由於長期以來根深蒂固的誤解，馬克思的哲學往往被視為一種「經濟決定論」的主張--經濟決定了社會、文化與政治等一切其他領域；此一誤解之必然結果是：「馬克思的國家學說」也被當作國家理論中最典型的「工具主義」--國家是資產階級用來進行階級宰制的工具。為了釐清這點，本論文之作者嘗試性地自「歷史社會學」的角度切入，說明馬克思的研究進路 其實與當代一般歷史社會學學者的研究進路無異，都是自歷史傳承與社會脈絡等眾多複雜的面向來了解「國家自主是否自主」的多種可能性：國家既不是現代資產階級手中的簡單工具，也不是能夠完全獨立於社會之外的政治實體。其次，自馬克思國家學說本身的哲學基礎，即所謂「歷史唯物論」看來，政治與經濟之間的關係也非單向決定的因果關係，而是呈現著 多種不同面向的辯證互動關係，因此也造成了馬克思有關國家自主性的學說中之兩種不同論述：「寄生性國家」與「工具性國家」。本文從馬克思論國家的本質、起源及其與社會的關係開始說起，再逐步論及「寄生性國家」與「工具性國家」這兩種論述中的各種「國家」類型，包括「東方專制主義」、「專制君主制」、「波拿巴主義的國家」、「工具國家在英國 」以及「工具性的國家在法國」等，可以說完整地梳理出馬克思國家學說的發展脈絡，並充分說明它其實就是一種有關國家的歷史社會學。 目 錄 第一章 序言 第一節 研究動機…………………………………………002 一之一：國家研究的歷史發展………………………………………002 一之二：馬克思主義與國家研究……………………………………005 第二節 論題形成的脈絡…………………………………010 二之一：馬克思論「寄生性國家」與「工具性國家」………………011 二之二：馬克思的歷史唯物論與國家研究…………………………019 第三節 研究進路的問題…………………………………025 三之一：歷史社會學的研究進路與國家研究………………………026 三之二：馬克思與「以國家為中心」的國家研究進路………………035 第四節 論述架構與研究限制…………………………041 四之一：論述架構……………………………………………………040 四之二：研究限制……………………………………………………047 第二章 歷史唯物論與國家 第一節 馬克思的歷史唯物論…………………………058 一之一：歷史唯物論與「經濟決定論」………………………………058 一之二：歷史唯物論與整體性觀點…………………………………063 第二節 馬克思論述人類歷史的發展………………072 二之一：分工、所有制與歷史………………………………073 二之二：國家自主性與國家的形式…………………………………080 第三節 小結…………………………………………………085 第三章 寄生性國家 第一節 東方專制主義的社會經濟基礎……………089 一之一：東方專制主義與「亞細亞生產模式」的概念………………089 一之二：東方專制主義國家自主性的形成…………………………095 第二節 向資本主義社會過渡中的專制君主制…100 二之一：專制君主制的歷史背景……………………………………100 二之二：專制君主制中的階級關係與國家自主性…………………105 第三節 波拿巴主義與法國歷史………………………110 三之一：法國歷史中的國家傳統……………………………………110 三之二：波拿巴主義的階級、意識形態因素與國家自主性………116 第四節 小結…………………………………………………122 第四章 工具性國家 第一節 資產階級與工具性國家………………………127 一之一：資產階級的形成……………………………………………127 一之二：資產階級與工具性的現代國家……………………………132 第二節 工具性國家在英國與法國…………………138 二之一：英國資產階級工具性國家的形成…………………………138 二之二：法國資產階級工具性國家的形成…………………………143 第三節 小結…………………………………………………148 第五章 總結與評估 參考文獻…………………………………………………………154 人名索引…………………………………………………………163 主題索引…………………………………………………………170 / For many decades, Marxian philosophy was usually misunderstood as a doctrine that is primarily "economically determinstic", ie., economy determines the social, cultural, and political spheres. What is the corollary of this misunderstanding is that Marxian Doctrines on the State had become one of the most typical types of Instrumentalism among the theories of the state and that state is the instrument of class domination in the hands of the capitalists. In order to clarify this long-term misunderstanding, the author of this thesis try to find his revelation in contemporary Historical Sociology, and to demonstrate the Marxian approaches to the state is no different from the approaches of many Historical Sociologists. Historical Sociology has shown its constant attempts to understand the diverse possibilities of state autonomy from the perspectives of historical heritage and social context. According to this viewpoint, state is neither the simple instrument in the hands of the capitalists, nor a political entity that can be totally isolated from the society. Secondly, in the light of Marxian Historical Materialism, the relationship between politics and economy is not an one-way causation. As the ultimate foundation of the Marxian doctrines of the state, Historical Materialism