In this paper I establish an alliance between the thought of Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Difference. In light of Fanon's critique of Sartre's characterization of the place of the Negritude movement in terms of dialectic, I point to the inherent limitations of modern humanism's dialectical accounts for enabling genuine historical change. Alternatively, I appeal to Deleuze's distinction between history and becoming, and his concomitant idea of intensive becoming-revolutionary. I conclude that such an alliance with Deleuzian metaphysics (...) holds far greater promises for effecting Fanon's revolutionary project of the creation of a new humanity (and therefore, of a new ethics and a new politics) than his traditional assimilation to Phenomenology and Existentialism. (shrink)

Hablar de islamofobia hacia comunidades negras africanas y afrodescendientes es difícil de abordar debido al orientalismo y a procesos de estereotipación de lo que concibe el ser musulmán, así como la racialización de un estatus espiritual. Esta percepción negativa y reduccionista del islam y de los musulmanes como un ente monolito y homogeneo, refuerza y configura dinámicas de poder. En el estado español, el orientalismo reduce a la persona musulmana bajo el sujeto “moro”, racializando una identidad religiosa desde el miedo (...) y el terror desde unas raíces históricas y estructurales, propiciando un señalamiento social racista que vigila y persigue. Esto ha invisibilizado a otras comunidades que también son objeto de la islamofobia y no entran en los cánones de la otredad de lo “moro”. Se pretende tener una noción más acertada de la realidad de los musulmanes que permitirá a su vez mejorar la identificación de la islamofobia en España. (shrink)

El presente artículo ofrece una revisión crítica de la noción de injusticia hermenéutica de Miranda Fricker a partir de dos elementos de la obra de Frantz Fanon: 1) la «historicidad» como una carga cultural en las categorías sociales que es productiva, lo que exige cuestionar la definición de injusticia hermenéutica como ausencia o tergiversación de categorías; 2) la redefinición que Fanon hizo del «esquema corporal» de Merleau Ponty: la experiencia vivida del cuerpo, lo que muestra que los recursos hermenéuticos no (...) son solo categorías mentales, sino que están imbricados con la dimensión material. Nuestro objetivo es mostrar cómo estos dos elementos de la teoría fanoniana hacen una contribución a la noción de injusticia hermenéutica y por qué esta es relevante para entender la injusticia estructural del racismo. (shrink)

In the opening lines of ‘Black Orpheus’, written as a preface to an anthology of negritude poetry, Sartre challenges white readers ‘to feel, as I do, the shock of being seen’. Reading this poetry, he thinks, should undermine white people’s presumption of the objectivity of their perspective. Accordingly, the essay itself contradicts two prominent aspects of the philosophy he had so far developed: the idea that poetry could not be politically engaged; and the theory of radical freedom. These changes (...) are ultimately rooted in his realisation, upon reading this poetry, that his previous understanding of prose is mistaken. This has the consequence that his philosophical method, which derives ontological conclusions from prose descriptions of experience, has two important limitations: its premises cannot be drawn solely from his own experience; and French prose might be insufficient for formulating all relevant premises. He therefore revises his method to deploy this poetry as phenomenological grounds for ontological conclusions, which transforms his ontology of human existence to include cultural inheritance as a primary feature. We will see how this reading of negritude poetry exemplifies both the epistemic challenge involved in what he calls ‘the look’ and the use of listening in response to it. (shrink)

While highlighting the inherent tension between the quest for universalization and the unavoidable particularity in philosophical hermeneutics, this essay argues against what it regards as the uncritical characterization of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s concept of “negritude” in terms of ethnophilosophy, a derogatoryterm employed in contemporary African philosophy to describe philosophy that is communal, and which can be sieved out from such genres as proverbs, wise sayings, and myths. It reviews the background and the contents of negritude, including its metaphysics (...) and its epistemology of emotion. It calls attention to Senghor’s ideas about communalism and his universalism seen in his theory of the civilization of the universal, and concludes that Senghor’s negritude is the outcome of a particular and personal interpretation of his experience of the African condition, and is therefore eminently hermeneutical. (shrink)

