Krisis is op zoek naar een redactiesecretaris

Als redactiesecretaris ben je verantwoordelijk het organiseren, voorzitten en notuleren van de redactievergaderingen van Krisis (circa eens per zes weken), het verdelen en monitoren van lopende redactietaken en het coördineren van het gehele redactietraject. Je beheert de mailbox en het peer-reviewplatform van Krisis en bent het centrale aanspreekpunt voor redacteuren, auteurs en peer-reviewers. Daarnaast communiceer je met de eindredacteuren van Krisis en verzorg je de digitale kanalen van het tijdschrift. Bovenal maak je deel uit van het redactiecollectief en denk je mee over de koers van het tijdschrift, de binnengekomen kopij en de inzet van aankomende themanummers.

Krisis is een onafhankelijk academisch tijdschrift dat open access publiceert. De redactie van Krisis bestaat uit academici verbonden aan verschillende universiteiten binnen Nederland én daarbuiten. Aangezien de publicaties van Krisis vrij toegankelijk zijn en de redactie zich vrijwillig inzet, draait het blad een kleine boekhouding. Per verschenen nummer krijgt de redactiesecretaris een vrijwilligersvergoeding van € 800,-. De secretaris is zo’n 2 uur per week kwijt aan mailcorrespondentie, zo’n 6-8 uur per redactievergadering (en het voorbereiden daarvan) en zo’n 20 uur aan het publiceren van een nummer. Al deze taken zullen in nauwe samenwerking met de redactie uitgevoerd worden. De redactie wil ervoor waken de redactiesecretaris een coördinerende (en niet een eindverantwoordelijke) rol te geven. Krisis verschijnt in de regel twee keer per jaar. De redactievergaderingen vinden doorgaans plaats in Amsterdam. De communicatie binnen de redactie verloopt overwegend in het Engels.

De redactiesecretaris heeft affiniteit met de hedendaagse politieke, sociale en cultuurfilosofie, evenals met de “missie” van Krisis. Daarnaast is het van belang dat de redactiesecretaris het leuk vindt om mee te draaien en bij te dragen aan het redactieproces, en dat de redactiesecretaris organisatorisch en administratief bekwaam en betrokken is. Ervaring met digitale media en platforms is een pre, evenals relatieve zekerheid dat je voor tenminste een jaar en het liefst langer beschikbaar bent.

Ben je geïnteresseerd in deze functie, mail dan je motivatie en relevante cv voor 12 juni 2020 naar info@krisis.eu.

Introduction Krisis 2019-1

This new issue of Krisis covers a wide array of subjects that are close to the aims and legacy of our journal. This issue includes reflections on contemporary political developments both on the international stage and with regards to more local levels, paying attention as well to the academic milieu in which many of our readers and contributors find themselves. As critical reflections on any of these developments presuppose a self-reflective attitude towards the means, potentials and ends of critique, it is no coincidence that the aforementioned topicalities are accompanied in this issue by engagements with central concepts and thinkers from the social, political and cultural philosophical traditions in which Krisis inscribes itself. Indeed, given the ways in which we are confronted with political agendas that hardly could be described otherwise than as “regressive,” the very title of our journal once again proves to be timely, just as the invocation of critical thought that is central to all of our contributions.

This issue contains a dossier of five essays on the topic of “Shame and Citizenship in Democracy,” which results from a workshop held at the University of Amsterdam in October 2017. Jill Locke’s essay discusses how the trope of the child is used in the public debate about the current President of the United States: Donald Trump. Josef Früchtl’s contribution analyzes the emergence of the Wutbürger and argues for the political potential of impertinence. Three shorter essays by Darryl Barthé, Lisa Koks & Natalie Scholz, and Tessa de Vet further engage with the relation between shame and democracy.

Furthermore, two articles are included in this issue. In Annemarije Hagen’s contribution she argues that political struggles do not have to rely on an account of the good life, but rather aim at the contestation of the limits of articulated universals. Ivana Perica’s article considers Jacques Rancière’s critique of Hannah Arendt’s thought, and aims – against Rancière’s own position – to bring both thinkers together and show the resonances between their projects.

