The collective memory of the Reconstruction era in US history is a good example of Jane Anna Gordon's notion of 'creolization' at work. I argue that this is an era that could do with even further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory. Settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that serve as the fundamental bases for creating settler colonial (...) nations-states. One of the most important works on the Reconstruction Era is W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935. I examine both the creolizing elements of DuBois' argument and also suggest how attention to settler memory can further creolize our grasp of this period through a re-reading of his text and putting it into the context of other developments occuring during the years he examines. (shrink)

En mettant en question l’utilisation par les colonisés de la langue des colonisateurs et en appelant au retour aux langues africaines, l’écrivain kényan Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o a produit sans doute la critique la plus radicale et la plus audacieuse qui soit, de la colonisation de l’esprit. Cet article le met en conversation avec Karl Marx dans l'esprit de la pensée de Jane Anna Gordon sur la créolisation de la théorie politique.

Inspired by Jane Gordon's book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon, this article examines the paradoxes of Creolization within the French context. How do post-colonial French identities of Maghrebi, Sub-Saharan African or Caribbean descent Creolize French society? Instead of being an opportunity that must be seized by the Nation, why is creolization perceived as an imminent threat to the Republic? How can one think of Creolizing politics in the former colonial power? How does Creolization compel us to rethink how (...) we live together? And how does it require us to rethink freedom and equality for all? These are the questions at the heart of this article. (shrink)

This essay engages the contributions to the forum by Nathalie Etoke, Kevin Bruyneel, Michael Neocosmos, and Sonia Dayan-Herzbrun to consider what it means to creolize political identities, political memory, and political institutions.

This introduction outlines why the author assembled a community of scholars with the task not of commenting on Jane Anna Gordon’s work on creolizing political theory but instead placing it in dialogue with their own. The idea is that the value of theory depends also on the extent to which it could be engaged as a communicative practice with other theories dedicated to a shared concern. In this case, it is scholars committed to thought devoted to concerns of dignity, freedom, (...) and liberation as well as the critical question of the ultimate value of doing theoretical work. (shrink)

The paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon's important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorporate the theoretical inventions of popular actions.

A book review of Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman, eds., Reimagining the Sacred: Richard Kearney Debates God.

The theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was to compensate for the absence of a (...) programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity. (shrink)

Over the last two decades, the various attempts to “radicalize” Levinas have resulted in two interesting and often separated debates: one the one hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and colonialism and racism, and on the other hand, there is the debate regarding the relationship between Levinas and Judaism. Whether scholars interested in issues of colonialism disregard Levinas's Judaism or use his "subaltern" identity to challenge European hegemony, they do not take seriously the Jewish content of (...) Levinas's thought. In this essay, I challenge the prevailing postcolonial orinetation of the Levinas-colonialism conversation, approaching Levinas's phenomenology from an anticolonial perspective. I will use Frantz Fanon’s dualistic understanding of the colonial world to evaluate the adequacy of Levinas’s phenomenology in describing the ontological structure of the colony and the historical experience of the colonized within it. Levinas’s incomplete understanding of the Holocaust as colonialism contributes to his failure to recognize the dividing line of colonial ontology, the zone of nonbeing, the non-human status of the colonized, and ultimately contributes to the insufficiency of his phenomenology to describe the colony. Because my purpose is not to reject Levinas’s thought in general but to encourage a new approach to his work, in the conclusion I will gesture toward the need for an anticolonial reading of Levinas’s project for Jewish education. (shrink)

The question of how to exist, to dwell, within one’s physical and psychological home has become an urgent one in an increasingly globalized world. Yet the answer to this question has never been more fleeting. Lacking universal political or sociological narratives in what can be oversimplified as a post-colonial or post-modern milieu, reformulating the question of how one dwells within one’s home has become both relevant and essential. This essay explores a return to the question of how one dwells, not (...) in pursuit of a theoretical harmonizing answer, but to reevaluate how the question is generally framed—a return to the foundation of how one exists, or more precisely, how a one exists. Through Martin Heidegger’s essay on dwelling and Michel Foucault’s understanding of history as power, my reading of two works of modern fiction captures the struggles of subjects attempting to define their place in the world. Examining how the protagonists of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout dwell within their homes provides much insight into how race, identity, and history impact dwelling in a global age. (shrink)

