In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 73-75 [Access article in PDF] Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Sonia Kruks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 200. $35.00 h.c. 0-8014-3387-8; $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8417-0. Sonia Kruks' latest book, Retrieving Experience, is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the relevance of feminist philosophy in a period of relative political quietism. It also offers timely (...) reminders of historical continuities between phenomenological and postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and political engagement. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon, and the later Sartre, Kruks proposes to "explore women's embodied experiences" and to "ask whether they might not offer some means to help build affective bonds among women who are in many ways radically different from one another" (6). The book approaches this task by means of two secondary issues. First, should feminist thought be oriented by phenomenological or postmodernist theoretical strategies? Second, can women's embodied experience be the conceptual basis for political and epistemological practices that avoid the pitfalls of "identity politics" or an "epistemology of provenance"? The answer to both questions comes through the notion of praxis developed in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. By thinking of embodiment as praxis or work, a strategy implicit in Beauvoir's idea that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Kruks seeks to resolve the ethical affront of finding one's individuality reduced to the "generality" of a collective—the ethical affront to which feminists of various generations and theoretical persuasions must respond.Retrieving Experience explores the significance of recognition as a political norm. Identifying Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew as a pivotal work in the history of identitarian theorizing, she situates recent appeals for race- and gender-based political mobilization in the United States with respect to the dialectical relationship between the Look, shame, and recognition existentialists observed in situations of anti-Semitic and colonial domination during and immediately after the Second World War. Legitimating knowledge gained under oppressive conditions formed an important element of African, Southeast Asian, and ultimately African-American and feminist resistance to cultural imperialism. However, Kruks warns, discourses of "recognition" risk placing the blame for group domination on individuals' face-to-face interactions while concealing the role of state and economic institutions in enabling social disdain to systematically damage a group's quality of life. Moreover, they suggest that the experience of subjugation alone justifies knowledge claims or counts, without further elaboration, as an act of political engagement. Kruks argues that knowers and actors need to identify conceptual and practical mediations enabling individual interactions, experiences, and strategies to prompt the recognition and transformation of [End Page 73] group situations. Sartre's notion of praxis, she suggests, explains how an individual can participate in a collectivity while acting autonomously or acquiescing to subjection.The most important passages in Retrieving Experience examine the affective aspects of the decision to take up a political identity or engage in political action. Going beyond Sartre's account of mediations, Kruks suggests that the sensory and emotional qualities of embodiment are themselves mediators, the products of praxis as well as its vehicles. Since any act of social knowledge involves the emotions, affect plays an important role in the process whereby individuals from different cultural, economic, and bodily situations learn about and shape one another's' environment through the act of knowledge. Individuals, then, may have a moral responsibility to learn about others in a way that gives them "sympathetic bodies." Drawing on Maria Lugones' social epistemology, Kruks argues that "world-traveling" or existing simultaneously in several communities or sets of power relations is a bodily act, but also a fully cultural, ethical act rather than a natural way of being. One is not born, but becomes, an embodied knower. Understanding female embodiment as a kind of work or "world-traveling" praxis enables feminist solidarity—"respectful recognition" to replace a historically implausible "sisterhood" or a distinct epistemological perspective as a regulative ideal for feminist politics.But how far can the... (shrink)

Laura Hengehold presents a new, Deleuzian reading of Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology, the place of recognition in The Second Sex, the philosophical issues in her novels, the important role of her student diaries and her early interest in Bergson and Leibniz.

Late in life, Foucault identified with “the critical tradition of Kant,” encouraging us to read both thinkers in new ways. Kant’s “Copernican” strategy of grounding knowledge in the limits of human reason proved to stabilize political, social-scientific, and medical expertise as well as philosophical discourse. These inevitable limits were made concrete in historical structures such as the asylum, the prison, and the sexual or racial human body. Such institutions built upon and shaped the aesthetic judgment of those considered “normal.” Following (...) Kant through all of Foucault’s major works, this book shows how bodies functioned as “problematic objects” in which the limits of post-Enlightenment European power and discourse were imaginatively figured and unified. It suggests ways that readers in a neoliberal political order can detach from the imaginative schemes vested in their bodies and experiment normatively with their own security needs. (shrink)

This article places Foucault 's 1977 suggestions regarding the reform of French rape law in the context of ongoing feminist debates as to whether rape should be considered a sex crime or a species of assault. When viewed as a disciplinary matrix with both physical and discursive effects, rape and the rape trial clearly contribute to the "hysterization" of women by cultivating complainants' confessions in order to demonstrate their supposed lack of self-knowledge.

