This book offers a systematic attempt to explore the point of convergance between feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault.

This book offers a systematic attempt to explore the point of convergance between feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault.

This book reassesses theories of agency and gender identity against the backdrop of changing relations between men and women in contemporary societies.

This article argues that the failure of certain theories of reflexive identity transformation to consider more fully issues connected to gender identity leads to an overemphasis on the expressive possibilities thrown up by processes of detraditionalization. By ignoring certain deeply embedded aspects, some theories of reflexive change reproduce the `disembodied and disembedded' subject of masculinist thought. The issues of disembodiment and disembeddedness are explored through a study of the work of Pierre Bourdieu on `habitus' and the `field'. The idea of (...) habitus yields a more dynamic theory of embodiment central to a feminist understanding of gender identity as a durable but not immutable norm. The idea of the `field' provides a more differentiated analysis of the social context in which the reflexive transformation of gender identity unfolds. This in turn offers a way of thinking of possible transformations within gender identity as uneven and non-synchronous phenomena. (shrink)

"Foucault: A Critical Introduction offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. Unlike most books on Foucault, this book offers an assessment of all Foucault's work, including his final writings on governmentality and the self. McNay argues that the later work initiates an important shift in his intellectual concerns which alters any retrospective reading of his writings as a whole." "Throughout, McNay is concerned to assess the normative and (...) political implications of Foucault's social criticism. She goes beyond the level of many commentators to look at the values from which Foucault's work springs, and reveals the implicit assumptions underlying his social critique. McNay also discusses Foucault's position in the modernity/postmodernity debate, his own ambivalence toward Enlightenment thought and his place in recent developments in feminist and cultural theory. The result is an invaluable book which clearly outlines the central themes of Foucault's work, while offering a fresh appraisal of his thought."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

This article considers Foucault’s analysis of ordoliberal and neoliberal governmental reason and its reorganization of social relations around a notion of enterprise. I focus on the particular idea that the generalization of the enterprise form to social relations was conceptualized in such exhaustive terms that it encompassed subjectivity itself. Self as enterprise highlights, inter alia, dynamics of control in neoliberal regimes which operate through the organized proliferation of individual difference in an economized matrix. It also throws into question conceptions of (...) individual autonomy that underpin much political thought and upon which ideas about political resistance are based. Self as enterprise also problematizes the viability of Foucault’s later work on ethics of the self as a practice of resistance. I go on to argue that Foucault’s discussion of an unresolved clash in civil society between monarchical and governmental power, between law and norm, offers an elliptical but more promising account of opposition to normalizing bio-power. (shrink)

This article considers two themes in Butler's work: the dialectic of subject formation - that the autonomous subject is instituted through constraint - and the relation between the psyche and the social. With regard to the former, the introduction of a notion of historicity into a conception of the symbolic yields a concept of agency. Nonetheless, this concept of agency still lacks social specificity. By reconfiguring the psyche as an effect of the interiorization of social norms, Butler introduces the destabilizing (...) force of the category of the unconscious into constructivist accounts of identity. This sociocentric reworking of the psyche-social relations provides a nuanced account of gender identity, but it results in a negative model of action as the displacement of constraining social norms. It is also important for a conception of agency to include an account of the creative dimensions of action where actors actively appropriate conflicting socio-cultural values to institute new collective forms of identity. (shrink)

This paper considers the advantages of incorporating Foucault's anti-essentialist theory of the body into feminist explanations of women's oppression. There are also problems in that Foucault neglects to examine the gendered character of the body and reproduces a sexism endemic in "gender neutral" social theory. The Foucauldian body is essentially passive resulting in a limited account of identity and agency. This conflicts with an aim of feminism: to rediscover and revalue the experiences of women.

The paper focuses on the discussion of social freedom in the family in Axel Honneth's most recent book Freedom's Right. I argue, on the one hand, that radical democrats have much to learn from Honneth's method of normative reconstruction because it provides a much needed corrective to the “social weightlessness” that characterizes their thought about democracy. In contrast to the current preoccupation with rarefied issues of political ontology, Freedom's Right exemplifies a type of sociologically attuned thinking that is essential for (...) addressing issues of power and inequality. On the other hand, I argue that Honneth's reliance on a teleological notion of historical progress has deeply constraining effects on his critique of power. First, in so far as it underestimates the impact of growing social inequality on personal and intimate relations, it fails to acknowledge just how extensive, radical and, potentially deeply contentious the political measures needed to realize social freedom in the family may have to be. Second, Honneth's teleological reconstruction provides too thin a basis to generate substantive normative solutions to issues of social justice in the family. Third, teleology tends to depoliticize the process of emancipatory social change by construing it in terms of impersonal mechanisms and developmental tendencies rather than as open-ended, often polemical and deeply contested forms of political struggle. (shrink)

I argue that Forst’s justification paradigm is less radical than claimed in that it fails to establish an immanent connection between the role of justification as a transcendental principle and as...

