In "The History of Sexuality", Foucault maintains that "Western man has become a confessing animal" (1990, 59), thus implying that "man" was not always such a creature. On a related point, Wittgenstein suggests that "man is a ceremonial animal" (1996, 67); here the suggestion is that human beings are, by their very nature, ritualistically inclined. In this paper I examine this crucial difference in emphasis, first by reconstructing Foucault's "genealogy" of confession, and subsequently by exploring relevant facets of Wittgenstein's later (...) thinking. While there are significant correlations between Foucault and Wittgenstein, an important disparity emerges in relation to the question of the "natural." By critically analyzing this, I show how Wittgenstein's minimal naturalism provides an important corrective to Foucault's more extravagant claims. By implication, we see why any radical relativist, historicist, and/or constructivist position becomes untenable on Wittgensteinian grounds, even though Wittgenstein himself is often read as promoting such views. (shrink)

In much recent cultural theory there has been a noticeable turn to testimonial discourse, perhaps especially in the context of finding ways of bearing witness to human suffering, tragedy and trauma.While this shift toward allowing others to speak ‘in the first person’ provides an important and powerful methodological tool, appealing to first-person testimony is also a hazardous enterprise. Drawing on a number of disparate philosophers and writers, in this article I explore some of the central epistemological and ethical problems surrounding (...) testimony. More specifically, I argue that the distinction between truth and sincerity is of fundamental importance here, and as such any unreflective methodological reliance on testimonial discourse is at best misconceived, at worst irresponsible. (shrink)

Early on in Specters of Marx, the first sentence in Exordium reads: ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally’. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Derrida gives the injunction: ‘If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost’. The ghost is the gift Derrida leaves us, yet, what can ghosts teach us about justice and how may (...) we (dare we) learn from them? Derrida invokes Levinas's name for the only time in Specters of Marx, with the line ‘The relation to others – that is to say, justice, writes Levinas’. From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ to ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, the spectral relation between Derrida and Levinas already performs spectral justice. How do we say ‘J'accepte’ to spectral justice – justice that we cannot rightly possess? The figure and logic of the ghost serve not merely rhetorical purposes but, in its non-presence and presence, the ghost becomes the trace of the justice that we can neither own nor disown, but need to learn to live with, even if, in politics and in life, the fear of ghosts remains. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay outlines a Lévinas- and Derrida-inspired politics of reproduction, via opening the ethics of reproduction, something previous work on the topic has omitted. It does so via a reassessment of two notable publications on Lévinas and feminism, Stella Sandford’s essay in the Cambridge Companion to Lévinas and Lisa Guenther’s volume The Gift of the Other: Lévinas and the Politics of Reproduction.11 Stella Sandford, ‘Lévinas, Feminism and the Feminine’. I particularly focus on this essay as its negative presentation of Lévinas’ (...) potential for feminism in one of the main introductory texts on his work is an apparently definite dismissal. There is no space to undertake a full analysis of what Sandford has to say in The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas. There is no doubting her familiarity with Lévinas’ texts, but the way in which she reads them is highly questionable. Her basic assumption is that texts can be treated systematically and she openly rejects Derr... (shrink)

This article explores Richard Rorty’s status in academic political theory in the decades after his conscious departure from disciplinary philosophy. Rorty found a receptive audience in this pluralistic field, and he became a point of orientation in a number of ongoing, research-agenda driving conversations, if often as an extreme example against which interlocutors could define themselves. In like fashion, Rorty refined his own self-conception as a patriotic liberal ironist in the course of his political theoretical engagements. I offer a sketch (...) of political theory’s landscape as a contrast to the reductivism and esotericism Rorty criticized in disciplinary philosophy, and survey his presence in the field over the years substantively, qualitatively, and quantitatively. (shrink)