230 The Nature of Political Theory- Asian values-argument would not necessarily directly associate their idea with postcolonial
theorizing (qua subaltern studies) but there are enough close parallels to discuss them
under this rubric. - Consequently, Taylor continues, ‘Only if we in the West can recapture a more adequate
view of our own history, can we learn to understand better the spiritual ideas that have been
interwoven in our development and hence be prepared to understand sympathetically the
spiritual paths of others’, see Taylor in Bauer and Bell (ed.) (1999: 143–4). - There are various perspectives on the relation of Asian values to human rights. Some see
human rights as just alien. Others see human rights already present within authoritative
value traditions or texts, like Confucius’sAnalectsor the IslamicQur’an. Thus, human
rights can be seen as distinctively Asian. Others see a space for active internal religious
and legal reform. In the latter two, the crucial contention is that human rights need to be
reconsidered and redrafted through the medium of Asian values. The ASEAN Bangkok
declaration of 1997 (which recast universal human rights in the light of Asian values) is
characteristic of this general process. Further, priority is given to social and economic
rights over political and civil human rights. Some of the enthusiasm of this debate was
dampened by the Asian finance crisis (1997–8). - AsAlisonJaggarscomments: ‘Evenifandrogynywereanadequatemoralideal, manyradical
feminists argue that it would be totally inappropriate as a political objective. Androgyny
may be a broad humanistic ideal for both sexes, but it contains no recognition of the
fact that, in order to approach that ideal, women and men must start from very different
places...radical feminists argue that men derive concrete benefits from their oppression
of women, and they conclude that feminists must struggle against rather than with men in
order to achieve liberation’ (Jaggar 1983: 88). - Some have more recently wanted to try to link the two perspectives, see Held (1993) or
Lister (1997). - Judith Squires, for example, in a synopotic text, refers to this as an important current
perspective within feminism. She sees it characterized by a strategy of ‘displacement’ which
essentially aims to destabilize or deconstruct previous narratives or discursive regimes. Its
method is usually genealogical and Foucaultian, see Squires (1999: 3ff. or 110–11). - Feminists now are ‘more likely, under the influence of Foucault, in particular, to integ-
rate everything into the discursive on the grounds that it is within discursive fields that
structures of power are constituted and that there is no prediscursive reality that acts as
an independent referent. In this sense, the validity of postmodernism’s representations of
more heterogeneous spaces cannot be established simply by appealing to a reality whose
truth they might more or less accurately convey’ (Coole 2000: 351). - This will be examined in detail in Chapter Eight.
- The idea of universal reason ‘is an event, or set of events and complex historical processes,
that is located at a certain point in the development of European societies’ (Foucault in
Rabinow (ed.) 1984). - Connolly suggests, for example, that the liberal and communitarian visions are all located
in the same exclusionary Enlightenment frame, see Connolly (1991: 29). Connolly will be
discussed in Chapter Eight. - Lyotard’s ideas will be discussed in Chapter Eight. However, radical difference undermines
itself in the same way that thorough-going scepticism undermines itself, as soon as it
makes any claim about the truth of scepticism. The thesis of radical incommensurability is
basically incoherent. If cultures are so distinct we would, by definition, have no common
lexicon to even circumscribe them as cultures.