The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the (...) home. (shrink)

"... Fraser and Bartky have brought the encounter between U.S. and French feminism to a new level of seriousness." —Ethics In the last decade, elements of French feminist discourse have permeated and transformed the larger feminist culture in the United States. This volume is the first sustained attempt to revalue French feminism and answer the question: What has been gained and what has been lost as a result of this intercultural encounter? Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir open the book; essays (...) by French feminists Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray follow; the North American contributors are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Diana J. Fuss, Nancy J. Holland, Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Dorothy Leland, Diana T. Meyers, Andrea Nye, and Margaret A. Simons. (shrink)

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly (...) to create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore and expand Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the body as a mass as he drafted it in his “On the Soul” lecture. He conceptualizes the soul as the reflection of the fact that we have a body, thus the conception of the body as a mass may offer possibilities to think the body outside or prior to this reflection. In the article, I expand on three types of bodies. The first of these possibilities is an (...) abstracted body Nancy ascribed to St. Augustine, a body which has been criticized by feminist scholars like Judith Butler. The second one is a hypothetical pre-body proposed by the object-oriented philosopher Graham Harman that may have existed before the actual body emerges. The last one is the disintegrated rotting body in two different contexts: European baroque imagery and asubha kammaṭṭhāna, a Thai meditational practice. All three types of bodies-as-a-mass are legitimate conceptualizations of what Nancy indicates. However, the mass quality is the very nonconceptuality, which is therefore the ultimate outcome that I had to reach. (shrink)

La performatividad es un concepto relativamente reciente. J. L. Austin lo introdujo en la filosofía del lenguaje en la década de los cincuenta para designar aquellas expresiones que, en las circunstancias apropiadas, hacen justo aquello que dicen que hacen (como cuando alguien exclama «te lo prometo»). Desde entonces ha sido sometido a intensos procesos de discusión, crítica y resignificación que lo han conducido a terrenos de reflexión teórica, filosófica y política progresivamente alejados de su contexto originario. Este libro explora, entre (...) todos los trayectos posibles en el interior de estos debates, el modo en que la preocupación de Austin por comprender cómo hacemos cosas con palabras llegó a derivar en lo que Judith Butler, como feminista, como filósofa y como teórica queer, hace con la performatividad. Con este fin se atiende, en primer lugar, a un contexto genealógico en el que confluyen trabajos y discusiones explícitas sobre la performatividad lingüística (como los de Jacques Derrida, Jonathan Culler o Shoshana Felman) junto a la obra de otros autores que, si bien no la tratan explícitamente, ha-cen posible su particular recepción por parte de Butler, como Michel Foucault. En segundo lugar, se trata de entender la reformulación de la performatividad en el ámbito de las identidades sexuales y genéricas, con la que Butler desplaza género y sexo del conjunto de las cosas que somos al orden de las cosas que hacemos. Las relaciones entre cuerpo y lenguaje, materia y textualidad, sexo y género sufren así una transformación con efectos de largo alcance sobre la filosofía, los estudios de género y las políticas identitarias. El intercambio de críticas entre Butler y autores como Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser o Pierre Bourdieu contribuye a entender parte de esos efectos, y también a profundizar en algunas de las prioridades políticas de nuestra autora: la resistencia a los efectos excluyentes de la normatividad genérica y, en particular, del sistema «dos sexos, dos géneros», en dirección a una versión más abierta, inclusiva y proliferante de la identidad. (shrink)

Nancy Fraser has elaborated a framework for analyzing different forms of oppression using the categories of redistribution and recognition. This framework has come under criticism from Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, despite the fact that all three theorists similarly insist that justice is not reducible solely to economic justice and that struggles against ‘cultural’ forms of oppression are equally important. Drawing on the debate between these theorists, in this article I examine the ways in which their respective (...) theoretical frameworks are potentially problematic or do not go far enough in theorizing the complex interconnections among economics, politics and culture. For example, Fraser’s binary economy/culture and Young’s distinction between culture and structure are overly broad and potentially misleading. Butler and Fraser also appear to adopt undertheorized and economistic conceptualizations of ‘the economy’ and capitalism. In the course of my critique, I propose a somewhat different approach to analyzing the causes of various forms of oppression and the relation between different emancipatory struggles. Among other things, I argue that social relationships need to be disaggregated further, into more than just two categories, and that the economic and the cultural (as well as the political) should be analyzed as always complexly overdetermining each other. (shrink)

