The Politics of Reason: A Postfoundational Appraoch

(Hardback)

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While Western political theory has traditionally affirmed the importance of pure reason, this has recently come under attack from a variety of directions, including from those who question its universal pretensions, its neglect of the emotions, and its attachment to rationally discerned truth.




Gavin Rae accepts aspects of these critiques, but rejects the conclusion that this means that reason should be abandoned politically. Instead, Rae argues that it opens the possibility for a rethinking and recuperation of a reconceived understanding of political reason that emphasises, not individual abstract reflection, but social performativity. Through engagements with analytic epistemology, critical theory, feminism, hegemony theory, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis, political reason is reconceived as an ongoing collective performative practice that aims at establishing the hegemonic norms that will structure and define collective identity, including its political and epistemic possibilities.

Author Bio

Gavin Rae is Associate Professor (Accredited to Professor) in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. His research interests lie in nineteenth and twentieth century European philosophy, where he works at the intersection of socio-political philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, ontology, and ethics. Besides over sixty published articles and book chapters, he has published seven monographs, most recently Questioning Sexuality: From Psychoanalysis to Gender Theory and Beyond (Edinburgh University Press, 2024) and Poststructuralist Agency: The Subject in Twentieth-Century Theory (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and co-edited seven volumes, the most recent of which are Transformation in Contemporary French Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcomingwith Emma Ingala and Cillian Fathaigh), Critique and Political Reason: Exploring Critical Theory (Edinburgh University Press, forthcomingwith Emma Ingala and Cillian Fathaigh), Philosophy across Borders (Routledge, 2025with Emma Ingala), and Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2025with Cillian Fathaigh).