This article places Foucault's 1977 suggestions regarding the reform of French rape law in the context of ongoing feminist debates as to whether rape should be considered a sex crime or a species of assault. When viewed as a disciplinary matrix with both physical and discursive effects, rape and the rape trial clearly contribute to the “hysterization” of women by cultivating complainants' confessions in order to demonstrate their supposed lack of self-knowledge.

4. Giving Voice: Beauvoir's Legacy in Two Perspectives.

In this brief excerpt from a forthcoming translation of L’Afrique et ses fantômes and Singe de Kafka, Seloua Luste Boulbina shows how French opposition to the Islamic hijab, as described by Fanon, mirrored British opposition to the Indian practice of sati by claiming to defend women while really defending the interests of European men. This made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to define and assert interests of their own, apart from the perspectives imposed by politically opposed groups of (...) men. Fanon recognized this complex silence. But Fanon also failed to read the perspective motivating the writings of fellow Martinican author, Mayotte Capécia, which prevented him from seeing any independence in women’s capacity for interracial love and prevented him from giving a more complex psychological and political meaning to mixed ancestry. (shrink)

Late in life, Foucault identified with “the critical tradition of Kant,” encouraging us to read both thinkers in new ways. Kant’s “Copernican” strategy of grounding knowledge in the limits of human reason proved to stabilize political, social-scientific, and medical expertise as well as philosophical discourse. These inevitable limits were made concrete in historical structures such as the asylum, the prison, and the sexual or racial human body. Such institutions built upon and shaped the aesthetic judgment of those considered “normal.” Following (...) Kant through all of Foucault’s major works, this book shows how bodies functioned as “problematic objects” in which the limits of post-Enlightenment European power and discourse were imaginatively figured and unified. It suggests ways that readers in a neoliberal political order can detach from the imaginative schemes vested in their bodies and experiment normatively with their own security needs. (shrink)

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, and following geographical and technological changes in the global economy, theorists in Europe as well as the United States have lamented the confusion and emotional disengagement of many groups formerly identified with the left. This paper addresses the Kantian origins of the idea that 'revolution', however defined (or deferred), is the only plausible image for effective historical engagement capable of motivating spectators to action. Drawing on Foucault's inquiries into conditions for the possibility (...) of 'heroizing' the present, I examine two frameworks for understanding the ontological impact of historical models for 'eventfulness', those offered by Heidegger and Bergson. I then explore their implication for debates between Foucauldian theorists over the technological and bodily bases required to recognize the optimistic moral significance Kant attributed to revolution in practices characterizing the 'new capitalism'. Key Words: Bergson • Foucault • Heidegger • historiography • Kant • revolution. (shrink)

