Abstract and Keywords This chapter offers an account of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical engagements with poststructuralism, reflection on examples of important contributions to this discussion, a discussion of the extent to which feminist work has engaged and critiqued the mainstream of the field, and feminist poststructuralist theorizations of the subject, identity, and culture. It also offers a critical genealogy of the epistemological paradigm poststrustructuralism has come to represent, in search of its continuities and breaks from its foundations (...) furnished by French structuralism, psychoanalysis and tangential links with Marxian critical theory. It argues that the anglophone appropriations of structuralism in postmodern context, as it would have been termed in the French academe, have veered away from the original and purely formal conceptualization of the subject by resorting to what might be called, in Marxian terminology, identity centered reifications. This chapter puts forward the claim that poststructuralist discourse and the neoliberal discourse of individual and social mobility, transformativity and the concomitant proclamation of “the death of ideology” (and history) have established numerous and mutually opportune discursive and ideological correspondences. (shrink)

A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry’s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, ”Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of (...) identity by exploring the formation of identities and the problem of subjectivity.Scholars in a variety of disciplines have begun to address what we might call the politics of identity. Their work expands on the evolving, anti-essentialist critiques of ethnic, sexual, national, and racial identities, particularly the work of those post-structuralist theorists who have articulated concepts of difference. The calls for a “post-essentialist” reconception of notions of identity have become increasingly common. The powerful resurgence of nationalisms in Eastern Europe provides just one example of the catalysts for such theorizing.Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of Assertion and Conditionals, Truth in Semantics, and Necessary Questions, has also published a novel, Avenging Angel, and a collection of essays, In My Father’s House. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is coeditor of Transition, a quarterly review, and the author of Figures in Black, The Signifying Monkey, and Loose Canons. His latest contribution to Critical Inquiry was “Critical Fanonism”. (shrink)

This volume brings together twenty original essays on the changes and continuities in gender relations and intersecting politics of sexuality, race, class and location. The book is located in debates about contemporary culture at a moment of rapid technological change, global interconnectedness and the growing cultural dominance of neoliberalism and postfeminism. The collection traverses disciplines, spaces and approaches. It is marked by an extraordinarily wide focus, ranging from analyses of celebrity magazines and makeover shows to examinations of the experiences of (...) young female migrants, 'mail order brides' and young women who repudiate feminism. The contributions are united by their attempts to think through the ways in which experiences and representations of femininity are changing in the twenty-first century. Are we seeing new femininities? Are neoliberalism and postfeminism constructing new identities and subjectivities? What kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment? This book will be of interest to everyone studying gender, media or cultural studies. (shrink)

This paper defends a “conceptualist” interpretation of Nāgārjuna which stands in-between two other prominent accounts, the nihilist view and what I call the anti-essentialist view. The nihilist reading, recently defended by Thomas Wood, holds that for Nāgārjuna nothing exists either at the ultimate or at the conventional level. On the anti-essentialist account, supported by Jay Garfield and David Kalupahana, though Nāgārjuna rejects the ultimate existence of things as svabhāva (independent), he affirms their conventional existence as interdependent. I argue (...) that the nihilist view raises two challenges to which anti-essentialists have given no adequate response. The first alleges that the notion that all things are interdependent is incoherent. The second consists of passages from Nāgārjuna’s writings that seem to claim that whatever exists is svabhāva or depends on what is svabhāva. The conceptualist interpretation, I suggest, allows us to respond to these challenges while avoiding the implausible nihilist account. On this view, the passages in question assert a claim not about what exists but about the concept of existence, namely that it is a core part of this concept that what exists is either svabhāva or depends on what is svabhāva. Thus, contra the anti-essentialist, Nāgārjuna’s view is that there is no coherent concept of universal interdependent existence. But contra the nihilist, things can still be said to exist conventionally, since conventional discourse is precisely discourse in which subjects do not endorse the svabhāva component of the concept of existence. The upshot – again contra the anti-essentialist – is that both conventional truth and emptiness are strictly inconceivable. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as (...) diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ETHICS. AFTER NIETZSCHE -/- Preface This book tells the story of twentieth-century ethics or, in more detail, it reconstructs the history of a discussion on the foundations of ethics which had a start with Nietzsche and Sidgwick, the leading proponents of late-nineteenth-century moral scepticism. During the first half of the century, the prevailing trends tended to exclude the possibility of normative ethics. On the Continent, the trend was to transform ethics into a philosophy of existence whose self-appointed task was (...) that of describing the human condition as consisting of choices, as unavoidable as arbitrary, without any attempt at providing criteria for making such choices. In the Anglo-Saxon countries, the heir of ethics was a philosophy of morality, that is, an analysis of the language of morality that intended to clarify valuations without trying to justify them. 1958 was the year of the normative turn that led to the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy, a turn followed by decades of controversies between distinct kinds of normative ethics: utilitarian, Kantian, virtue ethics. While the controversy was raging, a quiet revolution took place, that of applied ethics which surprisingly dissolved the controversy's very subject matter by providing methods for making convergence possible on intermediate principles even when no agreement was available about first principles. The normative turn and the revolution of applied ethics have led us, at the turn of the century, to a goal that was quite far from the starting point. Instead of scepticism and relativism that was the fashion at the beginning of the century, at the beginning of the third millennium impartial and universal moral arguments seem to hold the spot being supported, if not by a final rational foundation, at least by reasonableness, the most precious legacy of the Enlightenment. -/- ● TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- ● I Anglo-Saxon philosophy: naturalism 1. Dewey beyond evolutionism and utilitarianism 2. Dewey and anti-essentialist moral epistemology 3. Dewey and naturalist moral ontology 4. Dewey and normative ethics of conduct and function 5. Perry and semantic naturalism -/- ● II Anglo-Saxon philosophy: ideal utilitarianism and neo-intuitionism 1. Moore's critique of utilitarian empiricism 2. Moore on the naturalistic fallacy 3. Moore on the nature of intrinsic value 4. Moore on ideal utilitarianism 5. Prichard on the priority of the right over the good 6. Ross's coherentist moral epistemology 7. Ross's moral ontology: realism, pluralism, and non-naturalism 8. Ross's normative ethics of prima facie duties -/- The chapter reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore's early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. It stresses the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. It argues that PE is more a patchwork of somewhat diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. -/- ●III Anglo-Saxon philosophy: non-cognitivism 1. The Scandinavian School, the Vienna circle and proto-emotivism 2. Wittgenstein and the ineffability of ethics 3. Russell's and Ayer's radical emotivism 4. Stevenson and moderate emotivism 5. Stevenson and the pragmatics of moral language 6. Stevenson and the methods for solving ethical disagreement 7. Hare and prescriptivism The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of 'good', its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with 'emotive' meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell's ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson's theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. A section reconstructs the discussion from the Forties about Hume's law, mentioning Karl Popper's argument and Richard Hare's early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- ●IV Anglo-Saxon philosophy: critics of non-cognitivism 1. Neo-naturalism and its objections to the naturalistic fallacy argument 2. Objections to Hume's law 3. Clarence Lewis and the pragmatic contradiction 4. Toulmin and the good reasons approach 5. Baier and moral reasons 5. Baier, social moralities and the absolute morality 6. Baier and the moral point of view 7. Baier and the contents of absolute ethics -/- ● V Continental philosophy: the philosophy of values 1. Max Weber and the polytheism of values 2. Phenomenology against psychologism and rationalism 3. Reinach and the theory of social acts 4. Scheler and the material ethics of values 5. Hartmann and the ontology of values 6. Plessner, Gehlen and the Philosophische Anthropologie -/- The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl's project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the apriori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy conducted in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach's theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that sketches the ideas 'discovered' later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section discusses Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of 'values' – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler, who claimed to be Husserl's legitimate heirs. -/- ● VI Continental philosophy: the critics of the philosophy of values 1. Freud, the Superego and Civilization 2. Heidegger on original ethos against ethics 3. Sartre and de Beauvoir on authenticity and ambiguity 4. Adorno and Horkheimer on emancipation and immoralism -/- ●VII Post-liberal theologians and religious thinkers 1. Barth on the autonomy of faith from ethics 2. Developments of Reformed moral theology after Barth 3. Bonhoeffer on the concrete divine command and ethics of penultimate realities 4. Developments of Reformed and Catholic moral theology after world war II 5. Baeck and the transformation of liberal Judaism 6. Rosenzweig against liberal Judaism 7. Buber and religion as the vital lymph of morality 8. Heschel and Judaism as a science of actions -/- The chapter examines the main protagonists of Christian theology and Jewish religious thinking in the twentieth century. It stresses how the main dilemmas of contemporary philosophical ethics lie at the root of the various path of inquiry taken by these thinkers. -/- ● VIII Normative ethics: neo-Utilitarianism 1. The discussion on act and rule utilitarianism 2. Hare on two-tiered preference utilitarianism 3. Harsanyi, Gauthier and rational choice ethics 4. Parfit, utilitarianism and the idea of a person 5. Brandt and indirect conscience utilitarianism -/- The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick's and Moore's fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine refuted. Two examples give the reader a glimpse at this uproarious process. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This transformation results in preference utilitarianism combined with a 'Kantian' version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare's two-level preference utilitarianism, where act utilitarianism plays the function of the eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of an action-guiding practical device. -/- ● IX Normative ethics: neo-Aristotelianism and virtue ethics 1. Hannah Arendt, action and judgement 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer and phronesis 3. Alasdair MacIntyre on practices, virtues, and traditions 5. Stuart Hampshire on deliberation 6. Bernard Williams and moral complexity 7. Feminist ethics -/- Sect 1 reconstructs the post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named 'Rehabilitation of practical philosophy' is described. Heidegger's most brilliant disciples were the promoters of this Rehabilitation. Hans-Georg Gadamer is a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle's lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger's lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the significant role of the notion of phronesis. Sect 3 discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. It argues that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. The chapter gives a short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot's and Peter Geach's critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre's grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- ● X Normative ethics: Kantian and rights-based ethics 1. Dialogical constructivism 2. Apel, Habermas and discourse ethics 3. Gewirth and rights-based ethics 4. Nagel on agent-relative reasons 5. Donagan and persons as ends in themselves Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This current started with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. The chapter offers an examination of his argument in some detail, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas's elaboration on Apel's theory. -/- ● XI The applied ethics renaissance 1. Elisabeth Anscombe on the atom bomb 2. From medical ethics to bioethics 3. Rawls and public ethics 3. Nozick, Dworkin and further developments of public ethics 5. Sen and the revival of economic ethics -/- The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin's new casuistry. The chapter argues that Rawls's distinction between a "political" and a "metaphysical" approach to the theory of justice, one central part of ethical theory, is a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and the new casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter. The idea is that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls' view never will be close – on the essential criteria for judgment. -/- ● XII Fin-de-siècle metaethics 1. Deontic logics 2. Anti-realism 3. External realism 4. Internal realism 5. Kantian constructivism -/- The chapter illustrates the fresh start of meta-ethical discussion in the Eighties and Nineties and the resulting new alignments: metaphysical naturalism, internal realism, anti-realism, and constructivism. (shrink)