makes it clear that politics and economy are mutually and dialectically interactive, and this vigorous interaction provides us the two possible doctrines of the state, that is, parasite state and instrumentalist state. This thesis started from the formulations of the nature, origin of the state and its relations to the society, then the author gradually focus upon a "typology" of the state which can be shown in the two Marxian state doctrines, these types including "Oriental Despotism", "Absolutism", "Bonapartism", "Instrumentalist State in England", and "Instrumentalist State in France". The author not only gave an overall exposition of the development of the Marxian doctrines of the state, he also sufficiently proved that the doctrines constitute in fact some kind of historical sociology of the state.

當代哲學家紀傑克以他對於政治與文化現象的拉岡式解讀而聞名，但他哲學中的核心母題是什麼？對紀傑克而言，哲學不是使人「安然棲身」的論述，而是跟陌生感與他異性更緊密相關。所以，在紀傑克的眼中，哲學家的工作，不在於提供具體的解決方案，而是在於「新問題的創造」，重塑爭論的框架本身。 　　這篇研究中，筆者使用「系統與他者」這組概念，來彰顯紀傑克的兩大核心母題，其一，便是在有限性的範圍之內主張的自由，其二，則是他對新穎與變化的追索。「他者」使得系統能夠不斷重新定向，並向根本的變化保持開放。 　　「脫節狀態」是紀傑克用以描述主體之基本自由的概念。主體活動不被自然或文化的任一方決定；於是，所有主體所作的系統整合，都是一種與他者建立暫態平衡的嘗試，而所有用以整合的意指活動，都是一種對於他異性的回應，一種安身立命的奠基姿態。 　　簡言之，所謂「象徵界與實在界的不協調性」，在紀傑克的術語中不是消極的意涵，而是積極的意涵：它使得意義建構得以開始，並且是人類自由的根源。透過「系統」與「他者」的互動，思想總是有能力重新定向，藉此維持其鮮活與彈性，而這正是紀傑克式主體在現今政治情境中所致力實現的。 / Contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek is well-known for his Lacanian reading on political and cultural phenomena, but what is the central motif of his philosophy? For Žižek, philosophy is not some discourse to make people feel “being at home”, but rather something more related to foreignness and otherness. In Žižek’s eyes, What a philosopher really does is not providing substantial solutions, but rather “inventing new problems”, reshaping the framework of argumentation itself. 　　In this thesis, ”System and other” is the term I introduce to thematize two central motifs in Žižek’s philosophy: the first motif is his tireless assertion of freedom within the realm of finitude, and the second one is his relentless seeking for innovations and changes. “Other” is what enables the system to continuously re-orientate itself, and keep the system open to fundamental changes. 　　Žižek uses “Out-of-jointedness” to describe the fundamental freedom of the subject, neither nature nor culture can determine the subject. Every system organized by the subject is an attempt to create a transient balance with the other, and every totalizing signification is s a response to the otherness, the founding gesture of situating the subject itself into a meaningful context. 　　To sum up, Žižek does not use “Inconsistency between the Symbolic and the Real” as a negative term, but rather a positive term, it is the very starting point of meaning construction, and the ground for human freedom. Through the interaction between ”system and other”, the thought is always ready for re-orientation, therefore the thought is kept alive and flexible, and this is exactly what a Žižekian subject wants to accomplish in the present political situations.

