Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

This article argues that although post-truth is understood to pose a particular misogynistic threat to feminism, we cannot assume that feminists should simply oppose post-truth. The way the post-truth debate is constructed is problematic for feminism in three ways: it misconceives the relationship between democracy and truth; utilizes a questionable binary between reason and emotion; and propagates elitist assumptions about protecting democracy from the people. Recognizing the insufficiency of our understanding of post-truth, feminists have called for greater understanding of the (...) roles of language, affect and truth in the post-truth debate. In response, I suggest that the theories of Judith Butler and Bonnie Honig can help. However, I seek to emphasise that if feminists are to intervene meaningfully in the inequalities and intensified affective flows that structure the post-truth paradigm they would benefit from a deintensifying, confrontational but nonaggressive, approach. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the appropriate answer to the question of the form contemporary neoliberalism gives our lives rests on Michel Foucault’s definition of neoliberalism as a particular art of governing human beings. I claim that Foucault’s definition consists in three components: neoliberalism as a set of technologies structuring the ‘milieu’ of individuals in order to obtain specific effects from their behavior; neoliberalism as a governmental rationality transforming individual freedom into the very instrument through which individuals are directed; (...) and neoliberalism as a set of political strategies that constitute a specific, and eminently governable, form of subjectivity. I conclude by emphasising the importance that Foucault’s work on neoliberalism as well as the ancient ‘ethics of the care of the self’ still holds for us today. (shrink)

Public education is not just a way to organise and fund education. It is also the expression of a particular ideal about education and of a particular way to conceive of the relationship between education and society. The ideal of public education sees education as an important dimension of the common good and as an important institution in securing the common good. The common good is never what individuals or particular groups want or desire, but always reaches beyond such particular (...) desires towards that which societies as a whole should consider as desirable. This does, of course, put the common good in tension with the desires of individuals and groups. Neo-liberal modes of governance have, over the past decades, put this particular educational set up under pressure and have, according to some, eroded the very idea of the common good. This set of contributions reflects on this state of affairs, partly through an exploration of the idea of publicness itself – how it can be rearticulated and regained – and partly through reflections on the current state of education in the ‘north’ and the ‘south.’. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that many women lack the epistemic resources that would allow them to recognise the practice of vaginal examinations during childbirth as violent or as unnecessary and potentially declinable. I address vaginal examinations during childbirth as a special case of obstetric violence, in which women frequently lack the epistemic resources necessary to recognise the practice as violent not only because of the inherent difficulty of recognising violence that happens in an ‘essentially benevolent’ setting such as the (...) medical one, but also, and mainly, due to the pervasive sexual reification of women under patriarchy and the pervasive shame to which women are subjected. My argument is that the practice of vaginal examinations is indeed experienced – bodily apprehended – as violent by many women, but that full epistemic recognition of this violence is frequently obstructed because the experience perfectly coincides with the normal phenomenological situation of women within patriarchy and thus cannot really be framed as violent. A phenomenological analysis presenting the embodied experience of women under patriarchy as always already essentially tied to sexual availability and commodification, and to shame, will explain this epistemological impairment. A phenomenological take on Judith Butler’s distinction between ‘recognition’ and ‘apprehension’ informs my analysis: I deploy it to provide a richer, more nuanced response to the question of why vaginal examinations are not fully recognised and expressed as violent – even when they are, frequently, apprehended as such. Furthermore, Butler’s ideas about the epistemic ‘framings’ through which we make sense of different kinds of lives (grievable versus ungrievable) will help me to explain how the patriarchal sexual reification of women in fact already frames sexual violence as not-violence – which ultimately also prevents labouring women (and obstetrics staff) from recognising vaginal examinations during labour as violence. (shrink)

