Irigaray raises the question of sexual difference. Yet there are moments at which Irigaray’s own pursuit of this question recapitulates the kind of universalism it is meant to combat. She remains ensconced in judgments that close down the attempt to think beyond sexual difference. The article pursues this line of thought particularly in relation to her figuring of Antigone, suggesting that there is a need to open up sexual difference so that it does not function as a universal discourse, but (...) is open to other kinds of difference, for example, racial difference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chanter’s Democratizing PhilosophyMoira FradingerDeinvesting Fetishism, Embracing Radical DemocracyA radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. She ceaselessly alerts us to the conditions of production of our privileges; the exclusions on which our social, political, sexual, racial identities are constructed; the blood of those others who “have crafted our eyes,” to recall Donna Haraway’s famous manifesto (Haraway 1988, (...) 585);1 the suffering that allows for our happiness; the “danger” that defines our “purity,” to pay homage to Mary Douglas’s early anthropological exploration of boundary-formations (Douglas 1966). Chanter’s questioning of all the exclusions that give meaning to our identities and social orders is not oriented to “include” that which is excluded, as if she aimed at an “adding approach.” Rather, Chanter aims at thinking about how inclusions can change what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Rancière 2009, 72). At stake is how to make inclusion speak of difference instead of sameness.Chanter has questioned major feminist thinkers (Irigaray, Kristeva) as to their failure to avoid reinstating exclusions, that is, to avoid the fetishistic logic, thoroughly studied by Chanter, whereby excluded elements are assigned a fixed meaning. Recently she has engaged Rancière’s thought on the radical premise of equality as a starting point for politics and critical thought. But long before this new development, and within the ranks of her discipline, Chanter was a practicing democrat of sorts in the Rancièrian sense, bringing to bear those concepts “with no part” (to use Rancière’s phrase) in philosophy, concepts coming from other disciplines, in order to denaturalize reified “partitions of the sensible” (again Rancière 2010, 36) as they appear in the discipline of philosophy.2 In other words, she was engaged in making philosophy hear the [End Page 144] “difference” of other regimes of thought without reducing them to philosophical categories, with the premise that they are neither “truer” nor “lesser” than philosophical thought (in contrast to certain philosophical traditions of understanding “art,” as Chanter has argued).3 Thus, Chanter’s engagement with such “impurities” (from the point of view of philosophy) as literature, performance, reception studies, or psychoanalysis redraws the boundaries of her home discipline.Rachel Jones calls this practice “Chanter’s ethics of restlessness,” an alertness to the ways in which we, as feminist critics, may reproduce the exclusions that we denounce as constitutive of the systems of representation we inhabit. Double alertness at that, or perhaps an ethical dimension proper to the democratic questioning of boundaries: Chanter alerts us also to the fact that our questioning is never enough. We need a scene of interlocution that can keep our questioning open when we are tempted to close it. We unravel processes of exclusion but we always remain “blind” to the exclusions effected by our own critiques. It is perhaps her engaging of psychoanalysis—for all her critique of its conceptualization of sexual difference—which shows here: a commitment, if I may say so, to the subject of the unconscious, to being subjected to representational systems modeling our perceptions beyond our consciousness. This is to redeem, for philosophical thinking, the strange failure of consciousness that we call “the unconscious,” to paraphrase Lacan’s musings on this concept in Seminar XI (Lacan 1998, 17–64). In other words, Chanter’s conscious attention to exclusions is also an attention to the experience of that which our language makes or leaves silent. It is an experience of an excess or a void—always an experience of precariousness with respect to our symbols, a fragility of our means of expression. A structural failure; a failure of “language as such” that is always already a failure of our language.The inclusion of the subject—individual or collective—is crucial here, and this is where I see the crux of Chanter’s “restlessness”: For it is not a question of philosophizing about “the” essential nature of language as always failing but rather of pointing to the radical singularity through which the failure becomes manifest in any given system of... (shrink)

____Ethics of Eros__ sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by questioning the basic distinctions and categories in feminist theory. Tina Chanter uses the work of Luce Irigaray as the focus for a critique of French and Anglo-American feminism as it is articulated in the debate over essentialism. While these two branches of feminism represent opposing views, Chanter advocates a productive exchange between the two.

This volume of essays, all but one previously unpublished, investigates the question of Levinas’s relationship to feminist thought. Levinas, known as the philosopher of the Other, was famously portrayed by Simone de Beauvoir as a patriarchal thinker who denigrated women by viewing them as the paradigmatic Other. Reconsideration of the validity of this interpretation of Levinas and exploration of what more positively can be derived from his thought for feminism are two of this volume’s primary aims. Levinas breaks with Heidegger’s (...) phenomenology by understanding the ethical relation to the Other, the face-to-face, as exceeding the language of ontology. The ethical orientation of Levinas’s philosophy assumes a subject who lives in a world of enjoyment, a world that is made accessible through the dwelling. The feminine presence presides over this dwelling, and the feminine face represents the first welcome. How is this feminine face to be understood? Does it provide a model for the infinite obligation to the Other, or is it a proto-ethical relation? The essays in this volume investigate this dilemma. Contributors are Alison Ainley, Diane Brody, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Claire Katz, Kelly Oliver, Diane Perpich, Stella Sandford, Sonya Sikka, and Ewa Ziarek. (shrink)

