Offers an outline for a new ethical practice - one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human.

A look at political ethics covers cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal and misanthropy, and is accompanied by a description of modern public opinion about ...

In a series of memorable exchanges, three eminent theorists engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics.

Introduction : low theory -- Animating revolt and revolting animation -- Dude, where's my phallus? forgetting, losing, looping -- The queer art of failure -- Shadow feminisms : queer negativity and radical passivity -- "The killer in me is the killer in you" : homosexuality and fascism -- Animating failure: ending, fleeing, surviving.

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers (...) such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy. (shrink)

Winner of the R. H. Gapper Book Prize 2011. Judith Still sets Derrida's work in a series of contexts including the socio-political history of France, especially in relation to Algeria, and his relationship to other writers, most importantly Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas - key thinkers of hospitality. Still also follows the thread of sexual difference in Derrida's writing in order to shed light on his exploration of the complex and delicate, strange yet familiar, political and ethical (...) dilemmas of how to be those impossible things, a good host and a good guest.Hospitality is critically important in Derrida's writings, and his insights in this have been influential across a range of disciplines from geography, politics and sociology to literary studies and philosophy. It functions as a way of both thinking about relations between individuals, and analysing the community or state's often inhospitable reception of outsiders, such as refugees or migrants. (shrink)

The author draws on the policy analysis literature to delineate the linkage between conceptualization of risk and the formulation and proposed solution of risk-related policy problems. Two concepts of risk are identified: a concept of risk as a physically given attribute of hazardous technologies and a concept of risk as a socially constructed attribute. The argument is advanced that the social construction of risk provides a firm, theoretical basis for the design of policy. The discussion links the perception, manage ment, (...) and communication of risk to the more fundamental issue of the nature and role of science and technology. (shrink)

Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of higher pitches (...) to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations. (shrink)

It has been claimed that a sense of us is presupposed for shared intentions to be possible. Searle introduced this notion together with the notion of the sense of the other. in joint action. It argues that the sense of the other is a necessary condition for a sense of us. Whereas thisarticle distinguishes between the “sense of the other” and the “sense of us” and elaborates on their role the sense of the other is immediate and automatic, the sense (...) of us can (but need not) arise between people and can (a) develop over time, (b) depend on the situation, and (c) involves several sufficient but not necessary processes. The article relies on research on core knowledge to better understand the sense of the other. It elaborates the sense of us using insights from cognitive science and social psychology. The article shows that the sense of the other and the sense of us can contribute to our understanding of the perception of possibilities for joint action and how individuals can come to experience actions and intentions as shared, even if the participants lack common knowledge. This leads to the conclusion that people are ordinarily socially oriented rather than individually. (shrink)

This study compares corporate social performance in terms of charitable contributions of minority-owned and nonminority-owned small businesses. In this sample, minority-owned small businesses are younger, have less full-time employees, and lower annual sales. Minority-owned small businesses donate more funds to religious organizations than nonminority-owned small businesses. When annual sales are accounted for, minority-owned businesses contribute more total dollars to all charitable organizations than nonminority-owned firms. Suggestions for future research in this area are delineated.

Recent media reports about new programmes for 'happiness lessons' in schools signal a welcome concern with children's well-being. However, as I shall argue, the presuppositions of the discourse in which many of these proposals are framed, and their orientation towards particular strands of positive psychology, involve ideas about human life that are, in an important sense, anti-educational.

I begin with a discussion of the value of privacy and what we lose without it. I then turn to the difficulties of preserving privacy for genetic information and other medical records in the face of advanced information technology. I suggest three alternative public policy approaches to the problem of protecting individual privacy and also preserving databases for genetic research:(1) governmental guidelines and centralized databases, (2) corporate self-regulation, and (3) my hybrid approach. None of these are unproblematic; I discuss strengths (...) and drawbacks of each, emphasizing the importance of protecting the privacy of sensitive medical and genetic information as well as letting information technology flourish to aid patient care, public health and scientific research. (shrink)

