In this essay, I analyze two memoirs—Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS—which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key (...) terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical “pragmatics” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.

Research on the status and experience of women in academia in the last 30 years has challenged conventional explanations of persistent gender inequality, bringing into sharp focus the cumulative impact of small scale, often unintentional differences in recognition and response: the patterns of 'post-civil rights era' dis­crimination made famous by the 1999 report on the status of women in the MIT School of Science. I argue that feminist standpoint theory is a useful resource for understanding how this sea change in (...) understanding gender inequity was realized. At the same time, close attention to activist research on workplace environment issues suggests ways in which our understanding of standpoint theory can fruitfully be refined. I focus on the implications of two sets of distinctions: between types of epistemic injustice (and correlative advantage) that may affect marginalized knowers; and between the resources of situated knowledge and those of a critical standpoint on knowledge production. (shrink)

This study creates and develops a concept called the untimely-image including two sub-concepts called contours of the new and the untimely-site. The untimely-image concerns the clearing for and the expression of figures of “potential” in thought in the form of moving-images. The aim of these concepts is to form a critical framework for evaluating and conceptualizing political film as expressive, not of the new itself but of its “untimely” contours. The untimely-image, and its many implications, is developed over the course (...) of six chapters. Chapter 1 extensively defines “contours” and “new” as operative in this study, and also introduces a theme that runs through all the chapters: how to think the contours of the new in relation to the cult of the new in consumer culture and in relation to the larger mechanisms of advanced capitalism. Chapter 2 defines the parameters of the untimely-image as specifically regarding moving images, and continues the development of this concept. In Chapters 3 to 6, The Wire serves the double function of complicating and giving specification to the elaboration of the untimely-image as well as a case in which the untimely-image is used as a critical framework. The Wire and the untimely-image relate in processes of juxtaposition, wherein they meet, cross over, separate, and reproblematize each other. An untimely-image is fully defined in relation to concrete political issues. The untimely-image is therefore advanced by articulating the components and characteristics that, independently of the concrete issue, remain in every case, as well as by putting the concept to work regarding two specific problems in The Wire: its expression of blackness and its mapping of advanced capitalism. (shrink)

Spanish Translation of "He/She/They/Ze" (Ergo, 2018).

This paper examines the relationship between violence and the domination of speech in Spinoza’s political thought. Spinoza describes the cost of such violence to the State, to the collective epistemic resources, and to the members of the polity that domination aims to script and silence. Spinoza shows how obedience to a dominating power requires pretense and deception. The pressure to pretend is the linchpin of an account of how oppression severely degrades the conditions for meaningful communication, and thus the possibilities (...) for thinking and acting in common. Because it belongs to human nature to desire to share our thoughts with others, Spinoza believes that most people experience efforts to control our communication to be acutely intolerable. As a result, such unbearable violence threatens the political order that deploys it. I conclude with some speculative remarks about why, in the Theological-Political Treatise, Spinoza consistently deploys the superlative form of the adjective violentus in reference to the domination of thought and speech rather than to other modes of political violence. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of marginalization in cross-cultural communication from the perspectives of hermeneutic philosophy and postcolonial theory. Specifically, it focuses on European colonialism‘s effect on language and communicative practices in Latin America. I argue colonialism creates a deeply sedimented but unacknowledged background of inherited cultural prejudices against which social and political problems of oppression, violence and marginalization, especially towards women, emerge—but whose roots in colonial and imperial frameworks have lost transparency. This makes it especially difficult for postcolonial subjects (...) to meaningfully express their own experiences of psychic dislocation and fragmentation because the discursive background used to communicate these experiences is made up of multiple, sometimes conflicting traditions. To address this problem, I turn to a strategic use of Nietzsche‘s conceptions of subjectivity and language as metaphor to engage the unique difficulties that arise in giving voice to the subaltern experience. Thus, I argue that while colonialism introduces an added layer of complexity to philosophical discussions of language, the concrete particularities and political emergencies of Latin American history necessitate an account of language that can speak to these concrete particularities. To this end, I develop a conception of, what I call, ―hydric life,‖ a postcolonial feminist hermeneutics that better accommodates these cultural specificities. (shrink)

