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Amy Allen [81]Amy R. Allen [2]Amy Rebekah Allen [1]
  1.  64
    The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory.Amy Allen - 2016 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures (...)
  2.  47
    Critique on the couch: why critical theory needs psychoanalysis.Amy Allen - 2021 - New York: Columbia University Press.
    Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, (...)
  3. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory.Amy Allen - 2007 - Columbia University Press.
    Introduction : the politics of our selves -- Foucault, subjectivity, and the enlightenment : a critical reappraisal -- The impurity of practical reason : power and autonomy in Foucault -- Dependency, subordination, and recognition : Butler on subjection -- Empowering the lifeworld? autonomy and power in Habermas -- Contextualizing critical theory -- Engendering critical theory.
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  4. The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarity.Amy Allen - 1999 - Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.
    Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work of a diverse group of theorists of power, including (...)
  5.  95
    The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens.Amy Allen - 2007 - Hypatia 22 (2):200-204.
  6. Introduction.Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta - 2022 - In Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Power, neoliberalism, and the reinvention of politics: the critical theory of Wendy Brown. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
     
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  7.  28
    The Cambridge Habermas Lexicon.Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.) - 2018 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as (...)
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  8. Rethinking Power.Amy Allen - 1998 - Hypatia 13 (1):21 - 40.
    This paper argues that feminists have yet to develop a satisfactory account of power. Existing feminist accounts of power tend to have a one-sided emphasis either on power as domination or on power as empowerment. This conceptual one-sided-ness must be overcome if feminists are to develop an account complex enough to illuminate women's diverse experiences with power. Such an account is sketched here.
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  9. Emancipation without Utopia: Subjection, Modernity, and the Normative Claims of Feminist Critical Theory.Amy Allen - 2015 - Hypatia 30 (3):513-529.
    Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...)
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  10. Feminist perspectives on power.Amy Allen - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  11.  62
    Dripping with Blood and Dirt from Head to Toe: Marx’s Genealogy of Capitalism in Capital, Volume 1.Amy Allen - 2022 - The Monist 105 (4):470-486.
    I argue that Marx’s critique of political economy in volume 1 of Capital relies on a kind of genealogical argument that takes capitalism as its object. In the first section of the article, I sketch out an interpretation of the argumentative structure of Capital 1, highlighting what I take to be the two crucial turning points in Marx’s critique of political economy. Marx’s specifically genealogical argument comes to the foreground with the second of these turning points, which can be found (...)
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  12. Progress, Normativity, and the Dynamics of Social Change.Amy Allen, Rahel Jaeggi & Eva Von Redecker - 2016 - Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 37 (2):225-251.
  13.  26
    Decolonizing ethics: the critical theory of Enrique Dussel.Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.) - 2021 - University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
    A collection of essays on the work of Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, focusing on his ethics of liberation.
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  14. The Unforced Force of the Better Argument: Reason and Power in Habermas’ Political Theory.Amy Allen - 2012 - Constellations 19 (3):353-368.
    The tension between reason and power has a long and illustrious history in political theory. In his magnum opus of legal and political theory, "Between Facts and Norms," Jürgen Habermas presents his most complex, sophisticated, and ambitious attempt to confront this tension. My thesis in this article is that though Habermas’s political theory thematizes the tension between reason and power in a way that is initially quite promising, he ultimately forecloses that tension in the direction of a rationality that has (...)
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  15. Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal.Amy Allen - 2003 - Constellations 10 (2):180-198.
    In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, from Hegel, through Nietzsche and (...)
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  16. Power Trouble: Performativity as Critical Theory.Amy Allen - 1998 - Constellations 5 (4):456-471.
    Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theorize simultaneously (...)
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  17. Reason, power and history.Amy Allen - 2014 - Thesis Eleven 120 (1):10-25.
    This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that "Dialectic of Enlightenment," far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and outer nature.