Contemporary feminist theory is at an impasse: the project of reformulating concepts of self and social identity is thwarted by an association between identity and oppression and victimhood. In Sacrificial Logics, Allison Weir proposes a way out of this impasse through a concept of identity which depends on accepting difference. Weir argues that the equation of identity with repression and domination links "relational" feminists like Nancy Chodorow, who equate self-identity with the repression of connection to others, and poststructuralist feminists (...) like Judith Butler, who view any identity as a repression of nonidentity and difference. Through readings of Chodorow, Butler, Jessica Benjamin, Luce Irigaray, Jacqueline Rose and Julia Kristeva, Weir analyzes the relation of theories of self-identity to theories of women's identity, social identity, the identity of meaning in language and feminist solidarity. Drawing particularly on the work of Julia Kristeva, she argues for a reformulation of self-identity as a capacity to participate in a social world, and sketches a model of a self-identity which depends on a capacity to accept nonidentity, difference and connections to others. (shrink)

Recently, Judith Butler refused to accept an award for civil courage at the Berlin Christopher Street Day, because she felt the event had become too commercial, and the event's organization had failed to distance itself from certain discriminatory statements. This, as well as many of her works, suggests that more than any other contemporary feminist author, Butler is aware of the risk of implication in exclusionary politics; a risk she might therefore successfully avoid. However, in this essay I (...) argue that to the extent her theory of performativity has become a hegemonic framework within the field of gender studies, it leads to the foreclosure of certain possible gendered identities. Using Nancy's notion of finite thinking, I argue that a different approach to universality may lead to a less exclusionary way of conceptualizing gender. (shrink)

Inattentional blindness is described as the failure to perceive a supra-threshold stimulus when attention is directed away from that stimulus. Based on performance on an explicit recognition memory test and concurrent functional imaging data Rees, Russell, Frith, and Driver [Rees, G., Russell, C., Frith, C. D., & Driver, J. . Inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science, 286, 2504–2507] reported inattentional blindness for word stimuli that were fixated but ignored. The present study examined both explicit and (...) implicit memory for fixated but ignored words using a selective-attention task in which overlapping picture/word stimuli were presented at fixation. No explicit awareness of the unattended words was apparent on a recognition memory test. Analysis of an implicit memory task, however, indicated that unattended words were perceived at a perceptual level. Thus, the selective-attention task did not result in perfect filtering as suggested by Rees et al. While there was no evidence of conscious perception, subjects were not blind to the implicit perceptual properties of fixated but ignored words. (shrink)

"This book is a succinct, pedagogically designed introduction. As classroom text, Sullivan's work is heady with vibrant debate and slim heuristics; her intellectual clarity is stunning." - Choice A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory explores the ways in which sexuality, subjectivity and sociality have been discursively produced in various historical and cultural contexts. The book begins by putting gay and lesbian sexuality and politics in historical context and demonstrates how and why queer theory emerged in the West in the late (...) twentieth century. Sullivan goes on to provide a detailed overview of the complex ways in which queer theory has been employed, covering a diversity of key topics including: race, sadomasochism, straight sex, fetishism, community, popular culture, transgender, and performativity. Each chapter focuses on a distinct issue or topic, provides a critical analysis of the specific ways in which it has been responded to by critics (including Freud, Foucault, Derrida, Judith Butler, Jean-Luc Nancy, Adrienne Rich and Laura Mulvey), introduces key terms, and uses contemporary cinematic texts as examples. (shrink)

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)

