What does it mean to disagree with people with whom you usually agree? How should political actors concerned with emancipation approach internal disagreement? In short, how should we go about critiquing not our enemies or adversaries but those with whom we share emancipatory visions? I outline the notion of comradely critique as a solution to these questions. I go through a series of examples of how and when critique should differ depending on its addressee, drawing on Jodi (...) Dean’s figure of the comrade. I develop a contrast with its neighbours the ally and the partisan, thus identifying key elements of comradely critique: good faith, equal humanity, equal standing, solidarity, collaboration, common purpose and dispelling fatalism. I then analyse Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s private correspondence on the 1960s German student movement as an illustration of (imperfect) comradely critique. I conclude by identifying a crucial tension about publicness and privateness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Capitalism:Rhetorical Agency as Communicative LaborRonald Walter GreeneIt is a commonplace to describe rhetorical agency as political action. From such a starting point, rhetorical agency describes a communicative process of inquiry and advocacy on issues of public importance. As political action, rhetorical agency often takes on the characteristics of a normative theory of citizenship; a good citizen persuades and is persuaded by the gentle force of the better (...) argument. More radical visions of argument might include strikes, sit-ins, and boycotts in the rhetorical arsenal of good citizenship, and some might even flirt with violence as rhetorical action. This model of rhetorical agency requires a translation of the conceptual apparatus of rhetoric and its alignment with the problematics of democratic theory and actually existing democratic regimes. Classical models that hoped to harness rhetorical agency to the making of the "orator-statesman" (sic) must reimagine political participation in terms of publics and counterpublics, social movements, electoral campaigns, communication media and technologies, as well as supra- and sub-national institutional settings. As the classical norms of citizenship rub against (post) modern realities, a permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency seems destined to be lodged in the critical imagination of rhetorical studies. If politics today is, in Jodi Dean's words, "a domain of financially mediated and professionalized practices centered on advertising, public relations, and the means of mass communication," then actually existing rhetorical agency manifests itself in efforts to "raise the money, buy the television time, register the domain names, build the website, and craft the accessible, user-friendly, spectacular message" (2003, 96).If we recognize Dean's description of the political as an accurate description of the rhetorical situation today, rhetorical studies is left with three strategies: It can refashion a deliberative vision of rhetorical agency into a normative ideal for critiquing the structural conditions (capital, media [End Page 188] concentration) of political participation. Second, it can enlarge the field of normatively acceptable ways and means of political participation, for example, by embracing the more spectacular politics associated with visual and body rhetorics. Finally, rhetorical studies can work on the "demand" side and design new strategies and tactics for activating the rhetorical participation of citizens, for example, by encouraging the creation of communicative norms necessary for reinvigorating voluntary and civic organizations. However, while each of these approaches provides a research agenda, none of them gets at the root cause of the anxiety over agency: the attachment of rhetorical agency to a vision of political change. The anxiety over agency pushes rhetorical critics and theorists into becoming moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic to improve the quality and quantity of political participation.The purpose of this paper is to offer an escape route from theorizing rhetorical agency as a model of political communication.1 In opposition to a political-communicative vision of rhetorical agency, this paper suggests a different materialist ontology, one that imagines rhetorical agency as a form of living labor. I will argue that rhetorical agency belongs to the domain of communicative labor, a form of labor increasingly necessary to the workings of contemporary capitalist production. In other words, I want to replace a political-communicative model of rhetorical agency with a materialist-communicative model. To highlight the similarities and differences between the two models, I will focus on how the interface between politics, communication, and economics plays out in the Marxist tradition of rhetorical studies. I will organize this tradition into two sections: the first, represented by James Aune, advocates a hermeneutic approach to rhetorical agency, and the second, represented by Dana Cloud, argues for imagining rhetorical agency as a class-based social movement. By focusing on the work of my comrades, the paper risks being received as a "left sectarian" polemic.2 As I will demonstrate in each section, the problem with these two approaches has less to do with Marxism and more to do with how they turn to hermeneutics and social movements to imagine rhetorical agency in the idiom of communication theory. In the third section of the paper I will resituate rhetorical agency into a materialist ontology of labor and capitalist production. In so... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Heather Berg Left of #MeToo In her 1949 call to “End the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Claudia Jones tells the story of Dora Jones, a Black domestic worker enslaved for forty years by her employer.1 Elizabeth Ingalls, a wealthy white woman, had traveled to Dora Jones’s Alabama home as a missionary teacher and (...) persuaded the seventeen-year-old Jones to travel to Boston as her housekeeper in 1907. Ingalls would keep Jones captive until 1947. In the intervening years, Ingalls subjected Jones to routine physical abuse and an endless expanse of intensive, unpaid domestic labor. With no days off and permitted to leave only for errands, Jones was allowed no personal relationships or contact with the outside world. Ingalls’s first husband, the bureaucrat Walter Harman, raped Jones over the course of three years, and Jones became pregnant.2 Ingalls would term this an “affair” and, as court documents showed, pushed Jones to “submit” to an abortion.3 Later, when Jones protested her abusive conditions and attempted to escape, Ingalls blackmailed her, threatening 1. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs (June 1949): 11. 2. I am inferring non-consent based on Jones’s captivity. On unfreedom and the politics of consent, see Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 537–60. 3. United States v. Ingalls et al., Cr. No. 10568-SD (District Court, S.D. California, July 29, 1947). 260 Heather Berg to “commit Jones to prison” for interracial “adultery” and the abortion she had as a result. Jones finally won her freedom in 1947, a year after Ingalls’s adult daughter reported her mother to the police.4 Claudia Jones offers Dora Jones’s story as evidence of the exceptional precarity of Black women domestic workers. Like others in her cohort of “black left feminists” (to borrow Erik McDuffie’s term), Jones focused on domestic work as a field that epitomized the “triple oppression” at which she took aim.5 Sexual violence at work is not exceptional in Claudia Jones’s telling. Instead, it operates alongside a catalog of abuses at the intersection of capitalism, state terror, the degradation of women, imperialism, and white supremacy. An active member of the Communist Party, Jones insisted on thinking these systems together, maintaining that only through collective struggle against them could justice be won. Women would not be comrades in that struggle in any simple way. Jones was sharply critical of the idea that Black women’s oppression could be explained by “the rotten bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’”6 Instead, she urged working-class Black people to fight “against their common oppressors, the white ruling class.”7 Solidarity among women was illusory, in part, because of white women’s roles as employers of Black women’s domestic work. Against a narrative of sexual violence that describes simple dominance by men over women, Dora Jones’s story highlights the ways that systems of domination work together to enable abuse. Her suffering was not the same as that visited on bourgeois white women. Instead, it was perpetrated and enabled by one. There is no sisterhood to be found here. A critique of this framework is now common sense in most feminist circles, and yet the loudest feminist intervention in recent years trades in exactly the “bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’” Some seventy years after “An End to the Neglect’s” publication, the #MeToo movement has brought broad international attention to 4. For an overview of the case and its legal legacy, see Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 162–5. 5. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 9. 6. Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” 13. 7. Ibid. Heather Berg 261 the problem of workplace sexual violence. In 2006, civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded an anti-violence movement based... (shrink)