"The premise of the Jewish attitude toward illness is that living is sacred, that good health enables us to live a fully religious life, and that disease is an evil. Any effective therapy is permitted, even if it conflicts with Jewish law. To bring about healing is a responsibility not only of the person who is ill and of the professional caregivers, but also of the loved ones, and of the larger circle of family, friends, and community." "Illness and Health (...) in the Jewish Tradition is an anthology of traditional and modern Jewish writings that highlights these basic principles."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Further Reflections on Conversations of Our TimeJudith Butler (bio)The exchange that Ernesto Laclau and I conducted through e-mail last year at this time begins a conversation that I expect will continue. And I suppose I would like to use this “supplementary” reflection to think about what makes such a conversation possible, and what possibilities might emerge from such a conversation.First of all, I think that I was drawn to (...) the work of Laclau and Mouffe when I began to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and realized that I had found a set of Marxist thinkers for whom discourse was not merely a representation of preexisting social and historical realities, but was also constitutive of the field of the social and of history. The second moment came when I realized that central to the notion of articulation, appropriated from Gramsci, was the notion of rearticulation. As a temporally dynamic and relatively unpredictable play of forces, hegemony had been cast by both Laclau and Mouffe as an alternative to forms of static structuralism that tend to construe contemporary social forms as timeless totalities. I read in Laclau and Mouffe the political transcription of Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play”: a structure gains its status as a structure, its structurality, only through its repeated reinstatement. The dependency of that structure on its reinstatement means that the very possibility of structure depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance, that for structure, and social structure as a result, to become possible, there must first be a contingent repetition at its basis. Moreover, for some social formation to appear as structured is for it to have covered over in some way the contingency of its own installation.The theoretical rearticulation of structure as hegemony marked the work of Laclau and Mouffe as consequentially poststructuralist and offered perhaps the most important link between politics and poststructuralism in recent years (along with the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.It is, of course, impossible in this context to reconstruct the particular way in which Derrida’s work and Foucault’s work converge in the reconceptualization of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe have offered. One of the points, however, that became most salient for me is the reintroduction of temporality and, indeed, of futurity into the thinking of social formations. Among many critical social theorists, the tendency has been to underscore how the systemic character of capital tends to incorporate any instance of opposition in the service of capital’s own self-augmentation. I would clearly agree that the incorporative and domesticating possibilities of capital are immense. But I would also [End Page 13] argue that any theory that fails to think the possibilities of transformation from within that “systemic” formation is itself complicit with the idea of the “eternal” character of capital that capital so readily produces. Hegemony also marks a limit to the totalizing terms within which social formations are to be thought. For what hegemony attends to are the moments of breakage, of rearticulation, convergence, and resistance that are not immediately coopted by social formations in their past and present forms. That no social formation can endure without becoming reinstated, and that every reinstatement puts the “structure” in question at risk, suggests that the possibility of its own undoing is at once the condition of possibility of structure itself.Before I knew the work of Laclau and Mouffe very well, I came close to this kind of insight in my work on gender. 1 There I argued that gender is not an inner core or static essence, but a reiterated enactment of... (shrink)

This article considers the contribution that consultancy research might make to resolving communication problems that women have identified in their leadership practices. Within the intersecting fields of gender and language and workplace discourse, consultancy research – that is, practitioner-commissioned research to resolve work-related, communication problems – is still uncommon. This article presents a study of Monika, a senior leader in an engineering company, who commissioned me to find out why she was experiencing communication problems with her teams. By using interactional (...) sociolinguistic analysis, I was able to show Monika how her authority was being resisted on gendered, linguistic grounds. In making the case for more consultancy research, I discuss how we might use insights from discourse analysis to offer guidance to practitioners seeking our help. (shrink)

Having learned my just war theory at Michael Walzer’s figurative knee, for many years I accepted the independence of jus in bello from jus ad bellum unthinkingly. Just war theory consists of two separate parts, one concerning the legitimate grounds for going to war and the other the rules of engagement once war had begun. This two-part view, the “independence thesis,” went hand in hand with the “symmetry thesis,” or “the moral equality of soldiers”: soldiers whose cause is unjust have (...) the same rights to fight and to kill as those whose cause is just. But troubling questions sometimes crowded in. Doesn’t the justice of a country’s cause affect what actions it can legitimately take? Can’t victims of aggression legitimately do things aggressors cannot? Most fundamentally, “how can there be permissibly violent means of pursuing impermissible ends?”[1] Walzer casts glances at these problems when he proposes the idea of a “sliding scale,” in which the rules of war yield “slowly to the moral urgency of the cause: the rights of the righteous are enhanced, and those of their enemies devalued.”[2] He rejects the sliding scale in favor of the weaker qualification, “supreme emergency,” in which the rules of war are overridden “only in the face of an imminent catastrophe.”. (shrink)

In everyday contexts we do numerous things together. Philosophers of collective intentionality have wondered how we can distinguish parallel cases from cases where we act together. Often their theories argue in favor of one characteristic, feature, or function, that differentiates the two. This feature then distinguishes parallel actions from joint action. The approach in this book is different. Three claims are developed: (1) There are several functions that help human agents coordinate and act together. (2) This entails that joint action (...) should be understood through these different, interrelated, types of coordination. (3) A multidimensional conceptual space, with three levels of control and coordination, will allow us to connect these different forms of coordination and their interdependencies. This allows us to understand the jointness of an action in a more differentiated and encompassing way. This approach has ramifications for several distinctions that are typically understood to be binary, including those between action and mere bodily movement, joint action and parallel action, and action together and not together. (shrink)

Using selections from writers like Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Karen Joy Fowler, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree jr., and many others, this collection shows how the imagined worlds of science fiction create hold experiments for testing feminist hypotheses and for interpreting philosophical questions about humanity, gender, equality and more. Four main themes: Part 1, 'Human nature and reality', concentrates on whether there is an intrinsic difference between males and females. Part 2, 'Dystopias: the worst of all (...) possible worlds', portrays misogynistic societies uncomfortably familiar to the early 21st-century reader. Part 3, 'Separatist utopias: worlds of difference', assembles stories that scrutinize both the virtues and vices of separatism. In Part 4, 'Androgynous utopias: worlds of equality', the authors create worlds that anticipate the consequences, good and bad, of perfect sexual equality in education, intelligence, capability, and reproduction. (shrink)