In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall, as representative of both the politics of oppression as well as the politics of reconciliation. The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that (...) comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy. (shrink)

Art’s Way Out invites readers to examine how what we call “art” enters a conditioned relationship with the polity that leaves the occasion of education and the condition of culture in a quandary that is at best inept and at worse oppressive. There are two reasons for this: because any relationship between art and education is aporetic by dint of how they have emerged in between their respective autonomous and heteronomous forms of being and knowing; and because in the volatility (...) of representation, any cultural and educational conditioning is bound to vacillate between the same teleological states by which expressions of a political objective find themselves bookended by fascism .This is often overlooked by the constructivist expectations that are commonly invested in art and education. Moreover, any crossing of art with philosophy is bound to fall foul of the excessive desires that we project on them. This has nothing to do w .. (shrink)

This paper argues that in foregoing the questions that emerge from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning, an intrinsic fallacy mistakes the relationship between the arts and education for a simplistic mechanism of signification—a false “ease”—where empty forms are supposedly given meaning by ethical and aesthetic givens as if the pedagogy of art were analogous to an empty room that was (or still needs to be) inhabited. Art’s false “ease” presents a tautology that presumes the relationship between the arts (...) and learning on assumptions that force a false equivalence between (a) the perception of implicit causes that constitute a number of externalised artistic attributes (such as creative, critical, and intuitive forms of thinking and making) by which the arts are instrumentalised, and (b) a number of desired effects that are seen as being equal to the relative value that an arts subject (or discipline) commands in a perceived relationship with the world in terms of its use and therefore function. To counter this distortion this paper makes a case for a pedagogical aesthetics that would unlearn—and thereby exit—the educationalist tautology of art’s false ease. While politically this would mean that the arts are recognized in their ability to think and act outside the traditional notion of schooling as a walled polis, philosophically this represents a challenge to move arts education away from the “spatial” concepts by which dialectical narratives, such as those of form and content, have been hitherto assumed as constructivist signifiers. (shrink)

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, one the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting. 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between womrn and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must event risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

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)

Set principally in or around Seraing, an industrial region in decline just outside of Liège, in Belgium, the films of Jean-Luc and Pierre Dardenne marry geographical and historical-social realism with a series of ethical inquiries into such topics as immigration, unemployment, black market trading and petty crime. To date, critical commentary on the films has tended mainly to read the work of the Dardennes along two lines. The dominant approach uses the work of Emmanuel Levinas as a philosophical touchpoint in (...) order to illuminate the ethical dimension of the Dardenne brothers' films. The second considers the political dimensions of their films. However a third, related body of writing has emerged in later years, one which understands in terms of their relation to what Jürgen Habermas (2006), amongst others, has dubbed the postsecular age. This article locates the Dardennes' films at the intersection between the ethical, the political, and the postsecular, looking to the theologically-inflected philosophy of Gillian Rose to make the case that Seraing serves as the model of what Rose refers to as “the third city” – a postsecular site which challenges easy divisions between politics and ethics. As such Seraing is not, I shall argue, a mere staging post for the moral, political and spiritual problems posed by the films, but its cradle. Paying particular attention to the Dardennes' film Two Days, One Night (Deux Jours, Une Nuit, 2014) I demonstrate what an engagement that turns on existence with and within the city – an engagement that is both political and ethical – might look like. (shrink)

Public health responses to emerging infectious disease rarely try to interrupt the mobility of goods and information. Rather, designed under the rubric of ‘‘public health security,’’ they extend the rationale of free circulation through efforts to intensify movement and communication between international agencies, national health departments, and the pharmaceutical industry. In this way, public health security extends postliberal modes of transnational regulation. This article examines an unfolding scenario which is testing public health’s fidelity to the ethos of international trade agreements: (...) Indonesia has withdrawn from the World Health Organization’s ‘‘virus-sharing’’ scheme because WHO has facilitated the use of Indonesian samples of H5N1 for the commercial development of potentially profitable vaccines without consultation with the Indonesian labs in which they originated. It has been argued that the Indonesian move is one that contests the current securitization of global health. However, I argue that what we are witnessing is the process of emergence of a distinct form of biological sovereignty in the form of rival global health security aggregates, each working to inject a new form of postliberal sovereignty into the field of global public health. (shrink)