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This study examines intricately related questions of consciousness and learning, textually-mediated social coordination, and human relationships within nature, anchored in the everyday life practices and concerns of a remote First Nation community in the Treaty 9 region. Through the use of Institutional Ethnography, community-based research and narrative methods, the research traces how the ruling relations of land use planning unfold within the contemporary period of neoliberal development in Northern Ontario. People’s everyday experiences and access to land in the Mushkego Inninowuk (Swampy Cree) community of Fort Albany for example, are shaped in ways that become oriented to provincial ruling relations, while people also reorient these relations on their own terms through the activities of a community research project and through historically advanced Indigenous ways of being. The study examines the coordinating effects of provincially-driven land use planning on communities and territories in Treaty 9, as people in local sites are coordinated to others elsewhere in a complex process that serves to produce the legislative process called Bill 191 or the Far North Act. Examining texts, ideology and dialectical historical materialist relations, the study is an involved inquiry into the text process itself and how it comes to be put together. The textually mediated and institutional forms of organizing social relations—effectively land relations—unfold with the involvement of people from specific sites and social locations whose work is coordinated, as it centres on environmental protection and development in the region north of the 51st parallel. A critique of the textually mediated institutional process provides a rich site for exploring learning within the context of neoliberal capitalist relations and serves to illuminate ways in which people can better act to change the problematic relations that haunt settler-Indigenous history in the contemporary period. The work asks all people involved in the North how we can work to address historic injustices rooted in the relations and practices of accumulation and dispossession. The voices and modes of governance of Aboriginal people, obfuscated within the processes and relations of provincial planning, must be afforded the space and recognition to flourish on their own terms.

This study examines intricately related questions of consciousness and learning, textually-mediated social coordination, and human relationships within nature, anchored in the everyday life practices and concerns of a remote First Nation community in the Treaty 9 region. Through the use of Institutional Ethnography, community-based research and narrative methods, the research traces how the ruling relations of land use planning unfold within the contemporary period of neoliberal development in Northern Ontario. People’s everyday experiences and access to land in the Mushkego Inninowuk (Swampy Cree) community of Fort Albany for example, are shaped in ways that become oriented to provincial ruling relations, while people also reorient these relations on their own terms through the activities of a community research project and through historically advanced Indigenous ways of being. The study examines the coordinating effects of provincially-driven land use planning on communities and territories in Treaty 9, as people in local sites are coordinated to others elsewhere in a complex process that serves to produce the legislative process called Bill 191 or the Far North Act. Examining texts, ideology and dialectical historical materialist relations, the study is an involved inquiry into the text process itself and how it comes to be put together. The textually mediated and institutional forms of organizing social relations—effectively land relations—unfold with the involvement of people from specific sites and social locations whose work is coordinated, as it centres on environmental protection and development in the region north of the 51st parallel. A critique of the textually mediated institutional process provides a rich site for exploring learning within the context of neoliberal capitalist relations and serves to illuminate ways in which people can better act to change the problematic relations that haunt settler-Indigenous history in the contemporary period. The work asks all people involved in the North how we can work to address historic injustices rooted in the relations and practices of accumulation and dispossession. The voices and modes of governance of Aboriginal people, obfuscated within the processes and relations of provincial planning, must be afforded the space and recognition to flourish on their own terms.