THE JUST WAR THEORY OBLIGES CITIZENS OF A DEMOCRACY TO OPPOSE war unless it is being waged as a last resort and their nation possesses a just cause, the right intent, legitimate authority, and the probability of success without inflicting disproportionate harm. However, several contemporary Hollywood combat films suggest that the only real moral duties in wartime belong to soldiers, who are to defend and protect their comrades in arms. At the same time, by consistently presenting the obligation to "support (...) the troops" as the public's principal wartime duty and as the final answer to any criticism of the war, proponents of the Bush administration's war in Iraq have exported this "warrior's ethic" home from the battlefield and substituted it for the just war theory. As a result, citizens are no longer expected to critique their government's call to arms but are instead expected to exhibit loyalty to the troops by supporting the war. (shrink)

Marco Cicala, a Leftist Italian journalist, told me about his recent weird experience: when, in an article, he once used the word "capitalism," the editor asked him if the use of this term is really necessary - could he not replace it by a synonymous one, like "economy"? What better proof of the total triumph of capitalism than the virtual disappearance of the very term in the last 2 or 3 decades? No one, with the exception of a few allegedly (...) archaic Marxists, refers to capitalism any longer. The term was simply struck from the vocabulary of politicians, trade unionists, writers and journalists - even of social scientists... But what about the upsurge of the anti-globalization movement in the last years? Does it not clearly contradict this diagnostic? No: a close look quickly shows how this movement also succumbs to "the temptation to transform a critique of capitalism itself into a critique of 'imperialism'." In this way, when one talks about "globalization and its agents," the enemy is externalized. From this perspective, where the main task today is to fight "the American empire," any ally is good if it is anti-American, and so the unbridled Chinese "Communist" capitalism, violent Islamic anti-modernists, as well as the obscene Lukashenko regime in Belarus may appear as progressive anti-globalist comrades-in-arms... What we have here is thus another version of the ill-famed notion of "alternate modernity": instead of the critique of capitalism as such, of confronting its basic mechanism, we get the critique of the imperialist "excess," with the notion of mobilizing capitalist mechanisms within another, more "progressive," frame. (shrink)

