Epistemic standpoint theories have elaborated the effects of social situatedness on epistemic competence: Dominant groups are regularly subject to epistemic blockages that limit the possibility of cognition and knowledge production. Oppressed groups, on the other hand, have access to perceptions and insights that dominant groups lack. This diagnosis can be generalized: Not only our epistemic, but also our normative relation to the world is socially situated, that is, our values, virtues, moral sentiments are shaped by relations of domination. In this (...) article, my goal is to sketch the general outlines of a standpoint theory of normativity. I do so by engaging with two lines of tradition. First, I review conceptions of fugitive freedom in the Black Radical Tradition, before I recapitulate the feminist debate around the concept of care work. The counter-hegemonic norms theorized in these traditions can be brought into dialogue because they are both based on similar presuppositions, namely, political struggle provoked by social contradictions. (shrink)

Fugitive Politics explores the intersection between politics and ecology, between the requirements for radical change and the unprecedented challenges posed by the global crisis, a dialectic has rarely been addressed in academia. Across eight chapters, Carl Boggs explores how systemic change may be achieved within the current system, while detailing attempts at achieving change within nation states. Boggs states that any notion of revolution seems fanciful in the current climate, contending that controlling elites have concentrated their hold on corporate power (...) along three self-serving fronts: technology (Big Tech) and the surveillance order, militarism and the warfare state, intensification of globalized power. Combined with this Boggs cites the fundamental absence of revolutionary counter-forces, arguing that after decades of subservice relevant, allied to the rise of identity politics and social movements, the Marxist theoretical legacy is now exhausted, and will not provide an exit from the crisis. Boggs concludes that the only possibility for fundamental change will come from an open style of politics, in the Jacobin tradition, operating within the overall structures of the current democratic state. Written for both an academic and general readership, in the US and beyond, Fugitive Politics will be of vital importance to those studying political theory, political philosophy, political history, Marxism and Marxist theory, authoritarian politics, ecology, environmental politics, and climate politics. (shrink)

. Fugit Hora: Fashion and the ethics of style. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 340-354.

Political Theory as a Vocation -- Transgression, Equality, and Voice -- Norm and Form : The Constitutionalizing of Democracy -- Fugitive Democracy -- Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory -- Hobbes and the Culture of Despotism -- On Reading Marx Politically -- Max Weber : Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory -- Reason in Exile : Critical Theory and Technological Society -- Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political -- Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of Time -- The (...) Liberal/Democratic Divide : On Rawls's Political Liberalism -- On the Theory and Practice of Power -- Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism -- Postmodern Politics and the Absence of Myth -- The Destructive Sixties and Postmodern Conservatism -- From Progress to Modernization : The Conservative Turn -- Editorial -- What Revolutionary Action Means Today -- The People's Two Bodies -- The New Public Philosophy -- Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition -- Constitutional Order, Revolutionary Violence and Modern Power -- Agitated Times. (shrink)

Abstract:The central inquiry of this article concerns the ethical orientation within post-structuralism, specifically questioning its potential affinity with deontology. While the “philosophers of difference” offer divergent perspectives on the doctrine of judgment, Jacques Derrida folds it within Deconstruction as a nomo-aporetic transcendental horizon. To understand this operation and its potential ethical significance, I suggest Jean-François Lyotard offers the best counter-model with which to compare against Derrida’s. Amongst their direct and indirect exchanges with each other is a dialogue concerning the law (...) and its fundamental ground. Through their respective readings of Kafka – Derrida’s reading of “Before the Law” and Lyotard’s reading of “In the Penal Colony” – both attempt to delineate how the specific nature of the ground of the law determines the way in which an individual becomes subject to the law. Despite the enigmatic nature of their discourses, their comparison reveals converging and diverging trajectories in their ethical reflections as they push toward thinking the limits of lawfulness. Through such a comparative study of their texts, this exploration aims to unveil the shared fugitive vector of their ethical contemplations within the post-structuralist framework. (shrink)

