Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in (...) mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity. (shrink)

This paper reframes the issue of appropriation, extraction, and dispossession through AI—an assemblage of machine learning models trained on big data—in terms of enclosure and foreclosure. While enclosures are the product of a well-studied set of operations pertaining to both the constitution of the sovereign State and the primitive accumulation of capital, here, I want to recover an older form of the enclosure operation to then contrast it with foreclosure to better understand the effects of current algorithmic rationality. (...) I argue that the act of enclosing is to be understood as a set of fundamental operations that consist in producing structural distinctions between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion—whether by drawing lines on a map, constructing border walls, or by algorithmically categorizing and (mis)recognizing people and things. Tracking the transformation of an enclosure-logic into one of foreclosure, I show how current AI perpetuates and at the same time expends forms of extraction, exclusion, and dispossession toward a totalizing horizon. For, while the outside is essential and constitutive to the logic of enclosure, foreclosure, by contrast, is characterized by the “totalizing desire” to not leave anything out of it. The totalizing desire to move beyond the logic of the enclosure forecloses that the enclosure has just gotten bigger and that the operations of exclusion have been masked and displaced, making them harder to contest. (shrink)

Drawing inspiration from Susan Sontag’s notion of ‘rhetorical ownership’—applied not only to illness but also to the body more generally—this essay argues that philosophy, like medicine, has privileged a metaphorics of war and violence in its own discourses on embodiment. Drawing inspiration from Barbara Christian’s seminal essay ‘The Race for Theory,’ as well as literary theorist Eve Sedgwick’s account of what she calls ‘paranoid’ forms of inquiry in her book Touching Feeling, this essay explores the status of violence as an (...) especially resonant trope in discourses on materiality. One worry is that the omnipresence of violent metaphors in contemporary philosophy of the body may be narrowing the space for the elaboration of nonviolent understanding of corporeality that would imagine the body otherwise than as a battlefield or a site of violence. (shrink)

This paper considers how Schelling’s earlier work functions as a fifth column for the Germano-Coleridgeans, particularly Coleridge himself and Green. I consider their engagement with Schelling’s First Outline in relation to the Hunterian collection bought by the Crown in 1799, which made the life sciences a public concern within the framework of how knowledge was to be organized. The paper explores the pressure the life sciences put on philosophy and the constraining of both, in the context of British Idealism, by (...) religious imperatives that are internal, conceptual censors, and external (cultural and institutional) censors. Consolidating his work between the Romantic and Victorian periods, Green is a neglected figure in a progress from natural to political theology that coincides with a shift in British idealism from Schelling to a sanitized Hegel. Coleridge’s dialogue with and often expedient misrepresentations of Schelling are more complex, as he uses Schelling’s “Stufenfolge” to argue for a design in nature, yet is constantly troubled by a biodiversity and difference in nature to which Schelling was more open. Initially deploying Schelling to reconcile transcendental and natural philosophy, Coleridge can never entirely escape the trouble that biology causes philosophy and that philosophy (through Schelling) causes religion. (shrink)

This paper reframes the issue of appropriation, extraction, and dispossession through AI—an assemblage of machine learning models trained on big data—in terms of enclosure and foreclosure. While enclosures are the product of a well-studied set of operations pertaining to both the constitution of the sovereign State and the primitive accumulation of capital, here, I want to recover an older form of the enclosure operation to then contrast it with foreclosure to better understand the effects of current algorithmic rationality. (...) I argue that the act of enclosing is to be understood as a set of fundamental operations that consist in producing structural distinctions between inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion—whether by drawing lines on a map, constructing border walls, or by algorithmically categorizing and (mis)recognizing people and things. Tracking the transformation of an enclosure-logic into one of foreclosure, I show how current AI perpetuates and at the same time expends forms of extraction, exclusion, and dispossession toward a totalizing horizon. For, while the outside is essential and constitutive to the logic of enclosure, foreclosure, by contrast, is characterized by the “totalizing desire” to not leave anything out of it. The totalizing desire to move beyond the logic of the enclosure forecloses that the enclosure has just gotten bigger and that the operations of exclusion have been masked and displaced, making them harder to contest. (shrink)

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This paper looks at the prehistory of the foreclosure crisis in Cleveland, Ohio, in order to understand the effectiveness of civil society organizations in mitigating its impact on the city’s neighborhoods. Social theorists and movement activists have often postulated civil society as an authentic and voluntaristic realm in which we constitute and act on shared values. The voluntary nature of civil society organizations also, it is argued, make them more responsive, adaptable, and effective in meeting the needs of the (...) communities they operate in. The question is whether or not this has held true in the contemporary crisis. I find that in the 1970s, Cleveland’s community-based organizations were instrumental in securing resources from government and private philanthropies to deal with the urban crisis. The unintended result of this success was a general rationalization of Cleveland’s civil society around narrow practices and market-based conceptions of value. In the process, civil society was transformed into a political technology that solved various dilemmas of rule, but at the same time it was transformed into a civic monoculture that made the city especially vulnerable to foreclosure. A key implication of this analysis is that civil society has been transformed into an object and stake of urban politics and, as a result, it should not be expected to protect society against neoliberal institutional transformations. (shrink)

Automation may be able to completely eliminate the need for labour. But how should we use the freed-up time? In his proposal for a future urbanism, New Babylon, Constant Nieuwenhuys thought people would engage in nonstop free play, remaking surroundings. I argue that at the core of New Babylon is an intuition about a satisfying life, that of Homo ludens. This intuition had a broad appeal in the 1960s. New Babylon is an intuition pump, not a utopia, and Constant wants (...) Homo ludens to be possible and desirable. Possibility can today be most urgently equated with sustainability.I will argue that New Babylon is not sustainable. I will also argue Homo ludens is not desirable, and 1960s intuitions about the good life have dated. Constant forecloses on creative activity such as we might find in improving science and technology. (shrink)

