In this article I explore how cosmopolitanism can be a challenge for ordinary language philosophy. I also explore cosmopolitan aspects of Stanley Cavell’s ordinary language philosophy. Beginning by considering the moral aspects of cosmopolitanism and some examples of discussions of cosmopolitanism in philosophy of education, I turn to the scene of instruction in Wittgenstein and to Stanley Cavell’s emphasis on the role of autobiography in philosophy. The turn to the autobiographical dimension of ordinary language philosophy, especially its use of “I” (...) and “We”, becomes a way to work on the tension between the particular and the universal claims of cosmopolitanism. I show that the autobiographical aspects of philosophy and the philosophical significance of autobiographical writing in ordinary language philosophy can be seen as a test of representativeness—a test of the ground upon which one stands when saying “I”, “We” and “You.”. (shrink)

The Portable Kristeva. Edited by Kelly Oliver New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xxix + 410 pp., $21.00, £13.95 paper. The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the Present. Edited by Timothy Unwin, xxiii + 281 pp. £37.50, $59.95 cloth £13.95, $18.95 paper. Insurgent Identities: Class, Community, and Protest in Paris from 1848 to the Commune. By Roger V. Gould, viii + 253 pp. $40.95, £32.75 cloth $15.95, £12.75 paper. The State of the Nation: Government and the (...) Quest for a Better Society. By Derek Bok, 493 pp. $35.00 cloth. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy, and Religious Implications. By Michael Ruse, 299 pp. £11.99 paper. Economic Laws and Economic History. By Charles P. Kindleberger, xi + 191 pp. £14.95, $18.95 paper £32.50, $54.95 cloth. An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. By Michael Stanford, viii + 292 pp. $54.95, £45.00 cloth $29.95, £14.99 paper. The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain. By Kevin J. H. Dettmar xv + 276 pp. £45.00 cloth £20.50 paper. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. By Patricia Ingham, ix + 197 pp. n.p.g. The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. By Leo Damrosch, xiv + 384 pp. $39.95, cloth. Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. By Arihiro Fukudo, xiii + 175 pp. £35.00. Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals. By Creighton E. Gilbert, xiii + 316 pp., $85.00, £76.50. Leaving the Cave: Evolutionary Naturalism in Social‐Scientific Thought. By Pat Duffy Hutcheon, xvi + 504 pp. $55.00 cloth. The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England. By M. Lindsay Kaplan Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature & Culture, xii + 137 pp. £32.50, $49.9 cloth. The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680–1780. By Margaret R. Hunt, xiii + 353 pp.n.p.g. History Continues. By Georges Duby, translated by A. Goldhammer, xvi + 149 pp. $14.95, £ 11.95 paper. Friedrich Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations. Edited by Daniel Breazeale, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. xlvii + 276 pp. $49.95 cloth $15.95 paper. Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan. By Risto Saarinan, viii + 207 pp. $77.25, £35.00 cloth. Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes, Harvard Historical Studies, 117, xii + 404 pp. $55.00 cloth. Chronicles of the Vikings: Records, Memorials and Myths. Edited by R. I. Page., 239 pp. $50.00 cloth $17.95 paper. Ideas and Policies Under Labour 1945–1951. By Martin Francis, vi + 269 pp. £40.00 cloth. Aesthetics: The Classic Readings. Edited by David E. Cooper, vi + 276 pp. $ 54.95 cloth $ 19.95 paper. Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. By Max Paddison, xii + 378 pp. £15.95 paper. Medieval Stereotypes and Modern Antisemitism. By Robert Chazan, xiii + 189 pp. $35.00 cloth. Umwelt‐Lesebuch: Green Issues in Contemporary German Writing. Edited by Axel Goodbody, ix + 197 pp. £35.00, £9.99 paper. Understanding Contemporary Germany. By Stuart Parkes, xxxii + 247 pp., £13.99 paper. Cultural‐Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Edited by Axel Honneth, Thomas McCarthy, Claus Offe, and Albrecht Wellmer, 314 pp. n.p.g. Reflections of Change: Children's Literature Since 1945. Edited by Sandra L. Beckett, xi + 203 £ 43.95 cloth. The Arnolfini Betrothal: Medieval Marriage and the Enigma of Van Eyck's Double Portrait. By Edwin Hall, xxi + 180 pp. $50.00. Nineteenth‐Century Literary Realism: Through the Looking Glass. By Katherine Kearns, X + 310 PP. £40.00, $59.95. Socrates and Aristophanes. By Leo Strauss, 332 pp. $15.95, £12.75 paper. The Clock and the Mirror. Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine. By Nancy G. Siraisi, xiv + 361 pp. cloth $49.50, £37.50 cloth. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. By Catherine Wilson, 280 pp., $18.95, £14.95 paper. Intelligence de l'anticommunisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris. By Pierre Grémion, 645 pp. 240 FF. A City in Conflict: Troyes During the French Wars of Religion. By Penny Roberts, Studies in Early Modern History, x + 228 pp., £40.00 cloth. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. By Alison Weber, xi + 183 pp., $15.95 paper. Heresy and Literacy, 1000–1530. Edited by Peter Biller and Anne Hudson, xxv + 313 pp., $19.95, £13.95, paper. The Commercialization of English Society, 1000–1500. 2nd ed. By Richard H. Britnell, Manchester Medieval Studies, xvi + 281 pp. $24.95, £35.00 cloth £12.00 paper. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe. By Rogers Brubaker, 202 pp. n.p.g. (shrink)