Bertolt Brecht’s poem “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor” is frequently cited as a means to raise awareness among health workers of the health effects of living and working conditions. Less cited is his Call to Arms trilogy of poems, which calls for class-based action to transform the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many. In this article, we show how “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor,” with its plea for empathy for the ill, contrasts with the more (...) activist and often militant tone of the Call to Arms trilogy: “Call to a Sick Communist,” “The Sick Communist’s Answer to the Comrades,” and “Call to the Doctors and Nurses.” We also show that, while “A Worker’s Speech to a Doctor” has been applied in the training of health workers, its accusatorial tone towards health workers’ complicity in the system the poem is critiquing risks alienating such workers. In contrast, the Call to Arms trilogy seeks common ground, inviting these same workers into the broader political and social fight against injustice. While we contend that the description of the sick worker as a “Communist” risks estranging these health workers, our analysis of the Call to Arms poems nevertheless indicates that their use can contribute to moving health workers’ educational discourse beyond a laudable but fleeting elicitation of empathy for the ill towards a structural critique and deeper systemic understanding in order to prompt action by health workers to reform or even replace the capitalist economic system that sickens and kills so many. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 356-360 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's 'Specters of Marx' Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's 'Specters of Marx', edited and introduction by Michael Sprinker; 278 pp. London: Verso, 1999, $20.00. "Comrades, encore un effort!" (p. 233) is the Communist battle cry by which Derrida signals to his fiercest Marxist critics that he is not ready (...) to throw in the towel and concede defeat. The ten essays included in Ghostly Demarcations are intended to remedy what the editor in his brief introduction describes as the insufficiency or incompleteness of Derrida's first major attempt, in Specters of Marx (1993), to come to terms with Marx, more so than with Marxism. As Sprinker puts it, if one came to the book "in the hope that now, at long last, Derrida's... relationship to Marxism will be profoundly clarified, or definitely resolved, one will almost certainly be disappointed" (p. 1). Derrida himself feels good about Specters of Marx, He wrote that book with a "certain gaiety of affirmative thinking," he says. "It is," as he sees it, "a gay, humorous book. It is more light-hearted than I am, undoubtedly..." (p. 259), which he could hardly claim for its sequel, "Marx & Sons," the essay by which Derrida responded to his critics in Ghostly Demarcations.The texts included in this polemical volume present a broad spectrum of views, some of them critical enough to deeply wound Derrida. It takes Derrida nearly five pages of deconstructive maneuvers to warm up for his rebuttal. [End Page 356] Then, with all his fresh energy, the first punch is directed at a woman, obviously one of his demons, since there are no essays by women included in this volume. Addressing this absent female foe, Derrida speaks of her "unbridled manipulation of a rhetoric" (p. 223), her "final gleam of lucidity" (p. 222), and "outright inability to read" (p. 223). He is actually referring to absent Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak whose superb reading, translation and preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology in 1974, contributed in no small measure to Derrida's initial success by making his work accessible and comprehensible to English speaking scholars.Derrida's appreciation of the nine, all-male contributors, whose essays are indeed present in Ghostly Demarcations, appears in direct relation to the amount of critique or homage paid him and his deconstructive theories. The shortest (five pages) but clearly the most provocative essay, is by Terry Eagleton who, similar to other Marxists, refuses to accept Derrida's claim that deconstruction is a "radicalization of Marxism" (p. 101). "There is also something unavoidably opportunist about his political pact" (p. 86), says Eagleton, his "sudden dramatic somersault onto a stalled bandwagon" (p. 84). "Where was Jacques Derrida, he asks, when we needed him?" (p. 83). Fearlessly, Eagleton likens deconstructive rhetoric to senseless Panglossian discourse using absurd word clusters such as "onto-teleo-theological animus," and "tele-techno-medio-economic and scientifico-military forces" (p. 85). En revanche, Derrida makes irate comments about Eagleton throughout his text, mocking the critic's "triumphant air [who] doubtless assumes that he will spark the plaudits, mirth, or wrath of the crowd..."( p. 251).The longest, somewhat Proustian essay (44 pages) by Werner Hamacher, about "the messianism of commodity language," is a well written but essentially uncritical, deconstructive reading of Marx and Derrida built around abundant quotations from Derrida's text such as: "Pluriformative and reformative, the revolutionary performative of the absolute messianic promise is also a performative that turns against itself..." (p. 196). Derrida praises the "many luminous, powerful gestures [made to Derrida!] of his [Hamacher's] interpretation," calling it "impressive, admirable and original" (p. 224). Similar praise, for his "perceptive essay" (p. 244), goes to Warren Montag who adheres to Derrida's critical jargon and supports the philosopher's polemics surrounding "ontology."While Antonio Negri is sympathetic to Derrida, he also feels, as do other critics, that "Derrida is a prisoner of the ontology he critiques" (p. 13): "In playing with... (shrink)

