ABSTRACT
The collection presents a platform for dialogue between theorists and researchers engaged in more specific area studies, geopolitical studies, political theory or historical accounts of international politics. Finally, therefore, the book draws on a number of philosophical writers and presents a variety of theoretical ideas related, primarily, to the interpretive study of IR, whose work has sometimes been touched upon, but not fully contextualised by the dominant modes both of positivistic and post-positivist thought. Some branches of critical or radical thought have fetishised or exoticised particular writers, with an added currency being given to those who align themselves with, for instance, the body of work by this scholar or that theorist without fully contextualising the value or importance of other writers in the field. Our aim is to open the door more widely to some of those writers. This may be thought to reify traditions or ‘schools’ of thought as dominant hegemonies with very concrete fixed boundaries within the discipline. The editors and contributors to this volume have very much sought to avoid this, and although the concept of ‘tradition’ is relevant to interpretive thought as a starting point for identifying relations between concepts and influence in theory, the contributions to this collection never slip into the kind of objectification of specific traditions that the writing of R.G. Collingwood or Michael Oakeshott would seem to support. To recognise that there is a sustained debate between Gramsci and the successors of the Frankfurt School, or between Heidegger and Gadamer on the one hand and Derrida and Deleuze on the other, does not require an ontology that freezes the idea of tradition uncritically. There are many established authors who have explored, and who continue to explore, traditions within what is often labelled post-structuralism around very specific approaches and methods. The obvious examples in IR are writers drawing on the work of Foucault and on structural linguistics and discourse analysis. Our contribution does not reject Foucauldian scholarship in IR out of hand. But there is a tendency to identify post-structural research in IR primarily with Foucault, and often with specific aspects of Foucault’s work. No philosophic influence in IR better illustrates the idea of liquid modernity that Bauman has suggested, for Foucault was extraordinarily diverse in his work, and became one of the most potent critics of some of his earlier work towards the end of his life. Foucault’s contribution to IR has been valuable, but his work is perhaps too easily simplified or rendered down to a few conceptions – genealogy, governmentality, biopower, discourse, power/knowledge – which do not do justice to the sophistication of his ideas and the caution with which he expressed them. Foucault himself came to doubt the ways in which his ideas could become a formula, as the elderly Marx famously stormed out of a First International meeting in London crying ‘If that is what you call marxism, then I am not a marxist!’ Other interventions linked to the linguistic turn, to aesthetic understanding, to uses of narrative, to meetings of mind between critical theory and phenomenology, to different ways of reading the relation between theory and practice and to different ways of disrupting established approaches (including some of those derived from Foucault) have been marginalised because of the
exclusivity afforded to one particular theorisation of radical IR. Different contributors have different views of the value of Foucauldian IR, but all agree on the value of refreshing the resources of contemporary critical IR by looking also elsewhere. This is also valuable because there has always been much dialogue between the branches of philosophy represented here, much of which is rarely acknowledged in International Relations per se. Our purpose is, therefore, to open the doors of IR to this broader agenda of debate, not to reject anything. This debate has been further stimulated by work by Roland Bleiker and Stephen Chan, and by others who do not appear in this volume, to develop approaches that have come to be labelled the ‘aesthetic turn’, a strategic move to think critically about aesthetics as a form of knowledge as well as an attention to art objects of different kinds as focus points for the interrogation of ethical and critical thinking about IR very broadly defined. Note that it is an explicit purpose of much of this discussion to move away from the conventional boundaries of ‘what counts’ as IR. And this has attracted a diversity of contributions –from Christine Sylvester (1999), Peter Mandaville (2003), Cynthia Weber (2006) and others as well as some of the contributors here. The interest generated by the aesthetic turn has done much to reinvigorate debate about exactly what research in the discipline of IR should focus upon, what its parameters are and how it can draw on debates in continental philosophy associated with hermeneutics. Similarly narrative interventions, particularly those that ably highlight how history can be employed by scholars of world politics, have provided a rich terrain for scholars at the cutting edge of the discipline, although much of this work has yet to filter into the mainstream. In both cases, however, it is important to recognise the philosophical traditions associated with these interventions, perhaps highlighting the significance