The question of how to exist, to dwell, within one’s physical and psychological home has become an urgent one in an increasingly globalized world. Yet the answer to this question has never been more fleeting. Lacking universal political or sociological narratives in what can be oversimplified as a post-colonial or post-modern milieu, reformulating the question of how one dwells within one’s home has become both relevant and essential. This essay explores a return to the question of how one dwells, not (...) in pursuit of a theoretical harmonizing answer, but to reevaluate how the question is generally framed—a return to the foundation of how one exists, or more precisely, how a one exists. Through Martin Heidegger’s essay on dwelling and Michel Foucault’s understanding of history as power, my reading of two works of modern fiction captures the struggles of subjects attempting to define their place in the world. Examining how the protagonists of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout dwell within their homes provides much insight into how race, identity, and history impact dwelling in a global age. (shrink)

Beards are a sort of dwelling. Much like Heidegger's linguistic play with related etymologies of building and dwelling, beards are in a constant state of becoming, forever changing length, shape, and color. To the person—usually, but not always, a man—who grows a beard, the end product is always projected out into the future, like Heidegger’s concept of being. The beard is trimmed and groomed constantly; it is cultivated in a way that feels authentic to its wearer. But the same ontological (...) problems that Heidegger applies to dwelling in a home also apply to beards. Long facial hair symbolizes wisdom in many cultures, but anyone who has grown a beard can attest to the existential dilemma of long facial hair. I didn’t recognize you with the beard, someone will say. Beards can serve as symbols of erudition, yes, but they are also masks for our social selves. The beard is, after all, is a curious appendage, as it is an extension of the self, but not the self per se. Herman Melville called beards “suburbs of the chin.” If, like Heidegger, we are to see being as not a fixed entity divorced from other beings, but a being-in-the-world, a set of relations among other beings, then beards are not simply static accessories or styles, but an example of the slippery nature of being itself. (shrink)

Beards are a sort of dwelling. Much like Heidegger's linguistic play with related etymologies of building and dwelling, beards are in a constant state of becoming, forever changing length, shape, and color. To the person—usually, but not always, a man—who grows a beard, the end product is always projected out into the future, like Heidegger’s concept of being. The beard is trimmed and groomed constantly; it is cultivated in a way that feels authentic to its wearer. But the same ontological (...) problems that Heidegger applies to dwelling in a home also apply to beards. Long facial hair symbolizes wisdom in many cultures, but anyone who has grown a beard can attest to the existential dilemma of long facial hair. I didn’t recognize you with the beard, someone will say. Beards can serve as symbols of erudition, yes, but they are also masks for our social selves. The beard is, after all, is a curious appendage, as it is an extension of the self, but not the self per se. Herman Melville called beards “suburbs of the chin.” If, like Heidegger, we are to see being as not a fixed entity divorced from other beings, but a being-in-the-world, a set of relations among other beings, then beards are not simply static accessories or styles, but an example of the slippery nature of being itself. (shrink)

It might be surprising to find in a journal of contemporary philosophy a text that is mostly about Hugh of St. Victor. The hermeneutic question, however, did not begin only yesterday. While this question has its actual sources in Origen and Saint Augustine, it is in the Didascalicon or The Art of Reading by Hugh of St. Victor that it first finds its clearest formulation and its most methodical development. This “hidden source of hermeneutics” allows for a questioning of the (...) foundations of the hermeneutics of the text from its outset, and also for a return of hermeneutics, or better to turn it, to its primordial origin: a hermeneutics of the “world” or of “creation” [ liber mundi ], rather than of the “text” and of “Scripture” [ liber Scripturae ]. A “Catholic” hermeneutics of “the body and the voice” should, in my opinion, take the place of the “Protestant” hermeneutics of “the meaning of the text” and the “Jewish” hermeneutics of the “body of the letter”. This thesis, which is stated and developed in my book Crossing the Rubicon, has its roots and justification in this historical essay on Hugh of St. Victor. (shrink)

It is dwelling that allows mortals to initiate themselves in time and space. As such, dwelling constitutes the event of being. In his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Martin Heidegger stipulates that dwelling can only be achieved through harmonious relations among the constituents, earth, sky, mortals and gods, of the “fourfold.” Heidegger writes, “To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals – this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling.” (...) Initiating themselves in time and space is the great difficulty that the residents of Ilmorog, the remote village in postcolonial Kenya in which Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novel Petals of Blood is set, experience; in Petals of Blood, dwelling is what defines mortals’ being. (shrink)

Each of the essays collected here presents one or more flashpoints or crises in a history of 20 th - and 21 st -century dwelling.