This article suggests that both the multicultural perception of ‘ community’ as a bounded and internally homogeneous body and the celebration of migrants as hybrids and anti-essentialist actors fail to acknowledge the complexity of processes of identity construction. The first reifies and essentializes migrants’ cultural identities, denying subjective contestations over notions of cultural and religious authenticity. The celebration of migrants as progressive and counterhegemonic ‘hybrids’, however, reinforces essentialist understandings of ‘migrants’, producing a hierarchy between experiences of displacement. The article (...) suggests that it is essential to understand the ways in which migrants construct imagined, transnational and local communities. It provides a picture of the ways in which Moroccan migrant women in Italy draw and experience boundaries of exclusion and inclusion, of Self and Other in their day-to-day practices and discourses. In particular, it argues that Moroccan women define themselves both vis-a-vis Italians as well as by drawing boundaries between themselves and other Moroccan women and men. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as (...) diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)

This essay focuses on an issue arising from within an anti-essentialist perspective on sexual identity: how is it possible to explain the political impetus inhering in a category such as 'woman' without having recourse to a set of positive properties that would somehow fix her identity in advance? I examine how a particular theoretical outlook, social postmodernism, attempts to address this issue, and argue that, ultimately, social postmodernism generates its own impasse which I call social foundationalism - an impasse (...) which is structurally similar to biological foundationalism. I invoke discourse -theoretic concepts to introduce the psychoanalytic categories of master signifier and symbolic identification. This is done in order to suggest how Lacanian psychoanalysis permits us to theorize sexual difference in a way that avoids both biological foundationalism and social foundationalism. Key Words: discourse theory • identification • identity • Lacan • poststructuralism • psychoanalysis • sexual difference • social postmodernism. (shrink)

This article uses a discourse analytic perspective to analyse sex and relationship advice in a best-selling women’s magazine. It identifies three different interpretative repertoires which together structure constructions of sexual relationships: the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, organized around plans, goals and the scientific management of relationships; men-ology, in which women are instructed in how to learn to please men; and transforming the self, which calls on women to remodel their interior lives in order to construct a desirable subjectivity. The article considers (...) each repertoire in turn, and also looks at how they work together in order to privilege men and heterosexuality. Discussion focuses in particular on the postfeminist nature of the advice, in which pre-feminist, feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled in such a way as to make gender ideologies more pernicious and difficult to contest. (shrink)

Race difference and whiteness — key elements in the construction of my cultural identity — became a focus of my reflective practice that began over 5 years ago. This article reflects critically on the production of white identity from my social location as a white nurse. My attention focused on two aspects of whiteness: the social location from which I live and learn, and the hegemonic but unmarked discourse that informs the knowledge I read and create as a researcher. My (...) white identity is characterized by four features: the absent presence of whiteness; the need for an oppositional identity; the entitlement of choice and subjectivity; and the denial of a dominant position and relation to the racialized Other. Exploring these features is critically important at this juncture in global and professional history because of the persistence of neoliberalism and the popularity of culturalist approaches to diversity. Examining the process of my radicalization about race simultaneously calls attention to the historiography of ideas about whiteness and race difference and the institutionalization of beliefs and practices about race difference that continuously reproduce racialized identities and inform collective nursing practice and research. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss a view of de re thoughts that can be naturally endorsed in the wake of Russell's account. This is the view that a thought is about the very thing (res) rather than a mere characterization of it if and only if it is constitutively tied, if not to the existence, at least to the identity of its object and the thinker knows which/who the object of his/her thought is. Faced with the challenge of accommodating far (...) from uncommon cases of mistaken identity or substantial confusion on the part of the subject, I argue that the integrity of the view can be preserved and that the restrictions set on its truth by the advocates of the two-component picture and the anti-essentialists can be lifted. (shrink)

