In this article, I explore the relationship betweenperformativity, as it appears in Judith Butler's work, andplasticity, as it appears in the work of Catherine Malabou. I argue that these concepts are isomorphic. Butler and Malabou both hold that resistance to contemporary forms of power, or “insubordination,” is contingent on a subject's ability to become other than what it is; Butler articulates this ability in terms of performativity, and Malabou articulates it in terms of plasticity. I reveal the social-constructivist dimension of (...) Malabou's work while also making apparent the extent to which Butler's work, contrary to her own way of conceptualizing it, and hence surprisingly and uneasily, presupposes a biologically basic capacity for change. Plasticity is this biologically basic capacity. Both thinkers affirm the idea that insubordinate forms of transformation can be impeded by the discourse that conditions what a subject can think. I suggest that this is an insight that must be heeded, even as I seek to affirm a form of plasticity beyond discourse. (shrink)

From the perspective of sociological theory, Foucault’s concepts of power, power-knowledge, and discipline are one-sided. While Foucault contends that there is no center of power, his account of power remains top-down or structural, missing the interactive and enabling aspects of power. A more balanced view would suggest that all exercises of power include meaningful agency (the ability to do something); social structures (not simply as constraints but as interactive creations); social knowledge (including both reifying truth claims and enabling truth or (...) knowledge); and social-ontological being-in-the-social-world (both as enabling and dominating). (shrink)

I elicit some of Foucault’s insights to provide a more realistic picture than is the norm in social and political theory of how best to identify and overcome domination. Foucault’s vision is realized best, I argue, by combining his account with two related conceptions of domination based on human needs and realistic accounts of politics that focus on agency, power and interests. I defend a genealogical, inter-subjective account of how the determination of needs and interests forms the basis of ascertaining, (...) on a continuum, the extent to which relations of power generate states of domination. To that end I propose institutional changes that would empower citizens in positive and negative ways: power over legislation in district assemblies and via veto and repeal; real control over representatives through various means; and decennial constitutional plebiscites. (shrink)

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as (...) missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities. (shrink)

Abstract: This essay explores recent trends and major issues related to gay and lesbian philosophy in ethics (including issues concerning the morality of homosexuality, the natural function of sex, and outing and coming out); religion (covering past and present debates about the status of homosexuality and how biblical and qur'anic passages have been interpreted by both sides of the debate); the law (especially a discussion of the debates surrounding sodomy laws, same-sex marriage and its impact on transsexuals, and whether the (...) law should be used to enforce morality); scientific research into the origins of homosexuality (including discussion of arguments against such research); and metaphysics (especially the question of whether homosexuality is socially constructed during particular times and in particular cultures, or whether sexual orientation is an essential trait cutting across times and cultures). (shrink)

At the present historical moment, the modernization of the Greek nation is at the forefront of discussion in the Greek public sphere. In the shadow of this discussion, the official public sphere has also been grappling with a very low national birth rate - approximately 100,000 per population of 11 million. This statistical phenomenon is coupled with a high frequency of abortion, between 150,000 and 200,000 in 2001, and is referred to in the media and policy discussions as `the demografiko', (...) Greece's `No. 1 or No. 2 national problem'. This article examines popular Greek perceptions of the problem of the national birth rate and the contestation between meanings of nationhood that the resulting discourses both illuminate and, as the author shows, sometimes incite. The focus is on what women living in Athens say about the demografiko. These are voices not currently being heard in the public sphere. The author argues that the demografiko's articulation of `Greece' is a window through which one witnesses the racially and religiously inflected politics of late modernity, just as they are also being played out at the site of gender and reproduction elsewhere in Europe and Asia. (shrink)