The period of very high foreclosure rates sets the 2007–8 financial meltdown apart from similar banking crises fueled by asset price booms. Why did the 2007–8 meltdown lead to a prolonged foreclosure crisis? Through a theoretical perspective built on Minsky’s financial instability hypothesis, Polanyi’s ideas about adverse consequences of commodity fiction, financialization of homes, and institutional coupling, I argue that commodifying houses as financial assets exposed mortgage loan holders to price fluctuations originating in capital markets and elevated their (...) risk of default. I show how increased exposure to price fluctuations followed from the tight coupling between U.S. housing and capital markets, a coupling that resulted directly from the rising preponderance of securitization in U.S. housing finance. I provide further evidence from countries where housing finance was tightly coupled with capital markets to countries where housing finance did not rely dominantly on capital markets. (shrink)

Much of leftist political philosophy has uncritically accepted the logic of capitalism, which is a logic of conservation that presents itself as a logic of “production.” Many leftist political philosophers subscribe to capitalism’s fundamental myth—that capitalism produces the new. This appearance of proliferation, however, masks an underlying stasis. This article interrogates this trend in the apparently disparate projects of contemporary accelerationism and Jacques Rancière. The accelerationist project of immanence allows for newness only in quantity and not in quality, while Rancière, (...) coming closer to thinking radical newness in his account of politics, forecloses the possibility of a radically emancipatory society. I suggest an open ontology, which Marx offers, provides a better framework for thinking revolutionary newness. (shrink)

With the publication of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, popular media debates about gender equality gained additional fuel. However, the popularisation of feminist discourses in digital media has not brought substantial political change. In this article, I demonstrate how famous working mothers like Sandberg and Tina Fey provide accounts of their difficulties with identifying as ‘women who have it all’, although they are often perceived in such terms. I propose the framework of affective (...) dissonance to describe the discrepancy between their own sense of self and the public perception of them as ‘women who have it all’. I argue that both Sandberg and Fey fail to contribute to a renewed political feminism because they disavow their experience of affective dissonance, rather than actualising its political potential. These ‘women who have it all’ are entrenched in postfeminist neoliberal discourses of choice and agency, which locks them in frameworks of identity politics, foreclosing the possibility of an ethics of solidarity necessary for a feminist movement that might produce political transformation. (shrink)

This essay places Isaiah Berlin’s famous “Two Concepts of Liberty” in conversation with perspectives defined as black fugitive thought. The latter is used to refer principally to Aimé Césaire, W. E. B. Du Bois and David Walker. It argues that the trope of liberty in Western liberal political theory, exemplified in a lineage that connects Berlin, John Stuart Mill and Benjamin Constant, has maintained its universal meaning and coherence by excluding and silencing any representations of its modernity gestations, affiliations and (...) entanglements with Atlantic slavery and European empires. This particular incarnation of theory is characterized as the Western discursive and hegemonic effects of colonial-racial foreclosure. Foreclosure describes the discursive contexts in which particular terms or references become impossible to formulate because the means by which they could be formulated have been excluded from the discursive context. Through an examination of the action of foreclosure, based largely on unraveling the liberal-colonial convergences of Two Concepts the essay reflects on the political and theoretical problems posed for black political thought by the hegemony of Western formulations of liberty that deny their indebtedness to Western colonialism. Drawing upon juxtapositions between white liberal/republican thinkers and black fugitivity thinkers, it argues a particular lineage of black political thought is compelled to conceive of itself as an escape from the colonial and racial hegemony of Western liberty. (shrink)

This article specifically aims to address both the economic and ethical implications of mixed communities in the US through the lens of market failure, and more specifically, the recent subprime financial crisis. Relative to the research of mixed communities and social integration efforts, I first intend to explore income mix as an explanatory variable of census tract level foreclosure rates in the state of Ohio, USA. I aim to show that counter-homogenous income communities display a greater capacity to absorb (...) the adverse affects of the recent subprime financial crisis than concentrated communities of poverty. Second, I intend to provide an ethical appraisal of foreclosure effect on vulnerable communities using John Rawls' "Veil of Ignorance" as an ethical framework by which to evaluate the "fairness" of social segregation. Ethically speaking, a Rawlsian critique exposes the sub-optimality of concentrated pockets of neighborhood deprivation, where the uneven affects of subprime foreclosures are not only disproportionately shouldered by lower-income communities, but also found to be unjust. This study is not intended to suggest the unqualified support of existing US dispersal efforts, but it does contribute to exposing the sub-optimality and injustices of inert, segregated communities. (shrink)

Why does equality matter, as a social and political value, and what does it require? Relational egalitarians argue that it does not require that people receive equal distributive shares of some good, but that they relate as equals. Christian Schemmel here provides the first comprehensive development of a liberal conception of relational equality, one which understands relations of non-domination and egalitarian norms of social status as stringent demands of social justice. He first argues that expressing respect for the freedom and (...) equality of individuals in social cooperation requires stringent protections against domination. Taking this as a starting point, he then develops a substantive, liberal conception of non-domination and argues that non-domination is a particularly important, but not the only, concern of social justice. From there, Schemmel develops an account of the wrongness of inegalitarian norms of social status which shows how status-induced foreclosure of important social opportunities is a social injustice in its own right, over and above the role of status inequality in enabling domination, and the threats it poses to individuals' self-respect. Finally, Schemmel articulates the core requirements of liberal relational egalitarianism for political, economic, and health justice: these amount to demands for far-reaching forms of equality in all three domains, which can rarely, if ever, be overridden by competing concerns. With expert rigor and creativity, Justice and Egalitarian Relations brings together scholarship in a variety of related topics, from social justice and liberalism to distributive and relational equality, social equality, neo-republicanism, and non-denomination. (shrink)