Traditionally, transitional justice has referred to that field of theoretical scholarship that proffers recuperative strategies for political societies divided by a history of violence. Through the establishment of truth commissions, public confessionals and reparative measures, transitional justice regimes have sought to establish restorative conditions that might help reconcile historical antagonists both to each other and to the trauma of their shared past. Because of some of the theoretical lapses in this scholarship some have turned recently to the field of radical (...) democratic and ‘new pluralist’ thought – and especially to agonistic literature – to foreground a theory of post-conflict reconciliation based not on the principles of the sublimation of difference, but rather the perpetual deferral of accord. This essay works both to underscore that effort, as well as to problematize it. Through unorthodox readings of Giorgio Agamben, Jean Améry and Sheldon Wolin, the essay argues that an emphasis on messianicity as the temporal mode of political repair is ultimately less productive for what I call an agonistics of reconciliation than a more nuanced approach to what Wolin calls ‘fugitive democracy’. Where the former is allied with a problematic politics of mutual respect, the latter affirms a more germane politics of abiding resentment. In the end, a startling conclusion is drawn from reading agonistic reconciliation through Wolin: democracy may be a political experience reserved for scenes of transitional justice alone. (shrink)

This essay builds on various critiques of the relationship between the voice and autonomous individual subjectivity, briefly tracking the specific history through which the voice transformed into an ideal object representing the liberal subject of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper asks: what are we to make of those enfleshed voices that do not conform to the ideal voice of the self-possessed liberal subject? What are we to make of those voices that refuse the imperative of improvement that underpins social and economic (...) contractualism? How might we attend to the sonicity of those voices that refuse to individuate, possess, and accumulate? And what fugitive modes of speech might be transmitted by such un-formed and un-organized voices? Against the idealized voice of liberalism, and the gendered and racialized exclusions that this voice implies, I propose a mode of fugitive listening that allows us to open our ears to the noisy voices and modes of speech that sound outside the locus of politics proper. Indebted to the Black radical tradition, fugitive listening attends to sonic practices that refuse the given grounds of representation. I argue that fugitive listening is a practice that can be situated in what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten call ‘the undercommons’. The essay concludes by turning to gossip, figuring this noisy modality of speech as central to undercommon spaces shaped by Black performance. (shrink)

In Fugitive Time, Matthew Omelsky theorizes the embodied experience of time in twentieth- and twenty-first-century black artforms from across the world. Through the lens of time, he charts the sensations and coursing thoughts that accompany desires for freedom as they appear in the work of artists as varied as Toni Morrison, Yvonne Vera, Aimé Césaire, and Issa Samb. "Fugitive time" names a distinct utopian desire directed at the anticipated moment when the body and mind have been unburdened of the violence (...) that has consumed black life globally for centuries, bringing with it a new form of being. Omelsky shows how fugitive time is not about attaining this transcendent release, but instead sustaining the idea of it as an ecstatic social gathering. From the desire for ethereal queer worlds in the Black Audio Film Collective's Twilight City to Sun Ra's transformation of nineteenth-century scientific racism into an insurgent fugitive aesthetic, Omelsky shows how fugitive time evolves and how it remains a dominant form of imagining freedom in global black cultural expression. (shrink)

Sheldon S. Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy’ is arguably his most provocative contribution to political theory. Breaking with the understanding of democracy as a constitutional form whose origins he locates in the work of Aristotle, Wolin claims democracy is better understood not as a constitution, but as a ‘rebellious moment,’ making democracy dependent on cultural rather than institutional characteristics. This formulation poses a problem for democracy as a political phenomenon, as political power today tends to be concentrated within institutions. Without institutional expression, (...) democracy is alienated from political power and hence a contradiction in terms. I reconstruct an understanding of Wolin’s fugitive democracy that can avoid such problems, while also being adequate to the current political juncture. I argue that Aristotle’s conception of the practice of justice, read through the lens of Wolin’s ‘fugitive democracy,’ becomes ‘fugitive justice,’ the cultivation of a democratic ethos that might support and sustain fortuitous democratic moments, connecting democratic culture to political institutions. In this way, Aristotle’s work is split: not simply the founder of constitutionalism, through ‘fugitive justice’ Aristotle becomes a resource for radical democrats, and a complement to Wolin’s concept of democracy. (shrink)