This essay explores the two main objectives of Bishop’s book, which he analyzes in the context of the care for the dying: the medical metaphysics underlying medical science and biopolitics as governance of the human body. This essay discusses Bishop’s claims in view of newer developments in medicine, especially the turn to the construction of life, and confronts the concept of the patient’s sovereignty with an alternative model of vulnerable agency. In order to overcome the impasses of contemporary bioethics, the (...) essay argues that practical reason requires a two-fold ethics: first, it must develop a new hermeneutics of illness and disease, and second, in order to protect the individuals in the process of dying, moral claims concerning death must be based on the concept of human rights. (shrink)

After a time dominated by nature-phobia, a naturalistic turn is emerging within feminist theory. Welcoming this new theoretical embrace of nature and sympathising with its insistence that nature is not feminism’s enemy, this article nevertheless points to some problematic features of this turn. Focusing on Elizabeth Grosz’s postmodernist readings of Charles Darwin, I suggest that their emphasis of nature’s dynamic, indeterminate and enabling qualities both implies a politically unmotivated glorification of the dynamic and unruly, and as such obscures the important (...) fact that nature also works as a constraining factor on societies. I demonstrate, from the point of view of a Marxist-realist perspective, why an acknowledgement of nature’s limiting force is crucial for the coherence of any theoretical account of the workings of social systems. The article also addresses the feminist imperative to transcend the dualism between nature and culture, and shows how the concept of emergence offers a solution to dilemmas that tend to appear in connection to such efforts of transcendence. (shrink)

The Habermas–Foucault debate, despite the excellent commentary it has generated, has the standing of an ‘unfinished project’ precisely because it occasions the interrogation of the fundamental categories of modernity, and because the lingering sense of anxiety, which continues to remain after arguments and counter-arguments, demands new interpretations. Here, I advance the claim that what gives Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault’s histories and theoretical formulations their bite is the categorial distinction he maintains between facts and rights, and by extension, between causes and (...) reasons. The Kantian distinction between de jure validity and de facto effectivity underwrites the categorial distinction between both ‘norms/facts’ and ‘reasons/causes’ conceptual pairs, which distinction, in turn, is reinforced by a picture of the natural world as matter in motion and human agency as self-determination. I want to claim that Foucault’s work enacts a critique of Habermas not by evading the problem of justification but by undermining the very distinctions Habermas needs to maintain the universal and necessary status of communicative rationality. Drawing on Jonathan Lear’s discussion of reasons and causes in relation to the unconscious, I claim that psychoanalytic discourse helps us make intelligible a type of reflection—such as one finds in Foucault’s historiography—that is at once “critical and empirical.” Moreover, the realization that the distinction between causes and reasons may not be categorial and exhaustive shows how Habermas’s insistence on the contrary leads to one particular kind of misrecognition of our practices. (shrink)

This article takes the role of provocateur to ‘queer(y)’ the rules of intelligibility surrounding new schooling accountabilities. Butler’s work is seldom used outside the arena of gender and sexualities research. A ‘queer(y)ing’ methodology is subsequently applied in a context very different to where it is frequently associated. Empirical data from a case study secondary school in Australia are used to contextualise the use of queer theory in thinking differently about new schooling accountabilities and how they can unfold in ways that (...) are unforeseen and unexpected. By applying Butlerian theory in a manner very different to what is commonly expected, the author also destabilises the use of queer theory as well. (shrink)

The present essay reconsiders Georges Bataille’s politics of the impossible in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s collaborative work conducted at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political. In particular, my submission critically assesses Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s concerted effort to displace the problematic of the subject to make room for a new ground of the political derived from Bataillean conception of community. While Bataille’s philosophy proved to be decisive to Nancy’s and Lacoue-Labarthe’s exploratory research at the Centre, it (...) also constituted a source of profound ambivalence insofar as Bataillean thinking of relation necessarily leads back to the question of the subject. The paper argues that Nancy’s admitted failure to develop the unprecedented Bataillean politics is rooted in persistence of the subject in Bataille’s philosophy. At the same time, it maintains that what Nancy perceived as a failure must be grasped as success since Bataillean determination of the political necessitates not so much an eradication of the problematic of the subject, as its re-elaboration. If, as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest, construction of the subject throughout the development of Western metaphysics has determined philosophical thinking of political community, then Bataillean sovereignty allows for a new and non-identitarian conception of community not bound to the destiny of the state. (shrink)