In this article, I explore displacement as a force that precludes dwelling. I do so in the context of the georgic mode, a literary tradition defined by dwelling and by the kind of agricultural endeavoring that Heidegger relates to “building.” As he explains in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” to build is not only to make or to construct, but also “to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine”. Thus, in addition to creation outright, Heidegger’s “building” (...) involves husbandry. His expansive definition multiplies the kinds of human activity described by building. When humans cultivate plants, they create a situation and environment wherein the crop can flourish. The generative force is nonhuman; growth comes from the plant itself. We cannot build a vineyard as we can a structure. In addition to placing humans in a caretaking role, the three terms in Heidegger’s title further indicate that the husbandman’s “building” requires his continual attention to his place and to his work. Building, in the agricultural sense of the word, requires prolonged physical presence and much thought. Heidegger’s choice of a vineyard underscores the importance of time to dwelling: as a perennial plant that requires years of investment before bearing fruit, the vineyard functions as a site where planning and labor, observation and care unfold across the seasons and over a period of years. The full scope of Heidegger’s dwelling, then, involves prolonged and productive agricultural thinking and laboring. My fundamental premise is that Heideggerian dwelling reaches a confluence with the georgic mode. (shrink)

In this article, I explore displacement as a force that precludes dwelling. I do so in the context of the georgic mode, a literary tradition defined by dwelling and by the kind of agricultural endeavoring that Heidegger relates to “building.” As he explains in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” to build is not only to make or to construct, but also “to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine”. Thus, in addition to creation outright, Heidegger’s “building” (...) involves husbandry. His expansive definition multiplies the kinds of human activity described by building. When humans cultivate plants, they create a situation and environment wherein the crop can flourish. The generative force is nonhuman; growth comes from the plant itself. We cannot build a vineyard as we can a structure. In addition to placing humans in a caretaking role, the three terms in Heidegger’s title further indicate that the husbandman’s “building” requires his continual attention to his place and to his work. Building, in the agricultural sense of the word, requires prolonged physical presence and much thought. Heidegger’s choice of a vineyard underscores the importance of time to dwelling: as a perennial plant that requires years of investment before bearing fruit, the vineyard functions as a site where planning and labor, observation and care unfold across the seasons and over a period of years. The full scope of Heidegger’s dwelling, then, involves prolonged and productive agricultural thinking and laboring. My fundamental premise is that Heideggerian dwelling reaches a confluence with the georgic mode. (shrink)

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl had a permanent and profound impact on the philosophical formation of Paul Ricoeur. One could truly say, paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant 1959 essay ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’,that Husserl is the philosopher in whose shadow Ricoeur, like Merleau-Ponty, also stands, the thinker to whom he constantly returns. Husserl is Ricoeur’s philosopher of reflection, par excellence. Indeed, Ricoeur always invokes Husserl when he is discussing a paradigmatic instance of contemporary philosophy of ‘reflection’ and also of descriptive, (...) ‘eidetic’ phenomenology. Indeed, I shall argue in this chapter that Husserl’s influence on Ricoeur was decisive and provided an eidetic, descriptive methodology which is permanently in play, even when it has to be concretized and mediated by hermeneutics, as Ricoeur proposes after 1960. (shrink)

In 1988, the California state legislature passed the California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, which allowed courts to “enhance” the sentences of offenders who have been proven to "promote, further, or assist in any criminal conduct by gang members." It bundled together criminality, policing, and incarceration in ways that drew upon the fears of the black/latino Others that were imminent in panics surrounding the “crack epidemic” and inner-city crime. Jumping to April 2016, the Salvadoran government has passed strikingly similar (...) legislation, which centers on reclassifying gang-associated crimes as terroristic; in essence under their new laws gang affiliation is a terrorist. This, too, has been enacted in the midst of panic about gang violence and low-level warfare between gangs and the Salvadoran state. The adoption of US-style anti-gang approaches by the Salvadoran government is not new. In 2003, the right-wing government passed mano dura [“iron fist”] policies that sought to address increases in gang associate crime with zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime measures. Law enforcement received expanded leeway to target and arrest gang members, especially those from Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18. Despite the lack of sustained reductions in violent crime, the mano dura policies have remained and will only be exacerbated by the new legislation. (shrink)

In 1988, the California state legislature passed the California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, which allowed courts to “enhance” the sentences of offenders who have been proven to "promote, further, or assist in any criminal conduct by gang members." It bundled together criminality, policing, and incarceration in ways that drew upon the fears of the black/latino Others that were imminent in panics surrounding the “crack epidemic” and inner-city crime. Jumping to April 2016, the Salvadoran government has passed strikingly similar (...) legislation, which centers on reclassifying gang-associated crimes as terroristic; in essence under their new laws gang affiliation is a terrorist. This, too, has been enacted in the midst of panic about gang violence and low-level warfare between gangs and the Salvadoran state. The adoption of US-style anti-gang approaches by the Salvadoran government is not new. In 2003, the right-wing government passed mano dura [“iron fist”] policies that sought to address increases in gang associate crime with zero-tolerance, tough-on-crime measures. Law enforcement received expanded leeway to target and arrest gang members, especially those from Mara Salvatrucha 13 and Barrio 18. Despite the lack of sustained reductions in violent crime, the mano dura policies have remained and will only be exacerbated by the new legislation. (shrink)

