To such sanguine expectations, Pheng Cheah responds deftly with a sobering account of how the "inhuman" imperatives of capitalism and technology are ...

Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and ...

The body of the law is an ambiguous phrase. Conventionally, it designates the law as a determinate corpus; legal codes, statutes, and the rulings of common law. But it can also refer to the subjected body that is produced by and is part of the law. This subjected body is necessary for the law's existence. Thinking Through the Body of the Law reconceives the role of the body in the founding, maintaining, and regulation of our legal systems and social order (...) and elaborates on its implications for issues of legal responsibility and justice. Taking into account and sometimes challenging the tenets of critical legal theory, critical race theory, and feminist jurisprudence, these essays examine the body and the law as they relate to surrogacy, the Holocaust, land-rights for Aboriginals, murder, the media and insanity, taxation, genetic engineering, and sexy dressing and sexual harassment. (shrink)

This is a stellar collection. The pieces are diversified, not a commemorative gesture but a critical engagement.

In modernity, the concept of cosmopolitanism has changed from an intellectual ethos to a vision of an institutionally embedded global political consciousness. The central problem that troubles cosmopolitanism from its moment of inception in 18th-century philosophy to the globalized present is whether we live in a world that is interconnected enough to generate institutions that have a global regulatory reach and a global form of solidarity that can influence their functioning. Examination of Kant's pre-nationalist cosmopolitanism, Marx's postnationalist cosmopolitanism, and decolonizing (...) socialist nationalism indicates the normative attraction of the nation as a mode of solidarity. Contemporary arguments about new cosmopolitanisms focusing on the rise of transnational networks of global cities, postnational social formations created by migrant and diasporic flows and Habermas's recent revival of Kant's project of cosmopolitan democracy have likewise failed to address the persistence of nationalism as a normative force within the field of uneven globalization. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if it (...) is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the tribulations and the futures of radical national literary culture as a vehicle of freedom in the postcolonial South within the general context of the vicissitudes of the postcolonial nation-state in contemporary neocolonial globalisation. In philosophical modernity, culture is regarded as the means to overcome finitude and the realm where the ideal of human freedom can be incarnated. Consequently, the modern idea of freedom culminates in a politics of culture. Culture supplies the ontological paradigm for different models (...) of modern political community and even the idea of the political itself in the philosophical cosmopolitanism of Kant and the philosophical nationalisms of Fichte and Hegel. Although Marx presents his materialist cosmopolitanism as an inversion of Hegel's idealist nationalism, the same philosopheme of culture informs his idea of the proletarian world community. This is made evident by the persistence of the national question in Marxism. Insofar as it grants primacy to culture in the struggle against colonial and neocolonial economic and political domination, the project of Third World revolutionary national culture has its conceptual origins in the modern philosopheme of culture. However, the vicissitudes of these projects in neocolonial globalisation as exemplified by the work and lives of Pramoedya Ananta Toer of Indonesia and Ngugi Wa Thiong'o of Kenya cast doubt on the viability of this philosopheme of culture. The inability of revolutionary national culture to transcend the neocolonial forces of domination, death and destruction unleashed by global capital suggests that culture qua incarnational work is plagued by various forms of haunting that are internal to its structure. Hence, instead of regarding postcolonial national culture as the incarnation of human freedom, we ought to understand it as being essentially constituted by spectral negotiations with global capital. It is only from this vantage point that we can better grasp how it in turn haunts and destabilises neocolonial hegemony. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Derrida's suggestion in several texts that, while a classic dialectical materialism partakes of logocentrism, other sorts of nondialectical materialism would be possible. The nondialectical materialisms that emerge from the work of Derrida and that of Gilles Deleuze resist or evade the teleology of the dialectic in different ways. Because Derrida understands material force as the reference to the impossible other and Deleuze views materiality in terms of impersonal and preindividual forces, materiality, even if it (...) is not unfigurable as such, is not easily instantiated by concrete figures that are recognizable by political discourse. (shrink)