Summary
Political theorist whose work A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler uses at both ends of its argument: her phrase for Jews’ “continuing paranoia of extinction” (PDF p.33) and her account of democratic iteration and “jurisgenerative politics” in Another Cosmopolitanism (2006) (footnote 38, PDF p.71-72).
Details
- Benhabib defines “jurisgenerative politics” as “cases of legal and political contestation in which the meaning of rights and other fundamental principles are reposited, resignified and reappropriated by new and excluded groups, or by the citizenry, in the face of new and unprecedented hermeneutic challenges and meaning constellations” (Another Cosmopolitanism, 148, quoted PDF p.72).
- Her central illustration is “L’Affaire du Foulard” (from 1989): French-Muslim schoolgirls wearing hijabs to public school forced what the French state wanted to view as a private symbol into the shared public sphere, tracing a productive “disjunction between law as power and law as meaning” (49) (footnote 38, PDF p.72).
- Her March 2004 Tanner Lectures at Berkeley were published as Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford University Press, 2006) (footnote 38, PDF p.71).
- Her critique of Parting Ways, “‘Ethics without Normativity and Politics without Historicity’”, Constellations 20, no. 1 (2013): 150–63, is cited at PDF p.33 and listed in the Bibliography (PDF p.80).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, Ceremonial law, Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig