In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breathing with Denise LevertovNoëlle Batt (bio)The BreathingAn absolutepatience.Trees standup to their knees infog. The fogslowly flowsuphill.Whitecobwebs, the grassleaning where deerhave looked for apples.The woodsfrom brook to wherethe top of the hill looksover the fog, send upnot one bird.So absolute, it isno other thanhappiness itself, a breathingtoo quiet to hear.–Denise LevertovI propose to share this poem, "The Breathing," by Denise Levertov, with the readers of SubStance as a moment (...) of calm, an antidote to violence and pain, and a gesture of hope in the future relations between humans and the many creatures of the vegetal and animal world.What is remarkable in this imaginary landscape sketched by Levertov is the peacefulness of the scene which is mostly due to the absence of movement, the absence of action performed in praesentia between the first and the last word of the poem. And since we know that poets are marvelous craftsmen and craftswomen of language, we shall look for the cause to this effect in the poetic language and shall find it in the subtly modulated use (or non-use) of verbs in the poem, a different kind of use in each sentence, yet, converging to the same effect. And since verbs are also the main markers of time in language, the poem appears in the literal sense, as a verbal, a literary "still life." [End Page 160]The first sentence strikes a strong blow since the verb is quite simply omitted in it. The sentence is a nominal clause: "An absolute/ patience."In the second sentence, "Trees stand/ up to their knees in/ fog," we find a static verb "to stand" and the personification of the trees clearly establishes that they might have moved, but they have not; they stand wrapped in the fog up to "their knees," i.e., between a quarter and a fifth of their trunks.In the third sentence, something moves: "The fog/ slowly flows/ uphill." But there is something contradictory in the fact of flowing up. Usually, rivers or brooks flow down. Flowing up, then, implies a difficulty to flow and consequently a slowing down of the rhythm of the flow which is here expressed by the adverb "slowly"; the adverb seems here all the more congenial to the flowing in that the two words are linked by a strong paronomastic effect: slowly flows, set in the two /s/, one at the beginning of slowly, the other at the end of flows: slowly flows.The fourth sentence is characterized by still another pattern: "White/ cobwebs. The grass/leaning where deer/have looked for apples." We now face the result of two past actions, actions that were performed before the scene that the poem invites us to contemplate was composed. In effect, the "white cobwebs" have been woven by the spiders at a previous moment, and they even had time to be colored in white by the drops of the humid fog. And "the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples" tells us that deer were here earlier, looking for food, but they no longer are, and what signals their former presence is a tenuous detail: the inclination of the grass, bent by their walking on it and searching through it, remaining bent for a little while after their passage. And to achieve her verbal strategy, Levertov even suppresses the auxiliary which might have been here. We read "the grass leaning" with a lonely present participle, and not "the grass is leaning."Another interesting grammatical event happens in the fifth sentence: "The woods/ from brook to where/ the top of the hill looks/ over the fog, send up/ not one bird." The first verb is a verb of perception ("to look") and not a verb of action. But the second verb is a verb of action ("to send up"), which is used in a quite unusual variety of the verbal negative form since instead of having the negative adverb attached to the verb (don't send up), we have an affirmative use of the verb ("send... (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to study the use of diagrams and their associated gestures in three diferent reals : mathematics and physics, painting and literature. An example will be ofered for each realm, borrowed from a specialist’s study. The reference book for mathematics and physics will be Gilles Châtelet’s book Les Enjeux du mobile. And the detailed diagrams will be Cauchy and Poisson's and Oresme's. The reference books for painting will be: Francis Bacon. Une logique de la sensation, (...) which is Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the diagram based on the painter Francis Bacon’s declarations to David Sylvester. As for Literature, after considering two statements by Paul Valéry on the conditions of literary creation, I shall defend my own thesis on the diagrammatic dimension of the literary text. The specifc gestures associated in each case to the use of diagrams will be analysed and compared. (shrink)