This article engages new histories of the black frontline communities of the Underground Railroad to rethink both fugitive democracy and the transformative possibilities of sanctuary as its constitutive twin. We analyze the ways that communities of free blacks and fugitives in the border zones between the Antebellum US North and South crafted themselves as magnetic spaces of creative refuge that suggest we reconceive sanctuary as the generative twin of fugitivity. This insight enables us to theorize new ethical and political (...) dimensions of Sheldon Wolin’s concept fugitive democracy by illuminating how fugitivity as flight away from danger can be interwoven with sanctuary as flight into and toward alternatives. Specifically, we theorize three dimensions of fugitive democracy/transformative sanctuary—sanctuary tending, dramatic sanctuary, and disruptive hospitality. While some theorists have considered key motifs in Wolin’s fugitive democracy to be opposed to vital themes disclosed in contemporary theories of black fugitivity, we argue that the power of black frontline communities stemmed precisely from their capacities to dynamically entangle political approaches taken to be at odds. For example, we suggest a theory and practice of tending involving both nurturing care and militantly defensive action, dramatic sanctuary performances that amplify public power by oscillating between tricky concealment and flagrant publicity, and disruptive hospitality that interweaves law-breaking harbor with strategies for juridical and institutional change. These insights open onto an alternative imaginary that can also provide a toolbox for building grassroots democratic power today, particularly in the face of emergent neofascism and escalating displacement worldwide. (shrink)

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist who was uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau demonstrates why these charges are wrong and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with the themes of primitivism and slavery in Rousseau's political theory. Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial (...) contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable. (shrink)

Moral imperatives are claimed to be inescapable. The moral felon who convinces us that he desired to commit his crimes, that he had no desires that the actions thwarted, does not incline us to withdraw our judgment that he did what he ought not to have done. We do not permit him to evade his moral culpability by citing unusual desires or interests. This thesis of moral inescapability seems familiar and yet is notoriously difficult to make sense of. Philippa Foot (...) calls it “the fugitive thought,” and argues that there is no coherent thought to be brought into the light, but thinks that we could carry on moral discourse purged of claims of inescapability.1 Her pessimism about locating the fugitive is justified, but moral discourse may well not survive its elimination. Inescapability—our tendency to morally condemn the criminal regardless of his desires or interests—lies at the heart of our moral framework; indeed, we might well think that it is the whole point of having a moral language. For this reason our moral discourse is hopelessly flawed in the sense of there not being an acceptable explication of the central moral concepts, though it is not without practical merit. Participating in moral discourse may be warranted in pragmatic terms, despite its defects. (shrink)

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

Nietzsche’s discussions of nihilism are meant to bring into view an intriguing pathology of modern culture: that it is unable to sustain "higher values". This paper attempts to make sense of the nature and import of higher values. Higher values are a subset of final values. They are distinguished by their demandingness, susceptibility toward creating tragic conflicts, recruitment of a characteristic set of powerful emotions, perceived import, exclusionary nature, and their tendency to instantiate a community. The paper considers Nietzsche’s arguments (...) for the claim that we are committed to instituting some set of higher values. The cost of not doing so is vitiating our deepest aim and precluding a central form of happiness. (shrink)