This article starts from the observation that practices of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ or ‘governance by data’ are reconfiguring modes of social relationality and collectivity. By building, first, on an empirical exploration of digital bordering practices, we qualify these emergent algorithmic categories as ‘clusters’—pulsing patterns distilled from disaggregated data. As fluid, modular, and ever-emergent forms of association, these ‘clusters’ defy stable expressions of collective representation and social recognition. Second, we observe that this empirical analysis resonates with accounts that diagnosed algorithmic governance as (...) a threat to legal subjectivity and socio-political cohesion, and called for a reinvigoration of democratic values and their re-alignment with new ‘infrastructural publics’. Against this backdrop, however, we explore alternatives avenues of legal imagination by pushing in a different (somewhat opposite) direction. Against the re-inscription of liberal categories, we linger with the promise and prospect of illegibility as resistance against the foreclosure of future potentialities in algorithmic forms of subject-making. Instead of falling back on the projection of autonomous human agency and liberal subjectivity to counteract the ‘cluster’, we imagine emancipatory expressions of resistance that are enacted through fugitive, opaque, and experimental collectivities. (shrink)

The eminent scholar Lewis R. Gordon offers a probing meditation on freedom, justice, and decolonization. What is there to be understood and done when it is evident that the search for justice, which dominates social and political philosophy of the North, is an insufficient approach for the achievements of dignity, freedom, liberation, and revolution? Gordon takes the reader on a journey as he interrogates a trail from colonized philosophy to re-imagining liberation and revolution to critical challenges raised by Afropessimism, theodicy, (...) and looming catastrophe. He offers not forecast and foreclosure but instead an urgent call for dignifying and urgent acts of political commitment. Such movements take the form of examining what philosophy means in Africana philosophy, liberation in decolonial thought, the unshackling of political philosophy from the liberal moral theory setting the stage for the decolonization of justice and normative life, unleashing the obstacles to cultivating emancipatory politics, challenging reductionist forms of thought that proffer harm and suffering as conditions of political appearance and the valorization of nonhuman being. He asserts instead emancipatory considerations for occluded forms of life and the irreplaceability of existence in the face of catastrophe and ruin, and he concludes, through a discussion with the Circassian philosopher and decolonial theorist, Madina Tlostanova, with the project of shifting the geography of reason. (shrink)

This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal about their moral identity processes within organizational contexts. Based on interviews with 25 business leaders, 4 moral identity statuses were identified: achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. The moral identity statuses were based on how leaders approached and interpreted moral conflicts and what the influence of the organizational context was in their moral decision-making processes. Some remained steadfast (...) in adhering to their previous value commitments, while others tried to avoid taking any clear moral standpoint. Still others experienced moral conflicts as disequilibrating events that triggered reflective processes and developmental cycles of moral identity change. These moral identity statuses hold implications for facilitating moral identity development among business leaders in the context of work. (shrink)

Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? Walker Percy, it would seem, has a lot to say about human jadedness, sometimes through the very means by which we are meant to inhabit ontological intimacy. One may not care much about, say sparrows, but intuitively people seem jaded about something that matters to them in a deeper way. This chapter explores the personal or social sources of (...) jadedness: is it an individual problem only, or caused by broader cultural factors? I attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy’s unique philosophical contributions. I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness—a narrow, domain-specific psychological type and a global, existential type—that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from (...) politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

This article reads Radwa Ashour’s Granada (1995) as a novel that examines the cumulativeness of trauma in Arab/Muslim cultures. It is representative of postcolonial trauma novels’ rethinking of the Eurocentric event-based model that lays the postcolonial question by the wayside. A barbed critique that links the colonial past to its postcolonial aftermath is thus leveled at the lasting aftereffects of a violent Western coloniality/modernity. By deploying the family trope, it recasts the undeterrable advance of Western globalism as the instigator of (...) post-generational trauma. Ashour’s angst-ridden narrative especially laments the foreclosure inflicted on potentialities by the Western discourse of salvation in that the latter submits the Arab/Muslim Other’s attempt at conserving one’s legacy to processes of incrimination and obliteration. In view of her full awareness of the looming death that triggers her existential dilemma as an intellectual, Ashour insists on excavating the archive as an act of survival against external forces that threaten to annihilate her cultural heritage . By mourning the loss of al-Andalus , she therefore exhibits unwavering determination to lay bare the dark underside of a long and single history of Western modernity. (shrink)

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude by (...) taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

In the processual approach to identity, the role of the interaction between subjective and contextual factors in the process of its development is emphasized. Based on the model of Luyckx et al. relationships between identity and educational context, as well as the tendency to experience shame and guilt were analyzed.. 821 people aged from 14-25 and belonging to six educational groups: lower secondary school, basic vocational school, technical upper secondary school, general upper secondary school, post-secondary school and university, took part (...) in the research. Two questionnaires were used: The Dimensions of Identity Development Scale, to allow the measurement of the five dimensions of identity postulated by Luyckx et al and The Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 to measure of the shame and guilt proneness. The results show that general upper secondary school students in terms of the dimensions of identity are closer to lower secondary school students rather than to their peers from technical and vocational schools. Among general upper secondary school students not only was a higher intensity of an identity crisis observed, but also a strong tendency to experience shame and guilt. Among lower secondary school students and general upper secondary school students, people with diffusion and moratorium as identity statuses prevailed, while in the remaining groups the achievement and foreclosure identity were observed more frequently. A general relationship was also observed, namely, a greater tendency to experience shame was associated with a higher intensity of an identity crisis. (shrink)