Dual process theorists in psychology maintain that the mind’s workings can be explained in terms of conscious or controlled processes and automatic processes. Automatic processes are largely nonconscious, that is, triggered by environmental stimuli without the agent’s conscious awareness or deliberation. Automaticity researchers contend that even higher level habitual social behaviors can be nonconsciously primed. This article brings work on automaticity to bear on our understanding of habitual virtuous actions. After examining a recent intuitive account of habitual actions and habitual (...) virtuous actions, the author offers her own explanation in terms of goal-dependent automaticity. This form of automaticity provides an account of habitual virtuous actions that explains the sense in which these actions are rational, that is, done for reasons. Habitual virtuous actions are rational in the sense of being purposive or goal-directed and are essentially linked with the agent’s psychological states. Unlike deliberative virtuous actions, the agent’s reasons for habitual virtuous actions are not present to her conscious awareness at the time of acting. (shrink)

Procuramos expor o pluralismo de leituras da obra freudiana mediante a exploração da hipótese de historicização da formação psíquica dos sujeitos, especialmente relativa ao complexo de Édipo e Supereu. Partindo da perspectiva de estudos feministas, verificamos no corpus teórico freudiano se há a possibilidade de que o avanço sócio-histórico seja um fator de modificação de concepções que, na leitura freudiana clássica, seriam lidas como imutáveis, fixas e rígidas cultural e historicamente. Madelon Sprengnether, Nancy Chodorow e Judith Butler serão (...) retomadas para criticar a leitura clássica e generalizante do complexo de Édipo enquanto “estrutural”, essencializado e substancializado. Sugerimos que, sendo uma lei hegemônica, a vivência edípica não pode ser completamente ultrapassada, mas pode ser performativamente atuada de formas desviantes de sua estrutura classicamente pensada por Freud. Nesse âmbito, a transmissão geracional é nosso enfoque primordial. Ela é debatida ao menos em três momentos complementares: na análise da filogênese, da herança arcaica e do Édipo social exposta em Totem e tabu, na herança narcísica de expectativas e ideais compreendida em Introdução ao narcisismo e na teoria da perpetuação de valores e tradições morais via identificações geracionais superegoicas que consta nas Novas Conferências sobre Psicanálise. (shrink)

This volume presents an exploration of the intersection between the work of Michel Foucault and feminist theory, focusing on Foucault's theories of sex/body, identity/subject, and power/politics. Like the other books in this series, this volume seeks to bring a feminist perspective to bear on the interpretation of a major figure in the philosophical canon. In the case of Michel Foucault, however, this aim is somewhat ironic because Foucault sees his work as disrupting that very canon. Since feminists see their work (...) as similarly disruptive, Foucault and feminism would seem to find much common ground, but, as the contributors to this collection reveal, the matter is not so simple. Foucault, like many feminists, is centrally concerned with questions related to sexuality and the body. This concern has led both Foucault and feminists to challenge the founding concept of the modernist philosophical canon: the disembodied transcendental subject. For both Foucault and feminists, this subject must be deconstructed and a new concept of identity articulated. The exciting possibilities of a Foucaultian approach to issues of the subject and identity, especially as they relate to sex and the body, are detailed in several of the essays collected here. Despite these possibilities, however, Foucault's approach has raised serious questions about an equally crucial area of feminist thought-politics. Some feminist critics of Foucault have argued that his deconstruction of the concept "woman" also deconstructs the possibility of a feminist politics. Several essays explore the implications of this deconstruction for feminist politics and suggest that a Foucaultian feminist politics is not viable. Overall, this collection illustrates the range of interest Foucault's thought has generated among feminist thinkers and both the advantages and liabilities of his approach for the development of feminist theory and politics. Contributors are Nancy Fraser, Nancy Hartsock, Judith Butler, Ellen L. McCallum, Linda Alcoff, Honi Haber, Jana Sawicki, Jon Simons, Monique Deveaux, Moya Lloyd, Amy Allen, and Terry Aladjem. (shrink)