There has been much work highlighting the benefits of autoethnographic research yet little acknowledgement of the demands researching your own life makes on the emotional and mental wellbeing of the researcher. This paper explores the consequences that can arise as a result of autoethnographic research by detailing the crises involved in researching a topic that the researcher has experienced herself. This paper discusses the re-emergence of my grief over the death of my mother as I researched into the experience of (...) other young women who had experienced the death of their mother during their youth. The research process was a journey in which crises were experienced that conflicted and illuminated the emerging findings of the research. The role of the researcher and the researcher’s subjectivity--emotions, feelings, actions--are highlighted as integral to research practice. Accepting vulnerability and problematic feelings and emotions can be seen both as an important part of grieving the loss of a mother but also a significant step in conducting research and being a researcher. (shrink)

Wie wird man der, der man ist? Die Frage ist zweideutig. Zum einen scheint sie danach zu fragen, wie man durch all das, was einem geschieht und was man tut, schließlich zu jener bestimmten Person wird, die man zu einem gewissen Zeitpunkt ist. Zugleich zielt die Frage darauf, wie man das einholt, was man »ist«, es nicht nur ist, sondern wirklich wird. Die Frage wirft also einerseits das Problem der Verkettung von Taten, Umständen und Wirkungen auf, die das Produkt einer (...) bestimmten Veränderung hervorbringen, wie andererseits das Problem jener Prozesse der Aneignung und Anerkennung, durch die ein Selbstverhältnis zu dieser Veränderung möglich wird. Die Serie Breaking Bad geht diesem doppelten Prozess auf eine besondere Weise nach, indem sie eine negative Bildungsgeschichte, die Geschichte einer Gegen-Bildung erzählt. Sie zeigt, dass die Devise, zu werden, was man ist, nicht auf Selbstausschöpfung zielt - die Entfaltung und Ausschöpfung der eigenen Potentiale -, sondern vielmehr auf Selbstwerdung: die Verwandlung unseres Seins in Werden und Wissen, Selbstaneignung und Selbstüberschreitung. (shrink)

Over the last decade, a call for greater “realism” in political theory has challenged the goals and methods that are implicit in much contemporary “normative” theory. However, realists have yet to produce a convincing alternative research program that is “constructive” rather than primarily “critical” in nature. I argue that given their common wariness of a devotion to abstract principles, realists should consider adopting John Dewey’s vision of theoretical expertise as an expansive kind of prediction that engages all of our historical, (...) scientific, and imaginative resources. After demonstrating that realists are in need of such an affirmative vision, I outline Dewey’s original proposal, and elaborate its value in contemporary circumstances as a “predictive” method for political theory that stands between familiar critical and normative approaches. (shrink)

Figuring Naipaul deals with two issues: the writings of the Trinidad-born V.S. Naipaul and the problematic of postcolonial self-representation. In the literary world and among the reading public Naipaul has gained prominence and notoriety in the last two decades. But the critical response to his work has been essentially from what I call the 'mainstream' perspective. In my first Chapter (Part I) I attempt to map various critical trajectories that emerged from the mainstream perspective in the context of Naipaul criticism. (...) In order to contest the tacit assumptions of the mainstream discourse and to figure the representation of the postcolonial world in Naipaul's work I elaborate the patterns in which they both repeat and suggest a certain kind of collusion between the underlying assumptions of the two discourses (Naipaul's own and that of the mainstream criticism). The body of the thesis (Part II), consisting of eight chapters, is largely devoted to a detailed discussion of various ways in which what I call the Naipaul text constructs the postcolonial situation. This discussion elaborates certain recurring ruses and tropes I locate in the Naipaul text. My argument is that the ruses and tropes the text deploys in figuring the subject of the postcolonial world are deeply problematical in that they implicate the text in the hegemonic grand narrative of imperialism. The operation of these ruses and the pattern they constitute in the text are discussed in each Chapter of Part II. The ruses that the text depends on are mainly two: narrative deferral and the ruse of the gaze. The narrative movement of the Naipaul text, as I will show, drawing on the ruses of deferral and the gaze, has no less an aim than that of the project of self-consolidation. That is, these ruses along with tropes of 'centre', 'origin' and 'wholeness' proclaim in Naipaul's writing a certain desire for self-consolidation and self-unification. Between the desire to 'house the subject' and the celebration of a "home" Naipaul's project suspends the subject of the postcolonial world; these aspects are analysed in Chapters Two and Eight of my thesis respectively. But between these two moments, aspects of the text I attempt to unravel, the Naipaul text scapegoats the postcolonial condition. This scapegoating, I will argue, is a necessary condition for the realisation, for Naipaul, of the project of self-consolidation. This operation of the text is figured in the postcolonial dispatches Naipaul constructs. These dispatches, as I read them from Chapters Three to Seven, shape the postcolonial world in the Naipaul text. Each Chapter focuses upon specific works or groups of works by Naipaul. My analysis also engages with various sources the text relies on to prepare its dispatches. Chapter Nine is basically a critique of Naipaul's conception of 'history'; this critique undertakes to analyse Naipaul's utterances about history in general and his historical narrative, The Loss of El Dorado, in specific. My attempt is to show how various narratives of the Naipaul text represent the subject of the postcolonial world. In the process of unravelling the text I attempt to show how one can dislocate a pattern apparent in a text and celebrated by established opinion. I argue that such dislocations are important for conceiving interventionary critical strategies in the postcolonial situation. (shrink)