Collective trauma refers to psychological effects that are experienced by a group of people in response to shared traumatic conditions. Farmers represent a unique population that is chronically exposed to potentially traumatic events and conditions particular to the agricultural industry. Farming communities in Iowa have experienced the farm crisis of the 1980s, decades of extreme weather events, rapidly fluctuating markets, trade wars, rising input costs, farm bankruptcies and foreclosures, and high rates of farmer suicides. Exposure to such conditions can potentially (...) have dramatic effects on the people who experience them and the communities they live in. While research exists examining the behavioral health aspects of stress in farmers, no studies have examined the lived experiences of farmers within the framework of collective trauma and its effects on decision-making. To investigate how Iowa farmers perceive their own experiences of these potential types of collective trauma, this study conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with farmers and farmer-oriented behavioral health experts. Particular focus is placed on how collective trauma affects individual farmers, their families, and their farming communities, as well as how this type of trauma impacts farm management decisions and sustainability outcomes. Qualitative data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach to develop a theoretical framework describing how collective trauma, in the form of environmental, financial, and community threats, impacts farm management decisions and, in turn, affects environmental, economic, and social sustainability outcomes. Potential implications for how agricultural policy can potentially address the effects and systemic causes of trauma are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” (...) as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

This paper examines narrative approaches to care within the context of dementia. It reviews the function of stories and explores some of the narrative genres that shape the cultural perceptions of dementia. We argue that narrative intelligence within healthcare is an important element in nurturing communal self‐identity for people living with dementia. Listening and responding to stories and the cultural framework that this encompasses is an embodied action that is not just related to cognitive recall but situates us within a (...) cultural community. People with dementia may have challenges in maintaining narrative legitimacy in the face of fractured stories and incoherent narratives. Health professionals can offer support in reframing and presenting counterstories that maintain identities that can potentially be marginalised, silenced and open to narrative foreclosure. This process requires health professionals to be attentive and responsive to how patients with dementia and their supporters construct and position the stories they tell and the meaning(s) they attach to them. (shrink)

In notes to Hegel's Rechtsphilosophie lectures, written around the time of Haiti's 1825 ‘ransom’—the 150 million francs demanded by France to indemnify former slave and plantation owners—we find an uncanny remark. Hegel appears to report on a different ransom, a compensated abolition of slavery in North America that never happened, anticipating an application of the Fifth Amendment's takings clause that US legal scholarship routinely fails to mention. In view of Alan Brudner's enlistment of Hegel as the philosopher ‘uniquely’ able to (...) understand the Fifth Amendment's requirement for compensation for expropriations—a ‘constitutional essential for liberalism’—this paper explores the meaning of these passages in the historical context of the legal abolitions of Hegel's time: feudalism and slavery. The slaveholder indemnities were clearly the unjust ‘dividends’ of the colour line, but their legal foundations and developments in US thought of the nineteenth century also usefully illustrate takings law's foreclosure of political and social transformation through the securitization of value. Reading these histories and Hegel's comments alongside the critical interventions of the black radical tradition, I suggest that Hegel's curious remarks on compensated takings suggest not only a critical divergence from Brudner's understanding of ‘dialogic community’, but a crucial limitation in his field of analysis which pivoted on the denigration of black sovereignty. This paper thus suggests an understanding of US takings law through the shifting understandings of the term ‘ransom’—which for abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass signified not a resolution of slavery, but rather the threat of its perpetuation—and Douglass's elaboration of the pathology of the colour line. (shrink)

The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. I argue that understanding this foreclosure of Amerindian linguistic communities’ ability to collectively engage (...) in interpretive processes of culture and be heard and understood as coherent is an essential background condition to conceiving and theorizing the multiplicity of social oppressions and their intersections in contemporary Latin American contexts. Further, the work of disrupting and disobeying colonial interpretive frameworks has long been practiced by Indigenous women in Latin America, whose testimonies and expressions have been made sub-audible by design in colonial systems of meaning-making. This is part of the extensive legacy of the long quillwork of communal alphabets of survival. (shrink)

I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s only play Les bouches inutiles reveals the centrality of failure in Beauvoir’s feminist account of political freedom. In recent years, political theorists have mobilized failure to capture the diverse ways of being and doing that stand outside of hegemonic models of political life, with some conceiving of failure as a form of negativity. Negativity, on these accounts, captures an “antisocial” form of resistance by which subjects refuse configurations of sociality in order to achieve freedom. (...) I argue, however, that this form of negativity runs counter to the collective conception of freedom in Beauvoir’s political thought. To make this case, I interpret the play as a performance manqué and demonstrate that the failures that the women encounter in Les bouches inutiles are conditional on responses from the men. This allows me to recover a conception of failure as a form of positive negativity. What Beauvoir does in her literary theory is to conceptualize that same place of negativity, to which men have consigned women, as a place from which women might disclose themselves and their unique situations. Read in this way, failure is both the foreclosure of the space of intersubjectivity between women’s appeals and men’s responses, and at the same time opens ways for women to resist those failures. I then leverage Eve Sedgwick’s theory of the periperformative to show how, by engaging in poetic practices, women re-signify the political meanings of their bodies and become free with and through others. I conclude by stepping outside of the frame of the play to evaluate its recent resignification by contemporary readers. Doing so underscores the point that resisting failure requires ongoing practices of contestation and disclosure by subjects and audiences across time to affirm the collective dimension of freedom in feminist political theory. (shrink)