Focusing on the new theories of human motivation that emerged during the transition from feudalism to the modern period, this is the first book of new essays on the relationship between politics and the passions from Machiavelli to Bentham. Contributors address the crisis of moral and philosophical discourse in the early modern period; the necessity of inventing a new way of describing the relation between reflection and action, and private and public selves; the disciplinary regulation of the body; and the (...) ideological constitution of identity. The collection as a whole asks whether a discourse of the passions might provide a critical perspective on the politics of subjectivity. Whatever their specific approach to the question of ideology, all the essays reconsider the legacy of the passions in modern political theory and the importance of the history of politics and the passions for modern political debates. Contributors, in addition to the editors, are Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, Riccardo Caporali, Howard Caygill, Patrick Coleman, Frances Ferguson, John Guillory, Timothy Hampton, John P. McCormick, and Leonard Tennenhouse. (shrink)

How might we construe the demand that is posed by the circulation of photographic images in the contemporary world other than the sense that is given to these in contemporary cosmopolitanism, that is, as an extension of the realm of representation to a wider humanity? The ontological reading of the image and its way of marking life given here delineates an approach to the evidence that images present that de-centres the place of human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. Using (...) the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on the image, and Judith Butler on the apprehension of grievable life, the essay seeks to phrase the nature of a demand arising from the image, as that which exceeds an immediate or given context. It is this demand, I suggest, that is given in the non-representational aspect of the image, its circulation out of context. To heed this demand, I argue, is to attend to what Nancy terms “being-singular-plural” and Butler “grievable life,” and to move beyond the cosmopolitan form of vision toward what Derrida terms “hospitality.”. (shrink)

Provoked by postmodernist critiques such as those of Jean‐François Lyotard and Judith Butler, Linda Nicholson and Nancy Fraser, in their essay, “Social criticism without philosophy,” reject feminist essentialism and foundationalism and speculate as to how to combine “a postmodern incredulity toward metanarrative with the social‐critical power of feminism”. Lyotard had offered the sweeping argument that “grand narratives of legitimation,” like the Enlightenment story of the gradual and inevitable progress of reason and its concomitant notions of human rights, were (...) no longer credible. While such narratives once functioned to legitimate social institutions, practices, and discourses as true and just, he claimed they could no longer do so. The metaphysics in which they are grounded are no longer persuasive and thus we are forced to recognize a polytheism of competing, equally unprivileged discourses. While Fraser and Nicholson recognize that feminists have often lapsed into problematic foundationalism and essentialism because of metaphysically grounded theoretical commitments to such narratives, they argue that feminists committed to avoiding these modernist mistakes need not abandon theoretical tools of evaluation and analysis, as there is nothing inherently contradictory in the notion of postmodern theory. Lyotard himself, they argue, paradoxically offers a normative vision of a good society made up of democratic self‐managing groups while having ruled out the possibility of the normative political theorizing which would legitimate such a vision. (shrink)

In this anthology, prominent contemporary theorists assess the benefits and dangers of postmodernism for feminist theory. The contributors examine the meaning of postmodernism both as a methodological position and a diagnosis of the times. They consider such issues as the nature of personal and social identity today, the political implications of recent aesthetic trends, and the consequences of changing work and family relations on women's lives. Contributors: Seyla Benhabib, Susan Bordo, Judith Butler, Christine Di Stefano, Jane Flax, Nancy (...) Fraser, Donna Haraway, Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Andreas Huyssen, Linda J. Nicholson, Elspeth Probyn, Anna Yeatman, Iris Young. (shrink)

By placing John Dewey between John Rawls and Richard Bernstein, I argue for a socialist reading of Dewey’s takes on liberal democracy that moves away both from conservative readings of Dewey of those who claim that his democratic liberalism actually belongs to right-wing or center views, and from left-wing, communitarians who dismiss such views as irrelevant for socialist and radical variants of liberal democracy. Overall, it can be shown that Rawls and Dewey’s different takes on political liberalism could be ultimately (...) reconciled, given their similar takes on democracy, pluralism, and the person. Rawls’ rehabilitation of Kant can itself be shown to be closely related to his reading of Dewey. Furthermore, as Bernstein argues, such a renewal of Dewey’s social and political philosophy in Rawls’s political constructivism and reflective equilibrium was decisive for the great pragmatist turn observed in the second, third, and fourth generations of critical theory, not only in the so-called Frankfurt School (especially Habermas, Honneth, Forst) but also in feminist and decolonial thinkers such as Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Rahel Jaeggi, and Amy Allen. Dewey’s pragmatist turn in political philosophy allows thus for a dynamic, robust correlation between radical democracy and public education, which could be implemented in emerging democracies like Brazil. (shrink)