Imagine a future in which animals had fundamental rights to political participation and voting. What would our towns and cities look like? What kind of infrastructure would we need? And what kind of zoodemocracy would we, animals, co-author? As counterintuitive as it might seem, sometimes what is needed is not a minimal agenda. Animal rights theorists and the animal rights movement more generally have focused for decades on abolishing the farming of animals and on one-issue campaigns such as the abolition (...) of the animal fur trade. These are noble and important pursuits, but what if the driving force to produce meaningful change did not reside in looking at the horrors of factory farming, but rather in envisaging beautiful and joyful futures? What if what we needed was to provide imaginaries full of possibilities, opened to create new relationships and communities; futures that we might long for and might be willing to strive for? In this speculative article, I imagine a realistic and fictional zoodemocracy after the devastating effects of climate change hit Earth and Earth’s inhabitants with full force. The reader should imagine that the scenario portrayed in this article is situated in the 2180s and after many catastrophic events had happened. Location-wise, the article portrays different historical moments in which London, England, transitions from a human-centric polis and democracy to a zoopolis and zoodemocracy. (shrink)

Experimental design is one aspect of a scientific method. A well-designed, properly conducted experiment aims to control variables in order to isolate and manipulate causal effects and thereby maximize internal validity, support causal inferences, and guarantee reliable results. Traditionally employed in the natural sciences, experimental design has become an important part of research in the social and behavioral sciences. Experimental methods are also endorsed as the most reliable guides to policy effectiveness. Through a discussion of some of the central concepts (...) associated with experimental design, including controlled variation and randomization, this chapter will provide a summary of key ethical issues that tend to arise in experimental contexts. In addition, by exploring assumptions about the nature of causation and by analyzing features of causal relationships, systems, and inferences in social contexts, this chapter will summarize the ways in which experimental design can undermine the integrity of not only social and behavioral research but policies implemented on the basis of such research. (shrink)

As COVID-19 emerged as a phenomenon of the total environment, and despite the intertwined and complex relationships that make humanity an organic part of the Bio- and Geospheres, the majority of our responses to it have been corrective in character, with few or no consideration for unintended consequences which bring about further vulnerability to unanticipated global events. Tackling COVID-19 entails a systemic and precautionary approach to human-nature relations, which we frame as regaining diversity in the Geo-, Bio-, and Anthropospheres. Its (...) implementation requires nothing short of an overhaul in the way we interact with and build knowledge from natural and social environments. Hence, we discuss the urgency of shifting from current to precautionary approaches to COVID-19 and look, through the lens of diversity, at the anticipated benefits in four systems crucially affecting and affected by the pandemic: health, land, knowledge and innovation. Our reflections offer a glimpse of the sort of changes needed, from pursuing planetary health and creating more harmonious forms of land use to providing a multi-level platform for other ways of knowing/understanding and turning innovation into a source of global public goods. These exemplary initiatives introduce and solidify systemic thinking in policymaking and move priorities from reaction-based strategies to precautionary frameworks. (shrink)

