Dossier
The Journal Las Torres de Lucca, continuing its goal of becoming an open and free magazine, has incorporated the section "Dossier". This section is meant to publish compilations of articles on a specific topic proposed by the dossier coordinator.
Articles published in the dossier are evaluated according to the same rules as any other articles. Therefore, those authors interested in participating in a dossier should submit their articles as usual, indicating in "comments" the adscription to a particular dossier.
For information on how to propose a dossier to the Editorial Committee, write to
Next Issue
N° 16 (January-June 2020): Cornelius Castoriadis. A philosopher to think about the present.
N° 17 (July-December 2020): Feminist Political Theory: Tensions, Dilemmas and Debates.
N° 18 (January-June 2021): Justice, legitimacy and secession.
Number 16 (January-June 2020)
Cornelius Castoriadis: a philosopher to think about the present
Coordinators: Iván de los Ríos and Adrián Almazán
Submission Deadline: March 30, 2018.
Last December 2017, we commemorated the 20th anniversary of the death of Cornelius Castoriadis. Born in 1922 in Constantinople, battler against the Metaxas’ dictatorship, exiled in France, member of the mythical magazine "Socialism or Barbarism", psychoanalyst, professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales… The Greek-French philosopher left us a life as multifaceted and rich as his thinking and philosophy were. The diversity of his interests and his enormous erudition led him to make incursions into the most varied fields: ontology, history of institutions (in particular his work on Ancient Greece), sociology, political analysis, epistemology, etc. We could apply these labels to what was always a united thought linked to a maxim: the radical interrogation of a philosophy that has the pretension to answer questions considered by anyone who wants to understand, in a radical way, his present in order to transform it.
Castoriadis´s systematic construction is perhaps one of the last major attempts to create an ambitious and praxis oriented philosophical framework. A thought that breaks the isolated approach of philosophies that restrict their field of study to its own history or to the rigorously ontological reflection, a transdisciplinary framework which reflects on all human creations and their interaction with the organic and inorganic world. A systematic effort that Castoriadis bequeathed to all those who do not refuse to direct their efforts towards a radical transformation of society, the same one which he always fought for and which, today, is more urgent than ever.
Despite the wealth, relevance and appropriateness of a corpus of reflection spanned more than four decades, the reality is that the reception of Castoriadis' work in the Spanish-speaking world is still partial and insufficient. Although there are luckily some publishing initiatives that work to make available some of the works of the Greek-French philosopher for Spanish language readers, the coordinators of this monographic edition of the magazine "The Towers of Lucca" think it is urgent and necessary to make known the works and the central ideas of the Castoriadian political philosophy in greater depth. And that is why we launch this call for papers with the intention of allowing works directed towards the exposition and detailing of the political philosophy problems which occupied the philosophical work of Castoriadis: from its receipt of the Greek tradition to its reflection on the Athenian democratic institutions, the phenomena of institutionality, radical democracy, equality, etc.
Number 17 (July-December 2020)
Feminist Political Theory: Tensions, Dilemmas and Debates
Coordinator: Anabella Di Tullio y Romina Smiraglia
Deadline: November 30, 2019.
The first feminist researchers already warned us: it is not a simple task to integrate women into a theoretical tradition created by, for, and about men. Modern political theorists have defined and characterized women in relation to men´s needs, while maintaining them framed in nature, that is to say, outside the field of studies that they were delimiting. Far from assuming the existence of a situation that has to be questioned or analyzed, the subordination of women was taken for granted from the beginning of the political thought tradition.
This subjection has been systematically hidden or justified either by holding premises that alluded to a natural sexual order or by ignoring women and feminists arguments. Nevertheless, the considerations about sexual difference offered by political theorists constituted a key point in the conceptual articulations they present, since many of their main arguments rest on what they say —or remain silent— about the relations between the sexes.
We conceived feminist political theory as a field within feminist theory as well as a field in political theory, so we recognized the existence of feminist elements, strictly speaking, as well as specifically political ones in feminist political theory. We could also contradict ourselves and state that feminism is always political, so the distinction laid out before is pointless.