Albert Camus's existential thinking has been the object of renewed interest over the past decade. Political theorists have looked to his work to shed light on the contradictions and violence of modernity and the dynamics of postcolonial justice. This article contends that Camus's account of the modern human condition provides a means of engaging critically with one of the most compelling ideas linked to thinking about global politics today: cosmopolitanism. By developing Camus's position on absurdity and rebellion, it suggests that (...) the idea of cosmopolitanism should be situated in a post-foundationalist and post-teleological nexus to prevent it becoming a new political ideology of immutable truth. In order to make this argument, the article focuses on how Camus's thinking supports a rebellious cosmopolitan disposition towards global transformations. In so doing, it shows that cosmopolitanism must strive against the injustices of a deeply divided world, yet at the same time accept theoretical, factual and moral limits on its vision and actions. (shrink)

We are particularly interested in how poetry and phenomenological research come together to increase understanding of human phenomena. We are further interested in how these more aesthetic possibilities of understanding can occur within a community context, that is the possibility of a process in which understanding is shared through an ongoing process of participation. In this way phenomenologically-oriented understandings may meaningfully speak of that which is common between us as well as that which may be uniquely lived for each of (...) us in terms of its individual context and nuance. In this paper we reflect on a process by which we engaged with participants to poetically re-present a description of an experiential phenomenon. As part of this process we offered an evocative description of a health care scenario, and facilitated collectively created ‘embodied responses’ inspired by the interactive form of Japanese Renga. We ask the question: “What kind of phenomenology is this?” Through so doing we attempt to address the theme of this special issue, namely, a focus on a wide embrace of the notion of evidence. We do this by drawing out the epistemological implications of a phenomenological approach that attends to the ‘awakening of presences’ in embodied and linguistic ways. In this pursuit we are assisted by the writings of Gendlin, Gadamer, Levinas and Shotter. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject has become lost; or, (...) more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Canadian media coverage of street sex work has steadily increased. The majority of this interest pertains to graphic violence against street sex workers, most notably from Vancouver, British Columbia. In this article, the authors analyze newspaper coverage that appeared in western Canadian publications between 2006 and 2009. In theorizing the violence both depicted and perpetrated by newspapers, the authors propose an analytic framework capable of attending to the process of othering in all of its complexity. To (...) this end, the authors supplement a Foucauldian analysis of abjection by considering the work of Judith Butler along with Julia Kristeva's conceptualization of abjection. Using excerpts from western Canadian newspapers, the authors illustrate how the media's discursive practices function as triggers for the process of cultural abjection by inscribing street sex workers with images of defilement. The authors argue that newspaper coverage of street sex workers reinforces the inviolability of normalized life by constantly reiterating the horror reserved for abjected bodies. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as (...) a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

