Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-m9kch Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-02T16:20:02.457Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Second interlude: Towards a discursive understanding of human agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2009

Roland Bleiker
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
Get access

Summary

The kind of critique we need is one that can free it of its illusory pretension to define the totality of our lives as agents, without attempting the futile and ultimately self-destructing task of rejecting it altogether.

The task of articulating such a critical position on human agency towered over the entrance to this book and has never ceased to be its main puzzle, a cyclically reccurring dilemma, the issue with which each chapter had to struggle. How can we understand the processes through which transversal dissident shapes contemporary global politics? Where is this fine line between essentialism and relativism, between suffocating in the narrow grip of totalising knowledge claims and blindly roaming in a nihilistic world of absences? How to walk along this narrow path without taking a fatal step, either to the left or to the right, into a bottomless epistemological pit? How to deal with the death of God, to make a clear break with positivist forms of representing dissent without either abandoning the concept of human agency or falling back into a new form of essentialism?

We have now arrived at the point where some preliminary answers to these difficult questions are called for. A series of theoretical and practical inquiries into transversal struggles have suggested that human agency can still be exerted and conceptualised, even at a time when global politics is characterised by a multitude of increasingly complex cross-territorial interactions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×