What is the trouble with schools and why should we want to make ‘school trouble’? Schooling is implicated in the making of educational and social exclusions and inequalities as well as the making of particular sorts of students and teachers. For this reason schools are important sites of counter- or radical- politics. In this book, Deborah Youdell brings together theories of counter-politics and radical traditions in education to make sense of the politics of daily life inside schools and explores a (...) range of resources for thinking about and enacting political practices that make ‘school trouble’. The book offers a solid introduction to the much-debated issues of ‘intersectionality’ and the limits of identity politics and the relationship between schooling and the wider policy and political context. It pieces together a series of tools and tactics that might destabilize educational inequalities by unsettling the knowledges, meanings, practices, subjectivities and feelings that are normalized and privileged in the ‘business as usual’ of school life. Engaging with curriculum materials, teachers’ lesson plans and accounts of their pedagogy, and ethnographic observations of school practices, the book investigates a range of empirical examples of critical action in school, from overt political action pursued by educators to day-to-day pedagogic encounters between teachers and students. The book draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Chantel Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to make sense of these practices and identify the political possibilities for educators who refuse to accept the everyday injustices and wide-reaching social inequalities that face us. _School Trouble_ appears at a moment of political and economic flux and uncertainty, and when the policy moves that have promoted markets and private sector involvement in education around the globe have been subject to intense scrutiny and critique. Against this backdrop, renewed attention is being paid to the questions of how politics might be rejuvenated, how societies might be made fair, and what role education might have in pursing this. This book makes an important intervention into this terrain. By exploring a politics of discourse, an anti-identity politics, a politics of feeling, and a politics of becoming, it shows how the education assemblage can be unsettled and education can be re-imagined. The book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars in the fields of education, sociology, cultural studies, and social and political science as well as to critical educators looking for new tools for thinking about their practice. (shrink)

This article contributes to debates concerning the sexualization of culture in the European context by analysing shifts in contemporary forms of British women’s sexual sexual subjectivities in relation to consumer culture. The article employs a ‘heterotopological’ analysis of how space is materialized through history, power and discourse. A two-part analysis is employed that, first, maps the history of British sex shops in relation to two discourses of sexuality and consumption, namely ‘safe’ and ‘seedy’; and second, analyses how these discourses can (...) be taken up and negotiated by young women today, as evidenced in a focus group discussion on ‘Ann Summers’. It concludes that new directions and interesting insights into the intersections of space, power, gender and sexuality within neoliberal postfeminist shifts in feminine identity can be made by considering female-oriented sex shops as ‘postfeminist heterotopias’. (shrink)

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and (...) their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate.Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity. (shrink)

This essay focuses on an issue arising from within an anti-essentialist perspective on sexual identity: how is it possible to explain the political impetus inhering in a category such as ‘woman’ without having recourse to a set of positive properties that would somehow fix her identity in advance? I examine how a particular theoretical outlook, social post-modernism, attempts to address this issue, and argue that, ultimately, social postmodernism generates its own impasse which I call social foundationalism – an impasse (...) which is structurally similar to biological foundationalism. I invoke discourse-theoretic concepts to introduce the psychoanalytic categories of master signifier and symbolic identification. This is done in order to suggest how Lacanian psychoanalysis permits us to theorize sexual difference in a way that avoids both biological foundationalism and social foundationalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTSocial constructionism, and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory in particular, are well-known for their anti-essentialist understanding of identity. Hence these discourses have theoretically been utilized for understanding social identity construction and for deconstructing identities. However, I claim that social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory may have the as yet non-theorized operation of detecting and combating wholesale indictments of identities. This operation helps us diagnose how ethnic identity and affect become incriminated as supposedly inextricably intertwined with (...) racism, chauvinism and related pathologies. Yet interestingly, instead of unveiling and critiquing the new hegemony of blanket indictment of ethnic identity/affect, social constructionism and Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory have been used to incriminate identity as such. The present article interprets Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory against the grain to chastise the tendency to declare ethnic identity/affect as the new enemy. It shows how such new, hegemonic incrimination aspires to fill the empty signifier of peaceful coexistence with otherness, yet runs the risk of effacing otherness. The article concludes with an example of a reconstructive alternative. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s a strong opposition and anxiety towards biological and naturalizing knowledges was the norm in feminist discourse. In the past decades the certainties of that ‘anti-biologism’ have been challenged, in part because of a new recognition of the role of contingency in both biological determination and biological science. What seems to have survived the shift is a set of normative assumptions concerning the role of determinacy and contingency in the political implications of ontological claims: an (...) assumed political valorization of contingency. This article challenges those assumptions. It draws attention to the embrace of contingency and processuality on the part of supremacist biopolitical discourse, and suggests the need to think again about the politics of contingency and becoming. Focusing on the issue of racism and supremacist-specification, the article takes a genealogical look at ‘second-wave’ feminist anti-biologism. Monique Wittig’s materialist feminist attack on naturalizing ideology and ‘the myth of woman’ provides the historical example. The article draws attention to curious absences in Wittig’s anti-biologistic statements concerning early 20th-century biologistic feminism: the absence of a critique of eugenics, racism and supremacism. Arguably the condemnation of biology as a conservative ‘ideology of the status quo’ created masks for biopolitical ontology, obscuring the progressive, dynamic, processual character of biologism and of modern racism. While dislodging some powers of biologistic discourse, feminist anti-biologism might also have played a part in facilitating the revitalization of biopolitical racism within the constructivist culturalist rubric. The aim of the article is not to critique ‘second-wave’ feminism from the perspective of contemporary scholarship, but to help generate new ways of thinking and feeling about the role of ontology, contingency and temporality in the present politics of classification. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and bioethics, that (...) statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

This paper aims at foregrounding race and ethnicity discourse in Biblical Studies and beyond in order to undermine transhistorical and transcultural racism and ethnocentrism in religious discourse. It is my argument that matters of race and ethnicity should be approached as analytical categories in an interdisciplinary manner, albeit in a specific context, Hellenistic, Roman, Jewish, or Christian. In doing so, I first examine the works of Steve Fenton as well as Robert Miles and Malcolm Brown in order to look closely (...) at race and ethnicity discourse in the ancient Mediterranean world, especially from a sociological perspective. Then, I indicate how Jonathan Hall and Shaye Cohen examine Hellenic and Jewish identity, respectively, with a focus on ethnic identity in the Greco-Roman world. Finally, I consider how Judith Lieu and Denise Buell analyze early Christian identity as a racial or ethnic discourse in the Jewish, Hellenistic, and Roman matrix. Hence, I contend that identity in general and racial-ethnic identity in particular are by no means stable and static in essentialist terms, but rather they are fluid along the ostensible axis of fixed identity. (shrink)