Good interlocutors are a blessing, and needless to say, I’m feeling very blessed today. This is especially true for a project in which _vision_ figures so centrally, since we often see most clearly through the parallax of another’s eyes. Contributors to this conversation have cast distinct lines of sight onto _Anticolonial Eruptions _that have allowed me to see both otherwise and better, to recognize which elements of my original argument remain incomplete or unclear, to glimpse what was overlooked or taken (...) for granted, and to realize other moments where I might have been wrong entirely. They have revealed how my book, despite diagnosing colonial hubris, might reproduce blindspots that are more or less hubristic in their own right. This apparent irony is anything but. Any book, especially one this short, slices into and across history and theory ways that are inescapably partial, leaving a generative remainder to be dealt with. But more than this, I find nothing but encouragement in how my comrade-readers have taken up the lenses provided—the colonial blindspot, the second sight of the colonized, and the decolonial ambush—to excavate and cultivate a radical second sight from the depths of the colonial blindspot. Whether diagnosing the paradoxical unseeing of ocular-centrism, my own blindness toward the revolutionary nature of care as community resistance, or the ways that tropes of inevitability might refract my political judgment, each of the critiques printed above offers, in Kevin Bruyneel’s words, “more ammo for the canon/cannon” (88). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface This issue invites us to consider examples of feminist cultural production that use music, graphic art, and film to resist sexual conventions. Andrea Wood turns our attention to lesbian sex and romance in comics, a genre that has long captivated lay readers and is gaining popularity in academic circles. Rachel Lumsden analyzes Ethel Smyth’s 1913 musical composition “Possession,” an ode to same-sex intimacy displaying a “sonic meld” of (...) passion, desire, and political commitment. Sharmila Lodhia’s account of Nina Paley’s film Sita Sings the Blues considers how a sexually charged anitmated representation of a traditional epic can spur battles over cultural authenticity. Ariane Cruz examines how sexual pleasure presses against racist histories in a study on black women and BDSM. Whether sexuality is policed, as Chloë Taylor explores in her article, or the policing of sexuality is shunned, as Lynn Comella addresses in her review essay, it is clear that the grip of sexual politics on women ’s sexual lives is strong. Wang Zheng’s News and Views piece recounts recent global feminist tactics used to release five young feminists jailed in China, an urgent reminder about how women’s bodies are policed in violent ways. We begin this issue with Chloë Taylor’s essay reflecting on how sexology and psychiatry function to represent female desire in narrow ways. Taylor explores how female sexual dysfunction is constructed in sexology and psychiatric practice and locates this as part of a longer history of rendering selected bodies and sexual practices as deviant. Her analysis is a valuable rejoinder to the ever-expanding grip of psychiatry on the ordering—and disordering—of women’s bodies and sexuality. The line between normal and abnormal is always shifting, but its constant is how it maneuvers and is maneuvered to control female sexual desire. Taylor’s argument moves toward a non-normalizing feminist sexology that can interrogate sexual practice and function without rendering any as “right” or “wrong.” 256Preface Andrea Wood also turns to female sexuality, specifically lesbian sex, love, and romance, in her article on comics as a literary genre. Lesbian romance comics, Wood argues, offer a different discursive lens for “making the invisible visible.” Using queer theory to interrogate romantic depictions of lesbian sex and sexuality, she explores how the visual narrative form of comics allows for a different and politically compelling depiction of lesbian identity and sexual activity. Although lesbian romance and same-sex desire has been an interest of many feminist scholars, few have examined the visual field of lesbian comics—a genre, Wood insists, that demonstrates resistance to what Adrienne Rich identified as “compulsory heterosexuality.” Rachel Lumsden draws our attention to composer Ethel Smyth’s understudied song “Possession.” The song is a rumination on what it means to possess something or someone, and what it means to be possessed ; it is also a song that Smyth dedicated to Emmeline Pankhurst, her political comrade as well as her close friend and muse. Lumsden reads the song as a creative, strategically ambiguous “ode to an intimate female relationship,” a tribute to the respect, affection, and tenderness that Pankhurst and Smyth shared. Rather than reveal the “truth” of Smyth’s relationship with Pankhurst, Lumsden instead invites readers to consider the “sonic meld” of “Possession” as a space through which “themes of desire, activism, eroticism, solidarity, and sacrifice coalesce and congeal ” and as a site through which Smyth narrated her experiences, passions, desires, and political commitments. Sharmila Lodhia engages the controversy surrounding Nina Paley’s re-telling of the Ramayana in her film Sita Sings the Blues, which some critics have deemed “offensive,” “insulting,” and a “desecration of the Ramayana and the Hindu faith.” Lodhia treats Paley’s film—which positions Sita rather than Ram as the story’s protagonist, deploys animation and myriad narrator perspectives, fuses Paley’s own story with Sita’s story, and sets the story to a 1920s blues soundtrack—as a productive “body of critique about the epic’s central teachings on virtue, righteousness, and idealized gender roles.” By situating Paley’s retelling of the Ramayana in the context of numerous and varied Ramayana retellings, Lodhia reveals that Sita Sings the Blues is a “creative... (shrink)