Diverse meanings of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘exchange’ force us to interrogate the implicit ontology of states and the associated assumptions about will, matter and spirit used by political theorists, evoking different religious and political traditions. This article contrasts the notion of ‘sovereignty’ found in Joseph Tonda’s Le Souverain Moderne with the one found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Tonda’s text, I argue, challenges and complicates the appropriateness of referring to early Christianity as a model for resistance to global capitalism (...) in Empire. To help with this contrast, I draw on two Central African authors, Emmanuel Dongala and Joseph Mwantuali, whose novels illustrate the supernatural as well as thoroughly material significance of state power, wealth and sexuality in the modern Sovereign. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lynn Huffer's Mad For Foucault:An Analysis of Historical Eros?Laura HengeholdMad for Foucault is a remarkably beautiful book balanced on the edges between the personal, the impersonal, and the public and reflected through Foucault's own struggles to establish those divides. Huffer's goal in Mad for Foucault is to draw scholarly attention to the emotional and ethical content of Foucault's writing, as well as to assess the risks of queer (...) theory's dependence on dialectics and psychoanalytic theory. Reading History of Sexuality I in light of History of Madness, she argues, renders the ethical aspects of Foucault's early project clear and reveals the continuity with his later work on ethics, putting the central concerns of queer theory in a different light. But this continuity is only visible through attention to the lyrical force resulting from tensions between these edges, which also separate genders and epochs, as if Las Meninas were to draw the viewer's gaze toward a fractured mirror rather than a sovereign one.The elements of History of Sexuality I that have been most important for the queer theorists Huffer engages are Foucault's attempt to date the shifts from a perception of sinful acts to a perception of homosexual personality types, and his warning that reifying such personality types as "identities" in hopes of liberation from heterosexist oppression continues to support the social mechanisms that identify personal truth with sexuality. Some (associated with Judith Butler) have tried to develop an account of agency that owes less to the exclusions of traditional moral and psychological theories but risks establishing its own hierarchies of psychic "health." Others (Lee Edelman is exemplary) [End Page 226] have also argued that the affects associated with these acts and identities, and possibly the ethical attitudes arising from these affects, are historical effects that must be bracketed in the name of resisting biopower (Huffer 2010, 94-95).Both groups, Huffer argues, have merely performed a dialectical reversal within the order of sexualities inherited from the nineteenth century, without appreciating Foucault's effort to cast the very terms of that order into question—above all, in History of Madness (Huffer 2010, 113-16). What is more disturbing, both sides have enlisted psychoanalysis on their behalf, although Foucault remained skeptical of psychoanalysis. In History of Madness (2006a), Foucault's skepticism was justified in the name of the affective attachments of queer life and his deeply felt fascination for the traces of a sexual hybridity almost erased from European history. For Huffer, the real question posed by both History of Sexuality I and History of Madness is not, as queer theorists might believe, "why sexuality became a moral issue" (and how might it cease to be one) but who was buried when the nineteenth-century medicalization of sexuality replaced erotic experience with explanations of sexual abnormalities (2010, 229). She reads Foucault's work as a meditation on the ethical tragedy presented by the scattered ashes of even "infamous men."Although there are many themes I could address, I will let my comments be guided by Huffer's reading of the explicit and implicit critique of psychoanalysis found in Foucault's work, and its relation to Foucault's ambivalent Kantianism (2010, 127-33, 134). This critique comes from several directions. First, throughout all his works, including Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault criticizes interpretive approaches to the historical record and to human speech. Practices such as "commentary" reduce the variety of events that can be perceived in the historical field and turn some into the content or meaning of others, which are thereby privileged metaphysically as "more real." Second, Foucault criticizes power relations forcing some to confess and to interpret the products of their own confession in terms of the meanings religious or medical authorities insist on finding there. From the seventeenth century through the present, such authorities have identified work and family-oriented behavior as "reasonable" and have forced those whose behavior does not fit those terms to understand themselves as deviations from that norm (Huffer 2010, 105, 107-108).Third, according to Huffer, Foucault subjects belief in the psyche as scientific object and focus of work on the self to historical analysis... (shrink)

This volume explores African philosophies’ expression of transitional acts where thought interacts with history and proposes solutions to problems. Influential thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic engage with the realm of criticism and imagination, public spaces in Africa, and the relationship between historical politics and poetics.

Foucault’s debt to Kant is usually examined with respect to his ethos of critique. In fact, Kant’s writings on aesthetic judgment, teleological judgment, and anthropology constitute an important, if implicit, object of Foucault’s genealogical efforts to free Western culture from a scientia sexualis that oppresses sexual minorities. Comparing Foucault’s use of Kant to the use made by psychoanalytic theorists of sexual difference, this paper argues that the concept of non-teleological pleasure found in Kant’s critique of aesthetic judgment may provide grounds (...) for queer thinkers to resist and reconfigure associations between death, knowledge, and sexuality as a function of organisms—associations inherited from the post-Kantian philosophical anthropology and biological medicine of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because he claims that intuition can give us insight into “life” apart from space, if not time, Bergson seems to transgress Kant's limits on possible knowledge. This article argues, however, that there is a “critical” way to read Bergson that allows him to evade accusations of epistemologically and politically problematic vitalism. When compared with the archaeological and genealogical treatment of “life” found in Michel Foucault's work, Bergson's effort to save humans from the destructive effects of intellect converges in interesting (...) ways with Foucault's displacement of life as a foundational philosophical or scientific term. (shrink)