Whistleblowers are a vital means of protecting society because they provide information about serious wrongdoing. And yet, people who speak up can suffer. Even so, debates on whistleblowing focus on compelling employees to come forward, often overlooking the risk involved. Theoretical understanding of whistleblowers’ post-disclosure experience is weak because tangible and material impacts are poorly understood due partly to a lack of empirical detail on the financial costs of speaking out. To address this, we present findings from a novel empirical (...) study surveying whistleblowers. We demonstrate how whistleblowers who leave their role as a result of speaking out can lose both the financial and temporal resources necessary to redevelop their livelihoods post-disclosure. We also show how associated costs involving significant legal and health expenditure can rise. Based on these insights, our first contribution is to present a new conceptual framing of post-disclosure experiences, drawing on feminist theory, that emphasizes the bodily vulnerability of whistleblowers and their families. Our second contribution repositions whistleblowing as a form of labour defending against precarity, which involves new expenses, takes significant time, and often must be carried out with depleted income. Bringing forth the intersubjective aspect of the whistleblowing experience, our study shows how both the post-disclosure survival of whistleblowers, and their capacity to speak, depend on institutional supports or, in their absence, on personal networks. By reconceptualizing post-disclosure experiences in this way—as material, embodied and intersubjective—practical implications for whistleblower advocacy and policy emerge, alongside contributions to theoretical debates. Reversing typical formulations in business ethics, we turn extant debates on the ethical duty of employees to speak up against wrongdoing on their heads. We argue instead for a responsibility to protect whistleblowers exposed to vulnerability, a duty owed by those upon whose behalf they speak. (shrink)

The ethics of care addresses aspects of the human condition that other moral theories overlook—our vulnerability to injury, inevitable dependencies, and ubiquitous needs. In the grip of these experiences, we require care from others to survive and flourish. The precarious nature of human existence represents a related experience, one less thoroughly explored within care ethics. Through examination of these occasions for care, this article offers two contributions: First, a map of the conceptual relations between care ethics’ four key concepts: need, (...) vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness. As a subset of these efforts, I investigate the relevance of precariousness and precarity for care ethics by asking what they require of caring relations that vulnerability does not. Second, a more precise articulation of care ethics’ normative foundations and accompanying elucidation of the alternative vision of moral responsibility care ethics advances. Examining need, vulnerability, dependency, and precariousness through the lenses of finitude and embodiment exposes two common forms of conflation: between precarity and vulnerability and between dependency and vulnerability. Analysis of the moral significance of the body as a site for care reveals a novel portrayal of the normative foundations of care ethics and the reasons why we care for one another ethically. (shrink)

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of the (...) autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity. (shrink)

Modern health data practices come with many practical uncertainties. In this paper, I argue that data subjects’ trust in the institutions and organizations that control their data, and their ability to know their own moral obligations in relation to their data, are undermined by significant uncertainties regarding the what, how, and who of mass data collection and analysis. I conclude by considering how proposals for managing situations of high uncertainty might be applied to this problem. These emphasize increasing organizational flexibility, (...) knowledge, and capacity, and reducing hazard. (shrink)

The current study examines the micro-linguistic details of Twitter responses to the whistleblower-initiated publication of the Panama Papers. The leaked documents contained the micro-details of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and wealth accumulation schemes used by business elites, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The public release of the documents on April 4, 2016 resulted in a groundswell of Twitter and other social media activity throughout the world, including 161,036 Spanish-language tweets in the subsequent 5-month period. The findings illustrate that the responses were (...) polyvocal, consisting a collection of overlapping speech genres with varied thematic topics and linguistic styles, as well as differing degrees of calls for action and varying amounts of illocutionary force. The analysis also illustrates that, while the illocutionary force of tweets is somewhat associated with the adoption of a prosaic and vernacular ethical stance as well as with demands for action, these types of voicing behaviors were not present in the majority of the tweets. These results suggest that, while social media platforms are a popular site for collective forms of voicing activities, it is less certain that these collective stakeholder voices necessarily result in forceful accountability demands that spill out of the communication medium and thus serve as an impulse for positive social change. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to systematically reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s account of the relationship between the processes of authoritarian subject formation and the processes of political formation of the democratic common will. Undertaking a reading that brings Adorno into dialogue with contemporary philosophical perspectives, the paper asks the question of whether it is possible to think of a “democratic We” in nihilistic times. In order to achieve this aim, I will analyze in reverse the modifications that the concept of narcissism (...) has undergone, from Adorno’s use of it to account for the symbolic obstacles to the formation of democratic subjectivities after the Holocaust, to the initial formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, I will attempt to outline an affirmative answer to the initial question, formulating the potentials and merits of what I will call a politics of negativity. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article extends current theorizations of the ethics of the commons by drawing on feminist thought to propose a relational embodied ethics of the commons. Departing from abstract ethical principles, the proposed ethical theory reconsiders commoning as a process emerging through social actors’ embodied interactions, resulting in the development of an ethics that accounts for their shared corporeal concerns. Such theorizing allows for inclusive alternative forms of organizing, while offering the ethical and political possibility of countering forms of economic competition (...) and addressing the issues of viability that have long bedeviled commoning practices. This, we suggest, is achieved in the context of social organizing processes whereby social actors are able to reproduce their resource systems and communities based on recognition of their actual corporeal vulnerabilities, which drives reciprocity and embodied relationality with the other. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 511-521, December 2021.