Freedom, conceived ontologically, is power's condition of possibility. Yet, considering that the subject's interests and identity are constantly shaped, one still has to explain how – theoretically speaking – individuals can resist control. This is precisely the issue I address in the following pages. Following a brief overview of Foucault's contribution to our understanding of power, I turn to discuss the role of visibility vis-à-vis control, and show how the development of disciplinary techniques reversed the visibility of power. While Foucault (...) illustrates that during different historical periods, distinct modes of visibility are produced by power in order to control society, I argue that the very same power that produces visibility is concomitantly dependent upon it. In addition, I maintain that visibility is a necessary component of resistance. But Foucault – perhaps due to his premature death – never adequately explains how individuals can resist the mechanisms of control in a world in which power is ubiquitous. To help clarify this enigma, I turn to Hannah Arendt's insights into power, freedom, plurality, and natality. These concepts, I claim, can serve as a corrective to Foucault because they make room for resistance without assuming that humans can exit power's web. (shrink)

First, a close reading of Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power underscores the ways in which Butler’s account of power liquidates issues of political economy and problematically ontologizes Freudianism as a kind of first philosophy of the subject. Second, drawing largely from secondary sources, the religious studies reader is introduced to the life and work of Ernest Dicther, the father of motivational research, an influential American mid-twentieth century psychoanalytic school of marketing that Freudianized marketing discourse and transformed it into (...) the present day. Third, drawing from primary sources in Dichter’s published archive, a comparative reading of Butler and Dichter reveals strong points of confluence around the psychology and performativity of ritual, concomitantly highlighting scholars’ hidden participation in the American religious history Kathryn Lofton figures according to the terms of ‘consuming religion’. (shrink)

Guiado pelas teorias da decolonialidade e da performatividade, este artigo pretende discutir as possibilidades de uma teoria do humano no Direito que seja expansiva, rompendo com as leituras cis-heteronormativas e brancas das teorias dominantes sobre Direito e Justiça. Para isso, realiza duas tarefas: primeiro, toma as teorias sobre sexo, gênero e raça como linguagens atribuídas a corpos para usar o corpo como categoria jurídica de análise e, com esse corpo, aprendendo com as travestilidades, compreender o humano como sempre sendo “em (...) processo de”, exigindo-nos compromisso com “dignidades” produzidas a partir da multiplicidade da “pessoa”. Depois, usa duas categorias jurídico-constitucionais para rediscutir a entrada do “humano” no Direito nos marcos do gênero e da raça – e das múltiplas corporalidades: dignidade da pessoa humana e povo. Sem pretender resolver a oposição universalismo/individualismo contida nessas categorias, o trabalho sustenta a fronteira como lugar de expansão: um povo que performa pluriversalidades e a pessoa humana em suas multiplicidades. Essa teoria expansiva exige reconhecer que o humano é humano “em processo de” e coloca o limite dos sentidos produzidos pela tensão entre as duas categorias jurídicas no corpo, lido sob as linguagens de sexo, gênero e raça. Isso exigirá o compromisso e a responsabilização pela diminuição da distribuição diferencial de humanidade produzida na matriz branca e cis-heterconforme e o reconhecimento de que o sujeito que dá a si mesmo a “lei” deve poder se fazer mutuamente povo e pessoa humana. (shrink)

This paper expands on the political vision embedded in Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic work. It comments on Winnicott’s notion that individuality is produced by society, and adds that such production inevitably involves power asymmetry. It is argued that Winnicott values rights and property as communicative devices rather than as private enclosures held against society. However, it is also maintained that Winnicott thinks that social deliberation itself depends on a preceding objective instance that may be referred to as justice. Lastly, aspects of (...) Winnicott’s outlook that touch on ideas of welfare and distribution are examined, especially those concerning the relationships between the market and social agencies, and between the household and the state. It is suggested that these attributes point to an affinity Winnicott has with a progressive liberal trend dating back to Mill, the later manifestation of this liberalism being evident in the design of the 20th-century welfare state. It is concluded that it is for this polity that Winnicott wrote his psychological theory. (shrink)