In Feminist theory: from margin to center, feminist theorist bell hooks questioned the existing feminist discourses during her time by pointing out the lack of a solid definition of feminism and the predominance of white, privileged feminists in the movement. Although several other feminist theorists have made the same criticisms, what sets hooks apart is her invitation to a revolutionary feminist outlook, which uses a pluralistic lens to recognize the absence of oppressed groups and the interrogation of cultural representations. Even (...) before “intersectionality” became a buzzword in feminist circles, hooks has already been talking about the interlocking webs of oppression, a concept that most feminists associate with intersectionality. Despite her novel ideas though, most critics raise concerns about her inconsistencies, lack of methodology, and critical awareness. What I aim to do in this paper is to re-evaluate hooks and propose ways to address some of these supposed contradictions. To enrich hooks’ feminist theory, I propose three main points: the emphasis on the crossing of borders, feminist solidarity and global transgression. (shrink)

Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story has been solidified into an uncritical account. Building on novel historiographic work, it challenges (...) the modernist bias of histories of biopolitics and public health and considers an earlier and more plural history of collective practices of health of which the story told by Foucault is just one important episode. Finally, it discusses the implications of this revised model for wider sociological debates on the link between modernity, health and the body. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

This thesis investigates a theoretical response to the question of what constitutes the political implications of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This thesis, working within the tradition of critical and cultural theory, undertakes a sustained engagement with the works of Jacques Derrida to theorise the traditions, norms, and practices that inform a response to an event such as the crisis of 2008. This thesis works with his proposals that: the spectre of its limitations haunts politics; that this has led to (...) the ‘deconstruction’ of the meaning of politics through complex textual frameworks; and that this dynamic leads to a tension between the arrival of new political possibilities on the one hand and new forms of political sovereignty on the other. After examining the significance of Derrida’s approach and secondary literature debating its interpretation, this thesis deconstructs the political implications of the crisis from politics in the traditional sense of the nationstate, the textual politics of scholarship, and finally the politics of the media, the domain, I argue, that incorporates the most discrete and sophisticated forms of sovereign decision-making. Finally, this thesis opens up its findings to secondary literature that suggest contrasting arguments. (shrink)