The needless proliferation of virtues is a possible pitfall of the explosion of work in virtue ethics. I discuss two positions on proliferation and offer my own. Russell takes the first approach, arguing that virtue ethical right action is impossible unless we adopt a finite and specifiable list of the virtues. I argue against this. Hursthouse offers a second perspective, looking first to standard Aristotelian virtues, and adding virtues only when the standard list fails to capture something of moral importance. (...) Like Hursthouse, I believe that questions arising from applied ethics present the real challenge to the adequacy of traditional lists of virtues. These challenges are becoming increasingly urgent. Technologies are not only shaping our conceptions of ourselves, the human good, and virtues, but also, through germline gene editing, have the potential to change human nature. My position takes its cue from Hursthouse but goes beyond her by arguing for an “anthropological turn” in virtue ethics. The anthropological turn examines forms of life, especially those influenced by technology and science, and how they affect articulations of the human good and the virtues needed to attain it. Any new virtues, I argue, should be identified through study of how dispositions conducive to human good arise organically within forms of life. In this way, virtues remain grounded in what is good for humans, yet the anthropological turn recognizes that what counts as human good is now in flux because of science and technology. (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

This piece lays out the framework for a special issue on the topic of "Fits and Misfits," published as volume 7, issue 1 of Puncta: A Journal of Critical Phenomenology. We discuss the relationship between the concept of misfitting, coined by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and debility, coined by Jasbir Puar, in relationship to scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. We then introduce each of the eight articles in the special issue: Rosemarie Garland-Thomson's "What Misfitting Makes," Susan Bredlau's "Conversational Accessibility: Healthcare, Community, and the Ethics (...) of Everyday Encounters," Helen A. Fielding's "Being Touched by Wellness: Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and the Intensive Care Unit," Ann Murphy's "The Spirited Interworld: Caregiving and the Liminal Phenomenology of Dementia," Rachel Elliott's "Sharing Time with Misfits: We-Experience across Bodily Difference," David Morris's "An-Archic Time: Melting the Clock as Hypernorm of the I Can -- and Philosophy," Rebecca Longtin's "Merleau-Ponty's Cézanne as Misfit Artist," and, finally, Laura McMahon's "The Politics of Vulnerability and the School for Peace: Insights from Butler, Merleau-Ponty, and Family Systems Theory.". (shrink)

El debate entre redistribución y reconocimiento que protagonizaron Nancy Fraser y Judith Butler permite reabrir una discusión de la teoría del populismo, a saber: ¿cómo construir la universalidad de la política en un contexto de demandas socioeconómicas irresueltas y de luchas de reconocimiento ascendentes? Tres modelos están en juego, los cuales adquieren particular relevancia en el contexto latinoamericano actual de ascenso de las derechas. El de Fraser, donde prima la igualdad y la supeditación de las diferencias. El de (...) Laclau-Mouffe, donde la universalidad es una relación hegemónica. Y el de Butler, en donde la única universalidad posible es la que mantiene el conflicto de modos políticamente productivos. Al final, se argumenta que el giro de las izquierdas en favor de las luchas culturales no ha sido el culpable de la emergencia de los neofascismos tipo Bolsonaro y se postula una defensa de la universalidad del populismo democrático.The debate upon redistribution and recognition lead by Nancy Fraser and Judith Butler allows reopening a dormant discussion in the populist theory: how to construct a universality of politics in a context of unresolved socioeconomic demands and recognition struggles in ascent? Three models appear to be at stake, all of which acquire a particular relevance in the current context at Latin America and its rise of the right wing. Fraser’s answer, in which equality is preferred. Laclau-Mouffe’s answer, in which this universality is a hegemonic relationship. And Butler’s, in which the only possible universality is that which holds the conflict in politically productive ways. We will recover this debate seeking to clarify a substantial misunderstanding: that the turn of left wing politics towards cultural struggles is to blame for the rise of Bolsonaro-like neofascisms and we suggest a defence of a democratic populist universality. (shrink)