Les textes présentés dans cet ouvrage ont pour but d’étudier le rôle des diagrammes dans les relations entre écriture et composition musicale. Partant de l’idée que ces relations se rapportent, peu ou prou, à l’ordre d’une structure logique et se meuvent dans la sphère des schématismes de l’entendement, constatant que la logique formelle échoue à en rendre compte, nous avons proposé de nous livrer à un examen approfondi d’une interprétation diagrammatique. Pour cela, nous avons rassemblé un ensemble de personnalités aux (...) profils divers (musicologues, philosophes et compositeurs). De cette diversité est né un ouvrage fort original où le diagramme, lui-même, en tant qu’il est sa propre écriture, tisse, dans sa matière même, une carte d’intensité des rapports de forces où s’expriment les émotions les plus subtiles, convoquant le signe de la complexité des rapports entre le diagramme, l’œuvre et le sensible. Textes de : Moreno Andreatta, Noëlle Batt, José Luis Besada, Sarah Brault, Marc Chemillier, Jean-Marc Chouvel, Pascal Decroupet, Valeria Giardino, Franck Jedrzejewski, Vinícius Jonas de Aguiar, Hye Young Kim, Carlos Lobo, Justyna Morawska, Álvaro Oviedo, Makis Solomos, Antonia Soulez et Horacio Vaggione. (shrink)

What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss.

Graham, Noelle Comparisons are drawn between media reporting of eating disorders and other.forms of self-harm. Proper understanding of these illnesses can protect sufferers from further harm caused by inaccurate and insensitive reporting.

One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Julia Kristeva has been driving forward the fields of literary and cultural studies since the 1960s. This volume is an accessible, introductory guide to the main themes of Kristeva's work, including her ideas on: *semiotics and symbolism *abjection *melancholia *feminism *revolt. McAfee provides clear explanations of the more difficult aspects of Kristeva's theories, helpfully placing her ideas in the relevant theoretical context, be it literary theory, psychoanalysis, linguistics, gender studies or (...) philosophy, and demonstrates the impact of her critical interventions in these areas. Julia Kristeva is the essential guide for readers who are approaching the work of this challenging thinker for the first time, and provides the ideal opportunity for those with more knowledge to re-familiarise themselves with Kristeva's key terms. (shrink)

The philosophical life can be a nomadic life, both in thought and practice. In the engaging and insightful work of the Mexican-Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Pereda, the more important of these is nomadic thought—a mode of thinking that moves and explores, that is not stationary or static, that is not stubbornly hidebound. This is a kind of nomadism that characterizes healthy or epistemically virtuous thinking in general, and that might indeed be indispensable to it. But a nomadism in practice—of migration, or (...) exile, or cross-border transplantation—is certainly also central to Pereda’s philosophical outlook. "Mexico Unveiled" brings together for an English-speaking audience some of Pereda’s most recent reflections on the philosophical significance of these two different types of nomadism, with a special emphasis on nomadic thinking. That idea is the through-line for Pereda’s thinking here. But the book also offers an idiosyncratic synthesis of 20th-century Mexican philosophy that considers the persistent influence of European colonialism on Mexican intellectual life, the politics of identity and inclusion, and the changing ideas of what it means to be Mexican. (shrink)

Followership and leadership provide two distinct but complementary sets of behaviors that jointly contribute to positive team dynamics. Yet, followership is rarely measured in shared leadership research. Using a prospective design with a sample of leaderless project teams, we examined the interdependence of leadership and followership and how these leader-follower dynamics relate to relationship conflict at the dyadic and team level. Supporting the reciprocity of leader-follower dynamics, social relations analyses revealed that uniquely rating a teammate higher on effective leadership was (...) associated with being rated higher by that same person on effective followership. Additionally, team members with a reputation as an effective leader also tended to be viewed as an effective follower. As expected, team levels of leadership were tightly linked to team levels of followership. Connecting these results to relationship conflict at the dyadic level, we found that uniquely rating someone as an effective follower or an effective leader would decrease the likelihood of experiencing interpersonal conflict with that person and that having a reputation for effective followership or effective leadership relates negatively to being viewed as a conflict hub within the team. Finally, effective followership was significantly negatively related to team levels of conflict, but we did not find a significant relation between effective leadership and relationship conflict at the team level. Our results highlight that followership is not only a necessary ingredient for high levels of shared leadership to exist within a team, but it underpins more functional team interactions. (shrink)