This article offers a critical discourse analysis of the Israeli television series In Treatment. The series unfolds the therapy sessions of a 40-year-old single female attorney with her therapist. The main objective of the study was to identify the scripted tactics or narrative strategies that establish and maintain singlehood. The findings indicate that the therapeutic discourse plays a central role in the construction and interpretation of single women’s subjectivities, prompting a narrative that encourages the ‘discarding’ of singlehood as well as (...) therapeutic work slanted towards a more familial and maternally oriented subjectivity. This narrative unfolds through two dominant scripted tactics: the symbolic annihilation of singlehood and the construction of feminine identity hierarchies. Moreover, it is also prompted by the discursive alliance between the therapeutic discourse and the postfeminist discourse. Consequently, long-term singlehood is portrayed as an unnatural and pathological life script characterized by its lack and deficiency. Furthermore, as opposed to childless singlehood, single motherhood by choice emerges as a preferred and desirable life option. The category of single motherhood is endowed with new forms of legitimacy, reinforcing new-old patriarchal and postfeminist conceptions of women’s reproductive potential and what is considered to be women’s primary life purpose. (shrink)

Stories and images of successful career women and support for women’s advancement in working life have become hallmarks of contemporary postfeminist media culture, and especially of women’s magazines such as Cosmopolitan. While in previous research these features have been seen as signs for a new, popular feminism, more recently they have also been connected to the growing hegemony of neoliberal governance, a mode of power that ultimately aims at the economization of the social and is fundamentally exercised in and through (...) discourse. The aim of this article is to investigate further the interconnectedness of these two phenomena, postfeminism and neoliberalism, in the domain of work, using the example of the German edition of Cosmopolitan. For a detailed and multilayered investigation the study draws on linguistically oriented discourse analysis, focusing on the operation of a ‘discourse of postfeminist self-management’. The examination shows how this discourse, while on the one hand evoking an ethos of feminist engagement, on the other seeks to guide readers to mould themselves into a version of the entrepreneurial self required by the neoliberalized world of work. (shrink)

Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...) both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

Anti-essentialism, antiuniversalism, anti-foundationalism, fragmentation of subjectivity, pluralization of truths are feared to entail the danger of forfeiture of possibilities for critical counter discourses. But the deconstruction of categories is not inevitably the death of politics; rather, the postmodernist intervention of canonical power /knowledge alliances facilitates the recovery of "other" strategies of resistance concerning world problems from "nonconventional" sources that have hitherto been invalidated by mainstream discourses. Thus the crisis triggered by postmodern critique could hold immense opportunities for new (...) configurations of politics to emerge through micro-politics of permanent resistance and diversification of discourses of subversion. Political activism today stands in a complicated parasitical relationship of debt and defiance vis-ä-vis the postmodernist discourse, which, despite many shortcomings, does offer possibilities of thinking the "Other". To this end, I seek to go back into the history of philosophy and reclaim tools of resistance from "different" cultural contexts to revitalize and re-imagine our oppositional practices in the present. This paper attempts to experiment with the concept of non-violence [Ahimsa) as conceptualized within the Indian philosophical tradition. (shrink)

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine claims that Carol Gilligan's work is "essentialist," and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.

The volume addresses a variety of issues on Stance and Inter/Subjectivity, and the expression of Identity in discourse. It focuses on the multifaceted nature of stance, and the use of resources of epistemicity, effectivity, and evaluation and metaphor, as well as other dimensions within the domain of stance, such as mirativity, emotion and attribution. In this way it provides a more in-depth and a wider perspective into the nature of stance. The contributions feature the use of stance resources in several (...) languages, and in various discourse domains and genres, such as oral discourse, political and newspaper discourse, and science popularization and medical research articles, as well as online fora on social issues, mental health and peer support platforms. (shrink)

The philosophical manifestos of the past few decades involving attempts to go beyond constructs, discourses, and structures to the things themselves and a return to ontology and materialism often address the problems of the Anthropocene. Criticism of anthropocentrism and the introduction of the nonhuman into the focus of philosophy opened up new perspectives in solving the problems of idealism. This escape from the discursive aspect and the human factor, which is intended to break out philosophical projects to the outside, to (...) what is on the other side of culture and language, to the planet, to matter, is accompanied by sequences of negations. Exploring the outer edge of philosophy, the periphery of culture, dark and marginal subjects, these authors try to construct a kind of anti-discourse, a nonphilosophy. In order to unlock the nonthinkable, what is being proposed to us is an exploration of objects that philosophical thought has heretofore ignored. The path to the nonhuman and nonthinkable lies through nonphilosophy. This article attempts to analyze such negations. It analyzes the function of negation by turning to psychoanalytic theory, in which the examination and modification of negation is one of the key themes. The principal mechanism of analysis is the modified logic of the psychoanalyst Jean Michel Vappereau. But the classical modifications of negation of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are also considered. The article’s central question—how does one interpret the negation in a human’s turning to the nonhuman, of philosophy to nonphilosophy, of an act of thought to the nonthinkable—is resolved in two ways, which constitute the two sections of the article. The results of the analysis open up obscure ways of interpreting such philosophical manifestos. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 17.1 (2003) 73-75 [Access article in PDF] Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics. Sonia Kruks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 200. $35.00 h.c. 0-8014-3387-8; $16.95 pbk. 0-8014-8417-0. Sonia Kruks' latest book, Retrieving Experience, is a valuable contribution to ongoing debates about the relevance of feminist philosophy in a period of relative political quietism. It also offers timely (...) reminders of historical continuities between phenomenological and postmodern conceptions of subjectivity and political engagement. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Fanon, and the later Sartre, Kruks proposes to "explore women's embodied experiences" and to "ask whether they might not offer some means to help build affective bonds among women who are in many ways radically different from one another" (6). The book approaches this task by means of two secondary issues. First, should feminist thought be oriented by phenomenological or postmodernist theoretical strategies? Second, can women's embodied experience be the conceptual basis for political and epistemological practices that avoid the pitfalls of "identity politics" or an "epistemology of provenance"? The answer to both questions comes through the notion of praxis developed in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. By thinking of embodiment as praxis or work, a strategy implicit in Beauvoir's idea that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Kruks seeks to resolve the ethical affront of finding one's individuality reduced to the "generality" of a collective—the ethical affront to which feminists of various generations and theoretical persuasions must respond.Retrieving Experience explores the significance of recognition as a political norm. Identifying Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew as a pivotal work in the history of identitarian theorizing, she situates recent appeals for race- and gender-based political mobilization in the United States with respect to the dialectical relationship between the Look, shame, and recognition existentialists observed in situations of anti-Semitic and colonial domination during and immediately after the Second World War. Legitimating knowledge gained under oppressive conditions formed an important element of African, Southeast Asian, and ultimately African-American and feminist resistance to cultural imperialism. However, Kruks warns, discourses of "recognition" risk placing the blame for group domination on individuals' face-to-face interactions while concealing the role of state and economic institutions in enabling social disdain to systematically damage a group's quality of life. Moreover, they suggest that the experience of subjugation alone justifies knowledge claims or counts, without further elaboration, as an act of political engagement. Kruks argues that knowers and actors need to identify conceptual and practical mediations enabling individual interactions, experiences, and strategies to prompt the recognition and transformation of [End Page 73] group situations. Sartre's notion of praxis, she suggests, explains how an individual can participate in a collectivity while acting autonomously or acquiescing to subjection.The most important passages in Retrieving Experience examine the affective aspects of the decision to take up a political identity or engage in political action. Going beyond Sartre's account of mediations, Kruks suggests that the sensory and emotional qualities of embodiment are themselves mediators, the products of praxis as well as its vehicles. Since any act of social knowledge involves the emotions, affect plays an important role in the process whereby individuals from different cultural, economic, and bodily situations learn about and shape one another's' environment through the act of knowledge. Individuals, then, may have a moral responsibility to learn about others in a way that gives them "sympathetic bodies." Drawing on Maria Lugones' social epistemology, Kruks argues that "world-traveling" or existing simultaneously in several communities or sets of power relations is a bodily act, but also a fully cultural, ethical act rather than a natural way of being. One is not born, but becomes, an embodied knower. Understanding female embodiment as a kind of work or "world-traveling" praxis enables feminist solidarity—"respectful recognition" to replace a historically implausible "sisterhood" or a distinct epistemological perspective as a regulative ideal for feminist politics.But how far can the... (shrink)