Speaking of resonance, two interviews found their way to this issue. Our editors Robin Celikates and Thijs Lijster discussed Hartmut Rosa’s work on the concept of “resonance” and other topics with the author himself. Anna Blijdenstein’s conversation with Cécile Laborde on its turn engages with topics such as liberalism and religion, secularism, tolerance, and immigrant integration in Laborde’s oeuvre.

Three review-essays found their way as well to this issue. Didier Fassin takes issue with Chantal Mouffe’s call for a Left populism. Willem Halffman discusses the legacy of the 2016 Maagdenhuis occupation at the University of Amsterdam as represented in two publications, and Sigmund Bruno Schilpzand and Tom Kayzel discuss Bruno Latour’s Reset Modernity-project.

Six further book reviews complete this issue. Alma Apt discusses the Dutch translation of Isabell Lorey’s Regierung der Prekären; Natasha Basu reviews Natasha King’s No Borders; Corrado Fumagalli assesses Ryan Muldoon’s Social Contract Theory for a Diverse World; Hans Radder engages with Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle’s Socrates tenured; Paul Raekstad discusses Elizabeth Anderson’s Private Government; and Robert Sinnerbrink reviews Aesthetic Marx, edited by Johan F. Hartle & Samir Gandesha.

Introduction

On the occasion of Karl Marx’s 200th birthday this year, numerous conferences, edited volumes and special issues have celebrated his work by focusing on its main achievements – a radical critique of capitalist society and an alternative vocabulary for thinking about the social, economic and political tendencies and struggles of our age. Albeit often illuminating, this has also produced a certain amount of déjà vu. Providing an occasion to disrupt patterns of repetition and musealization, Krisis proposes a different way to pay tribute to Marx’s revolutionary theorizing. We have invited authors from around the globe to craft short entries for an alternative ABC under the title “Marx from the Margins: A Collective Project, from A to Z” – taking up, and giving a twist to, Kevin Anderson’s influential Marx at the Margins (2010). The chief motivation of this collaborative endeavour is to probe the power – including the generative failures – of Marx’s thinking by starting from marginal concepts in his work or from social realities or theoretical challenges often considered to be marginal from a Marxist perspective. Rather than reproduce historically and theoretically inadequate differentiations between an ascribed or prescribed cultural, economic, geographic, intellectual, political, social, or spatial centre and its margins, the margins we have identified and inspected are epistemic vantage points that open up new theoretical and political vistas while keeping Marx’s thought from becoming either an all-purpose intellectual token employed with little risk from left or right, or a set of formulaic certitudes that force-feed dead dogma to ever-shrinking political circles.

We have welcomed short and succinct contributions that discuss how a wide variety of concepts – from acid communism and big data via extractivism and the Haitian Revolution to whiteness and the Zapatistas – can offer an unexpected key to the significance of Marx’s thought today. The resulting ABC, far from a comprehensive compendium, is an open-ended and genuinely collective project that resonates between and amplifies through different voices speaking from different perspectives in different styles; we envisage it as a beginning rather than as an end. In this spirit, we invite readers to submit new entries to Krisis, where they will be subject to our usual editorial review process and added on a regular basis, thus making this issue of Krisis its first truly interactive one. The project is also an attempt to redeem, in part, the task that the name of this journal has set for its multiple generations of editors from the very beginning: a crisis/Krise/Krisis is always a moment in which certainties are suspended, things are at stake, and times are experienced as critical. A crisis, to which critique is internally linked, compels a critique that cannot consist simply of ready-made solutions pulled out of the lectern, but demand, in the words of Marx’s “credo of our journal” in his letter to Ruge, “the self-clarification (critical philosophy) of the struggles and wishes of the age”.

Mapping the New Right Wave

Liberal democracy today is in crisis, or, more accurately, in a state of siege. Not only in the United States but in much of Europe and in many nations across the globe, we are witnessing the advent of a new era of antidemocratic politics, much of it with increasingly authoritarian features.

— Wendy Brown, Peter E. Gordon, and Max Pensky, Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018)

How to respond to the rise of the new right as it expands with electoral gains and rhetorical force in the public domain? The Dutch writer Henk van Straten recently likened the dilemma to being caught in a wave, heading somewhere dangerous, yet feeling unable to change its direction. The image of citizens seized in a right-wing wave refers both to those attracted to elements of right-wing politics, as well as those repulsed by it but unable to find anchors for resistance or imagining viable alternatives.