In a world where, as Martin Heidegger puts it, ‘homelessness’ has become its destiny, the colonized/Oriental Other that once exclusively constituted and was neglected from the matrix of the Western imaginary has no longer maintained its distance as ‘out there’. Instead it is embodied as a ‘refugee’ appearing on the borders of the ‘home’ with its complex cultural, colonial history. The majority of refugee studies feature the refugee as the outcome of the interplay of the two concepts of the ‘rights (...) of man’ and the ‘rights of the citizen’, who resides on the threshold of nativity and nationality as the limit phenomenon of the nation-state stands before the law in its totality but cannot be classified under any of its provisions. However, this thesis investigates the philosophical underpinnings of the emergence of the phenomenon of the refugee that appears at the threshold of one’s own experience of home as an alien who does not belong to the privileged normative structure of the home. Drawing on Anthony Steinbock’s approach to the Husserlian phenomenology of generativity, this study phenomenologically examines the possibility of an ethical relation in the Homeworld and Alienworld encounter. Focusing on the mode of givenness of the alien to the home in interpersonal relations, the main question of the thesis is:If phenomenologically the Other is accessible to home in a mode of inaccessibility, then how can the ‘I’ initiate an ethical relation to the Other?As the result of addressing this question, building on Edmund Husserl’s late project of ethical renewal and Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenological ethics of Responsivity alongside Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, I develop a new understanding of the experience of violence versus morally experiencing the Other. Although James Dodd contributed greatly to the development of the phenomenology of violence, this thesis gives a new perspective to the concept of ‘violence’ versus the ‘ethical’ from the perspective of types of phenomena and various modes of givenness. From a phenomenological perspective, by analyzing the mode of givenness peculiar to the experience of the Other in the intersubjective realm, I propose that violence is a disposition toward receiving the Other in experience as a denigrated phenomenon. However, an ethical relation to the Other means to receiving the Other as saturated phenomenon that is non-objectifiable. Chapter One discusses how phenomenology as critique can be a critical reflection on experience in order to justify and turn back to the question that concerns the refugee subject as ‘an alien other’. Applying Besinnung enables me to unravel the meaning structure that is operative in colonial subjectification and de-subjectification and the concept of violence that is embedded in the colonial situation. Dodd’s phenomenological account of violence and Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the camp’ gives me the opportunity to analyze the current manifestation of colonial violence in Australian offshore refugee detention camps. Considering various sorts of violence that are operative in the colonial structure, Chapter Two focuses on a specific type of violence that is hidden in the cognitive structure of our consciousness: epistemic violence. Building on Miranda Fricker’s notion of ‘epistemic injustice’ and Husserl’s phenomenological notion of ‘horizon-structure of experience’ that he proposed in Experience and judgment I develop a phenomenological analysis of the horizon structure of experiencing two types of epistemic injustice, which are testimonial and hermeneutical injustice. Phenomenologically thematizing the intersubjective structure of the home, Chapter Three investigates the way the institutional violence of the colonial system can affect meaning constitution. A regressive inquiry into the pregiven lifeworld of the colonial situation as a violent situation that emerges out of the disrupted world of sense, the chapter enquires into the relation of the ‘I’ with the ‘alien’, and asks how does the ‘I’ experience the Other and constitute it as alien? Doing so, I argue that I experience the other as always present in its absence in a way that its presence is withdrawn from the accessibility of home as inaccessible. Chapter Four examines the mode of experiencing the alien Other by the home as a liminal experience in which the alienworld is inaccessible and incomprehensible to home. Furthermore, building on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Steinbock, I intend to liberate the phenomenon of the alien from the constitutive conditions of the home by discussing how the Other person is absolved from a disposal relation with me. This is to discover the most profound relation to the other that is given in moral experience. Chapter Five analyzes the moral experience of the Other in terms of the modality of the givenness of the Other, and in terms of the type of phenomena given in vertical givenness in the intersubjective realm. Reading Steinbock together with Marion, I explore the type of phenomenality of the alien Other who is given in the mode of revelation as a saturated phenomenon. I argue that by abandoning the givenness of the Other as a saturated phenomenon, I open the possibility of violence toward the Other. This way, I propose that the two concepts of violence and ethics are phenomenological orientations toward the reception of the call of the Other as a saturated phenomenon. (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of totalitarianism (...) during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

What is silence? Is it a loss, an omission? Is it a stopping of the mouth, of the voice? An empty place where no meaning has come forward…or perhaps at times quite the opposite, an absence-as-presence Deleuze, 1990; Derrida, 1976)? Might silence evoke much more about what we assume is our monological, unitary reality, indexing possibilities yet unseen? This paper outlines the ways in which silence is typically understood according to scholarly orthodoxy: as omission in human communication or a silencing (...) of minoritized individuals or communities by those in power. It then moves to critique the preeminence of whitestream Western-centric academic authority, which self-perpetuates via the exclusion of outsider ways of doing, being and knowing such as those brought forward by silence, constituting a loss of meaning and knowledge from the social imaginary. This paper suggests that the pursuit of an articulate unknowing regarding silence as a creative, disruptive force beyond the control of rationality is a means of engaging with radical possibilities for a different, juster world. It proposes a socio-diologic politics of the real that welcomes silence as an unsettling of our current thinking about what is and will be possible, as well as who does and does not matter. It concludes by illustrating the ingenious force of silence in examples of subversive art that expose the hegemonizing, rational version of reality sold by academics and powerholders, bringing forward into the imagination what prospects for change, justice, and social transformation yet await. (shrink)

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening (...) by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens. (shrink)