Declarations of law, of politics and of ethics have proliferated in contemporary discourses of public life. In this article, a terrain of research is unfurled that addresses the demand and repetition of declaration. Declarations are understood as relations of speech addressed between the masks of law, of sovereignty, of critic and of enemy. It is argued that what is instituted in the declarations of our time is a melancholic relation of speech which disavows the insistence of the remainder. The remainder (...) persists. How then to bear witness to the remainder? Mourning provides some headway in the effort. What remains undeclared here must be mourned. (shrink)

In the clinical practice of palliative medicine, recommended communication models fail to approximate the truth of suffering associated with an impending death. I provide evidence from patients' stories and empiric research alike to support this observation. Rather than attributing this deficiency to inadequate training or communication skills, I examine the epistemological premises of the biomedical language governing the patient-physician communication. I demonstrate that the contemporary biomedicine faces a fundamental aporetic occlusion in attempting to examine death. This review asserts that the (...) occlusion defines, rather than simply complicating, palliative care. Given the defining place of aporia in the care for the dying, I suggest that this finding shape the clinicians' responses to the needs of patients in clinical care and in designing palliative research. Lastly, I briefly signal that a genuinely apophatic voice construing the occlusion as a mystery rather than an aporia may be superior to the present communication and empathy models. (shrink)

Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfreedom such as those ideologically expressed in possessive individualist (...) and libertarian conceptions of freedom. (shrink)

Max Weber is noted for his analysis of the `specific and peculiar rationalism' of western culture. However, his diagnosis of a life disenchanted by reason draws attention to his lesser known formulations of the problem of theodicy - the problem of reconciling pain and misfortune with moral expectations of the world. Weber suggests that cultural responses to this problem change with the increasingly secular rationalization of life. The present paper traces this development from the cultural representation of pain as the (...) embodiment of moral strife in the early modern novel to contemporary images of pain and suffering in medicine, the mass media and film. The comparison suggests that late modernity is confronted by an `inverse' problem of theodicy, in which representations of pain and suffering are disassociated from ethical and political contexts and the quest for meaning within a human frame. (shrink)

Gillian Rose was a philosopher, social theorist, memoirist, and Jewish convert to Christianity who died an untimely death in 1995. She offers a novel account of faith, which grows out of her Hegelian philosophical background inflected by her reading of Kierkegaard and her rediscovered Jewish heritage. For Rose, faith is a mode of social practice. Rose's conception of faith is here reconstructed by translating her obscure jurisprudential idiom into the language of social practices and norms. The conception of secular faith (...) developed by Rose is shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of ethics and politics. The contemporary relevance of Rose's work is made clear through comparison with recent work by Robert Brandom, Robert Adams, and Patrick Deneen. (shrink)

Emotions that run through relations of power are complex and ambivalent, inviting resistance and opposition as much as compliance. While the literature in International Relations broadly accepts em...

