Subjectivities

2012 and 2013 saw two UN Special Rapporteurs visit (SR) Canada. In May of 2012, Olivier de Schutter, the
Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food visited Canada, as did James Anaya, the Special Rapporteur on the
rights of Indigenous peoples in October of 2013. Both released reports that condemned the Government of
Canada for specific inadequacies and failures with regards to Indigenous policies. Remarkable here is the
marked difference in the responses to these two reports by the Government. While surface-level explanations
have been offered throughout the media, more interestingly, the two cases offer an opportunity to reflect on how
indigeneity, or the Indigenous Subject, are governance devices mobilized at the international level.

This paper argues that the Indigenous Subject mobilized by the SRs in their reports, and the responses to those
reports, reproduce an colonized subject that has been promulgated through international law and settler
societies to facilitate the production of the modern liberal order. We first provide context before theorizing the
production of the Indigenous Subject, and the possibilities of self-affirmation to offer emancipatory pathways out
of the contemporary colonial construction. We then discuss how the Indigenous Subject is constituted through a
human rights discourse, before using the SR reports and responses to display the difficulty in moving away from
a colonizing liberal international order.

There has been a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” viewing it as a qualitative break from the bellicose natural law tradition preceding it.  This misunderstanding is in part due to Kant’s explicitly critical comments about colonialism as well as his attempt to rhetorically distance his cosmopolitanism from traditional natural law theory.  In this paper, I argue that the necessary foundation for Kant’s cosmopolitan subjectivity and right was forged in the experience of European colonialism and the (pre-Kantian) theory it engendered.  It is in this context that we witness the universalization of subjectivity and the subjectivization of right, emerging from the justificatory needs of extra-national jurisdiction and resource appropriation.  This form of cosmopolitanism, whose emergence necessarily tracks the rise of global capitalism, continues to exert great and often uncritical influence on theories and practices of peace today.

In his book Das Recht der Freiheit (2011), Axel Honneth develops a theory of social justice that incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their reproduction. This account enables the identification of social pathologies or systemic normative deficits that frustrate individual efforts to relate their actions reflexively to a normative order and inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own. In this article I utilize Honneth’s theory in the diagnosis of a contemporary social pathology, which impedes social recognition and thereby contributes to social injustice. I argue that this particular social pathology – associated with the Second Amendment right to bear arms – has given rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which I call self-defensive. I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar cómo la teoría de la performatividad de Judith Butler posibilita pensar la capacidad de acción y resistencia de los sujetos.  Butler propone deconstruir la categoría de identidad a través de la performatividad, que nos permite pensarnos como sujetos en el límite, interdependientes y vulnerables. Al considerarnos como seres performativos y, además, vulnerables a nuestras interacciones tanto con el contexto como con las demás personas, todo cuestionamiento de las normas sociales que nos rodean llevarán irremediablemente a una transformación del propio yo. Esta transformación que comienza en nuestras propias identidades, conduce a otra manera de entender lo humano y a otra forma de plantear nuestras agencias políticas.

Palabras clave: performatividad, identidad, vulnerabilidad, exterior constitutivo, agencia, resistencia.

Der Begriff Virtualität hat eine weite Bedeutungsebene und schließt adjektivische Bezüge, historische Entwicklungen sowie subjektkonstitutive Faktoren ein. Im modernen Kontext der Konstitution von Subjektivität und deren Analyse gewinnt der Begriff der Virtualität eine komplexe Bedeutungsebene hinzu. Gemäß der Selbsmodell-Theorie der Subjektivität (Thomas Metzinger) gehört Virtualität zum mentalen Paradigma der Konstitution von Selbstbewusstsein.

Ces neuf graphes (copie d'écran de graphiques obtenus avec OpenOffice Calc) exemplifient les résultats de l'analyse semi-automatique de textes au moyen de l'A.L.S  (lire le paragraphe correspondant sur ce site Academia.edu, dans mon article : "Jean-Jacques Pinto. Application de l'A.L.S. au corpus des "Fleurs du Mal" de Ch. Baudelaire. [Research Report], Aix Marseille Université. 2005. ")

. On observe sur le corpus des Fleurs du mal quatre types de courbes :

- Des courbes mettant en évidence un profil « extraverti » (point de vue « E ») : environ 80 %

- Une courbe à profil « introverti » (point de vue « I »), celle du poème XVII « La beauté » (L'explication par l'ironie et l'antiphrase est prouvée par le contexte: le démenti apporté par Baudelaire dans le poème immédiatement suivant nommé « l'Idéal », dont la courbe est typiquement « extravertie ».

- Une courbe à profil « hésitant » pour « Les chats » (balancement dans les deux quatrains, premier tercet « I », second tercet « E »), à comparer aux courbes « extraverties » des autres poèmes « Le chat ».

- Des courbes d'allure aléatoire (près de 20 %) pour lesquelles nous tenterons de montrer le rôle joué par diverses contraintes poétiques dans le gommage de la dimension subjective mise en évidence par l'A.L.S.

Nos résultats, s'ils se trouvaient confirmés, auraient, entre autres, un impact direct sur les choix lexicaux dans les traductions de Baudelaire en langues étrangères.

. Voir ci-dessous quelques exemples de graphes...

Abstract
In this paper we juxtapose the present day Supreme Court battles over the colonial anti-sodomy provisions in the Indian Penal Code (Section 377), with everyday interpretations of carnal intercourse by kotis and jananas in order to visibilize a whole different social world of carnality. The responses to the law coming from the civil society formations (namely the LGBT rights organizations, HIV/AIDS organizations and women’s rights organizations) is the site for the formation of a modern Indian homosexual subject, one who claims her/his rights to love and privacy through the language of human rights and constitutional freedom. We argue the arrival of the modern rights bearing homosexual subject is contested by political and religious formations through discourses of sin, unnaturality and proper sexual conduct. The contestation of religious discourse through discourse of constitutional rights covers over the creative interpretations of religion provided by kotis/jananas. An analysis of the kotis/janana discourse and bodily practices reveals sexual subject formation through creative reinterpretation of notions such as sin and unnaturality. In conclusion we contend the creative interpretations of religious themes by kotis/jananas trouble nationalist religious discourses as well as the constitutional discourses of the LGBT rights movement.