The last few years have seen the emergence of critical phenomenology as an exciting paradigm in phenomenology and beyond, spanning disciplines such as anthropology, urban studies, gender studies an...

This paper discusses Habermas’s argument that justice requires solidarity as its ‘reverse side’, whereby the former provides the necessary global framework for establishing intersubjective solidarity whilst the latter constitutes an important precondition for igniting social and political change in the direction of social justice. In this paper I argue that such a paradigm of reciprocity might be fruitfully complemented by a less apparent yet substantial nexus: that between solidarity and perceived injustice, which I contend also triggers the emergence of solidarity. (...) Drawing from Arendt’s thematisation of solidarity as a principle that stems from human suffering and recent scholarship on transitional post-conflict justice, I analyse the negative and reactive aspect of solidarity and the role of negative emotions in its emergence. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on feminist protests (exemplary, in Argentina and Poland) defending women's right to access to prenatal diagnostics and abortion, which I reflect upon from the perspective of Hannah Arendt's theory of politics. After briefly referring to Arendt's difficult relationship with feminism, linking it to the struggle of Argentinian women for legalizing abortion, I look at Arendt's theorizing of the body in and beyond the private. I then argue for politicization of abortion as extrinsically enforced and rethink (...) the role of the private in the context of abortion regulations and practices. In the closing section of my paper, I offer a micronarrative of the feminist street protests in Poland, and discuss it as an example of feminist revolutionary moment. (shrink)

The central claim of this article is that narrative agency, which I will define as a subject’s capacity to make sense of herself as an ‘I’ over time and in relation to other ‘I’s, is a precondition for identity formation. I engage with two critiques of this claim: first, that narrative agency is limited by, rather than primary to, subordinating gender norms and, second, that a view of narrative agency as primary is committed to too ambitious a conception of the (...) communicability of narratives. I argue that the narrative model survives these two criticisms by emphasising its irreducibility, its inherent relationality and its generative potential. I then suggest some of the ways in which a concept of narrative agency might help feminist critical theory to posit mutual recognition and respect as productive criteria for progressive self and social transformation. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Polazeci od ideje solidarnosti u feministickom diskursu koji se bavi suocavanjem sa prosloscu u Srbiji, rad pokrece pitanje kako i zasto feminizam moze da promislja mnogostruke razlicitosti medju zenama u Srbiji. U radu se raspravlja o idejama solidarnosti, konceptu moralne odgovornosti i suocavanja sa prosloscu na koje referiraju i feministicke teorije i prakse u Srbiji. Rad otvara pitanje o solidarnosti kao o strateskom pojmu i ukazuje na politiku ukljucivanja/iskljucivanja mnogostrukih drugosti u okviru nacionalnog kolektiva. Posebna paznja usmerena je na rodne (...) kategorije i konstrukcije razlicitosti unutar njih koje su ukratko prikazane kroz rezultate analize narativa secanja dve grupe zena u Srbiji - medicinskih sestara i antiratnih aktivistkinja - koji sluze kao ilustracija razlicitosti kojima se problematizuje koncept solidarnosti. Pri tom, ukazano je da subjektiviteti, iskustva i rodne pozicije u medjusobnoj interakciji oblikuju secanja, razlicitosti, ali i odnos prema proslosti. PR Projekat Ministarstva nauke Republike Srbije, br. 43007. (shrink)

This essay surveys the theme of solidarity in the respective works of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hannah Arendt. Recent discourses in continental political philosophy have arrived at an impasse regarding solidarity. On the one hand, solidarities are important for galvanizing historically oppressed peoples against dominant discourses. On the other hand, solidarities that impose similarities in advance run the risk of absorbing difference and becoming exclusionary. Gadamer and Arendt, each in different manners, promise a distinctive approach to discourses on solidarity through their (...) emphasis on the existential concern for human finitude. Both suggest that insofar as we are finite, we are bound together not by familiarity and sameness but rather by shared vulnerability, finding help with this vulnerability by remaining open to the difference and otherness that is always at stake in communal life. In this, Gadamer and Arendt open new paths to theorizing collectives in ways that embrace and defend difference rather than rejecting it. Moreover, both remind us of the urgency of such a notion of solidarity for responding to what, in allusion to Arendt, we may be inclined to call the dark times in which we live. (shrink)

In the 1980s extra-parliamentary social movements and critical theories of race, class, and gender added a new sociocultural understanding of justice—recognition—to the much older socioeconomic one. The best-known form of the struggle for recognition is the identity politics of disadvantaged groups. I argue that there is still another option to conceptualize their predicament, neglected in recent political philosophy, which understands exclusion not in terms of injustice, more particularly a lack of sociocultural recognition, but in terms of a lack of freedom. (...) I draw my inspiration from Hannah Arendt's model of political action. Arendt diagnoses exclusion not solely as a mode of injustice, but as a lack of participation and public freedom. Consequently, she advocates a struggle for participation, political equality, and freedom as a strategy for emancipation or empowerment. Arendt could help feminists see that collective empowerment is made possible not by a shared identity (the target of poststructuralist critics) but by common action in the service of a particular worldly issue or common end. In other words, feminists would do well to appreciate the revolutionary quality and heritage of the feminist movement better, that is, its character as a set of practices of freedom. (shrink)