I argue against two popular claims. The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists. . . . We try to make all of our material (...) cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional char- acter . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett). The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman). (shrink)

Unquestionably an influential thinker in Italy today, Giorgio Agamben has contributed to some of the most vital philosophical debates of our time. "The Coming Community" is an indispensable addition to the body of his work. How can we conceive a human community that lays no claim to identity - being American, being Muslim, being communist? How can a community be formed of singularities that refuse any criteria of belonging? Agamben draws on an eclectic and exciting set of sources to explore (...) the status of human subjectivities outside of general identity. From St Thomas' analysis of halos to a stocking commercial shown in French cinemas, and from the Talmud's warning about entering paradise to the power of the multitude in Tiananmen Square, Agamben tracks down the singular subjectivity that is coming in the contemporary world and shaping the world to come. Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. "The Coming Community" offers both a philosophical mediation and the beginnings of a new foundation for ethics, one grounded beyond subjectivity, ideology, and the concepts of good and evil. Agamben's exploration is, in part, a contemporary and creative response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures. This volume is the first in a new series that encourages transdisciplinary exploration and destabilizes traditional boundaries between disciplines, nations, genders, races, humans, and machines. Giorgio Agamben currently teaches philosophy at the College International de Philosophie in Paris and at the University of Macerata. He is the author of "Language and Death" and "Stanzas". This book is intended for those in the fields of cultural theory, literary theory, philosophy. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur has been hailed as one of the most important thinkers of the century. Oneself as Another, the clearest account of his "philosophical ethics," substantiates this position and lays the groundwork for a metaphysics of morals.

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul.

Relating Narratives is a major new work by the philosopher and feminist thinker Adriana Cavarero. First published in Italian to widespread acclaim, Relating Narratives is a fascinating and challenging new account of the relationship between selfhood and narration. Drawing a diverse array of thinkers from both the philosophical and the literary tradition, from Sophocles and Homer to Hannah Arendt, Karen Blixen, Walter Benjamin and Borges, Adriana Cadarero's theory of the `narratable self' shows how narrative models in philosophy and literature can (...) open new ways of thinking about formation of human identities. By showing how each human being has a unique story that can be told about them, Adriana Cavarero inaugurates an important shift in thinking about subjectivity and identity which relies not upon categorical or discursive norms, but rather seeks to account for `who' each one of us uniquely is. (shrink)

The question concerning technology.--The turning.--The word of Nietzsche: "God is dead."--The age of the world picture.--Science and reflection.

This topical new book by Zygmunt Bauman explores the notion of identity in the modern world. As we grapple with the insecurity and uncertainty of liquid modernity, Bauman argues that our socio-political, cultural, professional, religious and sexual identities are undergoing a process of continual transformation. Identities the world over have become more precarious than ever: we live in an era of constant change and disposability - whether it's last season's outfit, or car, or even partner - and our identities as (...) a result have become transient and deeply elusive. In a world of rapid global change where national borders are increasingly eroded, our identities are in a state of continuous flux. Identity - a notion that by its very nature is elusive and ambivalent - has become a key concept for understanding the changing nature of social life and personal experience in our contemporary, liquid modern age. In this brief book, Zygmunt Bauman explains compellingly why this is so. (shrink)

One of the strongest strands in Nancy's philosophy is an attempt to rethink community and the very idea of the social in a way that does not ground these ideas in some individual subject or subjectivity. The fundamental argument of this book is that being is always 'being with', that 'I' is not prior to 'we', that existence is essentially co-existence. He thinks this being together, not as a comfortable enclosure in a pre-existing group, but as a mutual abandonment and (...) exposure to each other, one that would preserve the 'I' and its freedom in a mode of imagining community as neither a 'society of spectacle' nor via some form of 'authenticity'. (shrink)

Biometrics is often described as `the next big thingin information technology'. Rather than IT renderingthe body irrelevant to identity – a mistaken idea tobegin with – the coupling of biometrics with ITunequivocally puts the body center stage. The questions to be raised about biometrics is howbodies will become related to identity, and what thenormative and political ramifications of this couplingwill be. Unlike the body rendered knowable in thebiomedical sciences, biometrics generates a readable body: it transforms the body's surfaces andcharacteristics into (...) digital codes and ciphers to be`read' by a machine. ``Your iris is read, in the sameway that your voice can be printed, and yourfingerprint can be read'', by computers that, in turn,have become ``touch-sensitive'', and endowed with seeingand hearing capacities. Thus transformed into readable``text'', the meaning and significance of the biometricbody will be contingent upon ``context'', and therelations established with other ``texts''. Thesemetaphors open up ways to investigate the differentmeanings that will become attached to the biometricbody and the ways in which it will be tied toidentity. This paper reports on an analysis of plans andpractices surrounding the `Eurodac' project, aEuropean Union initiative to use biometrics (specif.fingerprinting) in controlling illegal immigration andborder crossings by asylum seekers. (shrink)