The article seeks to examine identities young women are producing within late modern social conditions with the aim of exploring these identities in relation to the increasingly fragmented project of second wave feminism. In order to evaluate whether feminism has maintained intergenerational currency, the article, based upon interviews with 33 young women aged 16–20, discusses ways in which young women are engaging with choices available to them. The active negotiation of identity requires an examination of the discourses available to the (...) subjects and in this study it is apparent that, while these young women were alienated from second wave feminism, their identities were indeed informed by intrinsically feminist ideals. This contradiction begs the question of what place young women occupy within the increasingly diverse category of ‘feminisms’? The tension between second wave feminism and postfeminism and their problematic relationship is analysed as a problem deriving from difference. Analysis of interview material is used to argue that the identities under construction allow the young women to engage in a resistant fashion with the choices they have available at the micro-level of everyday life. (shrink)

Observers have noted a decline (in the US) in attributions of genetically-based inferiority (e.g. in intelligence) to Blacks, and a rise in attributions of culturally-based inferiority. Is this "culturalism" merely warmed-over racism ("cultural racism") or a genuinely distinct way of thinking about racial groups? The question raises a larger one about the relative place of biology and culture in racist thought. I develop a typology of culturalisms as applied to race: (1) inherentist or essentialist culturalism (inferiorizing cultural characteristics wrongly but (...) intelligibly regarded as inhering in the nature of racial groups). This view has an historical pedigree in the work of J.G. von Herder, and the tradition of "national racism." (2) non-inherentist culturalism (groups regarded as possessing changeable, malleable inferiorizing cultural characteristics). (3) colonalist culturalism (colonial subjects regarded as uncivilized but capable of becoming civilized under European tutelage). (4) neo-racism (cultures of former colonial subjects in or potentially immigrating to European countries are regarded in an inherentist manner and incompatible with but not inferior to European cultures). Non-inherentist culturalism (#2) can be put to either a racist or an anti-racist use. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine Foucault's discourse-oriented theory, his explanation of the power-knowledge relation, his notions of technologies of domination and technologies of the self, and the Foucauldian critique of the assumed neutrality of education and school counseling. The theory that we shall seek to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on Foucault's theory of power, his notion of discourse, his understanding of subjectivity, and his analysis of how power relations and discourses shape processes of ethical self-constitution. The (...) results of the current study converge with Besley's prior research on Foucault's analysis of education, his theory of language and social power, his non-essentialist conception of identity, and his emphasis on the centrality of truth in relation to the self. (shrink)

Since antiquity, there have been different philosophical and scientific theories about erotic desire and sexual experience. In this work, we will identify the metaphysics of sexuality in the Judeo-Christian perspective of creation and in the irrationalist perspective of Schopenhauer’s atheistic pessimism. Christian theology sacralizes heterosexuality, rejecting the Gnostic antagonism between matter and spirit. In dialogue with contemporary feminist movements, we will try to present the different rational models that justify sexual differentiation and gender identity. We will develop an empathetic and (...) non-homophobic dialogue with constructivist and existentialist theories that separate gender difference from the deterministic biologism of sexual difference. We will seek to verify the contribution of Christian personalist models to a spirituality of gender identity that reconciles culturalist theses and essentialist theses in the intelligibility of gender identity. (shrink)

This paper explores Max Stirner's political philosophy and its importance for contemporary theory. While our time is characterized by the breaking down and dislocation of essential and universal identities, little has been written on the philosophical roots of this phenomenon. I show the ways in which Stirner's ‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism, explicit in his critique of Feuerbach, lays the theoretical groundwork for this ‘politics of difference’. Indeed it anticipates many aspects of ‘poststructuralism’ thought. I argue here that Stirner's critique (...) of humanism, essentialist identity, rationality, and moral absolutism unmasks the subtle connections between identity, desire and politics. It also goes beyond the political imaginary of the Enlightenment and, in doing so, allows us to deconstruct accepted political and social identities and radically transform the notion of the political subject. However, Stirner's thinking is not a simplistic transgression of humanist categories. Rather he shows their discursive limitations and calls for a rethinking of these concepts in ways that are less abstract and oppressive. (shrink)

In this article, I situate and reconstruct Sartre's rejections of subjective and objective idealism in order both to sketch his realism-all-the-way-down and to contrast it with Richard Rorty's pragmatic, anti-essentialist contextualism. The contrast with Rorty is important because his contextualism is one of the most prominent approaches within the relatively recent proliferation of antiessentialist views mobilized under the banners of pragmatism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, constructivism, etc. Although Rorty's contextualism is both compelling and comparable to Sartre's realism-all-the-way-down, I shall argue that (...) the latter does not throw out the baby that the former throws out with the bathwater. Realism-all-the-way-down is not compelled to throw out realism along with subjective and objective idealism, whereas contextualism must throw out the whole lot. If compelling intuitions recommend realism to us, and if Rorty's rejection of realism is unconvincing, there are good reasons to prefer Sartre's realism-all-the-way-down. (shrink)

In this article, I situate and reconstruct Sartre's rejections of subjective and objective idealism in order both to sketch his realism-all-the-way-down and to contrast it with Richard Rorty's pragmatic, anti-essentialist contextualism. The contrast with Rorty is important because his contextualism is one of the most prominent approaches within the relatively recent proliferation of antiessentialist views mobilized under the banners of pragmatism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, constructivism, etc. Although Rorty's contextualism is both compelling and comparable to Sartre's realism-all-the-way-down, I shall argue that (...) the latter does not throw out the baby that the former throws out with the bathwater. Realism-all-the-way-down is not compelled to throw out realism along with subjective and objective idealism, whereas contextualism must throw out the whole lot. If compelling intuitions recommend realism to us, and if Rorty's rejection of realism is unconvincing, there are good reasons to prefer Sartre's realism-all-the-way-down. (shrink)