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  18.  75
    History, critique, and freedom: the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault.Andreea Smaranda Aldea & Amy Allen - 2016 - Continental Philosophy Review 49 (1):1-11.
  19.  51
    Foucault, psychoanalysis, and critique: Two aspects of problematization.Amy Allen - 2018 - Angelaki 23 (2):170-186.
    In this paper, I examine the relationship between Foucault and psychoanalysis through the lens of problematization. Rather than asking the interpretive question of what was Foucault’s own attitude toward psychoanalysis, I analyze what sort of problem psychoanalysis might be thought to pose for a Foucaultian conception of critique. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the three primary dangers that psychoanalysis is typically thought to pose for such a conception; these dangers are grouped under the headings (...)
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  20. Power, subjectivity, and agency: Between Arendt and Foucault.Amy Allen - 2002 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2):131 – 149.
    In this article, I argue for bringing the work of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt into dialogue with respect to the links between power, subjectivity, and agency. Although one might assume that Foucault and Arendt come from such radically different philosophical starting points that such a dialogue would be impossible, I argue that there is actually a good deal of common ground to be found between these two thinkers. Moreover, I suggest that Foucault's and Arendt's divergent views about the role (...)
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  21. Are We Driven? Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis Reconsidered.Amy Allen - 2015 - Critical Horizons 16 (4):311-328.
    If, as Axel Honneth has recently argued, critical theory needs psychoanalysis for meta-normative and explanatory reasons, this does not settle the question of which version of psychoanalysis critical theorists should embrace. In this paper, I argue against Honneth's favoured version – an intersubjectivist interpretation of Winnicott's object-relations theory – and in favour of an alternative based on the drive-theoretical work of Melanie Klein. Klein's work, I argue, provides critical theorists with a more realistic conception of the person and a richer (...)
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  22.  71
    Power and the Politics of Difference: Oppression, Empowerment, and Transnational Justice.Amy Allen - 2008 - Hypatia 23 (3):156-172.
    In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which (...)
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  23. Introduction.Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta - 2021 - In Amy Allen & Eduardo Mendieta (eds.), Decolonizing ethics: the critical theory of Enrique Dussel. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
  24.  71
    Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of Critique.Amy Allen - 2016 - Constellations 23 (2):244-254.
    In his account of critical theory as diagnosing social pathologies of reason, Axel Honneth has rehabilitated the analogy between critical theory and psychoanalysis – according to which the critical theorist stands in relation to the pathological social order as the analyst stands in relation to the analysand, and the aim of critical theory is to effect the diagnosis and, ultimately, the cure of social disorders or pathologies. In this article, I show that Honneth, like Habermas before him, has an overly (...)
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  25.  13
    7. The History of Historicity: The Critique of Reason in Foucault.Amy Allen - 2016 - In ChristopherVE Penfield, Vernon W. Cisney & Nicolae Morar (eds.), Between Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh University Press. pp. 125-137.
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  26. Solidarity after identity politics: Hannah Arendt and the power of feminist theory.Amy Allen - 1999 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 25 (1):97-118.
    This paper argues that Hannah Arendt's political theory offers key insights into the power that binds together the feminist movement - the power of solidarity. Second-wave feminist notions of solidarity were grounded in notions of shared identity; in recent years, as such conceptions of shared identity have come under attack for being exclusionary and repressive, feminists have been urged to give up the idea of solidarity altogether. However, the choice between (repressive) identity and (fragmented) non-identity is a false opposition, and (...)
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  27.  53
    The entanglement of power and validity : Foucault and critical theory.Amy Allen - 2010 - In Christopher Falzon (ed.), Foucault and Philosophy. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 78--98.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Subjection and Autonomy: Foucault contra Habermas What Is Fallacious About the Genetic Fallacy? Conclusion References.
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  28. Discourse, power, and subjectivation: The foucault/habermas debate reconsidered.Amy Allen - 2009 - Philosophical Forum 40 (1):1-28.
