Tag: political philosophy

Congratulations, You’re Included! Now, You’re Under Arrest: Arendt and Colonial Forms of Rightlessness

This paper offers a critique of Hannah Arendt’s account of the “right to have rights” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). While accepting Arendt’s claim that rights depend upon political belonging rather than humanity alone, it argues that her framework fails to capture rightlessness produced through coercive legal inclusion. The argument draws on Irene Watson and Sharon Venne’s critique of state-administered Indigenous rights, using the criminalisation and over-incarceration of Indigenous Australians to demonstrate that recognition by law does not necessarily restore political standing. Instead, colonial law can render Indigenous peoples visible primarily as subjects of policing and punishment while denying their authority as self-determining peoples. The paper concludes that Arendt’s account, including her analysis of assimilation, is sensitive to exclusion and defective belonging. Yet, settler-colonial rightlessness reveals a limitation: having rights requires not merely belonging to a political community but belonging as a people capable of self-determination.

Essentialised Disruption? Rancière, Catholic Drag, and the Police Order

Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics concerns what is sensible—that is what is visible, sayable, intelligible, and perceptible in a specific social order. This provides a framework for examining how aesthetic acts by marginalised peoples might reshape their position within society. In this essay, Mia Bock evaluates Jacques Rancière’s claim that aesthetic acts shape experience to create new modes of perception and forms of political subjectivity through a case study of a queer Catholic drag performance. Bock argues that although Rancière successfully demonstrates how aesthetic acts facilitate political subjectivisation through an agent’s enactments of their inherent equality, this does not mean that disruption necessitates a redistribution of the sensible. While aesthetic acts may indeed render excluded subjects visible, they do not always entail new intelligible possibilities. Where marginalised identities are already understood through stereotypes of disruptiveness, aesthetic disruptions may be interpreted as confirming rather than reconfiguring existing modes of perception.

Environment: Wilderness, Home, Commodity

By taking a reflective approach to her relationship with the environment, Mira Gibson intersects William Cronon’s article ‘The Trouble of Wilderness’ (1996) with Steven Vogel’s paper ‘Marx and Alienation from Nature’ (1988) to explore her relationship with the environment. Through this reflection, she investigates what she means by ‘environment’ and the implications of this on her ethical life. Then, she situates the possibility for environmental change within the social networks of labour.

Capital Punishment as a Categorical Contradiction of our Duty to Respect Other Humans

In this paper I argue that Immanuel Kant’s positions on the death penalty as a justified form of punishment and on universally owed respect are incompatible, both in practice during Kant’s lifetime, and conceptually. This contradiction is identified between concepts presented in two parts of Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals, and while both sections have different focus areas within the broader field of ethics, their respective subject matter is intended to occur within the same universal system of philosophy. As such, identifying this incongruency in Kant’s system suggests that his concepts of either punishment or respect may not be adequately justified.