Most readers of Habermas would not classify him as an existential thinker. The view of Habermas as a philosopher in German Idealist and Critical traditions from Kant to Hegel and Marx to the Frankfurt School prevails among Continental as much as among analytic philosophers. And the mainstream Anglo-American reception of his work and politics is shaped by the approaches of formal analysis rather than those of existential and social phenomenology or even current American pragmatism. One may argue that both these (...) readings eclipse richer existential dimensions of a thinker who challenges the notorious methodological and political splits among analytic, Continental and pragmatist orientations. I argue that Habermas’ critical relation to Heidegger’s a historical history of Being and his misguided political career cannot explain a competing narrative of his own affirmative appropriation of existential-ethical dimensions of thought and activism. Second, if one sets in the foreground this competing narrative, there emerges a weak thesis, whether or not a plausible complementarity between the communications critical social theory and concrete existential categories can be established. Third, one may inquire further into a stronger thesis whether or not this link must be developed in order to render Habermas’ own theory of a communicatively competent self sufficiently concrete and critical. (shrink)

Abstract: The cosmopolitan imagination constructs a world order in which the idea of human rights is an operative principle of justice. Does it also construct an idealisation of human rights? The radicality of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, as developed by Kant, lay in its analysis of the roots of organised violence in the modern world and its visionary programme for changing the world. Today, the temptation that faces the cosmopolitan imagination is to turn itself into an endorsement of the existing order of (...) human rights without a corresponding critical analysis of the roots of contemporary violence. Is the critical idealism associated with Kantian cosmopolitanism at risk of transmutation into an uncritical positivism? We find two prevailing approaches: either the constitutional framework of the existing world order is presented as the realisation of the cosmopolitan vision, or cosmopolitanism is turned into a utopian vision of a world order in which power is subordinated to the rule of international law. I suggest that the difficulties associated with both wings of cosmopolitanism threaten the legitimacy of the project and call for an understanding and culture of human rights that is less exclusively "conceptual" and more firmly grounded in social theory. (shrink)

While nursing practice embodies certain observable and sometimes habitual actions, much inheres in these actions that is not immediately discernible. Taking on Lyotard's exegesis of the unpresentable, I undertake an analysis of the unpresentable as it occurs in nursing practices. The unpresentable is a place of alterity often excluded from dominant discourses. Yet this very alterity is what practising nurses face day after day. Drawing from two nursing situations, one from a hermeneutic phenomenological study and the other from the literature, (...) I elucidate the unpresentable from a nursing point of view. Evoking Lyotard as well as selected philosophers from the continental philosophical tradition, I also question whether nursing in its present discourse is capable of responding to the unpresentable in nursing situations. Through the philosophical stance of presentation and representation, I delineate the urgent need to bring the otherness of the unpresentable into our nursing discourse. Nurses in practice confront a wide array of human differences and diversities and come to the realization that no framework alone can ever really have primacy over the multiform presentations of human suffering that so strikingly evoke alterity. (shrink)

