourses, including feminism, family law and gay and lesbian studies. As well as addressing current concerns about sexual difference and the ontology of homosexuality, the study provides a guide to reading Hegel in an original and productive way. It will be of interest to philosophers, feminists, theorists of sexualities, ethical and legal theorists.