    In this article, I take up one strand – arguably the central one – of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. Against those who hold that Foucault and Habermas occupy such drastically different theoretical perspectives as to preclude the integration of their views into a common framework, I begin to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights to be found on each side of the debate. While both Foucault and Habermas offer (...)
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  29. The anti-subjective hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the death of the subject.Amy Allen - 2000 - Philosophical Forum 31 (2):113–130.
    The centerpiece of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality is the analysis of what Foucault terms the “repressive hypothesis,” the nearly universal assumption on the part of twentieth-century Westerners that we are the heirs to a Victorian legacy of sexual repression. The supreme irony of this belief, according to Foucault, is that the whole time that we have been announcing and denouncing our repressed, Victorian sexuality, discourses about sexuality have actually proliferated. Paradoxically, as Victorian as we allegedly (...)
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  30.  41
    “Psychoanalysis and Ethnology” Revisited: Foucault's Historicization of History.Amy Allen - 2017 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (S1):31-46.
    This article re-examines the closing sections of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things in order to address the longstanding question of whether he is best understood as a philosopher or a historian. My central argument is that this question misses the crucial point of Foucault's work, which is to historicize the notion of history, which Foucault takes to be central to the historical a priori of modernity. An examination of his historicization of History thus reveals that Foucault is neither simply (...)
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  31.  91
    Emancipation, Progress, Critique: Debating Amy Allen’s The End of Progress.Albena Azmanova, Martin Saar, Guilel Treiber, Azar Dakwar, Noëlle McAfee, Andrew Feenberg & Amy Allen - 2018 - Contemporary Political Theory 17 (4):511-541.
  32.  11
    6 Recognizing Ambivalence: Honneth, Butler, and Philosophical Anthropology.Amy Allen - 2021 - In Heikki Ikäheimo, Kristina Lepold & Titus Stahl (eds.), Recognition and Ambivalence: Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 99-128.
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  33. Systematically distorted subjectivity?: Habermas and the critique of power.Amy R. Allen - 2007 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (5):641-650.
  34.  37
    The Normative and the Transcendental: Comments on Colin Koopman’s Genealogy as Critique.Amy Allen - 2014 - Foucault Studies 18:238-244.
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  35.  16
    9. Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.Amy Allen - 2017 - In Cristina Lafont & Penelope Deutscher (eds.), Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order. New York, USA: Columbia University Press. pp. 183-206.
  36. (1 other version)The Contemporary Frankfurt School's Eurocentrism Unveiled: The Contribution of Amy Allen.Claudia Leeb, Robert Nichols, Yves Winter & Amy Allen - 2018 - Political Theory 46 (5):772-800.
    In her latest book, The End of Progress, Amy Allen embarks on an ambitious and much-needed project: to decolonize contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. As with all of her books, this is an exceptionally well-written and well-argued book. Allen strives to avoid making assertions without backing them up via close and careful textual reading of the thinkers she engages in her book. In this article, I will state why this book makes a central contribution to contemporary critical theory (in the (...)
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  37. Feminism and the subject of politics.Amy Allen - 2009 - In Boudewijn de Bruin & Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), New waves in political philosophy. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
  38.  24
    Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations.Amy Allen & Brian O'Connor (eds.) - 2019 - Columbia University Press.
    Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions from some of the leading figures working in both of these fields, including (...)
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  39.  10
    6. Philosophies of Immanence and Transcendence.Amy Allen - 2016 - In Samir Haddad, Penelope Deutscher & Olivia Custer (eds.), Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 105-122.
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  40. Pornography and power.Amy Allen - 2001 - Journal of Social Philosophy 32 (4):512–531.
    When it was at its height, the feminist pornography debate tended to generate more heat than light. Only now that there has been a cease fire in the sex war does it seem possible to reflect on the debate in a more productive way and to address some of the questions that were left unresolved by it. In this paper, I shall argue that one of the major unresolved questions is that of how feminists should conceptualize power. The antipornography feminists (...)