Academics should produce quality scholarly research. However, the demands of the marketised, neoliberal higher education institution and the increase in the academic’s bureaucratic and administrative tasks do not allow for adequate engagement with the deep work and slow forms of scholarship that are needed to produce cutting-edge and insightful research. Many academics find it challenging to think critically and creatively under such conditions, yet they are unwilling to fill their time with shallow work instead. Thus, they are torn between producing (...) an institutionally-determined number of research outputs, and striving towards producing quality scholarly work that advances knowledge in the academic’s discipline. Reading groups serve to rework this tension by providing a communal and scheduled place and mind-space for reading major academic works. Reading takes time and persistence. We find that setting aside time and creating creative spaces for reading groups offer an opportunity for silent revolt against the pressures of the higher education institution. In this (post)qualitative inquiry we diffractively read – “through one another” – two autoethnographical accounts to experiment with our experiences of various reading groups over a period of three years while positioning ourselves in relation to Barad’s notion of diffraction. This speculative experimentation entails a myriad of ideas and methods that serve to decentre hegemonic, monolithic knowledge systems through seeking alternative ways of knowing, and recognises the importance of the entanglement of matter and meaning in tracing (and countering) the social relations produced in neoliberalist contexts. Such (re)thinking is thus a vital counterpoint to the neoliberal obsessions of the higher education context, (re)directing the scholar to new non-autonomous and mutable landscapes. (shrink)

Through the many reinterpretations of Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche (1919) within French Postmodernism, in recent decades, the uncanny has become a vague synonym for the methodology of deconstruction. The article aims to disambiguate the uncanny by reestablishing its characterizing nucleus and relocating it within the aesthetics through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell. The American philosopher claims that this feeling can be generated by drawing attention to the ordinary, which is so close and familiar to fade out of focus. Cavell and (...) the German Philosopher Juliane Rebentisch following him show that artistic practices can reinforce this experience, as through displacements and dislocations, they deprive objects of daily use and ordinary matters of their familiarity and force us to look more closely at their material, sensorial, and phenomenological dimensions. In this way, Cavell and Rebentisch offer a path to reconstitute a stable conceptual framework for defining the uncanny, linking it to Freud’s definition of something familiar appearing in an unfamiliar light. At the same time, they also propose a novelty by interpreting the uncanny not as inherently frightening and disturbing but as a compelling affective state that encourages a willingness to reappropriate and rediscover the ordinary. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

The question of how the university can relate to the world is centuries old. The poles of the debate can be characterized by the plea for an increasing instrumentalization of the university as a producer and provider of useful knowledge on the one hand (cf. the knowledge factory), and the defense of the university as an autonomous space for free inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake on the other hand (cf. the ivory tower). Our current global predicament, (...) however, forces us to rethink the relation between university and world. Indeed, an easy nstrumentalization of the university for the purposes of society is no longer possible in troubled times when the future of society itself seems to be at stake. Nevertheless, urgent societal concerns do need to be addressed by the university. Hence, the disinterested position seems a highly irresponsible option. The aim of this dissertation is to reconsider the relation between the university and the world from an educational perspective by addressing the question “How to situate study in the relation between university and society?” The dissertation consists of three parts. In Part One, the existing literature on the relation between university and society will be discussed. The first chapter discerns two main approaches to this issue, namely the transcendental-philosophical approach (cf. the idea of the university) and the critical-sociological approach (cf. academic capitalism) that conceive of the university, respectively, as an idea and as an organization. By means of an excursus on the emergence of the university in the Middle Ages, the case is made for an ecological approach to the university. In the second chapter, the work of two authors who have recently adopted such an ecological approach is briefly presented. Whereas Ronald Barnett’s theory of the ecological university is situated more in the transcendental-philosophical tradition, Susan Wright’s investigations of the university in the knowledge ecology can be placed in the critical-sociological tradition. Both conceptions, however, are hinged on an institutional understanding of the university. In line with recent developments in social theory, namely the focus on practices, it is proposed to work towards an ecology of study practices. Part Two presents Isabelle Stengers’ idea of the ecology of practices. The third chapter elucidates Stengers’ work on scientific practices by first situating it within the so-called Science Wars, which provided the impetus to elaborate a theoretical framework for a civilized dialogue between scientists and the broader public. The basic tenets and concepts of her approach, such as the understanding of practice as a set of requirements and obligations, are presented, explained, and discussed. In the fourth chapter, the focus shifts from scientific practices to study practices. Assisted by Stengers’ writings on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, this chapter aims to flesh out Whitehead’s description of the university as a ‘home of adventures’ in order to come to an educational understanding of the study practices of the university. A conceptual inquiry into how study practices activate certain worldly problems and turn them into matters of study is presented. Part Three develops the conceptual work on study practices further in relation to the activities of the Palestinian experimental university Campus in Camps. Chapter Five presents the work of Campus in Camps and explains how it relates to the theoretical discussion offered in the second part. On the basis of Stengers’ conception of practice, which discerns requirements and obligations as vital ingredients, this chapter argues that life in exile is what drives the study practices of Campus in Camps, and hence, that it is the issue of life in exile that participants are obligated to when they study. Whereas Chapter Five is focused on what is being studied in Campus in Camps, Chapter Six inquires in to the specific requirements its activities need to fulfill in order to be study practices; in other words, how the participants study. Four requirements are discerned that, taken together, seem indispensable to understand the study practices of Campus in Camps; namely, storytelling, comparing, mapmaking, and using. The concluding chapter returns to the research question and again takes up the main ideas developed in the dissertation, such as the adventure of study and the cohabitation of scientific and study practices in the university. The last two sections of the conclusion deal with two remaining issues of a more practical nature; namely, how to relate to institutionalization when working from a practice-theoretical point of view, and lastly the question of what can be done. In all, and returning to the initial problem, the dissertation asks what it means to conceive of the university as situated by and engaged with worldly questions. (shrink)