This paper will interpret Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and materialization as a theory of identity, and so put it into dialogue with a phenomenological account of habit formation. The goal is to argue that identity is developed already at a bodily level and that this takes place via the processes of habit formation. The constitution of subjectivity, in other words, requires at the most basic level some kind of bodily performativity. What follows intends to draw out the concept of (...) ‘the body’ in Butler’s work, the role of which is surprisingly meagre given her clear favour of language signification in the elaboration of her theory of performativity. Alternatively, this paper will provide a phenomenology of habit formation that re-introduces the body not as thematic materiality, but as lived materiality. The body will therefore be conceived as something which is already skilful and creative, sensitive and vulnerable, and ultimately, as Butler anticipates, responsive to the intertwinement of individual and social aspects of identity formation. In this regard, I will argue for a performative theory of (bodily) habitual identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Judith Butler’s work has tended to be read through two axes: an early gender theory/later ethical theory division, and/or an ethical/political divide. In contrast, I aim to undercut both hermeneutical strategies by turning to her epistemology, as manifested through her analyses of normativity and “frames,” to argue that the latter acts as the hinge uniting her so-called early and later works and the ethical and political dimensions of her thinking. From this premise, I maintain that Butler affirms that these (...) frames are conditioned by power relations and contingency, points to the existence of multiple frameworks that simultaneously compete against one another, and insists that frames are culturally specific and determining of the categories that identify what counts as a legitimate life for a particular community and the ways in which each life is to be treated. By highlighting the social, performative, and normative dimensions of epistemic practices, Butler offers an epistemology based in the construction of contingent and contestable frameworks and shows how the contestation between distinct frameworks conditions the ethical-political life of each community. (shrink)

This article draws from the reading protocols developed by José Esteban Muñoz to advance a political reading of Georges Bataille. It argues for a consistent and coherent anti-fascism across Bataille’s work, from the early “political” writings to the mature turn toward mysticism. Focusing in particular on his writings from the 1930s, this article clarifies some of the key concepts in Bataille’s critical theory of fascism: expenditure, heterology, base materialism, and democratic anguish.

The aim of this article is to study parrhesia as a form of political performativity. The study of parrhesia as a speech act has been inaugurated by the researches of Lorenzini, who has proposed an in-depth analysis of the parrhesiastic speech act: we nonetheless believe that some features of parrhesiastic performativity urge us to broaden some aspects of his theory. In the first section of this article we will study the nature of parrhesiastic utterance, where Lorenzini’s theses will be discussed (...) through the use of Butler’s approach. In the second section, we will examine the characteristics of Cynic performativity through our theoretical framework, in order to give an example of its effectiveness. We will put forward, then, an overall interpretation of parrhesia, which will be redefined as a communitarian performativity and, furthermore, as an innovative model of radical democracy. (shrink)

Social media is changing social accountability practices. The release of the Panama Papers on April 3, 2016 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) unleashed a tsunami of over 5 million tweets decrying corrupt politicians and tax-avoiding business elites, calling for policy change from governments, and demanding accountability from corporate and private tax avoiders. The current study uses 297,000+ original English-language geo-codable tweets with the hashtags #PanamaGate, #PanamaPapers, or #PanamaLeaks to examine the trajectory of Twitter-based social accountability conversations and (...) the potential for the emergence of a longer-term social accountability user network. We propose that it is the combination of financial inscriptions and evaluative ethical utterances that incite and sustain social accountability conversations and social accountability networks. Financial inscriptions simultaneously remind audiences of both the information event that fomented the initial public reaction and the monetary magnitude of the event. Value-based ethical messaging, in turn, enunciates an ethical stance that simultaneously evaluates existing practices and emphasizes the need for accountability. It is the combining of these two types of messaging that helps to construct and sustain a normative narrative about social accountability. The results illustrate how the repetition and re-working of these two forms of messaging facilitated the construction of a normative narrative that coalesced into a social accountability network which persisted beyond the initial Panama Paper information event and which was re-activated in 2017 when the ICIJ published the Paradise Papers. (shrink)