Through a critical reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel, Woman Warrior, this paper addresses Amy Allen’s criticism that Seyla Benhabib’s conception of narrative agency involves the idea of a gender-neutral core self. Allen’s criticism of Benhabib is found wanting and the notion of an ungendered self is judged incoherent. Rather, gender is one of a number of markers at work in the open-ended narrative construction of identity.

In his work on somaesthetics, Richard Shusterman employs Confucianism’s take on ritualized self-cultivation to address blind spots in Euro-American accounts. However, Shusterman’s remarks on the later classical-era thinker Xún Zǐ hint at a possible tension with the former’s pragmatism and promotion of somatic self-fashioning. The classical Confucian debate between Mencius and Xún Zǐ on human nature being either “good” or “bad” broaches issues of somaesthetics, namely as concerns self-cultivation being either internally spontaneous or externally imposed. Looking at this debate can (...) thus help the project of somaesthetics by bringing old, though in this case novel, vocabulary to bear on an issue with which Shusterman wrestles – the “ontic” status of somaesthetic practice. (shrink)

The article revisits the idea that writing may be gendered and asks whether we can define what a “woman writing” practice might be. We do this through a comparative study of the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler. Both have expressed reservations about, even objected to, the essentializing of gender and therefore of writing as a woman. They have, however, provided us with useful tools to define what a non-essentialist understanding of “woman” might entail. The article proposes to do (...) three things: first, to look at the way each author presents “woman” and what I term “woman writing” in their work; second, to find, beyond epistemic differences, the common grounds shared by the two authors; and third, to clarify the places where the two disagree. In a concluding part, we will highlight how that disagreement is reconciled in revisiting Kristeva’s and Butler’s use of loss in their apprehension of “woman,” allowing us to formulate a non-essentialist definition of “woman writing.”. (shrink)

The concept of person‐centeredness has become in many instances the standard of health care that humanises services and ensures that the patient/client is at the centre of care delivery. Rejecting a purely biomedical explanation of dementia that led to a loss of self, personhood in dementia could be maintained through social interaction and communication. In this article, we use the insights of queer theory to contribute to our current understanding of the care of those with dementia. We critically discuss the (...) concepts of person and personhood that have become the cornerstone values of person‐centred care for persons with dementia (PWD). Some critics, using queer theory as a theoretical approach, contend that person‐centred care often (unwittingly) reproduces heteronormative roles in trying to sustain life histories. In doing so, they argue, regendering of PWD is sometimes enforced by care providers who try to safeguard this biographical continuity. Cultural theorist Linn Sandberg also mentions that other axes of domination such as race and class are not conceptualised in person‐centeredness approaches, and neither are power asymmetries. Thus, in our article, we revisit the concept of person‐centred care as a first step in proposing another way to think about ‘beings with dementia’ (to avoid the term person). Believing that queer theorists have fallen short in questioning the idea of person or personhood as such, we will build on and broaden Sandberg's critique by demonstrating that queer and crip theory can be understood as a fundamental critique of the (Western) subject and processes of subjectivation. We argue that dementia can be conceptualised as a radical break not only with gendered roles and embodiments, but with many of the norms that make us recognisable subjects. Conceptualising dementia in this way turns it into what Sandberg called an ‘emancipatory space’ and not merely a pathology. (shrink)