In this essay, I trace the development of Julia Kristeva's theory and practice of “the subject in procession trial” from her semiotic works of the 1960s to her psychoanalytic writings of the 1970s and 1980s. I read Kristeva's exploration of this “subject in procession trial” as contributing to a postmodern feminist ethics.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a wildly heterogeneous lived experience of stressed embodiment. Many children, youths and adults with ASD are unable to access meaningful, relevant physical activity programmes because of the complexities associated with their behavioural, emotional and communicative idiosyncrasies. This paper describes an approach to designing, implementing and evaluating a movement-education-based embedded curriculum which was developed using semiotic phenomenology as a theoretical framework for observations, description and analysis of lived experiences of ASD.

Essays explore the significance of Julia Kristeva’s concept of intimate revolt for social and political philosophy. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and novelist Julia Kristeva has explored how global crises threaten people’s ability to revolt. In a context of widespread war, deepening poverty, environmental catastrophes, and rising fundamentalisms, she argues that a revival of inner psychic experience is necessary and empowering. “Intimate revolt” has become a central concept in Kristeva’s critical repertoire, framing and permeating her understanding of (...) power, meaning, and identity. New Forms of Revolt brings together ten essays on this aspect of Kristeva’s work, addressing contemporary social and political issues like immigration and cross-cultural encounters, colonial and postcolonial imaginations, racism and artistic representation, healthcare and social justice, the spectacle of global capitalism, and new media. Sarah K. Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge. Rebecca Tuvel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rhodes College. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I here explore how an ethics of rhythm can shed light on what promotes and inhibits recognition between people across our vulnerable lives, and the need for a renewal of the philosophy of pedagogy. I argue that philosophy itself has contributed to a certain oblivion regarding how we follow and create rhythmic societies, the need for a more profound and fine-tuned listening attitude as a philosophical-ethical marker, using among others Barthes concept of rhuthmos, Kierkegaards concept of repetition, Herbart’s concept (...) of pedagogical tact and Kristeva’s existential relationship. What forms of imposed rhythms of life can be said to cast light on new ways of living together today? I argue that rhythms affect, shape and set boundaries for interpersonal relationships. Moreover, that they serve as incentives for an ethic, or better; as views, perspectives and concepts to think with when describing the rhythm of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Our conversation stems from a collaborative, fieldwork-based project on Chinese Islam, and on Chinese Muslim women’s rights, within a secular political ideology and legislative rights framework. Dialogue was a defining feature throughout the years of field investigation and research, fusing autobiographical and cultural trajectories in what the anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup calls the ‘betweenness’ of intersubjectively created experience and knowledge. The premise for our conversation lies in the claim that insufficient attention has been paid to developments, which suggest alternatives to the (...) near-axiomatic ethnographic relationship of outside researcher and native informant. In foregrounding the cross-cultural relationship between two researchers, we explore how in the course of fieldwork interaction, boundaries of self and familiar ‘standpoints’ are redrawn. We ask how the history of this collaborative relationship across cultures might question and redefine the classic ethnographic binary of inside and outside, the centre and the margin, the universal and the particular, the ‘western feminist’ and ‘other women’. (shrink)

