Sacrifice : Michael Sawyer

The late Chinua Achebe, in his magisterial work of fiction, Things Fall Apart, employs the opening of Yeat’s “Second Coming” as the epigraph and as inspiration for the title to his most well known work of fiction. Yeats writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; To begin this. . .


Sacrifice : Michael Sawyer

The late Chinua Achebe, in his magisterial work of fiction, Things Fall Apart, employs the opening of Yeat’s “Second Coming” as the epigraph and as inspiration for the title to his most well known work of fiction. Yeats writes:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; To begin this. . .


Sexual Difference : Joan Copjec

In the mid-1970s a global warming began to melt the icy resistance of feminists to psychoanalysis. Yet only a decade later signs of another climate change in the relations between feminism and psychoanalysis were already apparent. Teresa de Lauretis, in her ground-breaking book, Technologies of Gender, articulated the slogan under which the reverse. . .


Sexual Difference : Joan Copjec

In the mid-1970s a global warming began to melt the icy resistance of feminists to psychoanalysis. Yet only a decade later signs of another climate change in the relations between feminism and psychoanalysis were already apparent. Teresa de Lauretis, in her ground-breaking book, Technologies of Gender, articulated the slogan under which the reverse. . .


Sharia : Ali Benmakhlouf

The “divine law,” the so-called “Sharia” in the Arabic language, refers not only to legal theories in the Islamic world, but mainly to an epistemic and methodological way of life: “The Sharia was as much a way of living and of seeing the world as it was a body of belief and intellectual play. Jurists and philosophers express very explicitly the idea that the divine law is not found . . .


Sharia : Ali Benmakhlouf

The “divine law,” the so-called “Sharia” in the Arabic language, refers not only to legal theories in the Islamic world, but mainly to an epistemic and methodological way of life: “The Sharia was as much a way of living and of seeing the world as it was a body of belief and intellectual play. Jurists and philosophers express very explicitly the idea that the divine law is not found . . .


Skepticism : Peter Nicholls

In choosing “skepticism” as a concept to address here, I’ve taken a cue from a well-known passage in Nietzsche’s Will to Power where he complains of philosophers that “they have trusted in concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest . . .


Skepticism : Peter Nicholls

In choosing “skepticism” as a concept to address here, I’ve taken a cue from a well-known passage in Nietzsche’s Will to Power where he complains of philosophers that “they have trusted in concepts as completely as they have mistrusted the senses: they have not stopped to consider that concepts and words are our inheritance from ages in which thinking was very modest . . .


Survival : Gil Anidjar

“I must repeat,” Primo Levi famously insisted, “we, the survivors, are not the true witness.” Out of this unusual claim or insight, Levi did more than his share in dedicating his life and works to a reflection on the witness, the true or complete witness, and on testimony. It should not be surprising therefore that, himself a paradigmatic figure, witness to the witnesses, Levi did not have. . .


Survival : Gil Anidjar

“I must repeat,” Primo Levi famously insisted, “we, the survivors, are not the true witness.” Out of this unusual claim or insight, Levi did more than his share in dedicating his life and works to a reflection on the witness, the true or complete witness, and on testimony. It should not be surprising therefore that, himself a paradigmatic figure, witness to the witnesses, Levi did not have. . .


Torture : J.M. Bernstein

“For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering. . .


Torture : J.M. Bernstein

“For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering. . .


Translation : <

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of . . . set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the. . .


Translation : <

Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of . . . set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the. . .


Triumph : Jacques Khalip

In a passage early on in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, the narrator pauses to observe the novel’s young protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, deep inside a performance of a Beethoven piano sonata. Apparently fascinated by her low-grade grasp at passion, the narrator administers a deflating blow to Lucy’s triumph of life: She was no dazzling exécutante; her runs . . .