Much contemporary work on agency offers only a partial account because it remains within an essentially negative understanding of subject formation. This essay examines the work of Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell and argues that the negative paradigm needs to be supplemented by a more generative theoretical framework, if feminists are to develop a fuller account of agency. In the negative paradigm, the subject is understood in passive terms as an effect of discursive structures. This tends to overlook ideas of (...) self-interpretation that introduce more active dimensions into understandings of subject formation and agency. Furthermore, an unqualified notion of indeterminacy does not unpick the imbrication of relations of time and power that overdetermine agency. Ultimately, structural accounts of subject formation need to be integrated more closely with hermeneutic perspectives of the self in order to understand better the complexities of agency in a post-traditional society. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the idea of exemplarity outlined by the Italian critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara that forms part of his general case for the centrality of disclosure to emancipatory political reasoning. Ferrara argues that “at its best” political thought should have the capacity to animate the democratic imagination by disclosing new political worlds and hence new possibilities for thought and action. I argue that Ferrara’s notion of exemplarity provides important conceptual resources for a re-grounding of critical theory in the (...) type of experientially based disclosing critique that has, post Habermas, been marginalized. Ferrara’s work is significant in two respects. First, exemplary universalism provides a much-needed alternative to the assimilative paradigms of normative reasoning that dominate contemporary political theory. Exemplary normativity suggests a mode of reasoning from concrete particularity that is more inclusive than principle-based approaches of voices which, by virtue of their ma... (shrink)

As an alternative to post-structural accounts of ‘performative’ agency, Habermasian feminists propose the idea of the narrative self. The concept of narrative is seen as a way of bridging the gap between the formalism of Habermas’s idea of communicative ethics and the dispersion that arises from the post-structural critique of the subject. The idea of the narrative self undoubtedly yields an active and creative account of agency. However, I argue that the attempt to reconcile a narrative concept of the self (...) within a theory of communicative ethics results in a limited understanding of identity and agency in the context of the systemic reproduction of gender inequalities. (shrink)

There has been a lively debate amongst political theorists about whether certain liberal concepts of democracy are so idealized that they lack relevance to ʹrealʹ politics. Echoing these debates, Lois McNay examines in this book some theories of radical democracy and argues that they too tend to rely on troubling abstractions - or what she terms ʹsocially weightlessʹ thinking. They often propose ideas of the political that are so far removed from the logic of everyday practice that, ultimately, (...) their supposed emancipatory potential is thrown into question. Radical democrats frequently maintain that what distinguishes their ideas of the political from others is the fundamental concern with unmasking and challenging unrecognized forms of inequality and domination that distort everyday life. But this supposed attentiveness to power is undermined by the invocation of rarefied models of political action that treat agency as an unproblematic given and overlook certain features of the embodied experience of oppression. The tendency of radical democrats to define democratic agency in terms of dynamics of perpetual flux, mobility and agonism passes over too swiftly the way in which objective structures of oppression are often taken into the body as subjective dispositions, leaving individuals with the feeling that they are unable to do little more than endure a state of affairs beyond their control. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Steven Klein’s excellent new book The Work of Politics is an innovative, insightful and original argument about the valuable role that welfare institutions may play in democratic movements for change. In place of a one-sided Weberian view of welfare institutions as bureaucratic instruments of social control, Klein recasts them in Arendtian terms as ‘worldly mediators’ or participatory mechanisms that act as channels for a radical politics of democratic world making. Although Klein is careful to modulate this utopian vision through a (...) developed account of power and domination, I question the relevance of this largely historical model of world-building activism for the contemporary world of welfare. I point to the way that decades of neoliberal social policy have arguably eroded many of the social conditions and relations of solidarity that are vital prerequisites for collective activism around welfare. (shrink)

Of the many interesting points that Alessandro Ferrara raises in reply to my article, I focus in response on the question of context transcendence for, as well as seeming to lie at the heart of our differences, it is of foundational importance to the tradition of critical theory which influences both our work. I agree with Ferrara about the ‘conceptual necessity’ of context transcendence for critique but I disagree with the assumption that he makes that experientially grounded critique is necessarily (...) inimical to context transcendence. I argue that this need not be the case if we conceive of the transcending capacity of thought in ways that are more compatible with the practical logic of social life, for example, in the historicized terms of a sociolinguistic expressivism. Ferrara’s elision of experientially grounded critique with radical contextualism tout court sets up something of a false dilemma between immanence and transcendence which ultimately serves to justify his reliance on the dubious ahistoric... (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 283-295, September 2022.