In his 1992 text ‘Force of Law’ Jacques Derrida makes the radical claim that the aura of law’s legitimacy is always achieved by virtue of an ideological sleight of hand. I argue that the radicality of this claim does not lie in its abandonment of the rule of law, nor is this claim a call to political quietism. Rather, Derrida charges us with the responsibility of interrogating the moments of law’s force or ideology. Following this suggestion I argue that one (...) important way that the law has maintained its aura of legitimacy is on the basis of an ideological appeal to the presumed natural or transparent nature of sexual complementarity. Through a reading of Hegel’s use of the Greek mythological Antigone, I argue that one important way that the im possibility of the necessary encounter between law and the singular case has been covered over, is by way of an appeal to the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality. The conclusion of my analysis is that the illusion of law’s legitimacy is not necessarily achieved with reference to the feminine, nor by virtue of an appeal to the transparency of heterosexuality, but it is no coincidence that it has been achieved in this way so often in the history of political philosophy either. However, no matter how the illusion of law’s legitimacy is achieved, it will always require a sleight of hand; it will always be ideological and therefore political. This analysis therefore serves as an example of how deconstruction can be mobilized as much more than a philosophical meditation on the impossibility of justice; rather, it offers a mode of analysis of critical importance to social and legal theorists. Key Words: Antigone • Derrida • Hegel • sexual difference. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationships between monumental commemoration and memory, placing Rachel Whiteread's Memorial to the Austrian Jewish Victims of the Shoah (2000) as the physical manifestation of Derrida's archive as a place where memory, power, writing and representation intersect. I consider the context and characteristics of Whiteread's memorial alongside the concept of the crypt, formulated by Derrida in his ‘Fors’ to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's The Wolf Man's Magic Word (1976). I propose that the archive, formed as it (...) as around the crypt, is a place where death and desire co-habit, and that the Holocaust, the subject of Whiteread's sculpture, is itself an archive that has been constructed around what Maria Torok terms the ‘exquisite corpse’. This exquisite corpse of the Holocaust encrypts, even in its own commemoration, the erotics and desires of the ‘Nazi father’ or ‘Hitler in uns’, what Derrida terms ‘the tombstone of the illicit’. This paper poses the question that we are, even as we remember the Jewish dead, simultaneously re-encrypting the forgetful, murderous Nazi father, and advocates that we maintain a watchfulness on the threshold of the archive, the monument, the text, in order to resist total resolution, complete meaning, the forgetful re-inscription of acts of atrocity. (shrink)

If the legitimacy of international humanitarian and human rights law lies, in part at least, in its capacity to confront dehumanising actions in the modern world, we may speak of the limits of this achievement. It is well known that people who commit genocide or crimes against humanity typically dehumanise those against whom their crimes are committed and that the humanitarian and human rights dimensions of international law were developed in response to the radicalisation of this phenomenon. The expanded scope (...) of international criminal justice caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore an idea of humanity in the face of organised attempts to eradicate the very idea of universal humanity. It also caught a cosmopolitan imagination because it seemed to restore the humanity of the perpetrators as well. They were no longer to be treated as beasts liable to the 'punishment' of the victors but to be brought to trial, held accountable for their deeds and converted back into responsible human beings. Today, however, I suggest that we face a double temptation: in confronting those who commit crimes against humanity to represent them as inhuman monsters rather than responsible human beings; in our compassion for victims of crimes against humanity, it is to represent them merely as victims and not as moral and political subjects. In either case, there can arise a reversal of the problem we are trying to address. I do not suggest this tendency is inevitable but where it is present it indicates an insufficiently reflective relation to international law. I address the problem of reversal through a discussion of three authors (Rawls, Habermas and Arendt) and three issues ('pariah peoples', 'criminal states' and 'monstrous perpetrators'). (shrink)

There is an unacknowledged disagreement on what kind of dialogue best supports democracy. Many view democracy as analogous to a law court and so view “democratic dialogue” as a contest between competing advocates who have acquired the kind of “steel trap” critical thinking skills that are ideal for winning in the external marketplace of ideas. Others assume that the propensity to seriously reflect on opposing viewpoints within the minds of individuals is ideal for democratic maintenance. It will be argued here (...) that our love affair with “critical thinking” that tends to support an external battle of ideas harms democracy. It will be argued that the complexity of our common humanity, the complexity of our form of governance, the complexity of the approaches needed to face wicked problems, and the complexity of the internal engine of personal development requires that we learn to readily engage in open truth-seeking dialogue with those who hold opposing viewpoints and in so doing, enhance the dimensionality through which we view the world. With regard to the educational implications, this suggests that, since engaging in dialogue across difference is the essence of the pedagogical framework that anchors Philosophy for Children, Philosophy for Children ought to be embraced as an essential component of any educational enterprise that views cultivating democratic citizenship as part of its mandate. (shrink)

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann , the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in (...) an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we will locate the points of convergence among the factors (the war on terror, sovereignty, and the media) that have produced and reconstituted the legal and ethical status of Guantánamo detainees. (shrink)