It is important to read afresh today the meaning of the Negritude movement without reducing it, as is often the case, to a counter-essentialism in response to the essentialism of the discourse of coloni-alism; to realize that Senghor, Césaire, and Damas were ????irst and foremost global philosophers, that is, thinkers of the plural and decentred world that the Bandung conference of 1955 had promised. Thus, their different perspectives converge as the task of thinking a humanism for our times based (...) on a non-imperial universal, a univer-sal of encounter and translation founded on equality. And, consequently, a socialism that is, in its different translations, a force of emancipation, but also of humanization and spiritualization of the earth. That task is still ours. (shrink)

Quel message est apporté par le courant littéraire de la négritude, et comment procède-t-il pour le transmettre? C'est par le biais d'une écriture introspective que la diaspora noire a conquis sa dignité et dépassé le stade victimaire, par-delà le seul cadre de la communauté francophone. A travers l'histoire de la traite et de la colonisation, notre lecture procédera en trois phases: une phase locutoire, consacrée à un rappel chronologique du contexte noir dans l'Histoire; une phase illocutoire, où seront exposées les (...) différentes réactions de l'intelligentsia noire face à la ségrégation et au passif colonial; une phase perlocutoire, qui conclura l'étude en observant l'impact de la négritude sur la réalité sociale du genre noir. Au-delà du courant historique francophone, l'idée de négritude incarne le problème des constructions d'identité et illustre parfaitement la difficulté de la condition humaine: être ce que nous voulons de ce que les autres veulent faire de nous. (shrink)

The Assimilation Argument purports to show that libertarians cannot plausibly distinguish supposed exercises of free will from random outcomes that nobody would count as exercises of free will. If this argument is sound, libertarians should either abandon their position or else concede that free will is a mystery. Drawing on a parallel with the Manipulation Argument against compatibilism, Christopher Franklin has recently contended that the Assimilation Argument is unsound. Here I defend the Assimilation Argument and the Rollback (...) Argument, a second challenge to libertarianism that Franklin rejects. My aim in doing so is to underscore the force of these challenges, and thereby to resist what appears to be an emerging trend in the literature. By not coming to grips with the kind of power that libertarians must secure, many writers have recently downplayed or dismissed the pressing worry for libertarianism. (shrink)

Key text never before in English by central figure of the Negritude movement.

While highlighting the inherent tension between the quest for universalization and the unavoidable particularity in philosophical hermeneutics, this essay argues against what it regards as the uncritical characterization of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s concept of “negritude” in terms of ethnophilosophy, a derogatoryterm employed in contemporary African philosophy to describe philosophy that is communal, and which can be sieved out from such genres as proverbs, wise sayings, and myths. It reviews the background and the contents of negritude, including its metaphysics (...) and its epistemology of emotion. It calls attention to Senghor’s ideas about communalism and his universalism seen in his theory of the civilization of the universal, and concludes that Senghor’s negritude is the outcome of a particular and personal interpretation of his experience of the African condition, and is therefore eminently hermeneutical. (shrink)

The Negritude Movement provides readers with not only an intellectual history of the Negritude Movement but also its prehistory and its posthistory.

In the first part of this essay, in order to grasp the complex and ambivalent relation of Fanon with negritude, I will recover the context from which emerged the ideology of negritude by focusing on the views of Léopold Senghor and the ways in which these views determined Sartre's interpretation of the movement. I will also examine Sartre's Black Orpheus and the influence it had on Fanon, especially on his Black Skin, White Masks. In the second part, I (...) will adumbrate Fanon's critique of the advocates of negritude, whom he refers to as 'men of culture', who fell back on archaic cultural practices far removed from the political realities of their colonized societies. In the third section, I will turn to Memmi's critique of Fanon with a view to establishing two points: first, Memmi misreads Fanon's rejection of negritude as a failure on the part of Fanon to 'return to self'; second, far from being an oppositional post-modern figure whose work is rife with contradiction, I will argue that the political project of Fanon is consistently Sartrean, despite his disagreement with Sartre on some issues. (shrink)