Descartes has been associated with a project of establishing the ego’s separation from and sovereignty over its material environment, a project often held to be constitutive of modernity as well as its discontents. Kyoo Lee’s Reading Descartes Otherwise tries to free our understanding of modernity from this imaginary and reductive reading, which she calls the “Cartesian complex,” by presenting the voice of The Meditations as embodied, phenomenologically astute, and emerging from the interstices of his own repeated dreamlike thought experiments.

Jean Godefroy Bidima’s La Palabre examines the traditional African institution of palaver as a way to create dialogue and open exchange in an effort to resolve conflict and promote democracy. In the wake of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the gacaca courts in Rwanda, Bidima offers a compelling model of how to develop an African public space where dialogue can combat misunderstanding. This volume, which includes other essays on legal processes, cultural diversity, memory, and the internet in Africa, (...) offers English-speaking readers the opportunity to become acquainted with a highly original and important postcolonial thinker. (shrink)

Freud's case study of "Dora" ignores indications that her symptoms might have resulted from a fear of rape. Drawing on feminist adaptations of Lacan, this paper suggests that fear of rape may serve as a horizon for women's ability to perceive themselves as efficacious speakers. Freud's failure to recognize this fear may reflect men's unwillingness to acknowledge their own role in rape as well as anxiety over the possibility of losing his own credibility.

Freud's case study of “Dora” ignores indications that her symptoms might have resulted from a fear of rape. Drawing on feminist adaptations of Lacan, this paper suggests that fear of rape may serve as a horizon for women's ability to perceive themselves as efficacious speakers. Freud's failure to recognize this fear may reflect men's unwillingness to acknowledge their own role in rape as well as anxiety over the possibility of losing his own credibility.

In The Imaginary Domain, Drucilla Cornell argues that law would best help women by guaranteeing "minimum conditions for individuation" for all citizens (1995, 4). Cornell believes that, as a guiding idea for law and economic institutions, the liberal social contract has not so much denied women equal protection as a group as it has arbitrarily given a negative meaning to sexual difference—including but not limited to female embodiment. In Deleuzian terms, this contract is a generative Idea encoding a discourse in (...) which women's life possibilities are more general and less singular than those of other citizens.Cornell agrees with Rawls that a polity should be grounded on principles to which all individuals could .. (shrink)

Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity suggests that if existentialism is vulnerable to accusations of solipsism and nihilism, this is because Sartre failed to approach ambiguity from the proper angle. Of all the forms of ambiguity described in this text, the most troubling conjoins human separateness with connection. From the essays of the 1940s to her lectures on literature during the 1960s, Beauvoir struggles to articulate the ethics of this form of ambiguity. Her refusal to deny the “anti‐social” aspect of existence finds (...) echoes in today's tensions between feminists and queer theorists. (shrink)

(2013). THE FABRIC OF THE WORLD: deleuze on fetishism and generative time images. Angelaki: Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 127-141.

Although Foucault's early writings were strongly influenced by the discourse of existential phenomenology, he later considered it an obstacle to a better understanding of social and political power. This essay seeks to understand some of the reasons for his shift, specifically with respect to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Foucault diverges from existential phenomenology according to an alternative tendency within the Kantian inheritance they both share: one which stresses the world-disruptive rather than the unifying or world-disclosive power of transcendental (...) imagination. Examining the role played by dreams and death in Foucault's early introduction to Binswanger's Dream and Existence allows us to situate his later analysis of the historical and political (rather than existential) meaning of death with respect to larger philosophical currents. (shrink)

Is democracy a requirement of justice or an instrument for realizing it? The correct answer to this question, I argue, depends on the background circumstances against which democracy is defended. In the presence of thin reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value democracy only instrumentally (if at all); in the presence of thick reasonable disagreement about justice, we should value it also intrinsically, as a necessary demand of justice. Since the latter type of disagreement is pervasive in real-world politics, I (...) conclude that theories of justice designed for our world should be centrally concerned with democracy. (shrink)