This essay contributes to developing a new approach to political legitimacy by asking what is involved in judging the legitimacy of a regime from a practical point of view. It is focused on one aspect of this question: the role of identity in such judgment. I examine three ways of understanding the significance of identity for political legitimacy: the foundational, associative, and agonistic picture. Neither view, I claim, persuasively captures the dilemmas of judgment in the face of disagreement and uncertainty (...) about who “I” am and who “we” are. I then propose a composite, pragmatic picture. This view casts the question of political legitimacy as an existential predicament: it is fundamentally a question about who you are—both as a person and as a member of collectives. The pragmatic picture integrates rational, prudential, and ethical qualities of good judgment that were heretofore associated with mutually exclusive ways of theorizing legitimacy. It also implies that the question of legitimacy cannot be resolved philosophically. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition – Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the tradition (...) to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other. (shrink)

: Gay marriage highlights a contradiction in American national identity: if gay marriage is supported, the normative status of the heterosexual nuclear family is undermined, while if not, the civil rights of homosexuals are undermined. This essay discusses the feminist dilemma of whether to support gay marriage to promote these individual civil rights or whether to critique marriage as a part of the patriarchal system that oppresses women.

Judith Butler’s meditations on precarity have received considerable attention in recent years. This article proposes that an undertheorized strain of her argument offers productive resources for theorizing violence. The question extends beyond material acts, to ask how certain groups are rendered eligible for heightened, regularized violence – and, by extension, how liberal subjects are rendered complicit with policies at odds with their universalist commitments. At stake is a politics of sensibility that complicates and enriches juridico-institutionalist models. That said, when Butler’s (...) account is brought to bear on a wider range of cases, it encounters a set of questions it is not prepared to answer on its own terms. Accordingly, I propose some directions the argument would need to be expanded to do justice to its own normative intuitions. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar que la obra de Judith Butler ofrece un conjunto de estrategias de lectura que no se reducen a principios o leyes. Por el contrario, son contingentes sin ser azarosas o arbitrarias. Los resultados de esta estrategia, que consideramos metodológica, se conforman gracias a una práctica de lectura que constituye un ejercicio crítico constante. Esta práctica adopta diversas estrategias que se condensan a partir de los aportes de diversos filósofos. Butler convierte entonces esa estrategia de (...) lectura en un acto político, enraizado en una ética que le permite hacer visibles a quienes están en situación de máxima vulnerabilidad, insinuando, al mismo tiempo, caminos para transformar la sociedad y ampliar los espacios de libertad. (shrink)

: This article examines Sarah Kofman's interpretation of Nietzsche in light of the claim that interpretation was for her both an articulation of her identity and a mode of deconstructing the very notion of identity. Faulkner argues that Kofman's work on Nietzsche can be understood as autobiographical, in that it served to mediate a relation to her self. Faulkner examines this relation with reference to Klein's model of the child's connection to its mother. By examining Kofman's later writings on Nietzsche (...) alongside her autobiography, this article contends that Kofman's defense of anti-Semitism in Nietzsche serves to fend off her own ambivalence about being Jewish. (shrink)