Taking as its starting point Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s theses on liberalism and war, and Dillon and Reid’s extensive engagement thereof, this thesis offers a critical conceptualization of drones and drone warfare. I argue that deployment of drones specifically over and against bodies and communities in conflict zones in and between Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, and until recently, Libya, is the material practice of a legal and political doctrine and precedent that has been established and policed most prominently by the United States and its military and intelligence apparatuses since the end of the Cold War. This novel precedent, however - due to its necessarily mutually constitutive relationship with a perceived danger said to be emerging from specific spaces, bodies, and communities in the decolonized and still-colonized worlds - locates its ontological and thus political genealogy in the anthropological knowledge that legally justified the (in)humanity of peoples and communities in these spaces during the era of high imperialism that lasted roughly from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. I theorize this as a mode of political, tragic nihilism through a reading of some key theories of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Nietzsche and specifically, their import to the field of critical security and international relations theory. I demonstrate that the semiotic image of the drone is a highly pertinent point of departure through which we can understand these political stakes of strategic discourses enunciating the imperatives of both the Revolution in Military Affairs as well as recent global counterinsurgency/counterterrorism operations, specifically as they relate to claims about what it is drones are said to productively offer such militaristic projects. Ultimately, I argue that it is through the semiotic image of the drone as a clean, precise tactic that furthers the strategic goals of counterterrorism to target specific bodies that we can begin to politically theorize a particularly malignant political nihilism symptomatic of contemporary liberal societies. However, I also suggest that it is through Nietzsche’s politics of nihilism that we can begin to think about radical critical interventions that resist such a dangerous mode of politics. / Graduate

This Sierra Leone Conflict arose from the society’s failure to institutionalize the requisite post-conventional organizing principle for collective will formation and for conflict resolution. In this post-traditional society - one artificially constructed from diverse political and cultural groups, without a shared ethos – only mutual (communicative) understanding can resolve differences and ensure solidarity. A lack of mutual understanding overburdens the adaptive capacity of the society, creating crises tendencies. Repression only intensified these tendencies, ensuring their eventual catastrophic explosion, 11 years civil conflict. State hindrances to social (communicative) interaction rendered the society incapable of realizing the requisite post conventional moral learning i.e. the social intelligence or problem-solving equipment required to resolve conflict, decolonize itself, neutralize normative power, shed dogmatic consciousness, change oppressive conventions, and influential customs. Thus, the study promotes civic virtues of post conventional morality (justice, truthfulness, moral rightness) as the key for liberating the society from its crisis-inducing colonial organizing principle. As the basis of sociology, the discipline the remains focused on society-wide problems, the theory of social evolution is adopted here to reconstruct the crisis in Sierra Leone’s constitutional democratic development. The study uses the rational reconstructive method to explicate problematic validity claims of norms, policy decisions, or the social order. The social order was rendered crisis-ridden because the reasons - the axis around which mutual understanding revolve - adduced for it cannot admit of consensus. The emerging social disintegration exemplifies use of deficient logic in social interaction, one below the requisite categorical moral cognitive consciousness. For this research, colonization is not necessarily externally induced, but forms of understanding in the political, legal, social, and educational interactions. The key point of the study is this: today Sierra Leone achieves solidarity, and decolonize from its conventional organizing principle, only if the state, economy, and civil society can find their limit in the socio-cultural domain.

This Sierra Leone Conflict arose from the society’s failure to institutionalize the requisite post-conventional organizing principle for collective will formation and for conflict resolution. In this post-traditional society - one artificially constructed from diverse political and cultural groups, without a shared ethos – only mutual (communicative) understanding can resolve differences and ensure solidarity. A lack of mutual understanding overburdens the adaptive capacity of the society, creating crises tendencies. Repression only intensified these tendencies, ensuring their eventual catastrophic explosion, 11 years civil conflict. State hindrances to social (communicative) interaction rendered the society incapable of realizing the requisite post conventional moral learning i.e. the social intelligence or problem-solving equipment required to resolve conflict, decolonize itself, neutralize normative power, shed dogmatic consciousness, change oppressive conventions, and influential customs. Thus, the study promotes civic virtues of post conventional morality (justice, truthfulness, moral rightness) as the key for liberating the society from its crisis-inducing colonial organizing principle. As the basis of sociology, the discipline the remains focused on society-wide problems, the theory of social evolution is adopted here to reconstruct the crisis in Sierra Leone’s constitutional democratic development. The study uses the rational reconstructive method to explicate problematic validity claims of norms, policy decisions, or the social order. The social order was rendered crisis-ridden because the reasons - the axis around which mutual understanding revolve - adduced for it cannot admit of consensus. The emerging social disintegration exemplifies use of deficient logic in social interaction, one below the requisite categorical moral cognitive consciousness. For this research, colonization is not necessarily externally induced, but forms of understanding in the political, legal, social, and educational interactions. The key point of the study is this: today Sierra Leone achieves solidarity, and decolonize from its conventional organizing principle, only if the state, economy, and civil society can find their limit in the socio-cultural domain.