Like many North African, Francophone, and world writers whose lives span the historic divide of independence from colonialism, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s work focuses in large part upon the idea of encounter, or, in French, “rencontre.” In this paper I focus upon the figure of the orphan in La mémoire tatouée and Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste, two of his earliest texts. By focusing upon the orphan as a multivalent term, and by following Khatibi’s emphasis upon language, literature, and (...) even life itself as a game or experiment, we can see how Khatibi creates an ethics of encounter that derives its meaning from recuperating a negatively connotated word and transforming it into a term of positive value. With the term “orphan,” he shows how through encountering the Other, by extending beyond into the unknown, by exceeding the circumscriptions of ancestry, identity, and national culture, the individual rises into a new status of free living. Moreover, it is equally through the practice of writing that life redounds with life; writing for Khatibi is never a mimetic representation of life per se but a space for experimenting, for discovery, and for exceeding the parochial nature of an individual’s physical placement in the world. In this sense, the orphan status of his writing shows itself through his aggressively restless, polyphonic, and ageneric writing that uses the localization of genre only as a hinge to push against in the quest to articulate a new relation to the world. (shrink)

Like many North African, Francophone, and world writers whose lives span the historic divide of independence from colonialism, Abdelkébir Khatibi’s work focuses in large part upon the idea of encounter, or, in French, “rencontre.” In this paper I focus upon the figure of the orphan in La mémoire tatouée and Le lutteur de classe à la manière taoïste, two of his earliest texts. By focusing upon the orphan as a multivalent term, and by following Khatibi’s emphasis upon language, literature, and (...) even life itself as a game or experiment, we can see how Khatibi creates an ethics of encounter that derives its meaning from recuperating a negatively connotated word and transforming it into a term of positive value. With the term “orphan,” he shows how through encountering the Other, by extending beyond into the unknown, by exceeding the circumscriptions of ancestry, identity, and national culture, the individual rises into a new status of free living. Moreover, it is equally through the practice of writing that life redounds with life; writing for Khatibi is never a mimetic representation of life per se but a space for experimenting, for discovery, and for exceeding the parochial nature of an individual’s physical placement in the world. In this sense, the orphan status of his writing shows itself through his aggressively restless, polyphonic, and ageneric writing that uses the localization of genre only as a hinge to push against in the quest to articulate a new relation to the world. (shrink)

This paper reflects on experiences of what i call vitality. Such experiences are neither idiosyncratic nor mere romanticism. Moreover, while some figures in continental philosophy do address the body—as perceiving, as sexed, as political—there has been almost no attention given to the active body of vitality. Drawing from the work of Michel Serres, this paper will uncover some of the significant features of such bodily experiences.

The Heideggerian question posed here as “what does it mean to dwell in a global age” leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial “in a global age” is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between “our age” and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura (...) is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of “our global age” and the one sketched in Heidegger's 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of “dwelling in a precarious age” has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same “metaphysics” that has precluded the possibility of “dwelling” throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter “dwelling”? (shrink)

The Heideggerian question posed here as “what does it mean to dwell in a global age” leaves open, invites even, the possibility of committing two conceptual mistakes from which, depending on the theoretical universe we inhabit, two separate sets of problems arise. On the one hand, if the adverbial “in a global age” is taken to denote a radical historical caesura between “our age” and the age in which the concept was first deployed, one has to prove that the caesura (...) is indeed not only historically operative but legitimate on an ontological level. This would, however, be a futile attempt: there hardly exists an essential, qualitative difference between the ontological regime of “our global age” and the one sketched in Heidegger's 1954 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” We have not been blessed by any epochal turns, despite important switches – to move for a second to a different register—in regimes of accumulation. Thus, it may be concluded, the ontological question about the state of “dwelling in a precarious age” has already been posed and answered by Heidegger himself—from an ontological perspective, he is our contemporary. And of course, to such question there can in fact be only one answer: it is the same “metaphysics” that has precluded the possibility of “dwelling” throughout modernity that gave rise to our age as global. But then to avoid the mistake sketched out above and the repetition of an already accomplished analysis, the question as it is posed for us here should be taken as a politicization of the original concept, foreign to a puritanically ontological Heideggerian diagnostics, although building on its foundations: what is to be done historically at this moment to enter “dwelling”? (shrink)