Freudian and phenomenological approaches to subjectivity allow the existence of a residual core self. Recent work within cultural analysis and sociology has rejected such a residue. The writings of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu are two cases in point. In the former case, this refusal functions to provide the possibility of reconstructable gendered identities. For Bourdieu, it confirms the primacy of the social. In both cases, the refusal is part of a case made against psychological essentialism. However, the campaign against (...) essentialism may not be served by the rejection of all aspects of the autonomous embodied self. As a test of the implications of this self-denial, an examination is made of the shift in transsexual discourse from the early culture of dissimulation to current trends of openness and the transcendence of dichotomous models of gender. It is shown that the model of citation found in the work of Judith Butler works poorly in the early stage, but works well in the later culture if stripped of its contingent association with dissimulation. The culture of open citation is shown to be dependent upon external certitudes which duplicate, in potentially stronger terms, the very essentialism which the rejection of residual selfhood was first meant to defeat. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The austerity measures adopted after the financial crisis of 2008–2009 accelerated the critical scholarship on neoliberalism and the media. This article uses discourse theory to analyse how The Economist newspaper constructed a ‘euphemised’ neoliberal discourse amid the European austerity drive in the years 2010–2012. The article argues for distinguishing between different types of neoliberalism and defines euphemised neoliberalism as a discourse that is characterised by a post-political style, a posture typical of The Economist’s elite journalistic identity. The article discusses (...) the type of discourse being articulated via The Economist’s rhetorical strategies of moral and rational austerity, anti-politics and austerity as modernisation. These strategies allowed for a nuanced and even a critical debate on European austerity policies, but ultimately The Economist produced a depoliticised understanding of economic policy-making, as the need for austerity and reforms could not be questioned. Finally, the article discusses how the austerity measures adopted in 2010 led to a crisis in the previously constituted euphemised neoliberal discourse and accelerated counter-hegemonic discourses, such as authoritarian forms of neoliberalism. (shrink)

Posthumanismus hat sich als neues Theorie-Paradigma etabliert. Wie alle gesellschaftlichen Diskurse, ist auch dieser eine Summe aus Machtkämpfen, Subjektpositionen, Identitäten und deshalb voller Konflikte. In diesem Diskurs, der vor allem zeitgenössische und somit technokulturelle Motive beinhaltet, aber natürlich auch eine lange Vorgeschichte hat, gibt es keine Einigung darüber, was das Posthumane eigentlich ist, d. h. ob es sich bei ihm um das Beste oder das Schlechteste handelt, das dem Menschen, seiner Humanität, der Menschheit und der humanistischen Tradition widerfahren könnte; noch (...) besteht Übereinstimmung darüber, ob Posthumanismus unvermeidlich, bereits Realität oder nur ein Trugbild ist; oder ob er politisch, kulturell, sozial progressiv oder im Gegenteil vielleicht sogar regressiv ist; ob er allein durch technologischen Wandel oder hauptsächlich konstruiert und somit ideologisch motiviert ist. Die Debatte zwischen Stefan Herbrechter und Karin Harrasser geht den Gründen für die Karriere posthumanistischer Motive und den damit zusammenhängenden Befürchtungen und Hoffnungen nach. Posthumanism has established itself as a new paradigm of theory. Like all social discourses, it is a sum of power struggles, subject positions, identities – and thus full of conflict. In this discourse, which includes mainly contemporary and hence techno cultural motifs, but which of course also has a long history, there is no agreement about what the posthuman actually is, that is if it is the best or the worst that could happen to man, to his humanity, to mankind and the humanistic tradition in general. Neither is there agreement as to whether posthumanism is inevitable, already a reality or just a mirage; or whether it is politically, culturally, socially progressive or to the contrary perhaps even regressive; whether it is solely produced by technological change or mainly constructed and thus ideologically motivated. The debate between Stefan Herbrechter and Karin Harrasser explores the reasons for the career of posthumanistic motives as well as related fears and hopes. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 152–154 Levi R. Bryant. The Democracy of Objects . Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. 2011. 316 pp. | ISBN 9781607852049. | $23.99 For two decades post-anarchism has adopted an epistemological point of departure for its critique of the representative ontologies of classical anarchism. This critique focused on the classical anarchist conceptualization of power as a unitary phenomenon that operated unidirectionally to repress an otherwise creative and benign human essence. Andrew Koch may have inaugurated this trend in (...) 1993 when he wrote his influential paper entitled “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism.” Koch’s paper certainly laid some of the important groundwork for post-anarchism’s continual subsumption of ontology beneath the a priori of an epistemological orientation, and his work continues to be cited as an early and important venture into post-anarchist philosophy. The problem is that Koch could not conceive of an anti-essentialist and autonomous ontological system, one not subject to regulation or representation by the human mind. Consequently, he was forced to assert a subjectivist claims-making ego as the foundation of a post-structuralist anarchist politics. Saul Newman was indebted to this heritage insofar as he also posited the ego (extrapolated from the writings of Max Stirner) and the subject (extrapolated from Jacques Lacan’s oeuvre ) as the paradoxical ‘outside’ to power and representation. Todd May fell into a similar trap in his book The Political Philosophy of Post-structuralist Anarchism when he wrote that “[m]etaphysics [...] partakes of the normativity inhabiting the epistemology that provides its foundations.” 1 Whereas Newman’s approach did not necessarily foreclose the possibility of metaphysics—at least to the extent that he began with the subject of the Lacanian tradition (wherein the subject is believed to be radically split between thinking and being)—May completely foreclosed the possibility of any escape from the reign of the epistemological. There laid the impasse of yesterday’s post-anarchism. This impasse at the heart of the project of post-anarchism has forced Koch, Newman, May, and many others, to come to similar conclusions about the place of ontology in post-anarchist scholarship. The post-anarchists have all formulated a response strikingly similar to Koch’s argument that any representative ontology ought to be dismantled and dethroned in favour of “a conceptualization of knowledge that is contingent on a plurality of internally consistent episteme .” 2 By dismissing all ontologies as suspiciously representative and as incessantly harbouring a dangerous form of essentialism, post-anarchists have overlooked the privilege that they have placed on the human subject, language, and discourse, at the expense of the democracy that the human subject shares with other animals, objects, and beings in the world. This epistemological characterization of post-anarchism has held sway for far too long. It is not by chance that post-anarchism, as a concept, was first formulated by Hakim Bey as an “ontological anarchism,” 3 and subsequently repressed by the canon of post-anarchist authors. Perhaps Bey’s ontological anarchism also lacked the ‘rigour’ required of today’s scholarly audience and for these two reasons (at least) he has received very little credit for his inaugurating efforts into post-anarchism. In any case, I want to challenge this reluctance and revive the roots of post-anarchism. Levi Bryant gives us a reason to believe that we can achieve the promise of Bey’s ontological anarchism without sacrificing the scholarly standard of rigour. Levi Bryant’s newest open-access book, The Democracy of Objects , is a tour de force . His book challenges post-anarchists to take their radical critique of representation a step further by questioning the “hegemony that epistemology currently enjoys in philosophy.” Bryant maintains that post-structuralism, and radical anti-humanisms, only appear to reject the subject as the locus of political agency. Their rejection is actually more of a disavowal, a replacement of the human subject with the equally human order of language or discourse. What post-structuralism attempts to elucidate is the manner in which the subject is colonized by the Other of language, discourse and social relations. What here appears as a movement away from the determining subject of humanism and existentialism is only replaced with the determining apparatuses of structures as they are conceived by astute analysts of political culture. Post-structuralism thus re-enters the anthropocentric discourse to the extent that the cultural analyst believes himself capable of conceiving the determinative structures of society. In contradistinction to the claims of post-structuralism and post-anarchism, the role of the ontologist is not to suture the gap between epistemology and the real but to de-suture it, as Bryant puts it: “[o]ntology does not tell us what objects exist, but that objects exist, that they are generative mechanisms.” Above all else, the role of ontology, for post-anarchists, ought to be a real de-centering of the subject in relation to other objects in the non-human world such that the subject becomes conceived as one object among others within a living democracy of equality. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that objects exist whether or not the subject or analyst is there to represent them: they represent themselves and are autonomous from our dictation, just as each object finds its autonomy in relation to other objects. Ontology must now be distinguished from representation. We must shift the terms of the debate and interrogate the hegemony that epistemology has been afforded within post-anarchist philosophy. At least two possibilities are now permitted. On the one hand, one could intervene into the reigning mode of philosophy, namely epistemology, by latching onto concepts from meta-ethical philosophy. Meta-ethics allows one to easily separate the ontological from the epistemological and to answer very particular questions about each in order to formulate an overarching meta-ethical position. 4 Post-anarchism is particularly adept at this task because of its resounding ability to frame itself as an ethical political philosophy in relation to the strategic political philosophy of classical Marxism. On the other hand, Bryant argues that “[p]erhaps the best way to defeat [the privilege currently held by epistemology] is to shift the terms of debate.” Shifting the terms of debate is also something that post-anarchists have been very good at doing. Thus, instead of asking the question ‘how do representative ontological systems harbour concealed epistemological orientations toward the political?’ one might ask ‘ do epistemological orientations toward the political always harbour representative and subject-centred ontological systems?” The genius of Bryant’s book rests in its ability to convincingly argue for the radical autonomy of being and of objects. This claim speaks to some of the most compelling theories of the political in anarchist and marxist political philosophy (for instance, hegemony, representation, democracy, and so on) and it re-stages the political drama of our times across a much wider terrain. The fallacy of strategic political philosophy in the Marxist tradition, as Todd May quite correctly points out, is that it remains committed to a concept of power that is unitary in its analysis, unidirectional in its influence, and utterly repressive in its effect. Similarly, Bryant’s ontology allows one to argue that there is a fallacy that occurs “whenever one type of entity is treated as the ground or explains all other entities.” Whereas May’s post-structuralist anarchism moved away from the fallacy of the unitary analysis of power, whereby subjects are constituted by the influence of a single site of power, it nonetheless remained committed to a tactical political philosophy which is monarchical in the final analysis . It remains monarchical to the extent that the human world, the world of epistemology, is treated as the yardstick of democracy. Bryant’s argument is quite instructive: “[w]hat we thus get is not a democracy of objects or actants where all objects are on equal ontological footing [...] but instead a monarchy of the human in relation to all other beings.” The real fallacy is thus not against strategic political philosophy but philosophy itself and the way it has played out over so many centuries. “The epistemic fallacy,” writes Bryant, “consists in the thesis that proper ontological questions can be fully transposed into epistemological questions.” The point that Bryant is making relates to the way ontology is today always reduced to an epistemology and thereby loses its significance as a philosophical question. This book should be applauded for its novelty and its thesis ought to be taken seriously by post-anarchists today. Because of this book, and the attendant post-continental movement that is being called ‘speculative realism,’ we can now distinguish three stages in the life of post-anarchism. First, we can deduce what Süreyya Evren has described as its ‘introductory period.’ The introductory period of post-anarchism is defined by its inability to side-step the ontological problem in the literature of classical anarchism. During this period, post-anarchism needed to distinguish itself from classical anarchism while nonetheless remaining committed to its ethical project. The second period overcomes the problem of the separation of post-anarchism from classical anarchism by re-reading the classical tradition as essentially post-anarchistic. Some of the critiques of post-anarchism—especially that from Cohn & Wilbur 5 —are included into this period insofar as post-anarchism, for them, was always already anarchism. Whereas the first and second phases have included only explicitly anarchist literature under their rubric of worthwhile investigation, in the third period this no longer holds true. To be certain, the second period permitted the incorporation of post-structuralist literature into post-anarchist discussions (but always with a certain amount of reservation). This third period, the one that is to come—the one that is already here if only we would heed its call—will not take such care with attempts at identification or canonization. Indeed, post-anarchism is already here, like a seed beneath the snow, waiting to be discovered. Levi Bryant teaches us that the third period is already here: and yet where is it? NOTES 1) Todd May. The Political Philosophy of Post-Structuralist Anarchism . University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1997. 2. 2) Andrew Koch. “Post-structuralism and the Epistemological Basis of Anarchism” [1993] in Post-Anarchism: A Reader . Eds. Duane Rousselle & Sureyyya Evren. London: Pluto Press. 2011. pp. 23-40. 3) Bey, Hakim. “ Post-Anarchism Anarchy .” 1987. 4) I have attempted to do this in my paper on Bataille’s post-anarchism; see Duane Rousselle. “Georges Bataille’s Post-anarchism.” Journal of Political Ideologies . 17(3): in press. 5) Jesse Cohn & Shawn Wilbur. “ What’s Wrong with Post-anarchism? ” 2010. (shrink)

