Ontological Entanglements, Agency and Ethics in International Relations: Exploring the Crossroads by Laura Zanotti

Author:Laura Zanotti [Zanotti, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351854115
Goodreads: 39826606
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

In summary, power and freedom cannot be severed from each other. Yet the historically contingent modalities of their co-constitution must be historically and contingently explored. Both power and freedom are practices whose processes of materialization come into being with the deployment of specific apparatuses through which humans engage with, know and govern society.

Re-thinking the subject invites us to re-think “power” and thus the conceptualization of the political as a struggle of freedom/oppression. As we have seen, sovereignty and subjectivity have largely been imagined as isomorphic, opposite force masses. Thus the conceptualization of sovereignty is based upon the foundational image of a unitary, free and rational subject, and the relation between the “subject” and society is conceived as a relation of externality among entities that pits one’s sovereignty against the other’s in a struggle of freedom and power.

As I have argued earlier, simplified versions of structuralism, regardless of political traditions, rely on the same ontological starting point as methodological individualism. Notwithstanding their adoption of a Foucauldian language, by describing power (or the Empire) and subjects (or the Multitude) as entities standing in relations of externality, Agamben along with Hardt and Negri, remain embedded in the dominant substantialism of IR theory. In fact, for Hardt and Negri, the emancipation of the Multitude is imagined through the possibility of constituting itself as one “subject,” a “mass” able to counter-weight Empire.6 Similarly, while neo-Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe insightfully explore the multiple ways of exertion of hegemony, there is also a presupposition that somewhere there is an authentic sphere of subjectivity that is oppressed by the capitalist arrangements of society, and so awaits to be discovered and liberated. The notion of alienation points to an “authentic human condition” that can be made immanent through the reversals of the organizing principles of current social order. Contra these oversimplifications of both human agency and the political, Alessandra Tanesini (2004) questions both Mouffe’s (1992) position about the agonic quality of the political and Habermas’s opposing emphasis on public debates as a way of reaching consensus. Unlike Habermas, political change does not have to be confined to a rational conversation about epistemic standards. It may instead have to start with changing the social practices that made those standards possible. Furthermore, Tanesini challenges Mouffe’s conceptualization of the political as ontologically limited to an enunciative “we” that excludes the other. She proposes instead that the constitution of meaning is open ended, and that language may become a tool leading to transformation of political relations more broadly.

In conceptualizing power, Foucault distances himself from theoretical traditions where power is understood as capacity, as a form of mass that impinges on liberty. In these traditions, as we have seen, in line with a substantialist ontological imaginary, power is imagined as a quantity and a force, usually oppressive, that impedes the full potential of otherwise autonomous agents. The research agenda focuses on analyzing power’s effects on individuals imagined as ontologically free, rational and moral. These effects are assessed in terms of the

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