Kant’s account of cognitive judgment is sophisticated, sound and philosophically far more illuminating than is often appreciated. Key features of Kant’s account of cognitive judgment are widely dispersed amongst various sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, whilst common philosophical proclivities have confounded these interpretive difficulties. This paper characterises Kant’s account of causal-perceptual judgment concisely to highlight one central philosophical achievement: Kant’s finding that, to understand and investigate empirical knowledge we must distinguish between predication as a grammatical form of (...) sentences, statements or judgments, and predication as a cognitive act of ascribing some characteristic to some localised particular. With Kant’s finding in view, I then elucidate how we have occluded his achievement. My results are not merely interpretive, but philosophical, because they show that Kant’s account of perceptual judgment accords with – and indeed justifies – a central and sound point regarding language, thought and reference advocated by apparently unlikely philosophical comrades. These finding highlight some methodological cautions which require re-emphasis today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imagined Apotheoses: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the AmericasWilliam M. HamlinPerhaps the two best known stories of Europeans being taken for gods by non-European peoples are those of Hernan Cortés in Mexico and Captain James Cook in Hawaii. Separated by two hundred sixty years, five thousand miles, and vast differences in cultural and linguistic context, these two incidents nonetheless share many traits in the conventional telling. Cortés and Cook (...) were both strong leaders, for instance, both capable of inspiring devotion among their subordinates. Both men became amateur ethnographers during their lengthy sojourns away from Europe, both sought to promote an image of respectful rather than rapacious foreign incursion, and both are said to have been taken for returning gods by the native peoples among whom they landed: Cortés for the Toltec culture-hero and demigod Quetzalcoatl, Cook for the Hawaiian deity Lono. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.“The Far Side” cartoon by Gary Larson. Courtesy of Chronicle Features, San Francisco.Recent scholarly studies and debates—among them the rather strident dispute between Gananath Obeyesekere and Marshall Sahlins over the alleged deification of Cook by eighteenth-century Hawaiians—have opened up these returning-god theories to skeptical critique and detailed justification; but such discussions have had little, if any, impact on popular imagination. 1 [End Page 405] Indeed, the idea that redoubtable European explorers can be (and often are) perceived as supernatural beings by non-European “primitives” has been uncritically perpetuated to this day by filmmakers, fantasists, writers of popular history, and purveyors of cultural literacy. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for instance, informs our children that Caribbean islanders encountered by Columbus “asked if he had come from heaven”—the implication being, of course, that they took him for a god. 2 And in the recent film, 1492: Conquest of Paradise, we hear the indefatigable Admiral (played by Gerard Depardieu) claim that “on every island the natives welcome us with great generosity and trust.... Because of our appearance, we have been mistaken for gods, and are treated accordingly.” 3 Fortunately, we also have a “Far Side” parody of the cultural conceit on which such ideas in part rely, but the cartoon serves as well to demonstrate just how thoroughly the conceit has permeated our collective awareness (see figure 1). 4 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.“It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” From The Return of the Jedi, dir. Richard Marquand, Lucasfilm, Ltd., 1983. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of Lucasfilm, Ltd.Let me offer just one other example. Near the end of the popular 1983 film The Return of the Jedi, the forest-dwelling Ewoks begin to chant and salaam upon first glimpsing the golden robot C-3PO, who in turn tells his captured comrades, “I do believe they think I am some sort of god.” When Han Solo sarcastically asks the robot to use his “divine influence” to help extricate them from their predicament, C-3PO replies that such an action would be improper: “It’s against my programming to impersonate a deity.” Here we see, embedded within a film romance, both the classic trope of the apotheosized foreigner and the related motif of the foreigner’s reluctance to [End Page 406] play the god-role (see figure 2). It is worth noting, however, that while C-3PO may be unwilling to exploit the Ewoks’ misperception, Luke Skywalker is not; he uses the “Force” to convince the Ewoks of the robot’s magical prowess and, more to the point, to perpetuate their misapprehension. 5What I wish to suggest in this essay is that certain habitual Western assumptions or conceits regarding cross-cultural encounters—assumptions which have been usefully termed “myth models” inasmuch as they condition human perception and find frequent discursive expression—coexist easily but in fact disjunctively with certain other ideological structures in many early modern travel narratives and colonial accounts. Obeyesekere, in his provocative book on the supposed deification of Captain Cook in Hawaii, has linked such myth models to the conceptual structures of the longue durée as characterized by Fernand Braudel, and it is possible that they may also be... (shrink)

