Abstract
The purpose of this essay is not so much to criticise or evaluate William Connolly’s pluralization of methods in political science, but to draw upon his conceptual resources, especially his notions of contingency, contestability, and ontopolitical interpretation, to further reflect about questions of method and critical explanation in political analysis from a poststructuralist perspective. Developing themes presented in a recent book - Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political theory (which was co-written with Jason Glynos) - I begin by accepting Connolly’s view that we bring various ethical and normative commitments to our interpretations of problematized phenomena, thus endorsing Nietzsche’s perspectivism, but I then add a little more to Nietzsche’s ‘perspective seeing’ by outlining three logics – social, political and fantasmatic - which I argue are indispensable in helping us to explain, criticize and evaluate. On the way, I contrast Connolly’s commitment to a Spinozist/Deleuzian philosophy of immanence, with a more Derridean and Heideggerian inspired philosophy of weak transcendence.
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