Video‐recording healthcare interactions provides important opportunities for research and service improvement. However, this method brings about tensions, especially when recording sensitive topics. Subsequent reflection may compel the researcher to engage in ethical and moral deliberations. This paper presents experiences from a South African genetic counselling study which made use of video‐recordings to understand communicative processes in routine practice. Video‐recording as a research method, as well as contextual and process considerations are discussed, such as researching one's own field, issues of trust (...) and anonymity, the challenge of providing true informed consent and capturing details which may cause psychological harm. Several recommendations for research practice in diverse healthcare settings are made. This includes the value of reflective pieces, the importance of retrospective consent, disclosure of the limitations to anonymity, as well as the collective responsibility of those involved to produce ethical research. These recommendations have value for genetic counselling and other healthcare fields. (shrink)

Draws connections between the life and writings of philosopher Sarah Kofman.

Redistributing the sensible: the art of borders, maps, territories and bodies -- Politics as the interruption of inequality, and the police as the miscount -- Art as dissensus: moving beyond the ethical and representative regimes with the help of Kant and Hegel -- Framing and reframing Rancière's critical intervention: Foucault and Kant -- Form and matter -- Feminist art: disrupting and consolidating the police order.

The Picture of Abjection is an analysis of independent, contemporary, international film. Appropriating Kristeva's analysis of abjection, which she developed in the context of psychoanalytic theory to designate that which a subject rejects as a site of impurity, the book takes up the abject in order to illuminate various intersections of discrimination. The focus is on how race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality intersect with one another in ways that involve abjection. The argument is informed by a variety of (...) disciplines, including film theory, psychoanalysis, philosophy and gender theory. The aim of the book is to enhance understanding of how film can both engage in and ameliorate the ways forms of discrimination play off one another. (shrink)

This essay examines the connections between ignorance and abjection. Chanter relates Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection to the mechanisms of division found in feminist theory, race theory, film theory, and cultural theory. The neglect of the co-constitutive relationships among such categories as gender, race, and class produces abjection. If those categories are treated as separate parts of a person's identity that merely interlock or intermesh, they are rendered invisible and unknowable even in the very discourses about them. Race thus (...) becomes gender's unthought other, just as gender becomes the excluded other of race. Via an exploration of Margaret's Museum and Casablanca, the author shows why the various sexual, racial, and nationalist dynamics of the two films cannot be reduced to class or commodity fetishism, following Karl Marx, or psychoanalytic fetishism, following Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Whether they are crystallized in Marxist or Lacanian terms, fetishistic currencies of exchange are haunted by an imaginary populated by unthought, abject figures. Ejected from the systems of exchange consecrated as symbolic, fragmented, dislocated, diseased body parts inform and constitute meaning. (shrink)

_Examines Antigone’s influence on contemporary European, Latin American, and African political activism, arts, and literature._.

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (...) who have argued for the universality of aesthetics? Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics, and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers. (shrink)

Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

Examining Levinas’s critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas’s thought. According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series (...) of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding. Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger’s tendency to collapse the ecstases of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us. The author suggests that though Levinas’s conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger’s philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas’s philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics. (shrink)

Explores how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Kristeva’s body of work.

Worldwide, more parents are opting for immersion pre-schooling for their children in order to benefit from its linguistic, educational, and cultural benefits. This immersion can be either bilingual or monolingual, aimed at early second language learning, or at language maintenance – offering minority language children mother-tongue support and enrichment. This book examines some of the key issues and policy concerns relating to immersion education in the early years. The term itself can be difficult in some political contexts, as can the (...) differing outcomes noted by studies comparing monolingual programmes, and bilingual programmes for minority language children. The importance of training in immersion methodology for educators is discussed, as is the need to adapt preschool pedagogical practices to the immersion context, in order to provide optimal input for young language learners. One of the most pressing discussions surrounds differentiated provision – ensuring that the varying needs of children with language impairment, typical second language learners, and mother-tongue speakers with significant socioeconomic or linguistic disadvantages are all met. Overall, the book explores the challenges currently facing the sector, particularly with regard to training and professional development for practitioners, and the provision of appropriate materials in less widely used languages. Given the documented benefit of high quality immersion pre-schooling, this book fulfils an urgent need to increase the recognition of the sector. This book was published as a special issue of _International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. _. (shrink)

Argues for the importance of the neglected theme of slavery in Antigone.

Let me forego all the usual caveats about the vagueness of the term postmodern, our inability to determine what postmodern might mean without first undertaking an exhaustive review of modernism, and the synchrony and dissonance of postmodernity with the equally problematic term poststructuralist. I'll just assume that Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan are among the important thinkers to have influenced the feminist demand to rethink subjectivity, and that Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva are two of the most significant and interesting thinkers (...) to have inflected this demand in feminist directions in the French context. (shrink)