,is article addresses the relationship between sovereignty, biopolitics and governmentality in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault. By unpacking Foucault’s genealogy of modern governmentality, it responds to a criticism leveled against Foucauldian accounts of power for their alleged abandonment of the traditional model of power in juridico-institutional terms in favor of an understanding of power as purely productive. ,is claim has most signi-cantly been developed by Agamben in “Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life”. I argue (...) that Judith Butler’s analysis of power, in particular in her essay “Inde-nite Detention”, presents a more di.erentiated account of power that registers the signi-cance of practices of sovereignty and resonates with Foucault’s lectures on “Security, Territory, Population”. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of mourning following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. Combining discussions of mourning, kitsch and sentimentality, I examine the perverse transformation of grief into patriotic nationalism. Linking Freud’s description of mourning as work with Derrida’s articulation of grief as ‘a work working at its own unproductivity’, I explore how grief has been paired with icons of American nostalgia, such as Norman Rockwell, as well as kitschy souvenirs from Ground Zero (...) vendors, and, through this pairing, been transformed into a motive force for war. A central part of this operation, I argue, is the process of identification with the traumatic event. Identification, what Freud describes as a ‘binding force’, takes place across diverse fields - from White House speeches, to kitsch memorabilia made available immediately following the attacks. Identification with the event enables identification with the nation - an operation immediately reifying the official rhetoric of ‘Us against Them’ propounded by President Bush and his advisers. As grief over 9/11 is transformed into a perpetual rationale for war, that day becomes a new origin conveniently obliterating all that came before regarding the history of US nation-building and its own brand of terrorism. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which 1970s French feminists who participated in the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de libération des femmes – MLF) wielded the spectre of lesbianism as an American idiosyncrasy to counteract the politicisation of lesbianism in France. It argues that the erasure of lesbian difference from the domain of French feminism was a necessary condition for making ‘woman’ an amenable subject for incorporation into the abstract unity of the French nation, wherein heterosexuality is conceived as a (...) democratic crucible where men and women harmoniously come together and differences are deemed divisive. Looking at the history of feminism from the standpoint of a lesbian perspective reveals unforeseen continuities between French ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ genealogies insofar as they rest on common heterosexual and racial foundations. Finally, the article demonstrates that the alleged un-Frenchness ascribed to the word ‘lesbian’ in the 1970s feminist movement spectrally returned in the 1990s when the word ‘gender’ was, in its turn, deemed radically foreign to the French culture by feminist researchers. Fiercely reactionary constituencies against the legalisation of same-sex marriage have more recently taken up this rhetorical weapon against sexual and racial minorities. (shrink)

Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics relates to and informs eminently contemporary accounts of feminist ethics in the Western continental feminist canon. To date only a few scholars have emphasized this connection. In this work, I show the centrality of Beauvoirian philosophy to contemporary philosophical discussions by elucidating the influence of Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics on Judith Butler’s feminist philosophy. While I acknowledge other possible influences, especially by French philosophers, on Butler’s work, I find it important to emphasize Beauvoir’s contributions as they have not (...) received the attention they deserve. My paper shows how Beauvoir’s account of agency as an ambiguous becoming reverberates in Butler’s theory of gender performativity developed in her early writings. I consider Butler’s theory of gender performativity to have existentialist roots based on the existentialist perception of the subject as a becoming that never coincides with itself. I also discuss how Butler takes on some basic ethical questions which Beauvoir already accentuates in her writings. I focus on three main points of intersection between the two philosophers, which are vulnerability and interconnectedness, violence and inevitability of ethical failure, and finally the ambiguity and opaqueness that come with situated ethics. (shrink)

: Catherine Malabou is a professor of philosophy at Paris-Nanterre. A collaborator and student of Jacques Derrida, her work shares some of his interest in rigorous protocols of reading, and a willingness to attend to the undercurrents of over-read and "too familiar" texts. But, as she points out, this orientation was shared by Hegel himself. Arguing against Heidegger, Kojève, and other critics of Hegel, the book in which this Introduction appears puts Hegel back on the map of the present.

Embodied interface agents are designed to ease the use of technology. Furthermore, they present one possible solution for future interaction scenarios beyond the desktop metaphor. Trust and believability play an important role in the relationship between user and the virtual counterpart. In order to reach this goal, a high degree of anthropomorphism in appearance and behavior of the artifact is pursued. According to the notion of the Uncanny Valley, however, this actually may have quite the opposite effect. This article provides (...) an analysis of the Uncanny Valley effect from a cultural and gender studies perspective. It invites readers to take a closer look at the narratives that influence the production of anthropomorphic artifacts. The article starts with a short introduction of the idea of the Uncanny Valley and gives a brief overview of current artifacts. Following this, a semiotic view on computer science is proposed, which in a further step serves as an epistemological grounding for a gender-critical rereading of the Turing test. This perspective will be supported by analyzing a classic story of user and artifact—E.T.A. Hoffmann’s narration of Olimpia. Finally, the special character of anthropomorphic artifacts is discussed by taking Freud’s concept of “Das Unheimliche”, as well as theories of identity formation into consideration, closing with a plea for a more diverse artifact production. (shrink)