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

Too often in a hospital setting, forgiveness is thought to be automatic—given if a physician makes the apology. But this is cheap grace: a forgiveness achieved without the participation of the injured party. We must remember that forgiveness must be given, and devise new practices to see that it can be.

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, (...) and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology. (shrink)

What kind of turn is the turn to ethics? A Right turn? A Left turn? A wrong turn? A U-turn? Ethics is back in literary studies, philosophy, and political theory. Where critiques of universal man and the autonomous human subject had, in recent years, produced a resistance to ethics in many fields of scholarship, today these critiques have generated a crossover among disciplines and led to theories and practices that see and do ethics otherwise. The decentering of the subject, the (...) contributors to this volume suggest, has brought about a recentering of the ethical. The philosophers, political theorists, literary critics and physician whose essays are collected here bring the particularities of their disciplines and training to a vital complex of questions. Many of these authors express concerns that the turn to ethics is a turn away from politics towards moralism. All ultimately conclude, however, that such concerns, rather than leading away from ethics, have helped to reinvigorate the intellectual field in the present moment. Contributors: Judith Butler, Homi K. Bhabha, Lawrence Buell, Nancy Fraser, John Guillory, Beatrice Hanssen, Barbara Johnson, Perri Klass, Chantal Mouffe, Doris Sommer, Rebecca Walkowitz. (shrink)

The Moral Psychology Handbook is a contribution to a relatively new genre of philosophical writing, the “handbook.” In the first section, I comment on an expectation about handbooks, namely that handbooks contain works representative of a field, and raise concerns about The Moral Psychology Handbook in this regard. In the rest of the article I comment in detail on two Handbook articles, “Moral Motivation” by Timothy Schroeder, Adina Roskies, and Shaun Nichols, and “Character” by Maria W. Merritt, John M. Doris, (...) and Gilbert Harman. Both articles illustrate the perils as well as the promise of reliance on empirical studies for philosophers who work in moral psychology. (shrink)

