This article examines the way in which the sublime comes to matter within various eighteenth century legal discourses, particularly in the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Edmund Burke. The essay seeks also to relate the theoretical works of these philosophers and lawyers to practical legislative developments of the period, in particular, the passage of the Black Act in1726 and the Marriage Act in 1753. The sublime comes to matter to the law in this period in the sense that (...) philosophical conceptualizations of the sublime in terms of power and transcendence become increasingly significant to representations of the nature and function of English law. Such theoretical accounts of the law as are found in the work of Hobbes, Locke, and Burke, moreover, translate into juridical practices designed to affirm the status of the law as a transcendentally sublime source of political authority in the eighteenth century. This article subjects that understanding of the law to a feminist critique that draws upon the work of the French philosopher, Luce Irigaray. It will be shown that the sublime within Western thought is generally associated with a sense of dread as to the possibility of the annihilation of consciousness. This ontological dread entails, in Jean Francois Lyotard’s terms, a recognition of the possibility of “nothing further happening” to the subject. Within Western discourse, this dread is projected onto, or made material in the form of, some ‘other’ that is, in Irigaray’s estimation, most usually feminine. Thus, the sublime comes to matter in this second, ontological sense and it is within this context that the transcendental sublime emerges as a response to a sense of dread that is projected on to some material, feminine, or feminised, ‘other’. In eighteenth century legal discourse, this ‘other’ take the form of the ‘state of nature’, or the revolutionary mob, or the revolutionary female who signifies more than anything a return to animality and chaos –an ontological and political fall from grace. The Black Act and the Marriage Act, with their shared emphasis upon the preservation of political stability and patriarchal property rights, may in this context be regarded as manifestations in the legal domain of the metaphysical principles of the transcendental sublime – with its emphasis upon an escape from, and a control of, the dreadful, feminine ‘other’. (shrink)

My dissertation examines how the feminine was invoked as a representational strategy to cope with the nihilism lying at the heart of Chinese modernity in the period from 1915 to 1936. As a revolution on both the individual level and the social level, Chinese modernity began with and continued in crisis. One imperative of Chinese modernity was to ceaselessly bring excitement and passion to the individual, urging and enticing the latter to join the nationalist project. However, this idealist endeavor demanded (...) more power than the individual could summon within a coherent and rational consciousness. The individual was forced to confront decentering or shattering experiences of revolution, which were impossible to represent. Therefore, the nihil lied at the heart of modern Chinese subjectivity. In the West, nihilism emerged as a psychological effect to the decline of belief; but in May Fourth China, nihilism emerged a response to the belief in a heightened spirit that is incommensurate with any practical goals. However, the very nihilistic experience had to be disguised or shielded to ensure the purity and sublimity of the revolution. The trope of woman was employed as a metonymy for the nihil, which gave birth to a “shadow subject” that was different from the ideal masculine and rational one. On the one hand, the projection of nihil onto woman further alienated and mystified the feminine; on the other hand, it empowered the feminine and incorporated woman into the mainstream of revolutionary discourse. Therefore, not only male writers used the representation of woman to overcome the traumatic nihilistic experience in their subjectivity, some female writers also integrated the nihil in their self-representation as a strategy to empower themselves. In my dissertation, I engage myself in a re-reading of selective modern Chinese literary works. Combining the theoretical strength of post-structuralism, existentialism, and feminism, my dissertation aims to deconstruct and reconstruct subjectivity, narrative, and revolutionary discourse in modern China. The discovery of the relation between woman and nihil provides a new perspective to reexamine the construction of modern subjectivity, as well as the gender relations in Chinese modernity. (shrink)

This dissertation is intended as an intervention in the interminable and apparently antinomical philosophical exchange between political theories of radical democracy descended from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and liberal democracy descended from John Rawls. Radical democrats have deployed the friend-enemy distinction of Carl Schmitt to criticize liberal democracy as hypocritical and ultimately undemocratic in its refusal to critique its own ground; liberal democrats have riposted by characterizing radical democracy as dangerously anarchic. In this project, I read Immanuel Kant in (...) dialog with the work of Ingeborg Maus to show in a novel way that contemporary radical democratic theories ultimately fall to the very critique upon which they indict liberal democracy, that they degenerate into the valorization of mere war, and that it was in fact in full recognition of this dynamic that Kants theory of liberal democracy begins. Kants theory of countervailing liberalism is ultimately discovered to be a politics of love over barbarism. The project ranges over a wide ground, from a close reading of Kant, to the 19th Century Pantheismusstreit, to works by Arendt, Hardt and Negri, Žižek, and Strauss. (shrink)