El presente artículo propone un estudio comparativo de la idea de fuga presente en la época del Barroco, como una herramienta crítica capaz de afrontar la crisis temporal contemporánea provocada por una hegemonía aceleracionista. El objetivo es demostrar que, simbólicamente, la fuga permite analizar comparativamente el tiempo en la contemporaneidad y en el Barroco, pues en ambos casos esta noción infiere cambio y transitoriedad. Sin embargo, mientras en el primero la fuga se vincula con un tiempo prospectivo enmarcado en la (...) aceleración y el hiper-consumo; en el Barroco la fuga potencia el momento, posibilitando la inflexión y la coyuntura. Bajo esta consideración, se estudia a la fuga como una alegoría temporal de la producción intelectual y cultural del Barroco que, a partir de las nociones y los usos del movimiento, el contrapunto, la retórica y el pliegue; lega una significación polisémica capaz de extender la constricción de la fugacidad temporal en la actualidad. (shrink)

Schiller's ethical studies.--Shelley and the Revolution.--The nature of voluntary progress.--The practical significance of pessimism.--Pessimism and modern thought.--Tests of right and wrong.--On purpose in thought.--George Eliot as a religious teacher.--Natural rights and Spinoza's essay on liberty.--The decay of earnestness.--Doubting and working.--How beliefs are made.--A neglected study.--The problem of Paracelsus.--Pope Leo's philosophical movement and its relations to modern thought.

Amy Herzog 'Reassessing the Aesthetic: Cinema, Deleuze, and the Art of Thinking' _Film-Philosophy_, Deleuze Special Issue vol. 5 no. 40, November 2001.

Abstract:What if our politics are shaped by the texture of wounds rather than the identity of selves? What possible future will have been opened up by posing that very question? I take up Eve Sedgwick’s invitation to begin with stigma “as a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy” for a transformative queer politics and elaborate Sedgwick’s attention to spoiled identity through Hortense Spiller’s conceptualization of the flesh. The flesh substantiates the grounds for a materialist ontology that begins with stigma, the materiality (...) of the wound, to constitute a transformative politics toward a fugitive elsewhere. Reading Sedgwick and Spillers together opens up a transformative ontological register that spans the material, affective, and fugitive. I argue that the hieroglyphics of the flesh give us knowledge of ourselves and others and the world(s) we have lived through but also invite us to transform who and what we are, how we relate, and what a world might look like where our being is not constituted by fugitive survival. I suggest that such hieroglyphics can be engaged by touching wounds understood as a haptic reading of textures impressed on our embodied being while paying attention to the lines of flight that erupt from the wound. (shrink)

Nous remercions Denis Bekaert de nous avoir autorisé à reproduire ce texte, que l'on trouvera également sur Premier Mardi, le carnet en ligne de l'équipe de la Bibliothèque Sainte-Barbe à Paris. Invité à prononcer la conférence inaugurale du dernier congrès de l'ABF, le sociologue des professions Claude Dubar distinguait chez le bibliothécaire quatre postures superposées en strates, témoins des grandes phases d'évolution de son métier et liées aux changements des politiques publiques. Au « classique » - Rythmes du social.

When, after the agreeable fatigues of solicitation, Mrs Millamant set out a long bill of conditions subject to which she might by degrees dwindle into a wife, Mirabell offered in return the condition that he might not thereby be beyond measure enlarged into a husband. With age and experience in research come the twin dangers of dwindling into a philosopher of science while being enlarged into a dotard. The philosophy of science, I believe, should not be the preserve of senile (...) scientists and of teachers of philosophy who have themselves never so much as understood the contents of a textbook of theoretical physics, let alone done a bit of mathematical research or even enjoyed the confidence of a creating scientist. On the latter count I run no risk: Any reader will see that I am untrained (though not altogether unread) in classroom philosophy. Of no ignorance of mine do I boast, indeed I regret it, but neither do I find this one ignorance fatal here, for few indeed of the great philosophers to explicate whose works hodiernal professors of phil osophy destroy forests of pulp were themselves so broadly and specially trained as are their scholiasts. In attempt to palliate the former count I have chosen to collect works written over the past thirty years, some of them not published before, and I include only a few very recent essays. (shrink)