This article problematizes the usual Christian motif of rescue of sex workers that is disseminated by most faith-based groups working in the field. By focusing upon the problem of prostitution and individual rescue as the primary solution, broader relationships of accountability are neglected and complicated sex worker identifications become impossible. New strategies for thinking about human sexuality are needed that incorporate indecency as a way of questioning traditional moral representations reproduced by Christian outreach projects. In addition, three strategies are outlined (...) that could form counter-narratives for ministry and feminist theological reflection not based upon sex work as a problem to be resolved but instead carving out creative space for mutual engagement between pastoral practitioners and sex industry workers. (shrink)

The paper shows that three heterogeneities in Freud and Kristeva expose the historical emergence, significance, and demise of psychic structures that present obstacles to our progressive political thinking. The oedipal and narcissistic structures of subjectivity represent the persistence of two past, bad forms of authority: paternal law and maternal authority. Contemporary psychoanalysis reveals a humankind going through the loss of this past in a process that opens up a different future of sexual difference in Western cultures.

Dialogue is promoted as a key strategy to ‘solve’ the ‘problem’ of diversity in educational settings. Yet, “[w]hen we select words … We usually take them from other utterances, and mainly from utterances that are kindred to ours in genre, that is in theme, composition or style”. This article problematises the complexities of dialogic engagements with foreigner teachers in educational encounters. Bakhtin’s treatment of polyphonic dialogic encounters provides an analytical frame for explicating the intertextuality of foreigner teacher engagements as not (...) only temporally and culturally, but also individually volatile. The article suggests that dialogic encounters are unpredictably complex, alive and never neutral, and that dialogic engagements can be so fraught with fear that verbal or cross cultural engagements with teacher foreigners must be recognised as risky and dangerous, and not always smooth ‘solutions’ to a ‘problem’. A dual Bakhtinian/kristevan lens expands the analysis to expose the vulnerability of dialogue, through unconscious revelations of teacher subjects that are forever in process. The article culminates in an argument for the crucial importance of a receptive, attentive ethics of care in dialogic engagements with cultural foreigners in educational relationships, to avoid fearful exposure, lifeless dialogue and silence. (shrink)

Thinking the origin in a radical way amounts to thinking the movement by which what does not proceed from something else - what does not have its origin elsewhere - comes to itself, has within itself precisely the ontological energy to detach itself from itself and to exist as origin. In its primordial sense, then, origin is self-origin: it is, becomes, and is known starting from itself. This self-presupposition of the origin constitutes the very advent of Being, its unmotivated and (...) permanent upsurge, which has to be thought in terms of creation. Human creation responds to this ontological genesis, to its indeterminacy and to its incompletion - and, consequently, to its temporality. At once individual and collective - that is, both psychical and social - human creation alone can give meaning to ontological genesis. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

The controversial case of Terri Schiavo came to a close on March 31, 2005, with her death following the removal of a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy tube. This event followed years of controversy and social upheaval. Voices from across the entire political and cultural spectrums filled the airwaves and op-ed pages of major newspapers. Protests ensued outside of Ms. Schiavo’s care facility. Ms. Schiavo’s parents published videos of their daughter on the internet in an effort to prove that she was not (...) in a vegetative state and could potentially recover. There is a certain mystery to the entire controversy given the fact that, legally, it was largely a matter of settled law. Precedent cases and legal statutes clearly set out the proper procedures and decisions to be followed in this case. Nonetheless, powerful challenges and virulent opposition to these standards arose. Through an investigation of this case as well as a comparative study of the case of Dax Cowart (in particular, the documentary depictions of Dax Cowart’s case) and of a photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, I plan to investigate the source of these social upheavals and hypothesize that they were largely the result of a phenomenological reaction to the human face. (shrink)