Entosis, a form of cell cannibalism, is a newly discovered pathogenic mechanism leading to the development of small brains, termed microcephaly, in which P53 activation was found to play a major role. Microcephaly with entosis, found in Pals1 mutant mice, displays P53 activation that promotes entosis and apoptotic cell death. This previously unappreciated pathogenic mechanism represents a novel cellular dynamic in dividing cortical progenitors which is responsible for cell loss. To date, various recent models of microcephaly have bolstered the importance (...) of P53 activation in cell death leading to microcephaly. P53 activation caused by mitotic delay or DNA damage manifests apoptotic cell death which can be suppressed by P53 removal in these animal models. Such genetic studies attest P53 activation as quality control meant to eliminate genomically unfit cells with minimal involvement in the actual function of microcephaly associated genes. In this review, we summarize the known role of P53 activation in a variety of microcephaly models and introduce a novel mechanism wherein entotic cell cannibalism in neural progenitors is triggered by P53 activation. (shrink)

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether through trauma (...) or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

I examine experiences of married couples to better understand whether economic shifts that push couples into gender-atypical work/family arrangements influence gender inequality. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 with stay-at-home husbands and their wives in 21 married-couple families with children. I find that the decision to have a father stay home is heavily influenced by economic conditions, suggesting that men’s increased job instability and shifts in the relative employment conditions of husbands and wives push some men into at-home (...) fatherhood. However, this shift in family arrangements can promote change toward greater gender equality even in couples that initially hold entrenched, gendered beliefs. The data indicate that at-home fathers come to value their increased involvement in children’s care in ways that reduce gender differences in parenting and that have the potential to translate into institutional change, particularly when they reenter the labor force. Furthermore, at-home father arrangements generally appear to provide increased support for women’s employment and promote changes in women’s work behavior that may reduce inequities that stem from traditionally gendered divisions in work/family responsibilities. (shrink)

An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger's philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the (...) very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj i ek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics "after" God. (shrink)

Due to the impact of biomedical technologies on human wellbeing, biomedical engineering presents discipline-specific ethical issues that can have global, economic, environmental, and societal consequences. Because ethics instruction is a component of accredited undergraduate engineering programs in the US, we developed an ethics assignment that provided biomedical engineering students with a framework for ethical decision-making and challenged them to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices. Thematic analysis performed on student reflections (n = 73) addressed two research (...) questions: (i) what considerations do biomedical engineering undergraduates describe when asked to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices; and (ii) how do students describe their participation in bioethical discussions? Students described design, economic factors, and empathy most frequently as considerations. Further, students reported confidence in their ability to engage in ethical discussion upon assignment completion. Overall, our analysis builds understanding of student attitudes and engagement to help inform future ethics curriculum development. (shrink)

Do poststructuralist accounts of the self undermine the prospects for effective democratic politics? In addressing this question, Nolle McAfee brings together the theories of Jrgen Habermas and Julia Kristeva, two major figures whose work is seldom juxtaposed. She examines their respective notions of subjectivity and politics and their implicit definitions of citizenship: the extent to which someone is able to deliberate and act in community with others.. Habermas, Kristeva, and Citizenship begins by tracing the rise of modern and poststructural views (...) of subjectivity, and then critiques these views as they are represented in the writings of Habermas and Kristeva. McAfee argues that Habermas's theory of subjectivity is overly optimistic about the possibility for individuals to know their own interests and act autonomously. Kristeva's poststructuralism has its own problems: it seems to limit political agency, since it considers the subject to be split and at odds with itself. Nevertheless, this book shows how Kristevan conceptions of the self can contribute to Habermas's hope for a more democratic, deliberative politics. Combining an insight from poststructural theory--that identity is constituted by a web of relationships--with the theory of deliberative democracy, McAfee argues that we need not be the kinds of individuals supposed by the modern liberal tradition to be effective political agents. The more we recognize our indebtedness to and relationship with others in our midst, the more likely we are to be capable members of political communities. (shrink)