El propòsit d'aquesta tesi es fonamenta en demostrar que el producte és un mitjà de comunicació social del que les persones es serveixen comunicativament -en funció del seu caràcter simbòlic- que permet a l'ésser humà interactuar amb el seu món social, cultural i personal. Aquest treball explica el paper que els productes juguen com a mitjans de comunicació social. La tesi parteix del fet que les pràctiques socials produeixen significat i sentit en la cultura material, partint de la proposició pragmàtica de que cada interpretació necessitat un determinat context que aporti significat i sentit als productes. Mitjançant la definició d'un model d'anàlisi "pragmàtico-etnogràfic" i la seva aplicació al estudi del producte telèfon mòbil, aquest treball mostra com per comprendre el significat d'un producte, cal valorar les pràctiques i accions socials que els signifiquen: posar l'atenció en l'anàlisi de la significació generada per les relacions establertes pel binomi producte i usuari. / The intention of this thesis is to demonstrate that the product is a medium of social communications which people use to communicate -as a function of its symbolic character- which allows human interaction between social, cultural and personal realms. The thesis explains the role that products play in social communication. The thesis shows the fact that social practices provide meaning and sense in the materialistic culture, from the pragmatic proposition that each interpretation needs a certain context which contributes significance and sense to the products. By means of the definition of the analytical model "pragmatic-ethnography" and its application to the study of the mobile telephone, this work confirms that in order to realize the significance of a product one has to evaluate the actions and social practices in which they matter: put the attention of the analysis to the significance generated by the relations established by the binominal product and user.

How might ‘the digital’ be conceived of in an ‘expanded field’ of art practice, where ontology is flattened such that it is not defined by a particular media? This text, together with an installation of art work at the Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores University (13-24 March), constitutes the thesis submission as a whole, such that in the practice of ‘reading’ the thesis, each element remains differentiated from the other and makes no attempt to ‘represent’ the other. In negating representation, such practices present a ‘radical’ rethinking of the digital as a differentiated in-itself, one that is not defined solely by entrenched computational narratives derived from set theory. Rather, following Nelson Goodman’s nominalistic rejection of class constructs, ‘the digital’ is thus understood in onto-epistemic terms as being syntactically and semantically differentiated (Languages of Art 161). In the context of New Zealand Post-object Art practices of the late 1960s, as read through Jack Burnham’s systems thinking, such a digitally differentiated ontology is conceived of in terms of the how of practice, rather than what of objects (“Systems Aesthetics”). After Heidegger, such a practice is seen as an event of becoming realised by the method of formal indication, such that what is concealed is brought forth as a thing-in-itself (The Event; Phenomenological Interpretations 26). As articulated through the researcher’s own sculptural practice – itself indebted to Post-object Art – indication is developed as an intersubjective method applicable to both artists and audience. However, the constraints imposed on the thing-in-itself by the Husserlian phenomenological tradition are also taken as imposing correlational limitations on the ‘digital’, such that it is inherently an in-itself for-us and thus not differentiated in-itself. To resolve such Kantian dialectics, the thesis draws on metaphysical arguments put forward by contemporary speculative ontologies – in particular the work of Quentin Meillassoux and Tristan Garcia (After Finitude; Form and Object). Where these contemporary continental philosophies provide a means of releasing events from the contingency of human ‘reason’, the thesis argues for a practice of ‘un-reason’ in which indication is recognized as being contingent on speculation. Practice, it is argued, was never reason’s alone to determine. Instead, through the ‘radical’ method of speculative indication, practice is asserted as the event through which the differentiated digital is revealed as a thing-in-itself of itself and not for us.