No description available.

No description available.

This thesis describes René Girards mimetic theory of desire and explicates its relevance for a critique of consumerism, emphasizing the loss of identity that can result from mimesis in a consumer society. It first presents Girards theory of desire, giving special attention to its implications for identity development. It then discusses more directly both his limited, explicit treatment of consumerism and the unspoken ways in which his theory can elucidate the situation of the consumer, focusing on how consumer society may manage to prevent the violence that often results from mimetic contagion, but does nothing to prevent what Girard calls metaphysical desire. Finally, it turns to Girards analysis of novelistic and Christian conversions and suggests how these may be seen as salvific alternatives to consumerism. I hope thereby to develop an effective tool for critiquing consumer society and for advocating Christian compassion and humility as the means of allowing identities stunted by consumerism to flourish.

This thesis examines the role of Reason-guided reason-giving in the deliberative democratic arena as a response to the theories of Iris Young, Chantal Mouffe and Lynn Sanders. I will aim to do two things. First, I will trace some path of logic-centered political philosophy and understand the role of reason as both subject and object in this genealogy. Secondly, and in the final sections I shall move to articulate the role of Reason, explicitly, in democratic philosophy. The theory that I will put forth is that the privileging of Reason, or of Reason-guided reason-giving, should be the ultimate standard for deliberative democratic discourse.

This thesis argues that, contrary to some prevalent intuitions, national borders are not being rendered obsolete by the increasingly global or deterritorialized character of social and political life. Rather, as state sovereignty becomes less and less anchored to geographic territory, borders have replaced land as an interpellative strategy with which states construct a demos or public over which power can be exercised. State borders work to supply this public with a coherent and homogenous national-political identity that frames, and in many contexts occludes, the articulation of specific heterogeneous identities within that public. <p> Of course, borders by themselves do not do anything. I argue that political geography and political anthropology commit a serious mistake when they treat borders as independent things or processes that act upon individuals and peoples. Borders are not extra-personal third parties to the interactions of persons. Rather, they are instances of bordering, the discursive activity through which subjects articulate difference in ways that construct their identities in relation to others. However, borders appear as independent agents because they have been separated from other operations of bordering-- and, most importantly, from the bordering subjects themselves-- by processes of alienation, objectification and abstraction. Consequently, the articulation of national-political identities occurs primarily by means of a suppression of the concrete subjects whose life-activity in fact structures-- and is deeply structured by-- these identities.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.