When it comes to the body, the professional pedagogical field shows a paradoxical attitude: With regard to sense-oriented school subjects, educational policies tend to underline a close relatedness of body and mind. However, where learning is primarily connected with mental activities and intellectual engagement, the body is rarely assigned an integral role. Discussing the grounding ideologies of this paradox, I will consult phenomenological and enactivist perspectives in order to develop an approach to embodied learning which takes into account both sense-oriented (...) as well as intellectual domains. I will argue that considering the interdependence of body and mind including their situatedness does not only benefit the cultivation of the body and the senses, but also opens up further perspectives for intellectual engagement. (shrink)

This short paper responds to the essays by Shilpi Sinha, Shaireen Rasheed, and Lyudmila Bryzzheva. It considers how racial inequality between teachers and students affects the possibilities of educational hospitality, both in cases of white teachers teaching racialized students and in cases of racialized teachers teaching white students. The response takes a phenomenological turn, considering the relative vulnerability of bodies that encounter each other in educational spaces which, themselves, are not neutral.

The idea that social and political institutions can be designed in order to achieve specific human ends goes back, at least, to Plato’s presentation of the appropriate form of the just city-state i...

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article explores the politics of digital protest and emergent forms of sociality in the #NoDAPL (No Dakota Access Pipeline) movement using Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of geontopower. I begin by situating the concept of geontopower in relation to a range of biopolitical, decolonial, and ecocritical theory in order to show its importance in conceptualizing the interconnectedness of decolonial and environmental interests. I use this theoretical framework to analyze several instances of what I call ‘digital decoloniality’ in the #NoDAPL movement, cases (...) where the particular affordances of social media technologies and the efforts of Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies disrupted normative assumptions regarding the boundaries of the digital and ‘analog’ worlds and resisted the geontopolitical structuring of life and nonlife. I argue that the #NoDAPL hashtag works to enact the prerogatives of Western science-based environmentalism and Indigenous epistemological tenets in common, performatively generating new possibilities for conceptualizing social struggle and shared history. (shrink)

This study examines the 3.5 m+ English-language original tweets that occurred during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Starting from previous research, we analyze how character terms such as “the banker,” “politician,” “the teaparty,” “GOP,” and “the corporation,” as well as concept terms such as “ethics,” “fairness,” “morals,” “justice,” and “democracy” were used by individual participants to respond to the Occupy Wall Street events. These character and concept terms not only allowed individuals to take an ethical stance but also accumulated (...) into a citizen’s narrative about social accountability. The analysis illustrates how the centrality of the different concepts and characters in the conversation changed over time as well as how the concepts ethics, morals, fairness, justice, and democracy participated within the conversation, helping to amplify the ethical attributes of different characters. These findings contribute to our understanding of how demands for social accountability are articulated and change over time. (shrink)

In this article, identity politics is understood as a form of politics stressing collective but malleable group identities as the basis of political action. This notion of identity politics also allows thinking of identity as intersectional. The focus of this article, and a problem related to identity politics, is that when discussed in the context of the neoliberal order, identity politics has a tendency to become harnessed by the ethos of vulnerability. Some implications of the ‘vulnerabilizisation’ are considered in the (...) field of education, which is a field currently thoroughly affected by neoliberalism. Therefore, it is also important to look closer at the relationship between identity politics and the ethos of vulnerability. In addition, we re-consider poststructuralist thinking as a theoretical and political approach to see what it can offer in terms of re-thinking identity politics and in analyzing the ethos of vulnerability. When categories of vulnerability keep expanding into various psycho-emotional vulnerabilities defining subjects that can be known and spoken about, it is crucial to ask whether we regard these changes as educationally and politically progressive. The article discusses some problematic policies in educational environments and the phenomenon of trigger warnings. (shrink)

In this paper we propose an ‘undisciplinary’ meeting between Elinor Ostrom and Judith Butler, with the intent to broaden the theory of the commons by discussing it as a relational politics. We use Butler’s theory of power to problematize existing visions of commons, shifting from Ostrom’s ‘bounded rationality’ to Butler’s concepts of ‘bounded selves’ and mutual vulnerability. To be bounded – as opposed to autonomous being – implies being an (ambiguous) effect of socio-power relations and norms that are often beyond (...) control. Thus, to be a collective of bounded selves implies being mutually vulnerable in power relations which are enabling, albeit injurious. A politics of commoning is not a mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). We argue that the multiple exposures which produce us are also the conditions of possibility for more just and equalitarian ‘re-commoning’ of democracies around the world. (shrink)

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)