It is no secret that philosophy was historically established as the endeavor of white men and that this history continues to underpin and inform the workings of the institutionalized discipline in contemporary university spaces. The discipline’s inherent preoccupation with the universal rather than the particular, the abstract rather than the material, has rendered philosophy particularly obtuse for certain kinds of thinking, and oblivious to large currents of political and aesthetic reflection that have shaped contemporary intellectual engagement with our world. In (...) this article, the authors’ aim is to read the epistemic erasures/foreclosures/violences associated with African philosophy differently, to ask whether it can change key. The article discusses Black African women’s creative work as theory or as philosophy done on different terms. The creative text that the authors center in this regard is the poem bientang (2020) by Black Afrikaans writer Jolyn Phillips. (shrink)

In _Autonomy_ Nicholas Brown theorizes the historical and theoretical argument for art's autonomy from its acknowledged character as a commodity. Refusing the position that the distinction between art and the commodity has collapsed, Brown demonstrates how art can, in confronting its material determinations, suspend the logic of capital by demanding interpretive attention. He applies his readings of Marx, Hegel, Adorno, and Jameson to a range of literature, photography, music, television, and sculpture, from Cindy Sherman's photography and the novels of Ben (...) Lerner and Jennifer Egan to _The Wire_ and the music of the White Stripes. He demonstrates that through their attention and commitment to form, such artists turn aside the determination posed by the demand of the market, thereby defeating the foreclosure of meaning entailed in commodification. In so doing, he offers a new theory of art that prompts a rethinking of the relationship between art, critical theory, and capitalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Tragic Vision of African American ReligionPaul E. CapetzThe Tragic Vision of African American Religion Matthew V. Johnson New York, N.Y.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 189 pp. $75.00Matthew Johnson’s profound book The Tragic Vision of African American Religion sheds new light upon the distinctive nature of African American religion. Adequate interpretation of this topic requires understanding the traumas inflicted upon Africans sold into slavery, their existential predicaments before and (...) after emancipation, and the ongoing plight of their descendants whose psyches have been indelibly scarred by this traumatic history. Johnson avails himself of the resources of philosophical theology, psychoanalytic theory, and literary criticism to argue his thesis that African American religion expresses a tragic vision of reality. Besides providing an illuminating analysis of the traumatic experience underlying this religious vision, Johnson presents a compelling constructive proposal as to the broader implications of his thesis for Christian theology at large.As a student of David Tracy and Langdon Gilkey, Johnson sees the necessity for rigorous philosophical reflection in theology. Because the spirituality of the black church stands in some real tension with the traditional theological categories inherited from Europe, Johnson proceeds with “a phenomenological orientation grounded in a philosophical hermeneutical approach” that allows him to excavate the traumatic experiences informing this spirituality (4). He skillfully uses the concepts of mourning, loss, longing, and desire developed in psychoanalytical theory to probe the significance of trauma for grasping the dynamics of African American spirituality. He engages literary criticism and argues convincingly for a distinction between “tragedy” as a literary genre and the tragic vision it articulates. Indeed, the tragic vision is prior to tragedy. The tragic is not the encounter with meaninglessness per se but “the always already aesthetic representation of the encounter, which preserves its terrible truth in a transfigured vision of reality” (6). This vision affirms life while facilitating “the recognition and embrace of the darker, more fundamental truths of life” (7).Cognizant that other theologians have declared the incompatibility of Christian faith with a tragic vision of reality, Johnson believes otherwise. He insists that the tragic is fundamental to human experience as such, although it is frequently evaded by strategies of foreclosure—including those of Christian theology—that falsify the experience. Yet the distinctive thing about the black religious experience is the way African Americans made the Christian faith [End Page 215] their own by transforming it at a deep spiritual level through their tragic vision. Mildly critical of previous formulations of black theology, Johnson contends that this involved much more than the affirmation that God cares about the sociopolitical liberation of oppressed people. The Christian tragic vision of the black experience offers the possibility of a new basis for “theology in an African American key” (6). Since he understands himself primarily as a Christian theologian, however, Johnson addresses an audience consisting of more than fellow black theologians. He rightly highlights a profound truth that white theologians have largely failed to grasp: the contribution of the black church “transcends the confines of African American culture to speak meaningfully to a Christian faith struggling to remain viable in a meaningful way” (10).James Cone once issued this challenge: “Why don’t white theologians make racism their issue?” White theologians who ponder Johnson’s book will begin to understand the full import of this challenge: by opening ourselves unreservedly to the pain of our black sisters and brothers, we may discover anew the meaning of that genuine humanity to which the gospel summons all people. A theological reformulation of Christian faith as tragic in the light of the traumas of the black experience could occasion a much needed reformation of the white churches in America.Paul E. CapetzUnited Theological Seminary of the Twin CitiesCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future. Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society (...) to an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself. Contributors McKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto. (shrink)

Despite all attempts at restoring it, the great humanist tradition could not resist the double trauma of Auschwitz and Hiroshima in which the very idea of humanity had been swallowed up by its opposite. Yet, beyond the critique of humanism carried out by twentieth-century philosophers such as Heidegger, the ancient profile of man as essentially humanus delineates itself again. On the other hand, as soon as the Nietzschean anthropo-technical – or biopolitical – vector of artificial intervention into the characteristics of (...) human nature enters into synergy with the Darwinian presupposition about the contiguity with the animal world, the social consequences can be devastating. But is this the only – destructive and self-destructive – face of post-humanism? Is it necessary for it to turn into a form of patent anti-humanism? In opposition to both Heidegger’s foreclosure of biology and the animal as well as the biopolitical misuse of an immunitarian semantics that has led to the most brutal forms of homicidal eugenics, in this article I claim that the overbearing entrance of biological life into socio-political dynamics is not necessarily a danger from which we have to defend ourselves in the name of a self-centred purity of the individual and the species. It might also be regarded as the future of man, a threshold from which he could be stimulated in view of a more complex and open elaboration of his humanitas. (shrink)

