Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: One of the academic amazements in recent years among students of International Relations is a series of neorealist discourses, articulated by, such as John Mearsheimer, Jack Snyder and Stephen Walt, being against the Iraq War. Realists against wars are not surprising news; historical records shows numerous realists had resisted wars, Kenan in the Korean war and Morgenthau in the Vietnam war. But a real surprising is their contents of discourses against the Iraq War. Recent realists discourses can be seen as a dramatic move from traditional framework of neorealism toward its ethical turn. Neorealist ethical moments consist of six different moves while each of them are correlated one another. (1) From analysis to manifest: their arguments are critically shifting from that states behave rationally toward that states ought to behave rationally, (2) Embedded ethics for using forces: realists’ strong criticism against Afghan and Iraq war implicitly indicates their standard of use of forces, whether the war is a matter of life and death of national security (all realists believe that the Iraq war is not in case), (3) Politics of truth, Myth and narrative: realists sharply attack false realities distorted by neoconservatives and they call strategists of the Bush administration and neoconservatives as a self-styled realists that articulate dangerous myths, (4) Discourses on open debate: instead of neoconservative myths, realists alternatively argue the necessity of an open debate in the public at large in order to overcome the distorted realities, (5) A concept of power: realists obviously move from Waltzian systemic neorealism toward new direction that focus on diffusion of power, (6) the political: the baseline of realists discourses is tension between friend and foe, Schmittian notion of the political, and, by acknowledging the political tension, they approve of others while neoconservatives strongly articulates good/evil forms of the myth-makings, (7)Quasi-Deconstruction: realists use some tools of what generally calls deconstruction that dissolves the binary opposition initiated by neoconservatives (good/evil, liberty/terror, Israel/Arab). Most of these arguments were not registered in the realist dictionary. The aim of this paper is thus, by examining realists’ discourses against Iraq war, to explore the realist turn to ethics, which has not been explicitly appeared in their theories of international relations.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which Native Americans have shaped and influenced Gary Snyder’s ecological vision and environmental imagination. In drawing on Buddhism and Native American culture, Snyder combines “Asian religious wisdom and shamanistic/mythic traditions” to create a new culture (more “native” than “foreign”), a new society, spirituality, view of nature and of man, all of which add up to what Wolfgang Welsch calls “transculturality,” a transcultural project that aims at going beyond monoculturality, interculturality and multiculturality.

The Western philosophical tradition beginning from the Renaissance has combined unquestioning anthropocentrism with Cartesian rationalism and the mind/body (self/other) duality, a perspective which tends to devalue the diversity of non-western human cultures as well as the non-human world. Snyder and the Native American writers have tried to lead us away from the blindness of this monocultural, colonizing mindset. The representation of Native American cultures, philosophies, and peoples in Snyder’s works reinforces our sense of the non-self, the other-than-human, the environmental imagination of the future. Carole Wolf suggests that the human “is not now, and never was, itself” (xiii), and Snyder claims that “The ‘post’ in the term posthumanism is on account of the word human. The dialogue to open next would be among all beings. . . . [W]e have to feel . . . that we are kin to all the rest . . . all the way through. Then we can also be uniquely ‘human’ with no sense of special privilege” (The Practice of the Wild 68).

In this essay, the Native Americans’ close relationship to the land, the community and spirituality is seen as a theme that runs through Snyder’s poetry, prose and interviews. His Myths & Texts (1960), Turtle Island (1974), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), Mountains and Rivers without End (1996) and Back on Fire (2007) will be discussed in relation to Native American writers like Linda Hogan, Leslie M. Silko and Louise Erdrich, with the focus on such concepts as shamanism, territorial intelligence, environmental racism, ethnopoetics, the “old ways” (the coyote-trickster, ceremonial dances, healing songs). The essay sets out to demonstrate that Snyder’s and the Native Americans’ powerful ecological critique is really a critique of the human world, one that would open it up so that we may see the wider posthuman world behind and beneath it. I am also arguing here that, for both Snyder and Welsch, cultures today are extremely “interconnected and entangled with each other” and lifestyles no longer “end at the borders of national cultures, but go beyond these.”