This paper argues that contemporary child and youth experiences of globalization call for retheorizing global justice around a new concept of empowered inclusion. The first part of the paper examines three case studies in globalization – child labour movements, child and youth migration, and young people’s organization around climate change – and shows how, in each case, young people, through their struggles against injustice, are simultaneously disempowered and empowered by their deep global interdependency. The second part proposes new theoretical advances (...) in global justice that better respond to child and youth experiences through a childist concept of the empowered inclusion of both children and other marginalized groups. And the third part advances some preliminary suggestions about how a more child-responsive conception of global power and justice might be operationalized in practice across global policies, institutions, and culture. (shrink)

This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis that engages feminist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches to (...) attend to the particular and everyday, I address some of the hesitations and uncertainties in undertaking research and producing knowledge, and concerns with forms of reflexive practice. At the heart of the discussion is the question of a vulnerable ethics, of how it is possible for feminist methods to represent the lives of others, especially when stories fail in the telling, both in providing adequate explanations and in the ways that trauma and suffering can remain incommunicable. Included in this are concerns as to how we as researchers are affected within the production of research. As a form of receptivity and wounding, the article argues for vulnerable writing that challenges feminist methods to remain open and receptive to what will always resist sense-making, while continuing to respond to the demand that we do justice to the lives of others. (shrink)

Phenomenological, process-based and post-Marxist approaches have stressed the immanent nature of the ontogenesis of our world. The concept of performativity epitomizes these temporal, spatial and material views. Reality is always in movement itself: it is constantly materially and socially ‘performed’. Other views lead to a pre-defined world that would be mostly revealed through sensations (i.e. ‘representational perspectives’). These transcendental stances assume that a subject, although pre-existing experience, is the absolute condition of possibility of it. In this paper, we develop another (...) view of performativity (either complementary or interrelated to an immanent stance), one that re-introduces transcendence in the analysis but sees in it something dialogical to the process itself. We draw from the notions of visibility-invisibility and continuity-discontinuity (Merleau-Ponty 1945/2013, 1964) in order to show how everyday activity both performs and makes visible the world. From that perspective, modes of visibility appear as conditions of possibility of performativity itself. We draw some implications for the conceptualization of management practices. (shrink)

The accurate illustration of the contemporary refugee subject has presented an unprecedented theoretical, epistemological and methodological challenge to all fields of academic research. Seeking for alternative philosophical modalities capable of liberating refugee representation from the suffocating threat–victim bipolarity, this article critically investigates Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler’s theoretical perspectives on refugee subjectivity. Section 1 systematises the dominant tropes of refugee representation either as dehumanised threats or depoliticised victims. Section 2 introduces the readers to Giorgio Agamben’s emblematic homo sacer as a (...) potentially fertile reconceptualisation of refugee subjectivity. In this context, Judith Butler’s critique on the Agambenian bare life is presented in two core pillars. Following one Butlerian claim, we trace the Agambenian inadequacy to successfully overcome the contemporary threat–victim mode of refugee representation in the absence of an empowering theoretical account of the homo sacer’s agentic and resisting capacities. In Section 4, we explore Judith Butler’s main argument regarding the constitutively political character of vulnerable refugee existence. By designating the Butlerian constellation of vulnerability and agency as an invigorating alternative perspective on modern refugee representation, we finally argue that Butler’s epistemological framework provides a more agonistic and nuanced theorisation of refugee subjectivity than Agamben. (shrink)

The concept of ‘political energy’ is often treated as merely a rhetorical synonym for enthusiasm and active engagement. However, as Bruce Clarke’s Energy Forms argues there is an allegorical traffic of ideas between politics and science that reaches an apotheosis in the early-twentieth century interest in energy. In the field of the ‘energy-humanities’ inaugurated by Clarke, the work of George Sorel remains largely overlooked. Situating itself in this field, my paper investigates the interplay of science and politics in Sorel’s work. (...) I contend that Sorel, influenced by Vico’s ideogeneitic law anticipates Clarke’s allegorical framework. Paralleling Henri Bergson’s attempts to rethink the novelty of life in the post-thermodynamic framework of energy, I argue that models from science (Brownian motion and friction) underlie Sorel’s conceptions of political myth and class antagonism. While these remain inchoate in Sorel’s works, I conclude with the suggestion that these traces are completed in Ernst Jünger’s conception of ‘total mobilization’. (shrink)

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, and (...) as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’, and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler’s work does. (shrink)

The paper argues that the liberal approach to social rights is contradictory and provides an alternative account that draws on solidarism, a strand of nineteenth-century French Republican thought. Solidarism links together a normative theory of social obligation and a descriptive account of social value, debt and unearned increment. The theory of social property provides a distinctive foundation for social rights.