This article discusses which barriers hamper access to, and participation in, cultural life for members of vulnerable groups, in particular persons belonging to old and new minorities and persons with disabilities in the context of digitization. It then examines what role public authorities can play in addressing and dismantling these barriers. The article adopts a bottom-up approach, in that it is based on a qualitative study, which gives voice to vulnerable groups. The qualitative research involved interviews with different organisations representing, (...) or working with, vulnerable groups in 12 European Union Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta and Spain). In that regard, the article approaches vulnerability from a distinct conceptual standpoint, identifying vulnerability as a condition caused by structural barriers. On the whole, the article shows that, while digitization of cultural content, goods and services, offers increased opportunities for culture to be democratised and for its consumption by wider and more varied audiences to be enhanced, it also engenders structural barriers and creates additional challenges. Furthermore, while digitisation has ensured more diverse representation in cultural content, vulnerable groups still face stereotypical and negative portrayals within mainstream cultural content. The thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews also captures different dimensions of access to digital cultural and supports the identification of effective policy measures to bridge the ‘digital divide’ and assist in the fulfilment of cultural rights of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

This article considers the ways in which Julia Kristeva's work aligns with process philosophy, resisting the essentialism of substance philosophy.

Depuis la fin des années 70, l’érosion croissante des droits sociaux, résultat des restructurations successives des marchés du travail nationaux encouragées au niveau de l’Union européenne, ainsi que l’émergence consécutive d’une société de compétition, ont mené à l’anomie sociale tout en ouvrant la porte à un nouvel ordre normatif disciplinaire. Ce nouvel ordre forme et refaçonne l’identité individuelle et collective en enfermant les gens dans des modèles de relations favorisant la peur, l’indifférence, l’intolérance envers l’autrui, ou encore le sentiment de (...) honte et la perte de l’estime de soi. Dans les cas les plus extrêmes, cela mène à l’auto-annihilation. (shrink)

This article considers the speech given by then Senator Barack Obama on race in America, on the collective trauma he is pointing to and the need for working through and what that means in psychoanalytic and pragmatic terms. Though Obama may have only tangentially been alluding to a Freudian notion of working through and probably was not thinking of John Dewey's work, the insights of that speech can be deepened by drawing on both psychoanalytic theory and American pragmatism's attention to (...) transactions, habits, and environing conditions. (shrink)

Who would have thought twenty-five years ago that the term “bioethics,” a neologism coined by an American biologist, would have met with such success, becoming one of the cornerstones of philosophical and juridical reflection at the end of the twentieth century? For it was in 1970 that the biologist and oncologist Van Rensalear Potter published his book, Bioethics, Science of Survival.

In response to a mandate conferred on the International Bioethics Committee (IBC) of UNESCO in November 1993, the IBC has drafted a "universal declaration on the human genome and human rights," which will be considered by the General Conference of UNESCO in November 1997. This article discusses the development of the document and provides the text of the "revised preliminary draft" of the declaration.

On 10 December 2003, a German civil court sitting in Bonn denied the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian...

The author, President of the Corsican antiracist collective Avà Basta, presents the specific forms taken by immigration and by its integration in a Corsican society deeply marked by its insularity and its unique history. She describes an immigrant population mostly of Moroccan origins, and analyses the role played by the identitary-nationalist Corsican reference in the racist discourse as well as in the anti-immigrant violence of the last months. She stresses the necessity, for Avà Basta, beyond its struggle against injustice and (...) discrimination on a universal basis, to demand that the nationalist movement position itself in favor of a definition of the Corsican nation based on a « community of fate s, ruling out any ethnicist temptation. (shrink)

Distinguishing explicit from implicit knowledge on the basis of the active representation of certain propositional attitudes fails to provide an explanation for dissociations in learning performance under implicit and explicit conditions. This suggests an account of implicit and explicit knowledge grounded in the presence of multiple learning mechanisms, and multiple brain systems more generally. A rough outline of a connectionist account of this kind is provided.

