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The article offers a philosophical reading of Mazen Kerbaj's sound piece "Starry Night". Recorded in 2006 during the bombing of Beirut by the Israeli Air Force, the piece stages an acoustic encounter between the improvised sounds of the trumpet and live bomb explosions. Arguing for a formal examination of the ways in which Kerbaj stages the problem of the genesis of musical order in the exchange between trumpet and bombs, the article draws parallels with explorations of the problems of the State and of political contradiction in the Marxist tradition. Three common points are identified: the contingency of the appearance of order, its inseparability from an excess of violence, and its spatializing function. The last part delineates parallels between Kerbaj's subversive aesthetic strategies and Badiou's elaboration of the concept of the subject as the interruption of a repetitive logic of placement.
Are Kantian philosophy and its principle of respect for persons inadequate to the protection of environmental values? This paper answers this question by elucidating how Kantian ethics can take environmental values seriously. In the period that starts with the Critique of Judgment in 1790 and ends with the Metaphysics of Morals in 1797, the subject would have been approached by Kant in a different manner; although the respect that we may owe to non-human nature is still grounded in our duties to mankind, the basis for such respect stems from nature’s aesthetic properties, and the duty to preserve nature lies in our duties to ourselves. Compared to the “market paradigm”, as it is called by Gillroy (the reference is to a conception of a public policy based on a criterion of economic efficiency or utility), Kantian philosophy can offer a better explanation of the relationship between environmental policy and the theory of justice. Kantian justice defines the “just state” as the one that protects the moral capacities of its “active” citizens, as presented in the first Part of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Kantian paradigm, the environmental risk becomes a “public” concern. That means it is not subsumed under an individual decision, based on a calculus.
Civil Society became an important theme in the recent discussion of political or social theory. Civil Society is playing a substantial role for the legislation process. We can find it especially in the activities of international NGO. It gives a new aspect of the relationship between state and society, and legal philosophically speaking, of validity of law. Activities of Civil Society are socially recognized and their support systems are gradually institutionalized also domestic in Japan. But Japanese NPO has its own weak point, which arises from the political structure of our society.