In Parkinson’s disease, the fronto-striatal network is involved in motor and cognitive symptoms. Working memory updating training engages this network in healthy populations, as observed by improved cognitive performance and increased striatal BOLD signal. This two-part study aimed to assess the feasibility of WM updating training in PD and measure change in cognition, movement and functional brain response in one individual with PD after WM updating training. A feasibility and single-subject study were performed in which patients with PD completed computerized (...) WM updating training. The outcome measures were the pre-post changes in criterion and transfer cognitive tests; cognitive complaints; psychological health; movement kinematics; and task-related BOLD signal. Participants in the feasibility study showed improvements on the criterion tests at post-test. FL displayed the largest improvements on the criterion tests and smaller improvements on transfer tests. Furthermore, FL reported improved cognitive performance in everyday life. A shorter onset latency and smoother upper-limb goal-directed movements were measured at post-test, as well as increased activation within the striatum and decreased activation throughout the fronto-parietal WM network. This two-part study demonstrated that WM updating training is feasible to complete for PD patients and that change occurred in FL at post-test in the domains of cognition, movement and functional brain response. (shrink)

Introduction -- Stoic ethics and rhetoric -- Eighteenth-century common sense and sensus communis -- Taste and sensus communis -- Propriety, sympathy, and style fusing individual and social -- Victorian language theories and the decline of sensus communis.

Schlusslogische Letztbegründung is a collection of essays in honor of Kurt Walter Zeidler. Mr. Zeidler is a distinguished Kant- and Neo-Kantian-scholar who has reconstructed Kant's concept of transcendental logic in connection with the logic of the concept of Hegel and the logic of symbolization of Peirce. (cf. Zeidler: Grundriss der transzendentalen Logik, 3rd ed., Wien 2017) He has most notably inquired intensively into the relation of transcendental logic to philosophy of science (cf. Zeidler: Prolegomena zur Wissenschaftstheorie, Wien 2000) and to (...) phenomenology (cf. Zeidler: Vermittlungen. Zum antiken und neueren Idealismus, Wien 2016). He has also published several studies on Neo-Kantianism (cf. Zeidler: Provokationen. Zu Problemen des Neukantianismus, Wien 2018). This is refelected in the collection of essays by distinguished scholars who discuss and critically examine Zeidler's work. It includes contributions by Steinar Mathisen (Oslo), Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (Vienna), Werner Flach (Lichtenau), Thomas Knoppe (Straberg), Geert Edel (Wyk/Föhr), Martin Bunte (Münster), Reinhard Hiltscher (Dresden), Walter Tydecks (Bensheim), Christian Krijnen (Amsterdam), Hartwig Wiedebach (Zürich), Max Gottschlich (Linz), Thomas Sören Hoffmann (Hagen), Rudolf Meer (Kaliningrad), Hans-Jürgen Müller (Frankfurt am Main), Robert König (Vienna), Ulrich Blau (Marburg), Karen Gloy (Luzern/Munich), Reinhold Breil (Aachen), Erhard Oeser (Vienna), Hans-Dieter Klein (Vienna), Hans Martin Dober (Tübingen), Kurt Walter Zeidler (Vienna) and Lois Marie Rendl (Vienna). (shrink)

This paper shows how the mythology surrounding rape enters into a criterion of reasonableness which operates through the legal system to make women vulnerable to unscrupulous victimization. It explores the possibility for changes in legal procedures and presumptions that would better serve women's interests and leave them less vulnerable to sexual violence. This requires that we reformulate the criterion of consent in terms of what is reasonable from a woman's point of view.

This article presents a fairness principle for evaluating decision-making based on predictions: a decision rule is unfair when the individuals directly impacted by the decisions who are equal with respect to the features that justify inequalities in outcomes do not have the same statistical prospects of being benefited or harmed by them, irrespective of their socially salient morally arbitrary traits. The principle can be used to evaluate prediction-based decision-making from the point of view of a wide range of antecedently specified (...) substantive views about justice in outcome distributions. (shrink)

Embedded pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs), like other types of randomized comparative-effectiveness research (CER) studies, are sometimes conducted without informed consent. Indeed, authors of both...

In this paper we argue that transparency of machine learning algorithms, just as explanation, can be defined at different levels of abstraction. We criticize recent attempts to identify the explanation of black box algorithms with making their decisions (post-hoc) interpretable, focusing our discussion on counterfactual explanations. These approaches to explanation simplify the real nature of the black boxes and risk misleading the public about the normative features of a model. We propose a new form of algorithmic transparency, that consists in (...) explaining algorithms as an intentional product, that serves a particular goal, or multiple goals (Daniel Dennet’s design stance) in a given domain of applicability, and that provides a measure of the extent to which such a goal is achieved, and evidence about the way that measure has been reached. We call such idea of algorithmic transparency “design publicity.” We argue that design publicity can be more easily linked with the justification of the use and of the design of the algorithm, and of each individual decision following from it. In comparison to post-hoc explanations of individual algorithmic decisions, design publicity meets a different demand (the demand for impersonal justification) of the explainee. Finally, we argue that when models that pursue justifiable goals (which may include fairness as avoidance of bias towards specific groups) to a justifiable degree are used consistently, the resulting decisions are all justified even if some of them are (unavoidably) based on incorrect predictions. For this argument, we rely on John Rawls’s idea of procedural justice applied to algorithms conceived as institutions. (shrink)