Dying is easy; comedy is hard. Comedy is sovereign. I begin with an excerpt from Bertolt Brecht’s Fugitive Conversations. Ziffel, a physicist, is chatting with the worker Kalle: For humor, I always think of the philosopher Hegel.... He had the makings of one of the greatest humorists among the philosophers.... I read his book The Great Logic once, when I had rheumatism and couldn’t move. It’s one of the greatest humorous works of world literature. It treats of the way of (...) life of concepts, those slippery, unstable, irresponsible existences; how they abuse one another and fight with knives and then sit down together to supper as though nothing had happened.... They can live... (shrink)

Back in October 2015 I had the opportunity to chair the book launch for all three works discussed in this review essay. At the event, Shirley Anne Tate said, “Black feminist theory is the theory”. The comment referred to how it is not ‘just’ that Black feminist theory is typically marginalised within institutional contexts and academic scholarship, ‘even’ within critical, feminist and poststructural work, but also to highlight the capacity of Black feminist scholarship to unpick and destabilise the known and (...) knowable in ways that are profoundly ontological, and which offer potential routes to meaningful social change through the hard task of working across difference. The three books reviewed here by Shirley Anne Tate, Suryia Nayak and Shona Hunter are theoretically rich and complex in breadth, scope and range, drawing on extensive Black feminist scholarship, as well as critical race, critical feminist, psychosocial, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, decolonial and poststructural approaches. Each book is embedded in everyday practices and social processes, offering multi-layered movement across different spatial-social and affective scales in ways that allow ‘big’ insights to emerge from the locatedness and particularity of human experience. They are reviewed in turn and some concluding comments identify important commonalities across the texts. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of the political agency of Cultural Studies within the contemporary conjuncture. It begins by examining critical polemics around culture and postmodernity and moves on to consider Bennett's Foucauldian approach to cultural criticism. Although critical of Bennett's approach, the paper retains the Foucauldian notion of governmentality as the explanation of governance as a form of rule. The relevance of governance to cultural studies is shown through the argument that the political agency of cultural studies rests on (...) an administrative structure that can no longer be verified empirically or conceptually. The argument proceeds by proposing that the liquidation of this political agency has been caused by the cultural agency of postmodernity, to which administrative and political authority is subordinate. Governance is the political expression of this state of affairs. After outlining the general features of governance the paper concludes with a discussion of how the political agency of culture is expressed through governance. (shrink)

This paper uses a semiotic, performative theory of language and post-colonial theory to argue that nursing's representations of ‘multiculturalism’ need to be grounded in a theory of whiteness, an historicized understanding of how ethnic/cultural differences come to be represented in the ways they are and informed by Foucault's notions of power/knowledge. Using nursing education and ‘cultural compentency’ as examples, the paper draws on a range of literatures to suggest more critical and politically productive ways of approaching difference from within nursing's (...) largely white interpretive framework. (shrink)

Judith Butler's theory of the constitution of subjectivity conceptualizes the subject as a performative materialization of its social environment. In her theory Butler utilizes Louis Althusser's notion of interpellation, and she critiques the constitutive paradoxes to which its tautological framing leads. Although there is no pre-existing subject, as it is constituted in the turn to the interpellative hail, Butler nonetheless theorizes a guilt and compulsion acting on an “individual” that compels his or her turn to answer the hail. There is (...) a price to pay for subjectivity in Butler's schema: the reprimand of the interpellative law that punishes at the same time as it constitutes. But a return to Althusser's text finds that he does not rely so much on coercion and guilt in his explanation of the subject's answer to the hail. Althusser can instead be read as suggesting that we are already an instantiation and enactment of power-ideology and, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, are already the principle of our own “subjection.” This contests the notion that we are in any way compelled to submit to an external, punitive force to become subjects. As subjects, we are always-already the embodiment of the field of society-power-ideology. (shrink)