In both popular and scholarly discussions, sexual consent is gaining traction as the central moral consideration in how people should treat one another in sexual encounters. However, while the concept of consent has been indispensable to oppose many forms of sexual violence, consent-based sexual ethics struggle to account for the phenomenological complexity of sexual intimacy and the social and structural pressures that often surround sexual communication and behavior. Feminist structural critique and social research on the prevalence of violation even within (...) consensual sex suggest that consent is insufficient to ground responsibility; a more fundamental orientation toward the value of sexual agency provides a better foundation for sexual ethics. Using feminist critical theory, phenomenology, and black feminist thought, this dissertation develops a socially situated and relational notion of sexual agency and diagnoses how such agency is neglected in prevailing discussions of consent in moral philosophy and legal theory. I argue that the ethical question of responsibility to another in a sexual encounter—apart from juridical considerations—should be reframed around the value of each person’s socially situated practices of agency. Preceding and extending beyond the obligation to gain valid consent for an action, responsibility demands adapting one’s intentions and behaviors in response to the wider range of another’s communicative expressions of agency. However, communicative expressions can be ambiguous or overdetermined by social context and cultural norms; they often offer only provisional traces of agency. To address this inherent uncertainty in intimacy, I propose drawing on insights from Emmanuel Levinas about the dynamic, open-ended nature of relationality, responsibility, and communication. Responsibility toward another does not depend on securing certainty about their “yes” or “no,” but requires responding continuously under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, adapting behaviors and intentions to make room for another’s agency despite its opacity. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler's theorization of violence has begun to receive growing scholarly attention, the feminist theoretical background of her notion of violence remains unexplored. In order to fill this lacuna, this article explicates the feminist genealogy of Butler's notion of violence. I argue that Butler's theorization of violence can be traced back to Gender Trouble, to her discussion of Monique Wittig's argument that the binary categorization of sex can be conceived as a form of discursive violence. I contend, first, that (...) Butler starts to develop her notion of “gender violence” on the basis of her reading of Wittig, and second, that Butler's more recent writings on military violence and the ethics of nonviolence build on her early interpretation of Wittig. On the basis of my reading, I suggest, in contrast to recent criticism, that Butler's later critique of violence is not at odds with but rather expands upon her prior work on violence. (shrink)

When we participate in political debate or protests, we are judged by how we look, which clothes we wear, by our skin colour, gender and body language. This results in exclusions and limits our freedom of expression. The Politics of Becoming explores radical democratic acts of disidentification to counter this problem. Anonymity in masked protest, graffiti, and online de-bate interrupts our everyday identities. This allows us to live our multiple selves. In the digital age, anonymity becomes an inherent part of (...) everyday communication. Through our smart devices we express our selves differently. As cyborgs, our identities are disrupted and reassembled. We curate self-representations on social media, create avatars, share selfies and choose the skin colour of our emojis. The Politics of Becoming encourages us to engage in a revolution of the self. Democratic pluralism is not only a matter of institutional design but also about how we express our identities. Inner revolutions change our personal realities and plant a seed for democratic futures. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

This article addresses the conditions that are necessary for non-Indigenous people to learn from Indigenous people, more specifically from women and feminists. As non-Indigenous scholars, we first explore the challenges of epistemic dialogue through the example of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. From there, through the concept of mastery, we examine the social and ontological conditions under which settler subjectivities develop. As demonstrated by Julietta Singh and Val Plumwood, the logic of mastery—which has legitimated the oppression and exploitation of Indigenous peoples—has been (...) reproduced in academia, leaving almost no room for Indigenous knowledge and epistemes. In the same vein, Sámi scholar Rauna Kuokkanen reclaims and suggests the logic of the gift as a means to render academia more hospitable to Indigenous peoples and epistemes. In our view, reclaim as a concept-practice is a promising way to disrupt colonial, racist, and sexist power relations. Thus, we in turn propose to reclaim vulnerability as defined by Judith Butler in order to deconstruct masterful settler subjectivities and reconstruct relational ones instead. As theorized by Erinn Gilson, we propose epistemic vulnerability to imagine the conditions of our learning from Indigenous peoples and philosophies. (shrink)