From Comrades to Bodhisattvas is the first book-length study of Han Chinese Buddhism in post-Mao China. Using an ethnographic approach supported by over a decade of field research, it provides an intimate portrait of lay Buddhist practitioners in Beijing who have recently embraced a religion that they were once socialized to see as harmful superstition. The book focuses on the lively discourses and debates that take place among these new practitioners in an unused courtyard of a Beijing temple. In this (...) non-monastic space, which shrinks each year as the temple authorities expand their commercial activities, laypersons gather to distribute and exchange Buddhist-themed media, listen to the fiery sermons of charismatic preachers, and seek solutions to personal moral crises. Applying recent theories in the anthropology of morality and ethics, Gareth Fisher argues that the practitioners are attracted to the courtyard as a place where they can find ethical resources to re-make both themselves and others in a rapidly changing nation that they believe lacks a coherent moral direction. Spurred on by the lessons of the preachers and the stories in the media they share, these courtyard practitioners inventively combine moral elements from China’s recent Maoist past with Buddhist teachings on the workings of karma and the importance of universal compassion. Their aim is to articulate a moral antidote to what they see as blind obsession with consumption and wealth accumulation among twenty-first century Chinese. Often socially marginalized and sidelined from meaningful roles in China’s new economy, these former communist comrades look to their new moral roles along a bodhisattva path to rebuild their self-worth. Each chapter focuses on a central trope in the courtyard practitioners’ projects to form new moral identities. The Chinese government’s restrictions on the spread of religious teachings in urban areas curtail these practitioners' ability to insert their moral visions into an emerging public sphere. Nevertheless, they succeed, at least partially, Fisher argues, in creating their own discursive space characterized by a morality of concern for fellow humans and animals and a recognition of the organizational abilities and pedagogical talents of its members that are unacknowledged in society at large. Moreover, as the later chapters of the book discuss, by writing, copying, and distributing Buddhist-themed materials, the practitioners participate in creating a religious network of fellow-Buddhists across the country, thereby forming a counter-cultural community within contemporary urban China. Highly readable and full of engaging descriptions of the real lives of practicing lay Buddhists in contemporary China, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas will interest specialists in Chinese Buddhism, anthropologists of contemporary Asia, and all scholars interested in the relationship between religion and cultural change. (shrink)

This is Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urtheilskraft) for Hackett Publications (Indianapolis, Indiana). ISBN 9780872200258 (paperback).