Among the reasons that Whitehead is such an interesting philosopher is that his work resonates across philosophical traditions. This collection develops connections between Whiteheadian concepts and recent European thinkers. The purpose is not simply to compare, however, but, as editor Jeremy Fackenthal suggests, to develop a Whiteheadian thinking “in tandem” with European philosophers in order to create disruptions or “dislocations” in thought that can engender creative approaches to contemporary problems.One general feature of the book deserves mention at the outset, though (...) I will return to it later in the review: although phenomenology and hermeneutics are each represented in the volume, roughly half of the essays focus on the work of Gilles Deleuze (if we group these together with essays focused on “new materialism,” which is connected with Deleuze, the proportion is more like two-thirds). This will be no surprise, since Deleuze is the European philosopher who was most appreciative of Whitehead. And yet, the result is that the conversation with “continental philosophy” is highly selective.The book is organized into three parts, each comprised of three essays. In part 1, “Technological and Systematic Dislocations,” William S. Hamrick brings Whitehead into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of “the flesh” to suggest an ecological ontology capable of overcoming the instrumentalization of nature. Hamrick's strategy is to read Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty as contributing to an “ontological foundation” for a sustainable civilization (18). Bo Eberle writes about the “quantified self” suggested in new, wearable self-monitoring technologies. Drawing on Whitehead's notion of causal efficacy, Eberle argues that devices such as Fitbit give us access to bodily states that bypasses the standard ways we are aware of ourselves (i.e., through consciousness). He goes further to argue that, like all ways of knowing, wearable technologies are selective, and that the selection reflects the interests of the manufacturers and promotes a certain kind of subjectivity (in the case of Fitbit, a subjectivity that is oriented toward “getting your steps in”). Whitehead's epistemology thus enables the critic of wearable technologies to understand how contemporary experience and self-understanding is shaped not simply by recent technological mediations but by the material interests embedded in them. J.R. Hustwit and Carl Dyke take on what they call “activist” uses of Whitehead that naively (in their judgment) suggest that a non-relational substance metaphysics is to blame for most of our social ills. They employ the theory of complex adaptive systems in conversation with Whitehead and Antonio Gramsci to show that, in fact, achieving significant social change is far more difficult and even unpredictable than mere insertion of better ideas into public discourse. Dominant hegemonies have ways of adapting and absorbing attempts to undermine them. Here Hustwit and Dyke draw on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur to suggest that resistance to the dominant hegemony is nevertheless always possible because of the vagueness of discourse, allowing a plurality of competing interpretations and thus fractures in the dominant hegemony. However, even this kind of resistance is impossible to control and its effects incapable of being entirely predicted. To the essay's titular question, “Can Whitehead save the world?” the authors answer, “No.”In part 2, “Animal/Human Dislocations,” Jeremy Fackenthal draws on the new materialism of Rosi Braidotti (and Deleuze) along with Whitehead to argue for a “process-relational” nomadism that culminates in a “becoming-imperceptible.” His reading together of Whitehead and Braidotti creates the opportunity to recast the former's concept of objective immortality in such a way that it does not refer to death so much as to being diffused into a relational network. The satisfaction of an actual occasion may be taken as its translation into its effects among its relations. Fackenthal argues that this becoming-imperceptible makes possible a sustainable presence within a fragile network of life. Deena M. Lin uses Whitehead, Braidotti, and Judith Butler to lay out a vision of human life as precarious and deserving attention, care, and solidarity. She presses this vision as a direct moral assault on US (Trump's) policy toward Syrian refugees. Going further, she draws on Braidotti's posthuman account of zoe to argue for universal connection and solidarity with all life that should foster, as the title of her essay puts it, “Welcoming of Syrian Life.” Tano Posteraro offers an intriguing essay drawing on Jakob von Uexküll's account of animal experience. Posteraro argues that Uexküll's notion of an animal's Umwelt, shaped by its distinctive perceptual apparatus, needs to be supplemented by Whitehead's notion of prehension to account for the active dimension of animal perception. Rather than a passive registering of animal environments, Posteraro argues that the latter are constructed, and that concepts (or conceptual prehensions) should be understood as tools with which such environments are constructed.In part 3, “Time, the World, and Abstraction,” three essays probe ways that Whiteheadian and Deleuzian themes may resonate critically and constructively. Kris Klotz brings the thought of Whitehead and Deleuze together to inquire about how alternatives to present social forms are envisioned. He argues that, for Whitehead, every actual occasion involves a selection of some features of the past, and, further, that every selection is also an abstraction from the concrete welter of influences impinging on it. For Whitehead, then, to envision alternatives involves a critique of abstractions, a reinstatement of the concrete plurality of possibilities. This, for Whitehead, is what rationality does: it works at restoring the concrete, and, with it, a series of alternatives that have been eclipsed. To this Whiteheadian analysis, Klotz adds Deleuze and Guattari's critique of “opinion.” For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is not an idiosyncrasy but a consensus to which differences of experience are subjected. Philosophy, for Deleuze and Guattari, must always struggle against opinion in order to bring alternatives to light. These conceptions of reason/philosophy, Klotz argues, represent useful ways to critique inequalities and other social wrongs that are embedded in the social forms that are routinely taken for granted. Elijah Prewitt-Davis uses a scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, along with philosophical innovations of Foucault, Deleuze, and Whitehead, to offer a distinctive account of power. Prewitt-Davis calls attention to Deleuze's important book on Leibniz, The Fold, and to how Whitehead's concept of prehension lies at its center. The upshot is that power is not reduced to dominance but, instead, is at work wherever any occasion of experience persists amid the onslaught of the influence of other occasions. Power, as Deleuze wrote, is the capacity to be affected—and to decide how to constitute oneself anew. Keith Robinson offers a detailed account of Whitehead's epistemology along with a reading of Deleuze's analysis of temporality to suggest that there is a common trajectory that seeks to undermine what the title of the essay describes as the “Bifurcation of Nature” (i.e., the separation of natural phenomena and human experience) within the dominant Western philosophical tradition.There is much of value in the volume as a whole. Aside from staging what Spinoza might have called good encounters between Whitehead and a number of continental philosophers, enhancing the conceptual power of each, the contributors are able to make a case that these philosophical trajectories, when read together, have much to contribute to our understanding of and response to the pressing issues of the day. In addition, readers who are interested in the relationship between Whitehead and the new materialism will find this volume to be a helpful resource, stocked with fine examples of how to sharpen new materialist thinking with Whitehead and how to read contemporary contexts through these lenses. On the other hand, this book is not a handbook nor a comprehensive reference. The organizational logic behind its division into sections is murky and the amount of attention given to particular continental philosophers as opposed to others appears somewhat arbitrary: there are recent continental philosophers who get little to no attention at (Derrida, Malabou, Žižek, Agamben, Latour, Nancy, for example), several of whom might prove to be quite interesting to read “in tandem” with Whitehead. Perhaps that is just to say that there are many more essays to be written. (shrink)

