Establishes the importance of Husserl's phenomenology for Levinas's ethics.

What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics.

What does Édouard Glissant have to contribute to theorizing decolonization and a philosophy of difference? And how is this contribution tied to rethinking place (from Caribbean to Caribbeanness) and world (comprised of creolized culture and identity)? This essay takes up Glissant’s work in the context of questions of history and memory, with particular focus on how historical experience grounds philosophical work on place and world through articulations of identity, language, cultural production, and thinking after catastrophe. Drawing from a contrast with (...) Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, this essay shows how Glissant’s critical concept “creolization” works as an expression of what I call “the afropostmodern,” and also as an important contribution to decolonial theories of world, culture, memory, language, and subjectivity after the Middle Passage. (shrink)

In dialogue with key theorists of catastrophe and trauma--including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Derek Walcott, as well as key figures in Holocaust studies--Glissant and the Middle Passage hones a sharp sense of the specifically Caribbean varieties of loss, developing them into a transformative philosophical idea. Using the Plantation as a critical concept, John E. Drabinski creolizes notions of rhizome and nomad, examining what kinds of aesthetics grow from these roots and offering reconsiderations (...) of what constitutes intellectual work and cultural production.Glissant and the Middle Passage establishes Glissant's proper place as a key theorist of ruin, catastrophe, abyss, and memory. Identifying his insistence on memories and histories tied to place as the crucial geography at the heart of his work, this book imparts an innovative new response to the specific historical experiences of the Middle Passage. - from the publisher. (shrink)

This essay tracks the movement in Édouard Glissant’s work from thinking relationality as creolisation to Relation as such, to a globalised sense of cultural contact and transformation he ca...

This essay explores a philosophical encounter between Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin framed by the problem of the affect of shame. In particular, this essay asks how the affect of shame functions simultaneously as the accomplishment of regimes of anti-black racism and the site of transformative, revolutionary consciousness. Shame threatens the formation of subjectivity, as well as, and as an extension of, senses of home and belonging. How are we to imagine another subjectivity, another relation to home, and so another (...) kind of social and political order? For both Fanon and Baldwin, imagining the future requires an engagement with memory and history that purges black subjects of shame. The two thinkers part ways at that moment, however, with Fanon advocating a forgetting of abject history and Baldwin arguing for a retrieval of meaning and place won through pain and suffering. At the heart of this parting of ways, then, lies a conflict over the meaning of history across the black diaspora and its relation to cultural production, which, in turn, reflects important, differing conceptions of home. (shrink)

Édouard Glissant passed away on 4 February 2011 at the age of 82. A few words of memory. As a person and thinker, Glissant lived through, then reflected with meditative patience and profundity upon some of the most critical years in the black Atlantic: the aesthetics and politics of anti-colonial struggle, the civil rights movement in the United States, postcolonial cultural anxiety and explosion, the vicissitudes of an emerging cultural globalism, and all of the accompanying intellectual movements from surrealism to (...) negritude to existentialism to those varieties of high modernism and postmodernism for which Glissant himself is such a generative, founding resource. His life bears witness to those years, events, and movements with a poet’s word and a philosopher’s eye. And so Glissant, like all important thinkers, leaves for us an enormous gift – in his case, a new, enigmatic vocabulary of and for the Americas. . (shrink)

An examination of the question of influence in Senghor's work, with particular attention to the concept of assimilation - which I argue allows Senghor to responsibly adopt notions from French vitalist and life-philosophy traditions, despite their close ties to colonial and imperial histories.

This edited collection gathers together leading commentators on the work of Édouard Glissant in order to theorize the philosophical significance of his work.

_Investigates the philosophical relationship between Levinas and Heidegger in a nonpolemical context, engaging some of philosophy’s most pressing issues._.

This essay examines James Baldwin's conception of what he calls “black English” and its link to historical and cultural identity. I link Baldwin's defense of black English to his reflections on the sorrow songs and sound, which draws on long-standing accounts of musicality as the foundation of the African-American tradition. In order to demonstrate this relation to the tradition, the essay puts Baldwin's remarks in relation to Frederick Douglass's and W. E. B. Du Bois's description of the sorrow songs. I (...) also underscore how that relation to the African-American tradition marks an important set of tensions with mid-twentieth century black Atlantic theory, tensions which make sense of the Americanness of Baldwin's work. Across the essay, I claim that Baldwin's account of language has epistemological and ontological significance, which gives an interesting and important twist to Martin Heidegger's famous phrase that “language is the house of Being.”. (shrink)

An extended discussion of Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 217 pp.