This paper is situated in the context of feminist poststructuralist debates around identity. In it, I argue that anti-essentialist accounts of identity, while they may displace, or at least call into question, the foundations of subjectivity, are no less likely to invoke a series of presuppositions with respect to the self than those who seek to maintain them in some form. In particular, these presuppositions often cohere around the materiality of the body. And yet, paradoxically, this accent on materiality (...) refers to a very particular kind of body - one that seems to have very little relation to the biological body. Using psychopharmacology as an example, I suggest that the Gilles Deleuze's ethology offers one way through which both to engage seriously with the 'biological' body while at the same time resisting either an essentialist or biological determinist position. (shrink)

Posthumanismus hat sich als neues Theorie-Paradigma etabliert. Wie alle gesellschaftlichen Diskurse, ist auch dieser eine Summe aus Machtkämpfen, Subjektpositionen, Identitäten und deshalb voller Konflikte. In diesem Diskurs, der vor allem zeitgenössische und somit technokulturelle Motive beinhaltet, aber natürlich auch eine lange Vorgeschichte hat, gibt es keine Einigung darüber, was das Posthumane eigentlich ist, d. h. ob es sich bei ihm um das Beste oder das Schlechteste handelt, das dem Menschen, seiner Humanität, der Menschheit und der humanistischen Tradition widerfahren könnte; noch (...) besteht Übereinstimmung darüber, ob Posthumanismus unvermeidlich, bereits Realität oder nur ein Trugbild ist; oder ob er politisch, kulturell, sozial progressiv oder im Gegenteil vielleicht sogar regressiv ist; ob er allein durch technologischen Wandel oder hauptsächlich konstruiert und somit ideologisch motiviert ist. Die Debatte zwischen Stefan Herbrechter und Karin Harrasser geht den Gründen für die Karriere posthumanistischer Motive und den damit zusammenhängenden Befürchtungen und Hoffnungen nach. Posthumanism has established itself as a new paradigm of theory. Like all social discourses, it is a sum of power struggles, subject positions, identities – and thus full of conflict. In this discourse, which includes mainly contemporary and hence techno cultural motifs, but which of course also has a long history, there is no agreement about what the posthuman actually is, that is if it is the best or the worst that could happen to man, to his humanity, to mankind and the humanistic tradition in general. Neither is there agreement as to whether posthumanism is inevitable, already a reality or just a mirage; or whether it is politically, culturally, socially progressive or to the contrary perhaps even regressive; whether it is solely produced by technological change or mainly constructed and thus ideologically motivated. The debate between Stefan Herbrechter and Karin Harrasser explores the reasons for the career of posthumanistic motives as well as related fears and hopes. (shrink)

