Intimate Distance: the Dislocation of Nature in Modernity

Abstract

the methods of literary analysis in an effort to understand both canonical texts and current sociopolitical events. This analysis focuses less on the meaning of terms than on the role they play; it involves a shift from historical definition to the problematics of reading (de Man 1979: ix). This new theory is especially helpful in discussing some of the central, and essentially contested, concepts in political theory. It helps us to understand these terms, not as unified markers, but in terms of the role they play in a given writer's thought or in the dynamics of a political culture. One of these key terms is Nature has had many meanings in political theory, and the unity and stability of those meanings has varied over time. A central feature of modernity is the shifting, problematic relation between and culture. In Ernesto Laclau's terms, has been dislocated insofar as its identity or meaning depends on an which both denies that identity and provides its condition of possibility at the same time (Laclau 1990: 39). Dislocation describes a situation of inescapable ambiguity. The opposition to provides the bedrock meaning of nature in the West, but this opposition has become fraught with tension. Since the eighteenth century, the outside of culture has given meaning to nature, but it has also increasingly been used to deny the identity of as something distinct from culture. This dislocation of is directly relevant to arguments about and within current social movements. They are relevant because underlies several crucial nodes of political argument: ideas of justice, of the desirability of change, of freedom and the limits of human action, of the source and possibility of knowledge, all involve differing senses and aspects of nature. The destabilization of is the open-