The idea of genetic assimilation, that environmentally induced phenotypes may become genetically fixed and no longer require the original environmental stimulus, has had varied success through time in evolutionary biology research. Proposed by Waddington in the 1940s, it became an area of active empirical research mostly thanks to the efforts of its inventor and his collaborators. It was then attacked as of minor importance during the ‘‘hardening’’ of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and was relegated to a secondary role for decades. (...) Recently, several papers have appeared, mostly independently of each other, to explore the likelihood of genetic assimilation as a biological phenomenon and its potential importance to our understanding of evolution. In this article we briefly trace the history of the concept and then discuss theoretical models that have newly employed genetic assimilation in a variety of contexts. We propose a typical scenario of evolution of genetic assimilation via an intermediate stage of phenotypic plasticity and present potential examples of the same. We also discuss a conceptual map of current and future lines of research aimed at exploring the actual relevance of genetic assimilation for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Review of recent works on the Negritude movement, with critical remarks and interventions.

Seth Shabo has presented a new argument that attempts to codify familiar worries about indeterminism, luck, and control. His ‘Assimilation Argument’ contends that libertarians cannot distinguish overtly randomized outcomes from exercises of free will. Shabo claims that the argument possesses advantages over the Mind Argument and Rollback Argument, which also purport to establish that indeterminism is incompatible with free will. I argue first that the Assimilation Argument presents no new challenges over and above those presented by the Rollback (...) Argument, and second that the Rollback Argument itself neither presents a deep challenge to, nor raises the cost of, accepting libertarianism. (shrink)

The exchange between the Borg and Captain Jean‐Luc Picard illustrates what's truly horrifying about the Borg. In philosophical terms, the Borg strips the assimilated of their autonomy. Choice is essential to autonomy, but autonomy means more than the freedom to act on whims. Autonomous can be applied to two different sorts of things: there are autonomous beings and autonomous actions. Beings that can rationally deliberate in the face of amoral choice are called autonomous, and many of their actions display autonomy. (...) Autonomous actions are done intentionally, with understanding, and without controlling influences that determine. As crucial as the idea of autonomy seems to be to the moral life, it is also been criticized for relying on a highly individualistic and overly rationalistic notion of humanity. Autonomy is a good thing that we can encourage in others by helping them develop deliberative skills and by interacting with them during decision making. (shrink)

This chapter examines when and how mental simulation--the consideration of alternatives to present reality--produces emotional responses that reflect either contrast or assimilation. The chapter begins with a description of a comparison domain that is most commonly associated with mental simulation--counterfactual thinking. Then the authors consider how mental simulation plays a critical role in determining assimilative and contrastive responses to other type of comparisons. The chapter concludes with a presentation of a model of mental simulation-based comparison processes and describe its (...) relationship to other contemporary comparison models. (shrink)

There are many advantages and disadvantages to central locations. These have shown themselves in the long course of European history. In times of peace, there are important economic and cultural advantages (to illustrate: the present area of the Czech Republic was the richest country in Europe between the two World Wars). There are cross-currents of trade and culture in central Europe of great advantage. For, cultural cross-currents represent a potential benefit in comprehension and cultural growth. But under threat of large-scale (...) conflict, these locations have proved extremely dangerous. Historically, Germany and Austria may be regarded as having had two chief models of their relationships to Europe. In the Holy Roman Empire, Germany was at the center of an aspiring “universalistic” European cosmopolitanism. (In some ways similar to the present situation of the European Union.) Austria maintained a great multi¬cultural empire, until it was destroyed in the First Word War. Generally, middle-European powers have promoted the integration of European diversity, when peace and stability have been plausible objectives. But when European diversity has declined toward ethnic or national conflict, Germany has drawn away from Europe and into itself, seeking inner unity and distinctness to protect it against possible combinations of enemies. This is true of central Europe generally, in degree, but interest often centers on Germany. Generally, central Europe is a cultural pressure cooker. (shrink)