The paper is focused on Genesis 1 – 3 where the primordial man [adàm] is created ‎and he was given the proper name Adam [adàm]. ‎ In Hebrew man and Adam are the same word, spelled the same way – [adàm]. ‎Different translations of Genesis 1-3 use for the first time the proper name Adam in ‎different places versions Gen 2:25; The German Luther ‎Bible Gen 3:8; Some English Protestant versions Gen 3:17; Bulgarian Protestant and many ‎English Protestant versions Gen (...) 3:20-21). The paper decodes the phenomenon by ‎studying the Hebrew original and several semiotic views on common and proper names ‎‎. Through these opinions the ‎important question “Who wrote the Bible?” is discussed. The analysis interfaces the new ‎linguistic relativity theory.‎ Four layers of symbolism are decoded: 1. The man became Adam; 2. The two men in ‎Gen 1:27 and in Gen 2:7 man [adàm] ‎is made by earth, ground [adamà]; 3. The two men in the New Testament ; 4. Edom, Adam and cultural discourses in both Testaments.‎. (shrink)

Responding to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Sandeep Banerjee argues that Chakrabarty treats nature as a thing rather than a relation. Reading the Anthropocene as a dialectical relation, Banerjee argues for an emergent “planetary consciousness” where the planet itself becomes the site of the labor/capital struggle.

This paper argues that social inequality is possibly the core topic of any critical theory in the social sciences – for epistemological as well as ethical reasons. As the social scientist is part of the scientific object, namely society, the project of science is interdependent with its object. For this reason, the structure of society itself influences the shape of social science. At the same time, the processes and results of the scientific project have an impact on society. Science changes (...) its own object. Epistemological issues are therefore tied to the ethical questions about the social organization of the scientific project, access to science, the structure of society and inequality. If access to science is unequal and if science contributes to inequality, this has to be legitimized scientifically. (shrink)

Thesis (Doctorate) - La Trobe University, 2012.

The text sets out from a fourfold concept of Eurocentrism developed in postcolonial studies and global history. Against this backdrop, it traces the treatment of non-Western societies throughout Marx's work. His 1853 articles on India are shown to be Eurocentric in every respect. They are partially based on a travel narrative by François Bernier. Bernier's text is analyzed in some detail as one of Marx's sources. Marx's treatment of the 1857-59 Indian rebellions also displays Eurocentric features. His writings on British (...) colonialism, in Ireland, however, begin to break with the Eurocentric mold. The Marxian critique of political economy, in contrast, teems with Orientalist motifs. Marx's late work is quite different in this respect: in the excerpts from his reading that he made from 1879 on, as well as in his discussions with the Russian Social Revolutionaries, he breaks with Eurocentrism. The development of Marx's thought shows that the hasty dismissal of him often observed in postcolonial studies is not carefully thought out. Yet the fact remains that Marxists who attempt to think global capitalism, historical progress and contingent development have something to learn from postcolonial studies. (shrink)

This study is an intervention in postcolonial theorising through a critique of technologies of representation. It examines the effects of technologically-mediated representation in a postcolonial condition that the Philippines has exemplified. New media technologies are mechanisms of representations that embody the logic of spectrality presented in Jacques Derrida’s later work. Spectrality, which brings doubts, ephemerality, and instability to dominant discourses and modes of representation, provides a chance for change.Spectres are effects of technologically-mediated representation that articulate the infinite demand for justice (...) under conditions of enduring inequality. As quasi-transcendental elements of deconstruction, spectres are not reducible to either human or technical intervention; they express the relation of humans to technologies, in which representation is central to the mediation of political authority. This technological representation is the condition of what Derrida calls “iteration,” or the transformation of hegemonic authority through the very repetition of its fundamental terms of identification. The examination of emancipatory new media technologies in a postcolonial condition is inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, in his deconstructive reading of Marx’s spectres. However, the writings of Habermas and Adorno have offered an implicit appraisal of the ontology of spectres. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Adorno’s negative dialectics are discourses that unwittingly solicit spectres. The account of the postcolonial condition in the Philippines works through the questions of universality, subalternity, and the right to theory that are raised by the project of Western critical theory. (shrink)

En este artículo, se presenta un análisis comparado entre los procesos históricos de colonización y descolonización en Asia y África. Se observa que, aunque la exploración de Asia es globalmente anterior a la de África, desembocó en el colonialismo, marcado por la competencia entre potencias imperialistas y su afán de dominio. Así, el objetivo de este trabajo es traer a la luz algunos elementos clave para reflexiones críticas y comparadas acerca de estas dinámicas de dominación de ambas regiones por parte (...) de los colonizadores en los siglos XVI y XX; igual que las lecciones derivadas de las mismas de cara al actual orden político. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph.D.) - La Trobe University, 2010.