In his recent bookThe Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen suggests that political philosophy should move beyond the dominant, Rawls-inspired, methodological paradigm – what Sen calls ‘transcendental institutionalism’ – towards a more practically oriented approach to justice: ‘realization-focused comparison’. In this article, I argue that Sen's call for a paradigm shift in thinking about justice is unwarranted. I show that his criticisms of the Rawlsian approach are either based on misunderstandings, or correct but of little consequence, and conclude that the Rawlsian (...) approach already delivers much of what Sen himself wants from a theory of justice. (shrink)

A globalized world, some argue, needs a global democracy. But there is considerable disagreement about whether global democracy is an ideal worth pursuing. One of the main grounds for scepticism is captured by the slogan: “No global demos, no global democracy.” The fact that a key precondition of democracy—a demos—is absent at the global level, some argue, speaks against the pursuit of global democracy. The paper discusses four interpretations of the skeptical slogan—each based on a specific account of the notion (...) of “the demos”—and concludes that none of them establishes that the global democratic ideal must be abandoned. In so doing, the paper (i) systematizes different types of objections against global democracy, thus bringing some clarity to an otherwise intricate debate and (ii) offers a robust but qualified defense of the global democratic ideal. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual map of the debate on ideal and non‐ideal theory. It argues that this debate encompasses a number of different questions, which have not been kept sufficiently separate in the literature. In particular, the article distinguishes between the following three interpretations of the ‘ideal vs. non‐ideal theory’ contrast: (i) full compliance vs. partial compliance theory; (ii) utopian vs. realistic theory; (iii) end‐state vs. transitional theory. The article advances critical reflections on each of these sub‐debates, and highlights (...) areas for future research in the field. (shrink)

In this article, Laura Quintana elaborates on a conceptual distinction between violence and rage. Along with this distinction, she recognises that while rage may possess a destructive potential, it can also be politicised in emancipatory practices that confront conditions of injustice and structural violence. Her analysis centers on contemporary political movements in Latin America, which she views as collective manifestations of rage. Within these movements, the manifestation of rage is intertwined with forms of care and communal labor. Quintana characterises (...) such movements as embodying a “dignified rage” (digna rabia) that calls for an emancipatory transformation of the status quo. She contends that these practices can be understood in terms of the notion of “anti-violence,” as it has been coined by Étienne Balibar. In this she diverges from Judith Butler, since, according to Quintana’s analysis, such practices challenge the demand for non-violence that has often served to neutralise the disruptive force of such manifestations and movements. (shrink)

In this article I present a disagreement between classical and constructive approaches to predicativity regarding the predicative status of so-called generalised inductive definitions. I begin by offering some motivation for an enquiry in the predicative foundations of constructive mathematics, by looking at contemporary work at the intersection between mathematics and computer science. I then review the background notions and spell out the above-mentioned disagreement between classical and constructive approaches to predicativity. Finally, I look at possible ways of defending the constructive (...) predicativity of inductive definitions. (shrink)

In this article I argue that characterizations of anger as a hostile emotion may be mistaken. My project is empirically informed and is partly descriptive, partly diagnostic. It is descriptive in that I am concerned with what anger is, and how it tends to manifest, rather than with what anger should be or how moral anger is manifested. The orthodox view on anger takes it to be, descriptively, an emotion that aims for retribution. This view fits well with anger being (...) a hostile emotion, as retribution is punitive. I will argue that a different view of anger deserves our attention. On this alternative view, anger aims for recognition of harms done, rather than for the punishment of those who have committed them. I argue that we have reason to favour a strong view that excludes retribution from anger’s main aims. In addition, I offer a diagnosis of the reasons that led the retributive view of anger to become, and remain, orthodoxy. This diagnosis provides indirect reason to give my descriptive proposal serious consideration, for it highlights that the orthodox view has dominated folk and philosophical conceptions of anger for reasons that do not speak in favour of the view’s veracity. The view that anger is a hostile emotion will therefore emerge as in need of serious scrutiny. (shrink)