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  41.  72
    Foucault and the politics of our selves.Amy Allen - 2011 - History of the Human Sciences 24 (4):43-59.
    Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...)
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  42. Feminism, Foucault, and the Critique of Reason: Re-reading the History of Madness.Amy Allen - 2013 - Foucault Studies 16:15-31.
    This paper situates Lynne Huffer’s recent queer-feminist Foucaultian critique of reason within the context of earlier feminist debates about reason and critically assesses Huffer’s work from the point of view of its faithfulness to Foucault’s work and its implications for feminism. I argue that Huffer’s characterization of Enlightenment reason as despotic not only departs from Foucault’s account of the relationship between power and reason, it also leaves her stuck in the same double binds that plagued earlier feminist critiques of reason. (...)
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  43.  66
    Normativity, Power, and Gender: Reply to Critics.Amy Allen - 2014 - Critical Horizons 15 (1):52-68.
    In this paper, I respond to the critiques of my book, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, made by Nikolas Kompridis, Paul Patton, Allison Weir and Moira Gatens. My response is organized around three overlapping themes that are raised in these four astute papers: a defence of my account of normativity, of my reading of Foucault’s conception of power, and of my analysis of gender subordination/identity.
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  44.  44
    Reconstruction or deconstruction?: A reply to Johanna Meehan.Amy Allen - 2000 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 26 (3):53-60.
    I argue that Johanna Meehan's call to examine the extra-linguistic psychic, affective and biological dimensions of gender identity is extremely important both for feminist theory in particular and for contemporary Continental philosophy in general. However, I suspect that such an examination might necessitate more than a mere expansion or reconstruction of Habermas' views; on the contrary, I suggest that Meehan's line of argument might lead instead toward a radical deconstruction of Habermasian critical theory. Key Words: feminism • Habermas • identity (...)
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  45.  25
    Comments on Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno's Practical Philosophy.Amy Allen - 2017 - European Journal of Philosophy 25 (3):840-845.
    In this paper, I offer some critical comments on Fabian Freyenhagen's book, Adorno's Practical Philosophy. Although I am largely in agreement with many of his arguments about the value of Adorno's negativism for contemporary critical theory, I raise a few critical questions that are grouped around the following three headings: immanent critique, objectivism, and skepticism. My primary aim in pursuing these questions is not to haggle over fine points of Adorno interpretation but rather to consider how these three issues bear (...)
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  46.  42
    How Not to Critique the Critique of Progress: A Reply to Payrow Shabani.Amy Allen - 2017 - Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (4):681-687.
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  47. History, Critique, and Freedom: The Historical A Priori in Husserl and Foucault.Andreea Smaranda Aldea & Amy R. Allen - 2016 - Springer, Continental Philosophy Review.
  48.  41
    Introduction.Amy Allen & Brian Schroeder - 2015 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (3):261-264.
    This is an introduction to a volume of articles containing highlights from the fifty-third Annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) hosted by Loyola University–New Orleans with Tulane University from October 23–25, 2014. Many of the articles included here mine the rich and productive vein of post-Kantian critical philosophy that inspires so much work in Continental philosophy; hence the title of our volume is “Legacies of Critique.” The volume opens with the “Co-director’s Address” by outgoing SPEP (...)
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  49.  52
    SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise.Amy Allen - 2015 - Journal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (3):265-282.
    The topic of my remarks is progress, but I should note at the outset that I have structured this article as something like a theme with variations, rather than a tightly interconnected, progressive argument. I am interested in problematizing how the concept of progress is deployed across a range of discussions. I start with the role of progress in my own field of critical social theory, and then move on to consider the idea of philosophical progress, and finally connect this (...)
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  50.  19
    Introduction.Amy Allen - 2002 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2):119 – 121.
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