This retrospective interview study focused on the impact that training and implementation of Philosophy, in Lipman's tradition of Philosophy for Children, had on the pedagogy of 14 primary teachers at one school. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to document the impact of teaching Philosophy on pedagogy, the resources required to facilitate and sustain such change, including the necessary dispositions required to teach Philosophy, and the critical junctures in pedagogical change associated with teaching Philosophy. Interview data were coded and analysed to generate (...) a grounded theory regarding the efficacy of teaching Philosophy in terms of its impact on the pedagogy of the teachers interviewed. This pedagogical transformation is then theorised in terms of Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development re the learning of the adults in this study. This study formed the pilot for a larger empirical study. (shrink)

Following the Derridean notion of deconstruction, an analysis of post September 11, 2001 discourses of Time and Newsweek over the discursive construction of an Afghan national identity shows how the media discourse through its specific linguistic signs and logocentric discourses may create a text that dehumanises or stereotypes a certain people. Thus, if a text is not deconstructed or critically read, one can miss the continuous attempt of how it engages itself in the act of establishing a kind of truth.

Paper presented at a meeting of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, Stony Brook, New York, USA, May 2000. -/- Foucault rejects the idea of intellectuals acting as "prophets": telling others what must be done and what sorts of social and political goals they should pursue. I argue that in outright rejecting such prophecy, Foucault may not be pursuing the most effective means of eventually breaking it down. I locate in Foucauldian genealogical works such as Discipline and Punish a (...) rhetorical strategy through which the intellectual acts as a prophet while also distancing him/herself from this role: the genealogist speaks as a universal intellectual while also encouraging others to question the truths thus provided, as well as the role of the intellectual as prophet itself. I argue that in so doing the genealogist engages in a kind of exile, a term I borrow from Edward Said to denote a movement of distancing without effecting a clean break. This intellectual, rather than rejecting outright the role of the prophet, works within this role while yet distancing him/herself from it -- acting as (what I call) a “prophet in exile.”. (shrink)

Québec’s model of cultural diversity, Interculturalism, has been the object of considerable debate since Bouchard and Taylor released in 2008 their now famous report, Building the Future: A Time for Reconciliation. Among other things, the authors recommended that schools take more seriously Québec’s Intercultural model as a means of bringing diverse cultures into a single society. In this dissertation I consider the uptake and implication of Intercultural ideals in Québec’s History and Citizenship education course. This study involved three secondary school (...) history teachers in Montreal Anglophone schools. Using Thacher’s “normative case study” as the methodological framework, I combine curriculum documents, classroom observations, open-ended interviews, and photo-voice methods to illuminate the Intercultural model’s shortcomings with regard to issues of power and identity. The guiding question for this dissertation is: how do the historicized power dynamics embedded within Québec’s Intercultural policy shape history education in Québec? Two sets of tensions are found to be at the crux of the issue of history teaching in Québec: first the theoretical debates on history education do not take Québec’s specific brand of cultural negotiation into account, resulting in a lack of research on the civic implications of history education particular to the Québec context. Second, the Intercultural model itself does not adequately deal with entrenched issues of power relating to marginalized identities, which raises many questions for how civic education is being carried out in the province. (shrink)

The wantok system in the Solomon Islands and the Melanesian countries more broadly, strongly links to the practices of group identity and belonging, reciprocity, and caring for one’s relatives. It is a term used to express patterns of relationships that link people in families, tribes, islands, provinces, nationality and even more superficially at greater Melanesian sub-regional aggregates. Various aspects of the wantok system are called different names by distinct language groups in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Nevertheless, the (...) word wantok originates from the English words ‘one talk’, which literally means in Melanesian pidgin, speakers of the same language. (shrink)