Although clinical criteria ultimately determine the pathological diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, ‘Alzheimer’s’ is also an ordinary sign, falling within a range of other possible signs, values and beliefs that define and are used to interpret dementia and mental diseases. While looking at talk-in-interaction in which two people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s interact with other people, this article tries to show that the way in which both lay and professional people interpret Alzheimer’s signs allows us to shed some light upon the core (...) of the traditional and controversial dichotomy between normal and pathological. The interactions analyzed in this paper show how people oppose biomedical discourse, suggesting that other forms of interpreting aging and forgetfulness are possible. It has opened multiple cartographies or varied spheres of communicability influenced by the signs of Alzheimer’s. (shrink)

This article takes up the work of Judith Butler in order to present a vision of ethics that avoids two common yet problematic positions: on the one hand, the skeptical position that ethical norms are so constitutive of who we are that they are ultimately impossible to assess and, on the other hand, the notion that we are justified in our commitment to any ethical norm that appears foundational to our identity. With particular attention to the trajectory of Butler’s project (...) from The Psychic Life of Power to Giving an Account of Oneself, the article discusses the shortcomings of these two positions and the virtues of the alternative account that Butler develops during this period. (shrink)

This article draws out a critical, yet under-appreciated political theme in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, namely his emphasis on guilt and atonement. First, the article assesses how Adorno’s Marxism allows him to think justice and guilt beyond the familiar legalistic frame. Second, the article reconstructs Adorno’s treatment of guilt as a distinctly political capacity to imagine one’s boundedness and indebtedness to others, and the affective engine enabling us to engage in a political ethic distinct from familiar categories of reparation. Third, the (...) article shows how the themes of guilt and atonement give us a more complete picture of Negative Dialectics. This inquiry also intervenes in contemporary debates regarding the political status and emancipatory potential latent within guilt-feelings, and claims Adorno gives us a path forward to imagine the relation between guilt and politics in a novel way. (shrink)

Climate change presents urgent ethical challenges. It causes us to revisit what it means to ‘do’ professionalism and invites us to enter what Fisher described as the ‘forgotten zone’ of human-nature relationships, posing the troubling question of whether we can continue to valorise a version of being human on the same terms as before.This article begins by considering the relevance of global warming to professional practice, foregrounding the commitment to do no harm. It poses as problematic the manner in which (...) climate change knowledges have been taken up by the ‘psy subject’. It concludes by considering how we might story different versions of being alive in, and to, the natural world. (shrink)

: Contrasting the work of Genevieve Lloyd, Elizabeth Grosz, and Moira Gatens with the poststructuralist philosophy of Judith Butler, this paper identifies a distinctive "Australian" feminism. It argues that while Butler remains trapped by the matter/representation binary, the Spinozist turn in Lloyd and Gatens, and Grosz's work on Bergson and Deleuze, are attempts to think corporeality.

This article aims at theorizing a creative and processual theory of non-heterosexual identity. It will be argued that, so far, scholars have tended to theorize non-heterosexual identity from a monologic perspective, which establishes one-sidedly a casual and/or unproblematic relation between the emergence of forms of psychological suffering and the development of a non-heterosexual identity. Although it must be recognized that such a claim is important at a political level, at a subjective level, it leaves non-heterosexual people destined to be flooded (...) by distressing and painful emotional states. To counter monologism within theorisations of non-heterosexual identity development, without ignoring the negative impacts of heteronormativity, it will be argued that non-heterosexual identity needs to be theorized 1) as part of a creative process situated in a specific sociohistorical context marked by heteronormativity, 2) as part of a situated process that produces and never ceases to produce multiple effects (self-states), which are unified to create an identity, and 3) as part of a situated process of creation that can be artificially transformed through art. These are the three claims that will move forward the argument of this article. (shrink)