> Against this postmodernism,
> there is an effort to shore up the primary premises, to establish in
> advance that any theory of politics requires a subject, needs from the
> start to presume its subject, the referentiality of language, the
> integrity
> of the institutional descriptions it provides. For politics is
> unthinkable
> without a foundation, without these premises. But do these claims
> seek to
> secure a contingent formation of politics that requires that these
> notions
> remain unproblematized features of its own definition? Is it the
> case that
> all politics, and feminist politics in particular, is unthinkable
> without
> these prized premises? Or is it rather that a specific version of
> politics
> is shown in its contingency once those premises are problematically
> thematized?
If there is no "subject," i.e. no being with a capacity for self- determination, and no "referentiality of language," i.e. no "language" that "refers" to and can embody truths about say the intent and premises of others, how, without self-contradiction, can it then be implicitly claimed that there is such a "subject," namely one able to rationally self-determine ("know") the intent and premises of others, "problematically thematize" "those premises," and then express in "language" the rationally self-determined truths it has reached about the "referent" of this language, i.e. "those premises"?
Ted