The dynamical hypothesis is strong in that, for it to be true, every cognitive phenomenon must be best modeled by a dynamical system. Depending on how it is interpreted, however, the hypothesis may be seen as probably false or even unfalsifiable. Strengthening the hypothesis to require unification, or at least coherence, across models in different cognitive domains alleviates this problem.

Many philosophers working on virtue theory have resisted the idea that the virtues are practical skills, apparently following Aristotle’s resistance to that idea. Bucking the trend, Matt Stichter defends a strong version of this idea in The Skillfulness of Virtue by marshaling a wide range of conceptual and empirical arguments to argue that the moral virtues are robust skills involving the cognitive-conative unification of Aristotelian phronêsis (‘practical intelligence’). Here I argue that Aristotle overlooks a more delimited kind of practical intelligence, (...) strongly analogous to his own account of phronêsis, that unifies complex forms of expertise such as medicine or even high-level sports. Insofar as the skill model of virtue is compelling, it must draw on a robust conception of practical expertise (technê) like the one developed here rather than the ordinary, anemic conception of practical skills. (shrink)

Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought | Western imperialism has received many different types of moral-political justifications, but one of the most historically influential justifications appeals to an allegedly universal form of human nature. In the early modern period this traditional conception of human nature—based on a Western archetype, e.g. Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German—opens up a logical space for considering the inhabitants of previously unknown lands as having a ‘less-than-human’ nature. This appeal (...) to human nature originally found its inspiration in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose ethical thought pervaded the work of European philosophers at the outset of the early modern period and the modern age of empire. Indeed some Spanish writers—most famously, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (b. 1494)—explicitly appealed to Aristotle’s moral-political philosophy in order to justify the conquest of the Americas in the early sixteenth century, for instance to justify war against the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. At the time of European arrival, the Aztec civilization was easily the greatest in Mesoamerica—and yet the Europeans generally considered the Aztec people to be ‘barbaric,’ i.e. less-than-fully-human. (shrink)

For the past three decades, notebooks and note?taking practices have elicited growing interest in various fields of research: anthropology, media and literature studies, history of the book, history of science. In this renewal, however, scientific travelers? notes have not received all the attention they deserve. To be sure, historians of discovery and exploration are used to considering travel diaries and field notes as a principal resource, on the basis of which they can assess a traveler?s accomplishment or document his itinerary. (...) From a different perspective, field journals offer rich material to literary scholars, critics, and specialists of travel writing. Notebooks of well?known travelers like Bougainville or Humboldt are thus scrutinized in their poetic and aesthetic dimensions, from the perspective of the genesis of travel writing. Still, few studies have taken up the task, a rather mundane and down?to?earth endeavor, to look at travel notebooks for their own sake, as material objects, made of paper and cardboard, and meant to store observational data and to insure their availability through time and space. The paper sets out to do just that: to take a set of manuscript notebooks written by eighteenth? and early nineteenth?century French, German, and Swiss naturalist travelers and scientists on the move together with the techniques at work in their writing, as the focus of a historical investigation. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between public philosophy and deliberative democracy, both at a broad philosophical level and more granularly at the forms of deliberative practice that political theorists and philosophers have embraced and tried to foster. Deliberative democracy theory promises to create a culture of robust public inquiry, scrutiny, and judgment to which the more formal sectors of the public sphere, namely legislatures, must respond. Deliberators consider various points of view, work through costs and consequences, work through what must (...) be given up, and develop a public will on which public policies can rest. Beyond the classroom, some philosophers and social theorists have applied the cognitivist aspect of critical thinking to assess the value of more public deliberations, arguing that the outcomes of deliberation are valuable to the extent that they track the truth. (shrink)

