Humanity 4.1 is out
By Editorial Collective 03/08/13, 9:38 AMIssue 4.1, featuring the work of photographer Murtada Bulbul and a dossier on transitions and reconciliation, is now live!
> Read MoreThe peculiar Marxism of Elaine Scarry
By Kiel Brennan-Marquez 02/28/13, 7:29 AMI would also like to briefly defend The Body in Pain, a splendid, subtle book that I think offers a way around many of the snares that Moyn identifies in post-ideological politics generally, and in Rorty’s disaster-aversion project in particular. Scarry’s book has two parts. The first is about torture and war: means of “unmaking” the world.
> Read MoreAgainst political imagination
By Kiel Brennan-Marquez 02/27/13, 5:59 PMWhen I was 18 years old, about to head off for college, a friend’s father gifted me a copy of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope. His explanation was cryptic.
> Read MoreTorture and taboo
By Samuel Moyn 02/08/13, 4:15 PM
A new piece in this week's issue of The Nation considers Elaine Scarry and, through her criticism, the how and why torture has become so appalling.
> Read MoreConcluding thoughts (ICC, pt. 7)
By Samuel Moyn 01/31/13, 9:57 AMLet me conclude. In case I haven’t been clear, the political approach isn’t at all meant to undermine the enterprise or institution. True, it is analytically neutral (more so, certainly, than its three rivals). But if Judith Shklar was right, it could also provide the sole plausible and necessarily instrumental justification for the ICC, for it inquires into whether and how the institution makes the world more decent, especially insofar as it intersects other political agendas in interstate order and disorder.
> Read MorePreservation and its limits (ICC, pt. 6)
By Samuel Moyn 01/31/13, 9:51 AMA final approach is available that tends to postpone the difficult calculus of political judgment, and I’ll call it preservation. People who recognize the severe limitations of promoting and professionalizing nevertheless strategically defer, during an initial period of institution-building, what political analysis is supposed to be about: critical distance for the sake of judgment of outcomes in context. On the preservative view, the ICC is a fledgling cause that needs to be sheltered from the ordinary conditions of inquiry.
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