This article analyzes Drucilla Cornell’s critical theory as a practice of engaging with radical thinking and radical politics in the interest of revolutionary transformation. Arguing that Walter Benjamin’s imperative to wrest tradition away from conformism is at the heart of Cornell’s work, the article shows how Cornell applies this imperative both to the tradition of resistance against oppression and to critical theory itself. The article follows Cornell’s call to decolonize the critical theoretical project by bringing Surinamese anticolonial activist and writer (...) Anton de Kom, various collectives that participated in the 2022 German art festival documenta 15, and the disobedience of six young Palestinian “Freedom Riders” into conversation with Cornell’s writings on the South African Revolution and on Afro-Caribbean liberatory thought. (shrink)

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the degree in which nature has a purpose, with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment. The (...) work profoundly influenced the artists, writers, and philosophers of the classical and romantic period, including Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In addition, it has remained a landmark work in fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics, and contemporary critical theory. Today it remains an essential work of philosophy, and required reading for all with an interest in aesthetics. (shrink)

At this time, as we approach the imminent end of a century, it is amusing to look back at the changes that have taken place in the manners in which people have addressed one another in society over the last hundred years. If we are to locate, among all the terms that relate to social address, those that are, as Raymond Williams calls them, the "keywords,"1 then, to be sure, the term tongzhi or comrade is bound to be at the (...) head of the list. (shrink)

At this time, as we approach the imminent end of a century, it is amusing to look back at the changes that have taken place in the manners in which people have addressed one another in society over the last hundred years. If we are to locate, among all the terms that relate to social address, those that are, as Raymond Williams calls them, the "keywords,"1 then, to be sure, the term tongzhi or comrade is bound to be at the (...) head of the list. (shrink)

What is the point of ideology critique? Prominent Anglo-American philosophers recently proposed novel arguments for the view that ideology critique is moral critique, and ideologies are flawed insofar as they contribute to injustice or oppression. We criticize that view and make the case for an alternative and more empirically-oriented approach, grounded in epistemic rather than moral commitments. We make two related claims: (i) ideology critique can debunk beliefs and practices by uncovering how, empirically, they are produced (...) by self-justifying power, and (ii) the self-justification of power should be understood as an epistemic rather than moral flaw. Drawing on the recent realist revival in political theory, we argue that this genealogical approach has more radical potential, despite being more parsimonious than morality-based approaches. We demonstrate the relative advantages of our view by discussing the results of empirical studies on the contemporary phenomenon of neopatriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa. (shrink)

This article discusses the difference between comradeship, brotherhood, and friendship in a military context. The difference between these bonds will be made clear with the help of the story of Achilles and Patroclus, poems of the war poets, and Aristotle's books on friendship in the Ethica Nicomachea, amplified with insightful reflections on this classical text by several present-day philosophers.

This edition contains the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement and Critique of Teleological Judgement. The introductions and notes that accompanied the translations in the original two volumes have now been dropped in order to make the translations available in a single volume.

Immanuel Kant was one of the leading lights of 18th-century philosophy; his work provided the foundations for later revolutionary thinkers such as Hegel and Marx. This work contains the keystone of his critical philosophy - the basis of human knowledge and truth.

The paper focuses on the manifestations of structural and symbolic violence against women during the communist regime by addressing the most important mechanisms and embedded beliefs that allowed the proliferation of spousal violence in communist Romania, in what I see as a continuation of the interwar patriarchal state, and a bridge to the new discriminatory policies developed by the democratic structures, after 1990.

Kant's attempt to establish the principles behind the faculty of judgment remains one of the most important works on human reason.

Cohesion may be based primarily on interpersonal ties or rely instead on the connection between member and group, while groups may cohere temporarily based on the immediate alignment of interests among members or may be tied together more permanently by socio-emotional bonds. Together, these characteristics define four prototypical group types. Cliques and coalitions are based primarily on dyadic ties. Groups of comrades or colleagues rely instead on the connection of members to the group for cohesion, which reduces the marginal cost (...) of increasing group size. The strong glue of socio-emotional cohesion binds cliques and comrades, while coalitions and groups of colleagues are often based on weaker forms of cohesion. The mix of strong and weak adhesives and the greater scalability offered by the member-group bond provide the building blocks for assembling very large societies without overtaxing the social brain. (shrink)