of largely neglected philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur, in IR. His work is touched upon in a number of places throughout this collection, given the importance of his contribution to theories of narrative and hermeneutics. Equally it is important to recognise that continental philosophy itself also filtered eastwards, impacting on the development of social theory and aesthetics in Russia, for example. In all this, our concern has been to look at work in the phenomenological tradition, but also that which has emerged from critical theory (taking that loose phrase to embrace both Frankfurt School and Gramscian thought). The editors (but not necessarily the contributors) share a common view of the relations between these two bodies of thought. That is that, although there are some very clear differences between them, there have also always been overlaps. From the work of Alfred Schutz (1967) in 1930 to the critical response to the Holocaust and the evenements of 1968, critical theorists and postmodernists, existentialists and those drawn to more activist debates on environment, feminism, sexuality and alternative visions of global order have drawn extensively on the conversation between the two bodies of ideas. These studies therefore represent a stage in the conversation between the postmodern arguments drawn from phenomenology and the ‘late modernity’ of critical theory, although each of the authors
has their own way through that discussion, and we have not sought to direct them in how they might take it forward. We have to apologise for the omission of some writers we would have liked to include. Pragmatic reasons affect this too: Routledge, our publishers, have generously supported this project from the start, but they were never going to allow us an unlimited number of pages. Apart from Ricoeur, who gets a number of mentions in these chapters, we might easily have included a number of other writers. We did not include Pierre Bourdieu, although his influence reaches across all the humanities, or Giorgio Agamben, whose work is becoming a significant influence, although in a longer edition we would have counted both ‘in’. Edith Stein’s (1997) humanistic phenomenology would have made a compelling accompaniment to her contemporary, Arendt, offered an important critique of Heidegger and forming an interesting contrast to the parallel work of Patočka, but she too is missing. Karl Jaspers, Husserl, Bachelard and Sartre all have claims on our attention – even if they are all relatively unfashionable now – but the impact of their work is felt in this volume through their influence on others. There are many more discussions of Spivak, Rorty and Chomsky’s influence in IR, and for that reason they are not represented here, but we would have certainly included them with good will if we had had more space. We offer some excuse for not including chapters on the illuminating work of Judith Butler (2006) or the ethical achievement of Martha Nussbaum (2007) in going well beyond Rawlsian liberalism in her recent work – both are still writing, and have extended their work directly into the field of IR in their important recent writing; we would encourage readers to follow this up for themselves. At the margins of these debates, Guy Debord, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Lacan, a range of critical realist scholars and others might suggest themselves as candidates for inclusion, but they are too marginal to phenomenology and the critical tradition to earn inclusion here, even though there are plenty of other good reasons to study them. Finally, some writers – Alain Badiou (2002) is the most obvious example – have enjoyed a recent fame that may yet justify their consideration in a collection such as this in the future, but we would withhold judgment right now on their possible impact on IR. And of course, as we have noted, there is not a chapter on Foucault in the collection, although his work does filter through many of the chapters. If we have not included writers you would prefer, we can only point to limited resources and encourage the reader to engage as fully as possible with the very wide range of contributions we have been able to include. It has been a pleasure to put this volume together. Contributors produced their work more or less to time and to a very high standard, but all the work in this edition has been read, often in multiple versions, and all has gone through several drafts. The editors thank the contributors for their patience, and the contributors, some perhaps through gritted teeth, thank the editors. Drafts of some of the papers have been circulated more widely, but all the papers have been read by both editors and often by other contributors. As a result, we have learned a lot, and we hope we have produced a much higher quality volume. The
collection has also been refereed by Routledge. This is not a question of something as mundane as ‘quality control’. It is also an attempt to practise what the volume preaches in terms of the development of understanding through collective exchange of ideas and through shared critical endeavour. That said, at the moment of putting the collection together in its final form, the editors are aware of the considerable work that all the contributors have done to make this a compelling debate that is more than the sum of its parts because many of the different chapters speak effectively to each other.