The research presented in this work represents reflections in the light of Julia Kristeva's philosophy concerning empirical data drawn from research describing the everyday life of people dependent on ventilators. It also presents a qualitative and narrative methodological approach from a person‐centred perspective. Most research on home ventilator treatment is biomedical. There are a few published studies describing the situation of people living at home on a ventilator but no previous publications have used the thoughts in Kristeva's philosophy applied to (...) this topic from a caring science perspective. The paper also addresses what a life at home on a ventilator may be like and will hopefully add some new aspects to the discussion of philosophical issues in nursing and the very essence of care. Kristeva's philosophy embraces phenomena such as language, abjection, body, and love, allowing her writings to make a fruitful contribution to nursing philosophy in that they strengthen, expand, and deepen a caring perspective. Moreover, her writings about revolt having the power to create hope add an interesting aspect to the work of earlier philosophers and nursing theorists. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis, in its purist mainstream sense, tends to be considered as an isolationist discipline that steers clear of interdisciplinary connections with other psychotherapies. Its drive for purity does not open up to influences that cast as alien and a threat to its core principles. We refer to Hegelian dialectics in an attempt to offer an alternative approach to interdisciplinarity in clinical psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis entertains a complex dialectical relationship with the major theories it opposes. In this dynamic, psychoanalysis begins by negating (...) the non-psychoanalytic theory as a part of self-negation (Hegel calls this phase self-alienation). But in its own process of growth, it negates this negation and reabsorbs the alienated self part. Reabsorbing the negated component, psychoanalysis does not revert to its original identity but becomes sublated into a different, more complex idea. In this epistemological process, psychoanalysis deals with its own practical and theoretical anomalies and lacunas. The paper illustrates this process using three central developments in the history of psychoanalysis: empathy in self psychology (connection with Rogers' humanist psychology), short-term dynamic psychotherapy (connection with short, intensive therapies), and mentalization-based psychotherapy (connection with cognitive-behavioral therapies). In all of these cases, psychoanalysis integrates components it previously opposed and changes these components to their own, specific characteristics. We address the epistemological shifts in the scientific status of psychoanalysis and show their connection to dialectics. Finally, we conclude that dialectical development is what allows psychoanalysis to remain relevant and up to date, to be open to interdisciplinary influences without its identity and tradition coming under threat. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the contemporary international refugee regime is grounded in a paradigm of ‘homesickness’, which puts the refugee in an inferior position of the supplicant, whose subjectivity is framed by the regime of fixed belonging. In order to address this situation, we need to challenge the ontological primacy of homesickness and embrace ‘homelessness’, which offers the possibility of rethinking the positions of both refugees and non-refugees in ethical terms. While the responsibility of the non-refugees lies in cultivating an (...) ethos of hospitality, the refugee can take hold of her subjectivity through the practice of care of the self. This paper first examines Nietzsche’s thought on homelessness and compares it with Foucault’s reading of the role of anakhōrēsis in the Hellenistic practice of care of the self. It then suggests how, by building on the project of universal hospitality, we can interpret the figure of the refugee through the prism of an ethic of freedom, anchored in a posit... (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)

This article investigates the emotional undercurrents of Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November. I argue that one of the main characters of Jansson’s book is the autumn forest that surrounds the abandoned Moomin house. The decomposing forest is not just an emblem of the inner lives of the guests that gather in the house but is an active character itself: an ambiguous life form that creeps in the house and must be expelled from its living core. I further demonstrate that the (...) emotion of disgust has a crucial role in Jansson’s narrative, and that an adequate analysis of the intentional content of disgust allows us to see what is at issue in the relations between the characters. In my reading, the main insight of Tove Jansson’s last Moomin book is not about loss or sorrow but is about the human capacity to begin anew by composing novel wholes from scraps. (shrink)