_The Continental Aesthetics Reader_ brings together classic and contemporary writings on art and aesthetics from the major figures in continental thought. The second edition is clearly divided into seven sections: Nineteenth-Century German Aesthetics Phenomenology and Hermeneutics Marxism and Critical Theory Excess and Affect Embodiment and Technology Poststructuralism and Postmodernism Aesthetic Ontologies. Each section is clearly placed in its historical and philosophical context, and each philosopher has an introduction by Clive Cazeaux. An updated list of readings for this edition includes selections (...) from Agamben, Butler, Guattari, Nancy, Virilio, and Žižek. Suggestions for further reading are given, and there is a glossary of over fifty key terms. Ideal for introductory courses in aesthetics, continental philosophy, art, and visual studies, _The Continental Aesthetics Reader_ provides a thorough introduction to some of the most influential writings on art and aesthetics from Kant and Hegel to Badiou and Rancière. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau (1935-2014) est reconnu aujourd'hui comme l'un des philosophes politiques principaux pour le XXIe siècle. Cet ouvrage poursuit les débats entrepris avec lui, et réunit quelques-uns de ses principaux interlocuteurs en France (Étienne Balibar, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière), aux États-Unis (Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser) et en Argentine (Horacio González, Leonor Arfuch, Emilio de Ipola, Senda Sferco). Laclau a écrit des ouvrages devenus des références sur l'hégémonie, le populisme et l'émancipation. Longtemps ignorées par la philosophie institutionnelle et méconnues (...) du grand public, ses thèses originales ont su perturber la scène contemporaine de la pensée politique. Son activité citoyenne en Argentine a fait de lui un intellectuel familier du public hispanophone. Ce que disent ici les penseurs argentins éclaire d'un jour nouveau la contribution des épistémologies du Sud aux débats politiques français et européens, mais aussi au-delà, portant sur la question d'un populisme de gauche que Laclau appelait de ses voeux et qu'il nous laisse en héritage."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article describes political discourse on domestic violence that obscures men's violence while placing the burden of responsibility on women. This perspective, which the author calls patriarchal resistance, challenges a feminist construction of the problem. Using a qualitative analysis of men's and political magazines, the author describes two main discursive strategies used in the resistance discourse: degendering the problem and gendering the blame. These strategies play a central role in resisting any attempts to situate social problems within a partiarchal framework. (...) It is argued that this is a political countermovement to the feminist constructions of domestic violence as opposed to a serious concern about women's violence and male victims. Three major implications this resistance discourse has are the normalization of intimate violence, the diversion of attention from men's responsibility and cultural and structural factors that foster violence, and the distortion of women's violence. (shrink)