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This essay is a political reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas', which examines agency and resistance in situations of political wrong. Le Guin's short story allows us to reformulate the questions of the boundaries of popular sovereignty and the opposition to general consent. These concerns will be here regarded as elements of a critique of neoliberal capitalism, in which freedom and self-realization are founded on injustices that persist because of a prevalent conception of the good life. The case of 'Omelas', moreover, challenges our understanding of resistance in revealing the blurred boundary between political action and mere noncompliance. The question asked will be about the nature of noncompliance: is noncompliance a form of resistance, and, if so, can it transform the political reality?

This essay examines and challenges some of the theoretical arguments of the neoliberal attack on the concept of popular sovereignty. I argue that in order to resist both the neoliberal reaction against popular power and the subsequent resurgence of populist rhetoric, we need to rework the concept of popular sovereignty. I focus on three groups of texts written in the early years of the neoliberal shift—namely, from the mid-1970s to early 1980s—which deal with the question of sovereignty: Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty; Foucault's works of the late 1970s; and Lefort's reflections on the symbolic dimension of power. While Hayek and Foucault defend similar views on sovereignty and argue that it is or should be replaced by technics of management, Lefort proposes a de-essentialized conception of democracy based on redefining sovereignty as the possibility of continually refiguring the space of power.

This paper focuses on Levinas's understanding of the social as distinguished from the political. In his neo-phenomenological work, Levinas never conceptualized the difference between the political and the social, because he was more interested in the difference between the ethical and everything else. In his Talmudic Readings, however, with the help of examples or paradigms, he offers a vision of a social domain distinct from the political one. This paper concentrates on the Talmudic Readings to delineate those situations in which Levinas distinguishes such a specifically social realm. It analyzes Levinas's understanding of the city as paradigm of liberalism's shortcomings and elaborates on the absence of the social in Levinas's conception of a good life.

In Levinas's philosophy, "nature" refers to two distinct and sometimes opposed concepts. Most often it stands for being and perseverance in being (i.e., conatus): it is what is and wants to be. In some places, however, "nature" indicates the limits of human power, violence, or hubris, and reveals the uncanny unlimitedness of transcendence. In other words, "nature" designates primarily the ontological character of Creation but also sometimes the otherness beyond ontology. It expresses the egoistic but also sometimes the altruistic. It commonly discourages ethics but also sometimes encourages it. The aim of this paper is to analyze how these two meanings of "nature" meet and contradict each other in Levinas's philosophy, and to interpret their meeting and contradiction. Levinas never offers a studied reflection on nature per se. However, his Talmudic Readings include descriptions of nature as both ontological and inspiring the ethical. Reinterpreting some of the Readings I show that, for Levinas, nature is associated with war, conquest and destruction, but is sometimes presented as the cure for these ontological evils. In other words, its function is similar to that of politics. It embodies a necessity that must be moderated by an ethics which, in a way, comes from nature itself.

Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic readings were given as lectures at the Colloque des Intellectuels Juifs de Langue Francaise, a conference that has been held every year in Paris since 1957. His commentaries on the Talmud purported to be non-technical, accessible, and popular adaptations of his philosophical thinking, which had been developed in difficult books written in the technical language of Husserlian phenomenology. In fact, however, a full understanding of these Talmudic readings often requires knowledge of their philosophical assumptions. Conversely, Levinas used his biblical and Talmudic interpretations to formulate philosophical arguments. [Excerpt provided by TELOS]. Adapted from the source document.

annabel herzog is a lecturer at the School of Political Science at the University of Haifa, Israel. She specializes in political philosophy and focuses on the intersection between ethics and politics and between philosophy and literature in the work of Arendt, Levinas, Camus, and Derrida. She is the author of Penser autrement la politique (Editions Kimé, Paris, 1997) and of essays published in such journals asPolitical Theory, Inquiry, and The European Journal of Political Theory.

This article argues that Camus's thinking, as expressed in his works of fiction and non-fiction, is based upon a contradiction between his determination to reconcile politics and ethics and his belief that they irrefutably contradict each other. Throughout his career, Camus's concerns never diverged from his aporetic attempt to reach an 'agreement' between two concepts he regarded as incompatible: justice and freedom. This article demonstrates how this basic aporia led Camus to an original - albeit rather hopeless - view of the human condition. It illustrates how Camus's aporia led him to define the role of thinkers in terms of public criticism and argues that in today's sociopolitical reality Camus's aporia can neither be dismissed, nor overcome.