Triumph : Jacques Khalip

In a passage early on in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View, the narrator pauses to observe the novel’s young protagonist, Lucy Honeychurch, deep inside a performance of a Beethoven piano sonata. Apparently fascinated by her low-grade grasp at passion, the narrator administers a deflating blow to Lucy’s triumph of life: She was no dazzling exécutante; her runs . . .


Trump : Joan Wallach Scott

Is “trump” a political concept in the sense that Adi Ophir has defined it?—as a “unit of mental representation,” a linguistic performance that “tries to explain, to present and to express the essence of what the concept refers to.” Is it, pace Koselleck, more than a word? He writes, “In use a word can be unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order . . .


Trump : Joan Wallach Scott

Is “trump” a political concept in the sense that Adi Ophir has defined it?—as a “unit of mental representation,” a linguistic performance that “tries to explain, to present and to express the essence of what the concept refers to.” Is it, pace Koselleck, more than a word? He writes, “In use a word can be unambiguous. By contrast, a concept must remain ambiguous in order . . .


University : Anat Matar

The modern university is undoubtedly heir to the Platonic academia and the universities of the Middle Ages. But it is the dramatic development of this institution from its pre-modern phase to its modern and then post-modern stages that motivate this essay’s focus on the liberal university, as it was shaped in the eighteenth century and then crystallized over the nineteenth. . .


University : Anat Matar

The modern university is undoubtedly heir to the Platonic academia and the universities of the Middle Ages. But it is the dramatic development of this institution from its pre-modern phase to its modern and then post-modern stages that motivate this essay’s focus on the liberal university, as it was shaped in the eighteenth century and then crystallized over the nineteenth. . .


Usury : Peter Szendy

Usury is certainly not a thing of the past. It even invited itself recently into the American presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders delivered a major speech in New York City Town Hall on January 5th, 2016, turning the word into one of his battle cries: We have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and. . .


Usury : Peter Szendy

Usury is certainly not a thing of the past. It even invited itself recently into the American presidential campaign, when Bernie Sanders delivered a major speech in New York City Town Hall on January 5th, 2016, turning the word into one of his battle cries: We have got to stop financial institutions from ripping off the American people by charging sky-high interest rates and. . .


Violence : Richard Bernstein

There is a disturbing paradox about violence. We are overwhelmed by talk and images of violence, and there is now a vast literature about the different types, ranging from child abuse, domestic violence, rape, serial murder, suicide bombing to the use of the new sophisticated robotics and drones as weapons for killing. The paradox is that although (or perhaps because). . .


Violence : Richard Bernstein

There is a disturbing paradox about violence. We are overwhelmed by talk and images of violence, and there is now a vast literature about the different types, ranging from child abuse, domestic violence, rape, serial murder, suicide bombing to the use of the new sophisticated robotics and drones as weapons for killing. The paradox is that although (or perhaps because). . .


Violence : Uday S. Mehta

Violence challenges analytical focus because of its ubiquity and multifarious forms. We are longer embedded within an extant framework of meaning in which violence can claim virtuosity as an act to be identified and judged by itself—in the manner of the Homeric world. Violence today is embedded in a world of reasons. It must have or be. . .


Violence : Uday S. Mehta

Violence challenges analytical focus because of its ubiquity and multifarious forms. We are longer embedded within an extant framework of meaning in which violence can claim virtuosity as an act to be identified and judged by itself—in the manner of the Homeric world. Violence today is embedded in a world of reasons. It must have or be. . .


Editorial Statement

Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon is a multidisciplinary, web-based journal that seeks to be a forum for engaged scholarship. Each lexical entry will focus on a single concept with the express intention of resituating it in the field of political discourse by addressing what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept. Each entry will. . .


Editorial Statement

Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon is a multidisciplinary, web-based journal that seeks to be a forum for engaged scholarship. Each lexical entry will focus on a single concept with the express intention of resituating it in the field of political discourse by addressing what has remained unquestioned or unthought in that concept. Each entry will. . .