Place mouse over image continent. 2.1 (2012): 36–39. From an ethical and political perspective, people and property can hardly be separated. Indeed, the modern political subject – that is, the individual, the person, the self, the autonomous actor, the rational self-interest maximizer, etc. – has taken shape in and through the elaboration, institutionalization, and enactment of that which rightfully belongs to it. This thread can be traced back perhaps most directly to Locke’s notion that the origin of the political state (...) occurs when people rise above the state of nature by ceding the power to prosecute offenses. The rule of law begins then with a defense of the right to property. People become subjects by adhering to the social contract, which they do by deferring the defense of their own property to the state. In this light, the response of the United States federal government to the financial crisis of 2008 appears to many as a breach of the social contract. The chant “banks got bailed out, we got sold out” states the claim plainly. Why exactly did some subjects (e.g., the banks) have their property defended by the state (i.e., through the variety of programs including TARP, the discount window at the US Federal Reserve, etc.), when other subjects (e.g., homeowners) found themselves without protection of their property rights, forced to default on mortgage debts and face dispossession? Even if the rhetoric about “too big to fail” can be believed, and the collapse of the financial system would lead to negative consequences for people who had little or no connection to the activities that brought it about, such consequences need not call into question the notion that everyone stands equally before the law. To occupy, then, appears as a form of civil disobedience, an intentional, retaliatory breach of the social contract by those who feel that they have lost the support of the state to which they ceded their power as sovereign agents. The visible and the invisible The violation of property rights of people who have recognition, protection and power under the law destabilizes their very status as citizens and tests the limit of democracy. Does the financial system force the dematerialized victimization of individuals? Do people become numbers, or worse still, percentages of unemployed, tranches of defaulted mortgages and foreclosures? Are they perhaps instead disenfranchised prospectively from the privileged position occupied by virtual entities and actors such as those involved in the derivatives markets, always already exiled back into the physical, visible realm? The line of conflict appears to be drawn between invisibility/absence/deferral and visibility/presence/realization. The demonstrators occupy an excess property of those subjects, namely, the banks and financial elite, who did receive recognition and protection under the law. By domesticating this excess property, rendering its invisibility visible within the political economy, the protesters raise a new form of threat to the hegemonic order. To occupy, then, involves a rejection of the order under which the “99%” have been subjected to erasure. The occupation seeks creatively to establish a new means of communication and law for its subjects. In the face of an existing power structure that is increasingly disenfranchising the majority of people while consolidating nodes of power and influence, the “occupation”, or the work of the Occupy movement, involves seizing a space that refuses the rules of the existing, allegedly corrupt sovereign state. This refusal of governance extends even to include a steadfast refusal to articulate a strategy, to formulate a list of demands, to converse with the sovereign power on the grounds of its own conventions, to put forth a leader, to resolve the ambiguity of the movement into a discreet identity, face, or voice. Do these tactics provide a resolution to the problem that was its genesis? Not in such a direct and easily resolved manner, but it remains difficult to imagine a direct and simple resolution to the problematic of the breach of the social contract. The ambiguity of the situation has generated significant interest within the broader populace, though many people sympathetic to the cause appear to be frustrated because the movement has not simply put forward a short list of concrete demands, or even a set of leaders and spokespeople, much less a resolution. And yet, this lack of coherence appears as a resolution of a problem generic to protest movements in the past, where individual leaders can be removed or discredited, and lists of demands can be co-opted by others holding more political power. Meanwhile, the ambiguity has compelled imitations on a global scale, with the Occupy Wall Street participants consciously taking actions that can be replicated by anyone anywhere without significant cost. These actions have taken place not in a peripheral location such as a parking lot in New Jersey, but instead close to the centers of power and governance, adjacent to Wall Street, close to the White House, on college campuses, etc. This spontaneous archipelago of protests becomes an irritant, a negation of the accepted order of protests, but when the protesters themselves move outside of their encampments, they are escorted by the police, constantly monitored and maintained so that a permanent state of paranoid persecution takes hold. To occupy, occupying, occupation – these actions involve a variable degree of danger – are you willing to step into a different space, where the rule of law is unclear and evolving? Are you presenting yourself as a representative of the majority, the 99%? Who has a sense of belonging to the 99%? This previously invisible population becomes a focal point of political power, garners increasing public support, infects the public dialogue. The government recognizes this population by forcing it from the occupied space, removing the element of possession of property. It is at this point of conflict, in the struggle to hold the physical property, where the greatest friction and violence occurs. Scaling the rule of law While occupied, the property calls for a redress of grievances, a restoration of the rule of law. The Occupy movement does not select and put forward individuals or leaders, it puts forward places – the occupied property represents the point of conflict, not the individual. And it is this very property that the government then tries to reclaim. The movement remains faceless, anonymous, uncounted, or rather counted only as a mass, the self-labeled mass of 99%. These spaces are like refugee camps or favelas, but constructed to unite the political life and private life of the protesters. This objective is presented as a tactical necessity, as all other means of protest and communication have failed, leaving only the option of seizing, holding, occupying a property. But to what end, exactly? Can anyone deliberately return to the prior social contract, embrace, affirm, and govern in strict accordance with the earlier relationship to property, following the logic of Locke’s arguments? In this respect, the contemporary crisis indicates a new, transitional phase in the way that property operates, or rather, in the balance between real and virtual value. The roots of the crisis lay in the massive overvaluation of property caused by lax lending practices, as more people were encouraged to borrow more money, which drove up the prices of property. At the same time, these individual properties, these mortgages for homes actual families lived in and worked to support, were bundled into securities that could be bought, sold, and speculated on. The reduction of a physical house or piece of real estate to an almost incalculably small element in an investment vehicle appears as a scaling of the hedge that radically diminishes the value of any individually owned property. Moreover, a number of recently-innovated financial products allow investors to hedge in new ways, to deliberately spread risk around a portfolio in hopes of bringing returns even when the individual mortgage defaults. At the level of the ‘free’ market, these virtual negative valuations are designed to balance the physical positive valuation, though many of the biggest lenders are now being investigated for controlling both sides of this valuation, the positive and the negative, to facilitate both the creation and failure of the investments and to profit from both. The ability to benefit from both the negative and positive value of an investment is a result of a technologically enabled capacity to operate within a complex field. These layered and scaled investment vehicles and the simultaneous negation of their value together represent a commingling of the virtual and physical existence that is both complex and multiple. The valuation of a virtual property has tremendous power to change the valuation of the physical - either injecting it with or depriving it of funds, pumping in or draining life and energy. This situation has roots of its own – the notion of property advanced e.g., throughout the enclosure movement in Britain was, from the outset, an imposition of virtuality (i.e., the concept of law, the institutions associated with ownership, etc.) on the physical reality of land. 1 The difference today is that technological trading platforms combined with innovations within the financial services industry have enabled the reduction of each individual property receiving or losing value in scale to an almost atomic level. In turn, the number of properties held simultaneously and valued as a massive, multiple wholes – i.e., the derivatives market in mortgage-backed securities – is a new phenomenon made possible through the application of similar technologies and institutional structures. And those actors who can trade in these layers of complexity can then profit from the new phase of disassociation of the virtual and the physical – unconcerned with and operating at such a virtual distance from the individual residing physically on a particular piece of real estate that they no longer feel the tug of the physical tying them back to the physical, operating literally as in a video game, in a virtually distanced world. What can or should be done about this situation? Answers lie outside the scope of this current essay, but merit consideration in the near future… NOTE 1) Hernando de Soto has emphasized this dimension by empirically demonstrating its non-existence in many countries in The Mystery of Capital. (shrink)