This essay builds on Jacques Rancière's exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse queer sexuality in Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz. The film both illustrates and embodies what Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible, an opening up of a new way of making sense of the world. In Escape from Alcatraz this sense-making is bound up with same-sex desire. Rancière is usually concerned with aesthetic practices linked to class struggle. This essay, however, (...) examines how Rancière's ideas are also illuminating in relation to subjugated sexual experiences. (shrink)

Several contemporary scholars have embraced the aesthetic resources in the Black Radical Tradition for the purpose of revitalizing the democratic project. Ironically, however, many drawn to the radical potential of fugitive escape are concerned about flight or exodus from the democratic project itself resulting in a defense of politics that constricts the possible benefits of fugitive aesthetics for democratic life. This article draws on the work of Alain Locke, a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, to suggest another way in (...) which we might follow Black fugitive aesthetics. Through an engagement with Locke, I theorize the notion of a fugitive bearing associated with a set of sensibilities that we might cultivate in order to approach the task of democratic transformation as a “reverent vandalism.” This article also challenges dismissive readings of Locke’s aestheticism by closely reexamining his commitment to expressive autonomy in connection with his theory of democracy. His “New Negro” avant-garde, like the fugitive, remains tethered to political life even while seeking a freedom that is unavailable within the strictures of the standing normative order. (shrink)

This essay analyzes Fred Moten’s “antipolitical” romance with the “fugitive black sociality” that he radically opposes to “politics,” defined as inescapably tied to antiblack modernity. By comparing Moten’s argument to other voices in the black radical tradition, and by triangulating Moten with Hannah Arendt and Sheldon Wolin, this essay opens inherited conceptions of the political to risk and reworking but also complicates figurations of fugitivity and resists the antagonism Moten posits between black fugitivity and democratic politics.

This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates into the unproductive; it supports run-away data prone to misidentifications by digital marketers, coders, and content moderators; and it (...) celebrates data predisposed to “back-talk” with playful irreverence toward those that seek to bring order through normative categorization and moderation. I call these data entropic, fugitive, and queer and explore their mischievous practices through three case studies: the unaccountable data in identity resolution, public shaming of the ImageNet training data, and reading practices of sex worker and influencer, @Charlieshe. Together these case studies articulate the political potential of digital failure as a process of unbecoming the good data subject by pushing past the margins of legibility, knowability, and thinkability, to reveal what is made illegible, unknowable, and unthinkable to data’s seeing eye. As predictive analytics, automated decision-systems, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly central roles in public governance, digital failure reveals how data itself is a flawed concept prone to political abuse and social engineering to protect the interests of the powerful, while keeping those marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented. (shrink)

The young generation of the ’80s was born and entirely educated under communist ideology. And yet indoctrination failed for some of these young people, who saw the West as a symbol of a better society to aspire to. In order to escape from S.R. Romania, some of them risked their lives in the “adventure” of crossing the border illegally. The main opponents of the fugitives, the border guards, were part of the same age group. In many cases, they behaved brutally (...) toward the fugitives. Did they come to see them as traitors, or was it just the context in which this adversity manifested itself mixed with the soldiers’ fear of their superiors’ punishments? The study is part of a more extensive research regarding the phenomenon of illegal border crossing during Ceaușescu`s dictatorship. Through this study, I aim to analyse the two situations in which some of the young people of the ’80s could find themselves: opponents of the regime (when fleeing to the West was a form of protest) and involuntary “servants” of the system, such as border soldiers, respectively. Also, I focused on identifying the reasons for the conflict between the two categories of young people belonging to the same generation. (shrink)

This book explores philosophical themes to do with self and subjectivity from the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, best known for the uncategorizable collection of fragmentary writings, published as The Book of Disquiet in 1982, forty-seven years after the author's death.