Critically Linked DiscourseNet

Chantal Mouffe (1940 – ) is a contemporary Belgian political theorist, a well-known public intellectual, and a prolific writer. As the co-author of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), Mouffe can certainly be considered a classic theorist of democratic politics and of – a term she helped coin – the ‘political’. In her work, Mouffe takes issue with what she calls the domination of neoliberal ideology in contemporary politics and argues passionately against the rationalist model of democratic politics embraced by the likes of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls. Even more intriguingly, unlike Ernesto Laclau, her partner both in life and in her professional career, Mouffe has rigorously applied her thinking to topics in international relations, delving on the contradictions of the liberal internationalist project and foreseeing negative consequences for the development of our global order. In Episode 5 of our podcast, together with Pieter Maeseele (University of Antwerp) and Seongcheol Kim (University of Bremen) we discuss On the Political, published in 2005, and Mouffe’s latest piece, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution. Left Populism and the Power of Affects from 2022. We explore questions such as: What is the difference between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’? Are we witnessing a deepening of ‘antagonisms’ globally? What’s next for the liberal international order in the face of war and unstable multipolarity?

Karl Marx (1818–1883), the 19th century philosopher, is remembered as many things: a revolutionary, a political activist, a journalist, and the father figure of Marxism, which is a theoretical approach in the social sciences and the humanities alike. Marxism is also the political ideology defining what we now refer to as the Left in politics. Rather ignominiously, it also spawned some of the harshest dictatorships in human history under the label of Communism. So, Marx, who died rather young for a philosopher, managed in this relatively short lifespan to create a truly indelible mark on human culture. In today's episode, together with our guests, Ana Deumert (Cape Town University) and Christian Chun (University of Massachusetts Boston), we discuss chapter 10 ‘The Working Day’, from Volume I of his Capital, published in 1867. Among the questions we explore are the following: What does Marx' concept of 'surplus labour' still mean today? Have we grown out of practices such as child labour? How does 'overwork' feel for an academic? Join us on Critically Linked to find out what answers we have for you, and what the Capitalist 'vampire' means to Marx.

Ernesto Laclau’s writings in post-Marxist thinking have given us many enduring concepts: antagonism, hegemony, the logic of equivalence, and the logic of difference. Society, Laclau argued, was not a closed project, but always an open one. Almost 40 years after the publication of his book (with Chantal Mouffe) – ‘Hegemony and socialist strategy: Towards a radical democratic politics’ (1985) – what can Laclau’s philosophy still teach us? Together with Eva Herschinger, a discourse analyst and one of the first authors bringing Laclau’s thinking to International Relations, and Thomas Jacobs, assistant professor at the Université St. Louis, Brussels, and author of newly published book ‘Hegemony, discourse, and political strategy. Towards a post-Marxist understanding of contestation and politicization’ (2022) we unravel this question and ask many more: What is antagonism? How is it related to identity? Are we doomed to antagonize each other? Join us on Critically Linked (link below) and find out what answers we have for you.

Most of the 5 to 6 million Ukrainian refugees in Europe are women and children. Under the banner of “Women, life, freedom” women are marching at the forefront of protests in Iran. Women are demanding their right to education in Afghanistan. Women protest the striking down of Roe and the constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. Amid such challenges, one question emerges almost by necessity: Are we witnessing a resurgence of the ‘woman’ question? Together with Kaushalya Perera, Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Marco Verweij, Professor of Political Science at Jacobs University Bremen, we discuss in today’s episode John Stuart Mill’s (1806 – 1873) seminal essay 'The Subjection of Women' (1869). Is Mill’s uncompromising critique of women’s legal enslavement still something that speaks to us even today, 150 years later? In today’s episode we explore possible answers to this question together with an updated critique of Mill’s text. Join us on Critically Linked and find out more about it!

In this first episode of Critically Linked, we sit down with Michael Kranert, Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Southampton, UK, and Andrew Jones, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, to discuss the relevance of Immanuel Kant’s thinking in today’s world. In an article published in 2018, Jamaican-born philosopher Charles W. Mills (1951 – 2021) tried to develop what he called a “black radical Kantianism”. Questioning Kantian universalism, Mills attempted to reappropriate in his writing Western liberal concepts from an Afromodern viewpoint. Is Kantian ethics a valid framework for today’s world? Can we still hope to achieve peace in international relations by following Kant’s famous articles from his 1797 essay “Towards Perpetual Peace”? Questions, answers, and more questions are all available in this first episode of a podcast series sponsored by DiscourseNet, the Association for Discourse Studies. Join our discussion on Critically Linked!