Can friendship as a political practice offer enough traction to imagine a borderless world? The startling contemporary rise in aggressive ethno-nationalism and end-times ecological crises have the same root: an inability to be together with humans as much as the natural world. Matt Hern and Am Johal suggest that porous renditions of being-together animated by friendship can spark a repoliticization of the political to surpass the foreclosures of the state, speak to a freedom of movement, and find renovated relationships with (...) the more-than-human. This volume includes interviews with Jean-Luc Nancy, Leela Gandhi and Leanne Simpson. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, (...) Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine. (shrink)

La «société de la connaissance» concerne l'ensemble des secteurs productifs. Elle induit une réorganisation des entreprises, qui a des conséquences sur la définition du travail et sur l'établissement de la valeur des firmes. Les enjeux de transfert de connaissances pour le développement sont devenus critiques, comme le montre l'exemple des médicaments. Dans cette situation, une stratégie de verrouillage, par la construction de nouvelles enclosures dans le domaine immatériel est en chantier dans l'ensemble des pays développés. En contrepoint, les nouveaux mouvements (...) sociaux du numérique visent à étendre le domaine public et à construire les biens communs de l'information. Ces mouvements se rapprochent des pays en développement et permettent de définir un nouvel équilibre économique et géopolitique mondial. Deux questions peuvent nous servir de boussole pour inventer les nouvelles formes d'organisation publique de l'ére informationnelle: le critère de l'accès au savoir pour tous et celui de la défense de la vie privée.The "knowledge society" refers to all productive sectors. It induces a reorganization of companies, which has implications for the definition of work and the establishment of the value of firms. Issues of knowledge transfer for development have become critical, as the example of drugs. In this situation, a foreclosure strategy by building new enclosures in the field site is immaterial in all developed countries. In counterpoint, the new social movements aim to extend the digital public domain and build common property information. These movements are similar in developing countries and help to define a new global economic and geopolitical balance. Two questions can serve as a compass to invent new forms of organization of public informational era: the criterion of access to knowledge for all and the defense of privacy. (shrink)

Abstract:Untranslatability and resistance are terms that have a longstanding place in psychoanalytic theory and philosophies of law. But how might these terms labor differently whence their conditions rest on the founding conditions of antiblackness that position blackness as a type of permanent errancy? Pursuing the question on the untranslatability of blackness, antiblackness, and the resistances therein and thereof, the article adumbrates on the strange and estranged forty-year gap between the anti-lynching legislation’s enactment and its first court hearing (1969) as well (...) as its second court hearing (1999)—cases which have translated the statute’s original legislative intent from anti-lynching to “self-lynching.” As the article considers the untranslatability of blackness in the various registers of “resistance” in law, representation, and the psychic economies of antiblackness, it also reflects on how the transience of such translation casts an impossible “self” via a mode of lynching in the juridical imaginary—a type of foreclosure that precedes and operates beyond the orders of de jure and de facto law. (shrink)

« Real politics » : Some remarks on justice and politics The focus of the article is on the foreclosure of justice from the constellation of modern political concepts, that is, the erosion which modernity operates concerning the conditions which would enable us to pose the question of justice. The failure of all modern attempts to formulate the right of resistance shows the collapse of the idea of justice, henceforth reduced to being either a purely formal procedure or the (...) will of majority. From this point of view, justice is merely the advantage of the stronger, as we can see in the position of Thrasymachus, already criticised by Plato. The essence of the crisis we are facing today involves more than just economics. It also involves law and politics. The moment is thus an opportunity to re-open the question of justice. To do so, we must go beyond the principle of majority decision. True politics, an idea which traverses Kant and Walter Benjamin, envisages the question of justice beyond the doxastic horizon. It re-opens the Socratic conflict between truth and opinion. The core of the problem hinges on the possibility of a real political change in this political form, the form of a modern democracy which represents itself as absolute and un-transcendable. (shrink)