In an attempt to go beyond persistent East-West colonialist/imperialist relations of dominance as part of globalization, emerging discourses relating to the concept of contemporaneity have sought to extend critical legitimacy to both an internationally dominant deconstructivist postcolonialism and to localized anti-imperialist assertions of national-cultural identity. Emerging discourses relating to the concept of contemporaneity can thus be understood to have entered into a problematic theoretical double-bind involving mutually resistant essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives on the critical significance of cultural identity. (...) In this essay I shall argue, with specific reference to the theorization of contemporary Chinese art, that one possible way beyond this problematic theoretical double-bind is to develop a polylogue, exploring in close analytical detail potential areas of remotivational interaction as well as resistance between international deconstructivist postcolonialist and localized essentialist anti-imperialist theoretical perspectives; a strategy akin to Jacques Derrida’s radical collage-text Glas (1974), which has the potential to open up differing discursive positions to one another while internally dividing and questioning their individual authority. (shrink)

Liberal democracy suffers from an internal contradiction stemming from its ideological roots and rending it from within. On the one hand its goal is to generate a system of laws and rules that maximize individual rights and liberties; on the other hand, some of its fundamental assumptions pertaining to the Subject restrict the political and social agent's existential experience to a limited threshold of speech and action. The central assumption of this article is that the main meeting point of the (...) critics of modernity, Apel and Habermas primarily, and the post-structuralists, Foucault and Deleuze, in regard to the Subject, rehabilitates liberal discourse and creates an opening for a political theory that maximizes the freedom of the individual as a structured, anti-essentialist Subject. I will show that the expansion of the concept of the self in the two streams sheds new light on the concepts of political control and liberty, and in this way extends the normative discussion of all aspects of the political agent's status in a modern democracy. (shrink)

By examining an exemplar sample of mental health nursing educational policies and related legislation, in this article, we trace the discursive production of madness as an “othered” identity category. We engage in a critical discourse analysis of mental health nursing education in Canada, drawing on provincial and federal policies and legislation as the main sources of data. Theoretically framed by critical posthumanism and mad studies, this article outlines how the mad subjectivity becomes decontextualized out of its identity‐based understanding and (...) recontextualized as an inferior category of “the human,” circulating within discourses of pedagogy, economics, law, and psychiatry. The article maps the intertextual nexus of the discourse of mental health nursing education, making visible the complex, the arbitrary, and the sometimes‐contradictory nature of the discipline's grappling with identity‐based mental health concepts. We close with several implications for nursing policy, education, and practice. (shrink)

The paper is an analytic retrospective of the author?s work during the preceding research period, involving the study of role, meaning and place of stereotypes in identity discourses. In order to explain the reasons for and ways of dealing with stereotypes, she reviews the evolution of her own research approach and the alternative approaches to the topic from the perspective of various scholarly disciplines. Seeking to avoid the trap of?interpreting stereotypes stereotypically?, the author chooses not to follow the usual method (...) whereby ethnic stereotypes are?deconstructed? as false and generalizing image of oneself and others, and exposed to social-psychological and political-anthropological critique. Instead, the author looks at stereotypes primarily in terms of their linguistic and social?semiotics? and their theoretical and practical usability. Stressing the necessity of relativizing the binary structure of discourse, the author argues that stereotypes, though indispensable as elements of the?economy? of language and thought, should be socially conceptualized and historicized in analysis. U ovom tekstu autorka daje pregled svog rada tokom proteklog projektnog perioda u kome je istrazivala ulogu, znacenje i mesto stereotipa u identitetskim diskursima. Da bi objasnila razloge i nacine svog bavljenja stereotipima, ona se osvrce kako na evoluciju sopstvenog istrazivackog postupka, tako i na alternativne pristupe temi iz perspektiva razlicitih naucnih disciplina. U nastojanju da izbegne zamku?stereotipnog tumacenja stereotipa?, autorka ne sledi uobicajeni postupak?dekonstrukcije? etnickih stereotipa, kao lane i uopstavajuce predstave o sebi i?drugom?, te njihove socijalno-psiholoske i politicko-antropoloske kritike, vec se prevashodno bavi dimenzijama jezicke i socijalne?semiotike? stereotipa i njihovom teorijskom i prakticnom upotrebljivoscu. Polazeci od neophodnosti stereotipa u?misaonoj ekonomiji?, autorka se u svom postupku zalaze za relativizaciju binarne strukture diskursa, kao i za socijalnu kontekstualizaciju i istorizaciju stereotipa u teorijskoj analizi. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as (...) "essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

This chapter examines the distinction among observers, participants, and agents from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. It first examines an exemplary discourse on the nonscientific theme of “beauty” using the evil stepmother in “Snow White” as an example. It discusses this theme from the perspective of interactive constructivism and interprets it as a problem between universalist and anti-universalist approaches. The chapter then demonstrates numerous connections between constructivism and Dewey's Pragmatic theory of inquiry. Dewey, for example, (...) had already distinguished spectators, agents, and participants, even though he did not articulate those distinctions in a systematic way. This chapter follows upon Dewey's insights, suggesting ways in which a constructivist theory of observation can enrich contemporary Pragmatist arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as (...) "essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

En el actual clima de acechantes cuestionamientos sobre la identidad regional, suelen tener recepción versiones cuando no ahistóricas o esencialistas, deterministas o simplistas que lo que hacen es reducir la noción arrinconándola en categorías que poco o nada aportan a la autocomprensión de nuestros pueblos. De modo que resulta pertinente volver sobre una mirada en que la identidad debe ser concebida como un fenómeno social complejo, conflictuado y relacional en constante reconstrucción. Nuestra América, en este sentido, sigue siendo un texto (...) fundamental porque no solo permite comprender la idea de nación moderna que propone el cubano, sino también el modo de construirla. Un proyecto sociocultural inconcluso y que lo será solo si acepta la diferencia como constructo base de nuestra heterogénea realidad. In the current climate of pressing questions about regional identity, there tends to be, if not ahistorical or essentialist versions, at least determinist or simplistic ones that only reduce the notion cornering it into categories that contribute little or nothing to the understanding of our peoples. Therefore, it is pertinent to turn our eyes toward a vision of identity that should be conceived as a complex, conflictive, and relational social phenomena in constant reconstruction. “Nuestra América”, in this sense, continues to be a fundamental text since it not only permits us to understand the idea of the modern nation proposed by the Cuban, but also the way in which it must be build. This is an inconclusive sociocultural project which will only be finished if difference is accepted as a basic building block of our heterogenous reality. (shrink)

The nature of mystical experience has been hotly debated. Essentialists divide into two camps: 1) immediate identity beyond any subject-object structure 2) the mystical object maintaining some distinctness at the point of contact. Paul Tillich’s mystical a priori has some affinities with the former, while William James’ model of religious experience coheres only with the latter. Opposing the essentialists are constructivists. After noting some ironies of the constructivist position, this article elaborates difficulties with 1) the traditional model of pure identity (...) with the divine by certain mystics, 2) the Tillichian universal mystical awareness, and 3) the Jamesian direct perceptual model. Finally, it proposes that the human body and brain mediate mystical experience, which consists of a distinctive sense of bodily harmony conjoined with openness to the potentialities of an integrated environment, involving distinctive neurological processes. (shrink)