In this essay I take issue with Derek Parfit's reductionist account of personal identity.Parfit is concerned to respond to what he sees as flaws in the conception of the role of 'person' in self-interest theories. He attempts to show that the notion of a person as something over and above a totality of mental and physical states and events (in his words, a 'further fact'), is empty, and so, our ethical concerns must be based on something other than this. My (...) objections centre around the claim that Parfit employs an impoverished conception of 'life'. Parfit misconceives the connection between 'I' and one's body, and, so, despite his rejection of a metaphysical conception of 'self', remains within the logic of Cartesianism. What Parfit and other reductionists call an 'impersonal' perspective, I shall call the third-person perspective: a perspective which one in general may take. Against Parfit I shall offer a more complex conception of 'self' through the concept of 'bodily perspective'. I emphasize the irreducible ambiguities of human embodiment in order to show the presuppositions and the limitations of Parfit's view. Of interest is the conception of time and the model of continuity that is appropriate to an embodied subject's life. I employ Paul Ricoeur's concept of 'human time' to argue that the reflective character of human experience demands a model of temporality and continuity that differs significantly from the one Parfit employs. (shrink)

Offers an outline for a new ethical practice - one responsive to the need for critical autonomy and grounded in a new sense of the human subject. The author demonstrates how difficult it is to give an account of oneself, and how this lack of self-transparency and narratibility is crucial to an ethical understanding of the human.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the theory (...) of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)

Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology (...) of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies. (shrink)

The proliferation of biometric identification technology raises difficult issues in the matter of security, privacy and identity. Though biometric "images" are not images per se, they are both unique representations of an individual in themsevles and a means of access to other identifying information. I compare biometric imaging with other kinds of identifying representations and find that there are issues specific to biometric ID's. Because they represent information that is written into the body they are directly related to one's sense (...) of autonomy and self-esteem. Releasing biometric ID's into the public sphere therefore involves a tangible loss of control and privacy. This does not mean that to do so is never a reasonable act, but rather that it should be carefully weighed, and should never be mandatory in order to receive any fundamental rights or benefits. (shrink)

A collection of five essays of French philosopher Nancy, originally published in 1985-86: The Inoperative Community, Myth Interpreted, Literary Communism, Shattered Love, and Of Divine Places.

Narratives have always played a prominent role in both bioethics and medicine; the fields have attracted much storytelling, ranging from great literature to humbler stories of sickness and personal histories. And all bioethicists work with cases--from court cases that shape policy matters to case studies that chronicle sickness. But how useful are these various narratives for sorting out moral matters? What kind of ethical work can stories do--and what are the limits to this work? The new essays in Stories and (...) Their Limits offer insightful reflections on the relationship between narratives and ethics. (shrink)

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, (...) the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article attempts to show a way in which social science research can contribute in a meaningful and equitable way to philosophical bioethics. It builds on the social science critique of bioethics present in the work of authors such as Renée Fox, Barry Hoffmaster and Charles Bosk, proposing the characteristics of a critical bioethics that would take social science seriously. The social science critique claims that traditional philosophical bioethics gives a dominant role to idealised, rational thought, and tends to (...) exclude social and cultural factors, relegating them to the status of irrelevancies. Another problem is the way in which bioethics assumes social reality divides down the same lines/categories as philosophical theories. Critical bioethics requires bioethicists to root their enquires in empirical research, to challenge theories using evidence, to be reflexive and to be sceptical about the claims of other bioethicists, scientists and clinicians. The aim is to produce a rigorous normative analysis of lived moral experience. (shrink)

I have experienced the tribulations of fate.Victories and defeats, revolutions and restorations.Inflations and deflations, bombings,Defamations, broken regimes and broken pipes,Hunger and cold, internment and solitary confinement.Through it all I have passed,And through me it all has passed.I am acquainted with the abundant varieties of terror,The terror from above and the terror from below,Terror on the land and terror from the air,Terror legal and extra-legal,Brown, red and checkered terror,And worst of all, the terror none dares to name.I am acquainted with them (...) all and know their grip. (shrink)

Governing by identity describes the emerging regime of a globalizing, mobile world. Governance depends on identification but identification increasingly depends on biometrics. This 'solution' to difficulties of verification is described and some technical weaknesses are discussed. The role of biometrics in classification systems is also considered and is shown to contain possible prejudice in relation to racialized criteria of identity. Lastly, the culture of biometric identification is shown to be limited to abstract data, artificially separated from the lived experience of (...) the body including the orientation to others. It is proposed that creators of national ID systems in particular address these crucial deficiencies in their attempt to provide new modes of verification. (shrink)

This article seeks to establish that the social sciences have an important contribution to make to the study of ethics. The discussion is framed around three questions: (i) what theoretical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? (ii) what empirical work can the social sciences contribute to the understanding of ethics? And (iii) how does this theoretical and empirical work combine, to enhance the understanding of how ethics, as a field of analysis and debate, is socially (...) constituted and situated? Through these questions the argument goes beyond the now commonly cited objection to the over‐simplistic division between normative and descriptive ethics (that assigns the social sciences the ‘handmaiden’ role of simply providing the ‘facts’). In extending this argument, this article seeks to establish, more firmly and in more detail, that: (a) the social sciences have a longstanding theoretical interest analysing the role that a concern with ethics plays in explanations of social change, social organisation and social action; (b) the explanations that are based on the empirical investigations conducted by social scientists exemplify the interplay of epistemological and methodological analyses so that our understanding of particular substantive issues is extended beyond the conventional questions raised by ethicists, and (c) through this combination of theoretical and empirical work, social scientists go beyond the specific ethical questions of particular practices to enquire further into the social processes that lie behind the very designation of certain matters as being ‘ethical issues’. (shrink)