The figure of the wave emphasizes aspects of the new rights’ effective organizational and communicative practices. It shapes how the new right is discussed as a symptom, a threat, a result of prior forces, or a warning for future developments. It also affects the process and form of resistance. For individuals and collectives, experiencing the new right as a wave informs how they feel empowered or helpless in relation to it, how hopes and fears become articulated and embodied, and so on.

While the description and experience of the new right as a wave seems ubiquitous across different political settings and shared in many countries, its specific meanings and functions diverge in each context – and depending on the perspective taken. An incumbent government will articulate the wave-like character of the new right differently than a member of a right-wing youth movement; for a union member in Brazil the ‘new right wave’ means something different than for a union member in the Netherlands.

How to critically deconstruct the wave as a way of describing and experiencing this political moment? How to explore its vital elements? How can we see across different local settings without losing a sense of their specificities? In addition to reflections on the figure of the wave as a particular way of framing the current political moment, we invite academic or artistic contributions that map the rise of the new right from an (inter)national comparative perspective, with a specific emphasis on responses and (the problems of) resistance in each setting. Shorter essays with a regional focus are welcomed as well.

The formats of the contributions can vary from (peer-reviewed) articles (5000-8000 words) to essays (2000-5000) and book reviews (1500-2500). Abstracts can be submitted here until June 30th 2019. See here for additional information on submissions.

Boekpresentatie

Op maandagavond 11 juni presenteert Gijs van Oenen zijn nieuwe boek Overspannen Democratie. Hoge verwachtingen, paradoxale gevolgen, in Spui 25, van 20-21.30u. Er is een discussiepanel bestaande uit de hoogleraren politicologie Sarah de Lange en Tom van der Meer; de gespreksleiding is in handen van Irena Rosenthal. Het boek is inmiddels al in de winkel verkrijgbaar! Wie wil komen: het is gratis, wel even aanmelden.

Donations

Krisis still is a completely independent online journal, without any ties to big publication companies and factories of knowledge. This independence means that we remain dependent on your donations. Although Krisis is a non-profit enterprise, we are in need of a small annual budget for our platform to stay afloat. To keep the quality of our contributions as high as possible, Krisis works with a paid editorial assistant and a paid proofreader (while the editorial board is happy to self-exploit). Without your donation, Krisis cannot subsist. Therefore, we hope that you – reader, contributor, supporter – are willing to donate a small (or larger) amount to Krisis to secure our financial future: we need you! Donations can be sent directly to our bank account at IBAN NL33INGB0005172630.

Introduction

While super-hurricane climate and super-offensive politicians are tying up news headlines, the new issue of Krisis brings together philosophical perspectives on urgent political issues. Our first article explores the interrelation between philosophy and activism head-on, when Joost Leuven analyses the role of theory in contemporary animal rights advocacy. Against the backdrop of social research suggesting that animal rights advocates are often weary of taking clear philosophical positions, Leuven argues as to why the articulation of philosophical theory should be an intrinsic aspect of the practice of advocacy. With similar exigency, Michiel Bot’s work focuses on the case of Dutch politician Geert Wilders’s employment of ‘giving and taking offense’. Bot examines one of the architects of modern political rhetoric and demonstrates the enduring salience of Adorno and Marcuse for the 21st century. The article by Pieter Lemmens and Yuk Hui focusses on two philosophers that have recently waded into the discussion of the Anthropocene, Stiegler and Sloterdijk, and explores their Heideggerian inheritance. This exploration prompts serious questions as to whether Stiegler and Sloterdijk have convincing answers to the Anthropocene’s moral and political challenges.

In addition, Rob Ritzen interviews philosopher Chiara Bottici, author of A Philosophy of Political Myth and Imaginal Politics. As the imaginal’s power – be it fake-news, digital propaganda or conservative utopias – becomes more and more visible, Bottici’s work attempts to build a philosophical framework for investigating the role of images and narratives in politics.

As part of our review section, Sudeep Dasgupta considers Gloria Wekker’s book White Innocence against the backdrop of current politics of race, Matthijs Kouw presents the Dutch geophilosophical work Water by René ten Bos, and Temi Ogunye reviews Alejandra Mancilla’s cosmopolitan exploration of The Right of Necessity. Finally, Marc Tuters discusses Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s Cartographies of the Absolute in relation to Fredric Jameson’s legacy.