However, political theory is a disciplinary field while feminist theory is a particular gaze of the word, whose questions and study objects are constructed, often, interdisciplinary. Therefore, how to proceed? Shall we build a particular field within political theory disciplinary? Shall we remain in the quicksand of feminist theory in order to construct new questions and study objects in relation to the political? Shall we think other paths, displacements, movements?
It is perhaps, in a way, precisely this tension that has often led to underestimate or vanish the contributions that feminism has made about politics. However, that tension is also its greatest power, because this critical approach allows to show the universal as particular, the general as partial, the neutral as biased, and the Man drawn to unfailingly male.
Women as Susan Moller Okin, Carole Pateman, Linda Nicholson, Lynda Lange, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Mary O'Brien, Genevieve Lloyd, Hanna Pitkin, Wendy Brown, Françoise Collin, Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Hirschmann, Jane Mansbridge, Christine Di Stefano, Anne Phillips, Martha Nussbaum, María Luisa Femenías, Alejandra Ciriza, Francesca Gargallo, Urania Atenea Ungo Montenegro, María-Xosé Agra Romero, Celia Amorós y Fina Birulés led the way into the research and reconnaissance of this field that we call feminist political theory. It was thanks to them and so many others feminists theorists that in 1970s and 1980s the claims on the exclusion of women from the main categories of political thought and the distortion of the feminine "nature” were articulated —although texts such as The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen by Olympe de Gouge or A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft give account of a history and a genealogy that we must recover.
Since then, and especially during the 1990s, feminist political theory begins to emphasize on the implications of the main conceptions of the malestream theory. It is no longer just about making visible the absence of women, but thinking about the implications that these theoretical constructions have been made only from masculine positions: the gender bias is present not only in how we theorized, but in the decision on what is theorized.
Number 18 (January-June 2021)
Justice, Legitimacy and Secession
Coordinator: Sergi Morales-Gálvez (KU Leuven).
Deadline: April 24, 2020.
Politics is about managing conflict, about how we should live together. Many traditions of thought and political thinkers have nonetheless taken this shared space of conflict, this ‘we the people’, as a given. ‘The people’ is just considered as a necessary precondition for politics. What happens when a part of this ‘we’ disagrees with that? When, some consider this shared community should not be taken as given and claim for their right to secede and build their own independent political community. Such claims have bearings on the fundamental questions ‘who is the demos? And who are the people entitled to self-government?’
Political philosophers have reflected on this issue widely. Some have defended the morality of groups to secede if they have a democratic majority. Others have argued that secession is justified only when it is a remedy against an evil – for example, when a minority group is persecuted by a state controlled by a majority group.
This kind of conflict constitutes a pressing issue in contemporary democratic societies. It thus calls for further philosophical reflection. How should political institutions deal with secession? Are democratic procedures a normatively appealing solution? Pro-independence supporters argue the affirmative on the basis of a right to self-determination. From a philosophical point of view, however, things are not obvious. Which majority are we talking about? A majority state-wide, or only within the minority group claiming for independence? Going further, what does self-determination mean and imply in democratic terms? Does it imply the creation of a nation-state or should internal self-government suffice? Is self-determination territorially conditioned? What would happen with dispersed minorities? Besides, is a democratic procedure enough to justify a decision regardless of its content? What is the place of justice when discussing on secession issues? How should we balance justice claims and democratic procedures when dealing with secession?
All these questions seem fundamental philosophically speaking, but secession is also a relevant issue in our contemporary societies. It is part of, but not limited to, the Spanish constitutional crisis derived from the political claims of Catalan pro-independence parties and institutions, perhaps the greatest political turmoil since the beginning of Spanish democracy in 1978 (in addition to the recognition demands of other territories such as the Basque Country). It was also a pressing issue for the Quebec and Scottish referendums on independence in 1995 and 2014 respectively, New Caledonia’s agreement with France regarding its political status, the Kurdish unilateral referendum on independence in Iraq in 2017, or the political status of Taiwan. These are a few examples of how relevant are pro-independence claims nowadays.
What can the different theories of democracy and theories of justice have to say about the pressing issue of secession? This dossier invites scholars working on political philosophy to contribute to these and other related questions.