Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (...) who have argued for the universality of aesthetics? Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics, and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus (...) becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

____Ethics of Eros__ sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by questioning the basic distinctions and categories in feminist theory. Tina Chanter uses the work of Luce Irigaray as the focus for a critique of French and Anglo-American feminism as it is articulated in the debate over essentialism. While these two branches of feminism represent opposing views, Chanter advocates a productive exchange between the two.

This volume of essays, all but one previously unpublished, investigates the question of Levinas’s relationship to feminist thought. Levinas, known as the philosopher of the Other, was famously portrayed by Simone de Beauvoir as a patriarchal thinker who denigrated women by viewing them as the paradigmatic Other. Reconsideration of the validity of this interpretation of Levinas and exploration of what more positively can be derived from his thought for feminism are two of this volume’s primary aims. Levinas breaks with Heidegger’s (...) phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. The ethical orientation of Levinas’s philosophy assumes a subject who lives in a world of enjoyment, a world that is made accessible through the dwelling. The feminine presence presides over this dwelling, and the feminine face represents the first welcome. How is this feminine face to be understood? Does it provide a model for the infinite obligation to the Other, or is it a proto-ethical relation? The essays in this volume investigate this dilemma. Contributors are Alison Ainley, Diane Brody, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Claire Katz, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Stella Sandford, Sonya Sikka, and Ewa Ziarek. (shrink)

Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's thought. The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded (...) from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series (...) of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

The Picture of Abjection is an analysis of independent, contemporary, international film. Appropriating Kristeva's analysis of abjection, which she developed in the context of psychoanalytic theory to designate that which a subject rejects as a site of impurity, the book takes up the abject in order to illuminate various intersections of discrimination. The focus is on how race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality intersect with one another in ways that involve abjection. The argument is informed by a variety of (...) disciplines, including film theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy and gender theory. The aim of the book is to enhance understanding of how film can both engage in and ameliorate the ways forms of discrimination play off one another. (shrink)

Argues for the importance of the neglected theme of slavery in Antigone.

ABSTRACT I consider Bromell’s critique of Rancière in the context of a discussion of the Black Lives Matter movement, focusing on taking a knee. I argue that Rancière’s analysis can shed light on the Black Lives Matter movement, while also agreeing with Bromell’s general argument that race blindness is characteristic of Ranciere’s work. In this spirit, I suggest that taking race seriously implies Rancière’s conception of humans as poetic beings requires revision.

A practicing psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray is also a linguist and a philosopher. Irigaray's earliest book, Le Language des déments (1973), is a study of language and various forms of mental disturbance. It was out of her experience of psychoanalysis, both as analysand and analyst (see 1977, p. 62), that in 1974 Irigaray came to publish Speculum of the Other Woman, a book which takes as its trajectory, however, the history of Western philosophy from Plato to hegel (see Article 6). In (...) her reinterpretation of the Western philosophical tradition Irigaray identifies and excavates the repressed feminine that she sees as having been systematically sublimated by a logic of representation that functioned according to a monolithic economy geared towards masculinity. Her view is that “all Western discourse presents a certain isomorphism with the masculine sex: the privilege of unity, form of the self, of the visible, of the specularisable, of the erection” which “does not correspond to the female sex: there is not ‘a’ female sex” (1977, p. 64). Hence the title of her 1977 work This Sex Which is Not One, which can be read either as “the (female) sex that does not count as such within the masculine economy of the visible,” or as “the (female) sex that is not singular, but multiple” (see Jardine and Menke, 1991, p. 64). (shrink)

Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a persons identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus (...) becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

This chapter brings together the two sets of concerns, the first clustering around ethics and sexual difference, the second around race, slavery, and colonialism. The author suggests that, for Derrida, each of these concerns implicates the other, and to the extent that this is true, his reflections on Hegel's Antigone have not been read as carefully as they need to be. At the same time, the author says that Derrida has not read Sophocles as well or as closely as he (...) might have done. The claim is rather to read Hegel, who himself, as many have pointed out, could be called to account for not reading Sophocles closely, for not even wanting to do so, for appropriating Antigone only as a pretext, using her as fodder for his dialectical machine–and that is precisely the issue at stake here. (shrink)

Irigaray raises the question of sexual difference. Yet there are moments at which Irigaray’s own pursuit of this question recapitulates the kind of universalism it is meant to combat. She remains ensconced in judgments that close down the attempt to think beyond sexual difference. The article pursues this line of thought particularly in relation to her figuring of Antigone, suggesting that there is a need to open up sexual difference so that it does not function as a universal discourse, but (...) is open to other kinds of difference, for example, racial difference. (shrink)

Redistributing the sensible: the art of borders, maps, territories and bodies -- Politics as the interruption of inequality, and the police as the miscount -- Art as dissensus: moving beyond the ethical and representative regimes with the help of Kant and Hegel -- Framing and reframing Rancière's critical intervention: Foucault and Kant -- Form and matter -- Feminist art: disrupting and consolidating the police order.

In Glas, Derrida focuses his attention on a question regarding the family, on the unintelligibility of familial love for which Hegel makes Antigone representative. The account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the family differs in several crucial ways from the standard account of how Hegelian self-consciousness is constituted in the master–slave dialectic. Most notably, the achievement of self-consciousness through familial love involves no risk of life, no struggle to the death, no conflict. While Derrida refrains from interrogating the relation (...) between the master–slave dialectic and sexual difference directly, he interrogates the peaceful recognition that Hegel says occurs between Polynices as brother and Antigone as sister. I explore the silences that punctuate Derrida's discussion of Antigone, especially his silence on Hegel's twofold elision of the master–slave dialectic with the husband–wife relation, and of Antigone with the figure of the wife. By symbolically marrying her off, Hegel subordinates Antigone to a symbolic husband. (shrink)