This article studies the chronic and acute anomic social impacts of the development of market societies in Europe over the past few decades. Focusing on the firm but linking micro and macro levels, it argues that the passage from the welfare state to disembedded markets and neoliberal governance has generated individual and collective anomie by depriving social actors of agency and voice while caging them in the disciplinary constraints of an ideal competition society. Promoted by public and private governors animated (...) by visions of managerial omnipotence, this reconfiguration has hollowed out the cluster of rights that was the basis of democratic and social citizenship in Europe. The article discusses the manifestations of anomie, stressing the violence flowing from the radical uncertainty to which atomized employees and more broadly citizens are facing in the reification of collective goals, which have been reduced to participation in market society. Drawing on the classical literature (Durkheim, Parsons, Merton) but expanding upon it, the article examines exit solutions, at the individual and collective levels, involving violence against the self (suicide) and others (mobbing, xenophobia, fascism), and concludes that Europe seems to be heading towards a protracted period of danger-laden chronic and acute anomie. (shrink)

Currently, the number of individuals affected by Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly increasing, expected to reach 14 million in the United States within 30 years. In spite of this impending crisis, less than 50 percent of primary care physicians disclose the diagnosis of dementia to their patients. This failure negatively impacts not only patients but also caregivers, whom dementia patients require to help them meet their needs and who often serve as important decision makers, either as surrogates or as designated healthcare (...) agents for the patient. If caregivers are not informed about and prepared to deal with the challenges they face, their health, both emotional and physical, is put at risk. We will argue that both patient and caregiver have the right to be informed of the diagnosis, as their interests are intertwined, especially as the disease progresses and the caregiver becomes the primary advocate for the patient. The caregiver of an individual with dementia therefore becomes intimately connected to the patient’s autonomy in a way few caregivers of other diseases do. In this article, we will show that a timely and thorough disclosure of the diagnosis is morally obligated by the core principles of medical ethics. As the population ages, primary care physicians must see themselves in a triadic relationship with both the dementia patient and caregiver, recognizing that the interests of both are deeply interdependent. (shrink)

The following article outlines spiritual formation as it occurs at His Mansion Ministries, a communal ministry centered on Jesus Christ that focuses on helping men and women struggling with life-controlling behaviors and attitudes. Spiritual formation is argued to be a beautiful movement from self to other, a movement that is rooted in a conversion of the self to God. This movement is displayed in the community of His Mansion and the relationships therein. This spiritual movement is also seen in the (...) work and learning that is accomplished at His Mansion. The experience of relationships, work, and learning in the world is typically oriented around the self. At His Mansion Ministries, we believe that spiritual formation happens as a person, in submission to God and his love, moving from being oriented around the self to being aware of and acting for the good of others. (shrink)

I address the question of whether certain poststructuralist theories of subjectivity can contribute to Habermas's project of deliberative democracy--whether effective political agency requires that we be the kinds of individuals supposed by the modern liberal tradition or whether effective citizenship is possible under a poststructuralist theory of the subject as an "open system." I find that poststructuralist subjectivities can be effective political agents. ;In part one, I introduce two sometimes warring theories of subjectivity. One is the theory of Jurgen Habermas. (...) I argue that Habermas's theory leads to a theory of subjectivity being transparent to itself, independently spontaneous, fixed, and individualistic. The other is the theory of Julia Kristeva, which holds that the subject is a tenuous effect of its relations with the others in its midst and its own internal otherness. In part two I show how their theories of subjectivity inform their views of citizenship and politics. As I argue, each orientation has its problems. Habermas mistakenly argues that the subject can act discretely and autonomously; conversely, Kristeva's view seems to foreclose the possibility of agency, since it considers the subject as fragmented, split, and at odds with itself. Where Habermas is overly optimistic about the possibility for individuals to know their own interests and act autonomously, Kristeva's view could be construed negatively: If subjectivity is dynamic and "in process," could anyone act as an agent in the public sphere? ;In part three I answer this question affirmatively by developing an alternative model of subjectivity and citizenship, namely that of subjectivities indebted to others and deeply interrelated, from the deepest ontological level up to the level of political community. Building on this, I develop a theory of political knowledge, choice and action that fits into current work in deliberative democracy. I conclude that the more we recognize our indebtedness and relationship with the others in our midst, the more likely we are to have effective political agency, practice, and communities. (shrink)

This interesting and provocative work develops a new theological approach to language in the light of contemporary critical theory.