UTILIZING MICHEL FOUCAULT'S CONCEPTION OF "PLAGUE" AS A DESCRIPtion of states of exception, this essay analyzes America's plans to genetically screen illegal immigrants. It argues that liberal democratic theory presupposes the exceptionalism of the nation-state and hence justifies sacrifices to appease the tragic order of things. The use of genetic technology in current American immigration policy instantiates these "necessary" sacrifices, extending agency and visibility in a never-ending struggle to foreclose every manner of contingency. In contrast, I offer a "doxological" view (...) of space that, eschewing this tragic economy, re-imagines the world by resisting foreclosure and "laboring" to remain open. After theorizing the genetic screening of illegal immigrants through Foucault's "plague" and Hans Jonas' work on sacrifice, I articulate the globalized nation-state as the exception for violence and conclude with political theology's more capacious view of space and cultural identity. (shrink)

The present paper aims to shed light on some post-oedipal moments of the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Going beyond the stereotypical opposition between the oedipal psychoanalysis and the anti-oedipal schizoanalysis, it endeavors to reinvestigate the semiotic nature of theknotenpunktand thesinthomeby applying some Deleuzian and Bakhtinian concepts. Thus, theknotenpunktis described as a grotesque knot bringing together some heterogeneous elements. The involved disparate components establish a rhizomatic multiplicity irreducible to a common determiner. As far as thesinthomeis concerned, it is also illustrated as a grotesque (...) knot quilting the disseminated heterogeneous orders. In contrast to the dominant conception of the symptom with a complex mode of signifying (that is mainly bound to the oedipal topography), theknotenpunktand thesinthomehold a kind of hyper-formative mode of signifying. As a result, the latter may be regarded as pure formators irreducible to a meaning or a certain interpretation. Finally, the paper sets out to analyze and evaluate the relationship between thesinthomeand the foreclosure from a semiotic perspective. Accordingly, thesinthomeis explained as a reply to foreclosure which is specifically a perceptive-imperative (retroactive) contemplation (in the light of law according to the Peircean phaneroscopy) on the rhizomatic multiplicity of psychosis (the case of schizophrenia). (shrink)

Current critical pedagogical scholarship has theorized the epistemological and social intersection between globalization and educational technology according to two distinct positions. For some, this intersection offers new liberatory knowledges and opportunities that can subvert social homogenization and economic disparity. For others, this relationship is just another phase of neoimperialism that should be politically and ideologically resisted. In contrast, we argue that the intersection between globalization and educational technologies is rather a manifestation of larger economic and logical forces, and that resistance (...) to such circumstances can neither be purely ideological or social. Instead, we contend that such a theoretical and pedagogical foreclosure dialectically actualizes conditions for real change—particularly when it complicates educational research technologies and their impact on epistemological multiplicity. (shrink)

Genome Canada has funded a research project to evaluate the usefulness of different forms of ethical analysis for assessing the moral weight of public opinion in the governance of genomics. This paper will describe a role of public consultation for ethical analysis and a contribution of ethical analysis to public consultation and the governance of genomics/biotechnology. Public consultation increases the robustness of ethical analysis with a more diverse and rich accounts experiences. Consultation must be carefully and respectfully designed to generate (...) sufficiently diverse and rich accounts of moral experiences. Since dominant groupstend to define ethical or policy issues in a manner that excludes some interests or perspectives, it is important to identify the range of interests that diverse publics hold before defining the issue and scope of a consultation. Similarly, a heavy policy focus and pressures to commercialize products risk oversimplification of the discussion and the premature foreclosure of ethical dialogue. Consequently, a significant contribution of ethical dialogue strengthened by social analysis is to consider the context and non-policy use of power to govern genomics and to sustain social debate on enduring ethical issues. (shrink)

The use of psychoanalytic ideas to explore social and political questions is not new. Freud began this work himself and social research has consistently drawn on his ideas. This makes perfect sense. Social and political theory must find ways to conceptualise the relation between human subjects and our social environment; and the distinctive and intense observation of individual psychical structuring afforded within clinical psychoanalysis has given rise to rich theoretical and methodological resources for doing just this. However, psychoanalytic concepts do (...) not remain the same when they are rearticulated in the context of research. This book traces the reiteration and transformation of concepts in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, Klein and Lacan, the social theory of Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and Zizek, and case studies of empirical research ranging from the classic Tavistock Institute studies to contemporary work in politics, gender studies, cultural studies and education. Each chapter explores one cluster of concepts: Melancholia, loss and subjectivity Overdetermination and free association Resistance, reflexivity and the compulsion to repeat Repression, disavowal and foreclosure Psychic defenses and social defenses Arguing against the reification of psychoanalytic concepts, Claudia Lapping suggests the need for a reflexive understanding of the play of attachments and substitutions as concepts are reframed in the contrasting activities of psychoanalysis and research. (shrink)

Political theorists have increasingly adopted the psychoanalytic language of ‘mourning’ to characterize experiences of loss and injury, and to legitimate these as claims about a past political or cultural order. Mourning would seek to work through these experiences while opening persons to their shared vulnerabilities. With this article, I return to Freud’s original distinction between mourning and melancholia, along with its development through the work of Donald Winnicott and the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although psychoanalytic mourning balances a coming-to-terms with (...) loss against investment in new social relations, when it is extrapolated to a broader community it risks over-determining the social field. The cost is a foreclosure of other modalities for articulating claims about injury and political order, and in particular those that might draw on anger as a resource for political action and solidarity. (shrink)