The core of Zimmerman’s picture posits an inverse correlation between an action’s automaticity and belief’s role in the action’s execution. This proposal faces serious problems. First, high-attention, high-control actions don’t seem to heighten awareness of one’s beliefs. Second, low-attention, low-control actions are caused by the same states at play when executing high-attention, high-control actions, in which case there is no ontological difference in the states involved in these behaviors. Third, on Zimmerman’s view it is unclear what it is for a (...) state to be involved in behaviors at all, as the basic realist response—that beliefs cause behavior—is unavailable to a Zimmerman-style pragmatist. Lastly, if Zimmerman's view were right and low-level behaviors weren't caused by beliefs, then we should turn our attention to those states instead, as most of our behavior isn’t executed under conditions of high control and attention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 244-265 [Access article in PDF] Community, Assimilation, and the Unfamiliar Tim Donovan Fellowship We are five friends, one day we came out of the house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself near the first one, and (...) then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. Finally we all stood in a row. People began to notice us, they pointed at us and said: "Those five just came out of that house." Since then we have been living together; it would be a peaceful life if it weren't for the sixth one continually trying to interfere. He doesn't do us any harm, but he annoys us, and that is harm enough; why does he intrude where he is not wanted? We don't know him and don't want him to join us. There was a time, of course, when the five of us did not know one another, either; and it could be said that we still don't know one another, but what is possible and can be tolerated by the five of us is not possible and cannot be tolerated with the sixth one. In any case, we are five and don't want to be six. And what is the point of this continual being together anyhow? It is also pointless for the five of us, but here we are together; a new combination, however, we do not want, just because of our experiences. But how is one to make this clear to the sixth one? Long explanations would almost amount to accepting him in our circle, so we prefer not to explain and not to accept him. No matter how he pouts his lips, we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes. — Franz Kafka 1. I want to introduce this essay on Edmund Spenser's early modern dialogue View of the Present State of Ireland with a contemporary question influenced by Franz Kafka's epigraph: What are the principles that presuppose an understanding of community? I have purposely stated the question of belonging as "an understanding" rather than "what are the principles that we presuppose as...." After all, who is this we that so easily gathers identity within the common usage? I begin with a question to maintain uncertainty, [End Page 244] which indicates a responsibility to greet the unfamiliar, all the while knowing very clearly that the concept of community naturally presumes some common measure of familiarity. Yet as Kafka's allegory implies: What presupposes the propriety of those familiar experiences we name our own?Spenser's dialogue is undoubtedly challenging, a challenge that has drawn an enormous amount of recent critical analysis from literary critics and historians. Still, a general difficulty persists. Michael Donnelly summarizes the difficulty quite well when he notes that the View is quite "anomalous in the Spenserian oeuvre," a rather strange dialogue that seems uncharacteristic of the poet's humanist image (1). The challenges certainly begin with the troubling difficulties of an argument that concludes with the stark political necessities of enforced famine, massive relocation, and ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, the anxious burden of justifying this dire program expresses itself in a tone that would be thought intemperate even by many of Spenser's contemporaries (McCabe, 116). More important than the dialogue's dire tone of determination, there is a continued resonance of enforced cultural assimilation and genocide that haunts our contemporary world forewarned by arguments of pathology and apartheid. However, a glance at recent political news would indicate that these forewarnings are repeatedly ignored. I believe the challenge that the View evokes dwells in the traditional lineage of the concept of community. Thus, we cannot so easily dismiss Spenser's dialogue as merely an early modern problem; nor can we dismiss it as another diatribe in the long-standing tradition of racial screeds. The political problems that the dialogue engages foreshadow current... (shrink)

Ultimate value is rarely fully realized as people have to maintain a balance between values in their everyday life. Robbins notes, however, that it may be perfectly exemplified through ritual. In this paper, I want to show that the perfect exemplification of a value that fundamentally matters to a society may otherwise be attained through the incorporation of an overwhelming stranger. Anthropologists have shown that the presence of a potent foreigner incites a sense of categorical disunity that leads to the (...) dialectical counter movement to assimilate them. In this imaginary process of establishing a new unity, I argue, people are not simply attempting to incorporate the pervading stranger but also to encompass them within their hierarchically arranged idea of value. Subsequently, during the moment of assimilation - which can occur through myth, ritual, or other social forms - the community makes their ultimate value socially present. I will try to exemplify my argument by examining key cultural representations of the other among upland-lowland people in North Seram, Eastern Indonesia. (shrink)