"Jean-Luc Godard is nothing if not an enigma. His image has a life of its own, especially in its younger form: cigarette, sunglasses, smirk, rambling revolutionary slogans, and important books. It wasn’t just an image, we all know, for it reflected perfectly in iconic image the more substantial revolutionary recklessness with the camera we see from Breathless forward. Filmmaking is never the same after Godard. Images and their sequencing – Godard cloaked them in sunglasses and made them smirk. He made (...) them revolutionary. That’s his thing. And even the older Godard makes for an iconic photograph: rough facial hair, the artist’s glasses, smirk, and important books. His films continue to be unpredictable, compelling, and revolutionary...". (shrink)

State ownership, worker ownership, and household ownership are the three main forms in which productive assets (firms) can be held. I argue that worker ownership is not wise in economies with high capital-labor ratios, for it forces the worker to concentrate all her assets in one firm. I review the coupon economy that I proposed in 1994, and express reservations that it could work: greedy people would be able to circumvent its purpose of preventing the concentration of corporate wealth. Although (...) extremely high corporate salaries are the norm today, I argue these are competitive and market determined, a consequence of the gargantuan size of firms. It would, however, be possible to tax such salaries at high rates, because the labor - supply response would be small. The social-democratic model remains the best one, to date, for producing a relatively egalitarian outcome, and it relies on solidarity, redistribution, and private ownership of firms. Whether a solidaristic social ethos can develop without a conflagration, such as the second world war, which not only united populations in the war effort, but also wiped out substantial middle-class wealth in Europe - thus engendering the post-war movement towards social - insurance is an open question. (shrink)

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

We present a simple distributed concept that appears to insinuate SWARM behavior in a collection of mobile platforms. The control is based on the inter-mobile platform communication links’ signal-to-noise ratio. This double use of communications is a natural linkage for SWARM behavior.

Spanning 1200 years of intellectual history – from the 6th century BCE emergence of philosophical enquiry in the Greek city-state of Miletus, to the 6th century CE closure of the Academy in Athens in 529 – Philosophy of Mind in Antiquity provides an outstanding survey of philosophy of mind of the period. It covers a crucial era for the history of philosophy of mind, examining the enduring and controversial arguments of Plato and Aristotle, in addition to the contribution of the (...) Stoics and other key figures. Following an introduction by John Sisko, fifteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: the Presocratics, Plato, cognition, Aristotle, intellect, natural science, time, mind, perception, and body, the Stoics, Galen, and Plotinus. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, ancient philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in Antiquity is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as Classics. (shrink)

I present briefly G. A. Cohen’s theory of distributive justice, discuss the relationship that I think he believed held between human nature and justice, and offer thoughts on the feasibility of Cohenesque justice, or Cohenesque socialism. I introduce the idea of Kantian equilibrium, as a way of explaining how people cooperate. Expanding the domain of activities in which humans cooperate will, I believe, go a long way towards achieving Cohenesque socialism, and the history of human society suggests it is feasible (...) to do so. (shrink)

How well is the field of political studies doing and where is it headed? Such questions are examined and answered in this broad world overview of political science, along with the advances and shortcomings, as well as the recommended prescriptions for the future decades of the new century. The book includes three world regional assessments of the discipline, along with an in-depth survey of various sub-disciplinary fields and a concluding critical essay on the future of political studies. This is the (...) final volume in a book series on the development of political science, created in 2000 by Research Committee 33 of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) on the study of political science as a discipline. Contents include: Political Science in Three Asian Democracies: Disaffected (Japan), Third-Wave (Korea), and Fledgling (China) * Political Science in Europe: Its Development as a Discipline * Political Science in North America and Other Continents: Is There a Genuinely Int. (shrink)

Examines Adam Smith's main principles in Wealth of Nations as the basis for effective policymaking. Adam Smith proposed several principles that would help mitigate or eliminate some of the problems we face as a nation today. Many assume that our current laissez-faire capitalism applies his principles. But, in contrast to the libertarianism of the United States, Smith's recipe to increase everyone's wealth and happiness was justice, liberty, and equality. This book examines Adam Smith's main principles in Wealth of Nations as (...) the basis for effective policymaking. Adam Smith wanted to increase happiness through this formula for a good life: equality, liberty, and justice. Free market interpretations of Smith, the book argues, grossly misrepresent his thought, emphasizing only liberty and not also equality and justice. This book suggests policies that combine all three in order for happiness to be maximized. (shrink)

Extols the virtue of small liberal arts colleges and the liberal arts tradition.

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.