This article is intended to work on a number of different levels. First it is concerned with the brain-become-subject as hypothesized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy?. It is concerned with demonstrating the convergence between Deleuze and Guattari's work and the claims of some contemporary neuro-biological theories of consciousness. In particular, I will be comparing Deleuze and Guattari's hypothesis to the work of Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett. Second, it is my contention that the (...) shared themes of this convergence amount to the renewal of a paradigm in the understanding of human consciousness and its relationship to the body, which I have elsewhere called `the new Bergsonism'. The emphasis in the text on themes such as duration, material connectedness and immanence, Becoming, multiplicity, selection and so on, is taken to be self-evidently Bergsonian. The primary task of this particular article is, then, to establish a careful technical demonstration of the existence of a shared set of themes and concepts. I have made this demonstration more concrete by placing it within the context of a discussion of the affective dimensions of the experience of social idiosyncrasy (as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer). My wider agenda is that this demonstration of shared themes in poststructuralism and neuro-science should contribute towards a more general attempt to establish a neo-Bergsonian paradigm at the heart of a new sociology of affect. (shrink)

: This paper responds to comments, queries, and criticisms offered by Alcoff, Bergoffen, and Ferguson at a scholar's session on my work held at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in October 2001. Responding to Alcoff, I highlight my understanding of liberation in the context of a Nietzschean and a Latin American feminism and the politics of conceptualizing "resistance" in postcolonial theory. Responding to Ferguson, I address, among other issues, the often misunderstood distinction between postcolonialism (...) and postmodernism, as well as related implications regarding some postcolonial feminists' qualified appeals to universals and women's rights. Responding to Bergoffen, I advocate on behalf of cultural formations supportive of the feminist affirmation of life and of radical subjectivities that challenge gender orthodoxies. (shrink)

Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance (...) by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border. (shrink)

Critically engages the work of American philosopher Richard J. Bernstein.

In my response to the comments of Vincent Colapietro, Charlene Seigfried, and Gail Weiss on Living Across and Through Skins , I explain pragmatist feminism as an ecological ontology that understands bodies and environments as dynamically co-constitutive. I then discuss the relationship of pragmatist feminism to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Nietzschean genealogy, and Darwinian evolutionary theory. Some of the specific concepts I examine include the anonymous body, the bodying organism, truth as transactional flourishing, and the preservation of racial and ethnic categories.

In my dissertation, I engage in a political history of waste; in particular I look at modern philosophers from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and the way that waste functions alongside narratives of civilization, progress, and perfection. I analyze the political, pedagogical, and other theories of John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. I use Julia Kristevaâs concept of abjection to trace the legacies of these philosophers to the continued and continuing practices of wasting life their work (...) supports and maintains. Social contract theory must have its others, those wasted and abjected to limn the boundary of the âclean and properâ civilized order. Locke abjects waste in his theory of property and I link the use of his term âwastelandâ to the wastelanding of Native Americans. As Kristeva says the forgetting, repressing, or disavowal of abjection leads to the return of its repressed in the form of our âapocalypses.â I discuss Rousseauâs treatment of waste and the way it is ambivalently embraced, which I think is a more appropriate treatment of waste. I also compare Emile and Sophieâs education and argue that his education of women makes waste of their lives. Last, I discuss Kantâs theory of waste and race together, arguing that he redeems all waste and that he makes waste of all races except the white race. He assents to the use of people of color as means for the white raceâs ends, rather than treating them as ends in themselves. Thus, I conclude that social contract theories are wasteful of life and lives and that contract theory should be garbaged for a new political principle: to not make waste of life or lives. (shrink)