Beginning with the role of the Sex Pistols’s “God Save the Queen” in Lee Edelman and J. Jack Halberstam’s debates about queer death and failure, I follow a musical motive from the Pistols track to its reappearance in Atari Teenage Riot’s 1995 “Delete Yourself .” In this song, as in much of ATR’s work from the 1990s, overlapping queer and Afro-diasporic aesthetics condense around the idea of death or “bare life.” ATR’s musical strategies treat this death as a form (...) of de-intensification and divestment— not, as in Edelman or the Pistols, as a form of negation . I will show that ATR’s musical recontextualization of the Pistols’s riff mirrors the political recontextualization of queerness and queer death from negation to disinvestment. Pushing this misprision or sticky interface between cyberpunk, queer, and Afro-diasporic musical aesthetics, I use ATR’s music to consider how queer death might work as a political response to neoliberal demands to invest in “normal” life. I first discuss the traditional concept of death as negation in both the Sex Pistols song "God Save the Queen," and in Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam’s formulations. I then argue that Atari Teenage Riot's song “Delete Yourself” describes a neoliberal, biopolitical concept of death, death as carefully administered divestment. Finally, I use Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of drugs, and Ronald Bogue’s Deleuzian reading of death metal to identify and explain how “MIDIjunkies” and “Into the Death” complicate the biopolitical/neoliberal management of death by reworking traditional black/queer critical aesthet- ics. In these songs, ATR undermine biopolitical neoliberalism’s demand to invest in and intensify regular “normal” life: rather than treating death as a nadir of intensity, they intensify it–that is, they go into the death. This strategy of going “into the death” is one possible queer necropolitical response to neoliberalism. (shrink)

This paper argues that the theological ethics of the future will be both more authentically Christian and more public, and briefly illustrates that claim in relation to the polity and to the academy. It argues, first, that Christian political reasoning should not be preoccupied with liberal anxieties about epistemic criteria for public reasoning, but rather turn its attention to the institutional telos of the polity, the political common good; and be prepared to speak in an openly Christian voice where appropriate. (...) It argues, second, that scholarly reasoning offered by theological ethicists to the academy will be more effective the better it understands the complementary roles fulfilled by theology and other academic disciplines, such as the social sciences. Theological ethicists should not view theology as queen of the sciences but instead critically appropriate the findings of the social sciences and also work to offer it healthier, theologically-informed concepts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sacrificial Ram and the Swan QueenMimetic Theory Fades to BlackBrian Collins (bio)“We speak of a ‘black’ mirror. But where it mirrors, it darkens, of course, but it doesn’t look black, and that which is seen in it does not appear ‘dirty’ but ‘deep.’”—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on ColorThis paper explores the ways in which male and female bodies become the sites of mimetic desire and ritual violence in Darren (...) Aronofsky’s two companion films The Wrestler (109 min, Wild Bunch, 2008, DVD) and Black Swan (108 min, Fox Searchlight, 2010, DVD). Both films (which were originally intended to be one film, explaining their thematic consistency)1 share three elements. First, both explore cultural forms, wrestling and dance, respectively, that punish the body of the performer in a spectacular way. Second, both films end with the ritualistic dying (if not the death) of the main character. Third, in both films, this dying is accompanied by a kind of transformation that can only be called “becoming-animal.”2 Though this last point is much easier to demonstrate [End Page 207] in the case of Black Swan, I will argue that this is also true for The Wrestler. In interpreting these films, I will rely mainly on René Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and the surrogate victim mechanism, supplemented by Slavoj Žižek’s notion of symbolic death. Symbolic death or “second death” is Žižek’s Hegelian appropriation of the psychoanalytic death drive. The death drive holds a special place for Girard, since he considers Freud’s formulation of the death drive his admission that the Oedipal complex cannot explain the compulsion to repetition, an admission for which he credits Freud’s honesty. In this paper, I demonstrate that pseudo-masochism, Girard’s alternate theory of repetition, and the Žižekian second death are both present in Black Swan and The Wrestler, and that each film plays on the animal/human distinction and ritual transformations of the body to explore these themes.Part One: The Sacrificial Ram“The function of the wrestler is not to win: it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him.”—Roland Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” MythologiesThe Pseudo-Masochistic Body I: Becoming-RamWilliam Golding’s novel Pincher Martin: The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1956) follows a bitter, selfish, and intransigent sailor who finds himself clinging to a rock in the middle of the ocean, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, only to slowly learn that he is not a survivor at all, but is rather trapped like a character from The Twilight Zone in the utter loneliness of the timeless time between his titular “two deaths.” The first death comes when Martin goes down with his ship and the second comes when he is annihilated (possibly; the ending is ambiguous) by the “black lightning,” which Terry Eagleton identifies in his analysis of the book as “the fire of God’s ruthless love, which burns up those who cannot bear it.” Martin’s misotheism is his last defense against the terrifying power of love, and he continues to defy God as the black lightning engulfs him.3 Why the two deaths? Martin is unable to die properly the first time, Eagleton argues, “because he is incapable of love. Only the good are capable of dying. Martin cannot yield himself up to death because he has never been able to yield himself up to others in life.”4 [End Page 208]Randy “The Ram” Robinson, born Robin Ramzinski, (Mickey Rourke), the protagonist of The Wrestler, is, like Pincher Martin, between two deaths, isolated from the rest of humanity because of his inability to connect with others. But while Pincher Martin is defiant and bound for a self-created Hell because of his deliberate rejection of love, Ram is a much more sympathetic character—though no less doomed—because he tries but fails time after time to accept the love of those who could save him. Pincher Martin’s self-created internal obstacle is his hatred of God, externalized through his encounter with the black lightning. But in Ram’s case... (shrink)

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the “Role-Ideal Model” is (...) that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles as parents, colleagues, employers, citizens, etc., because roles are the site where structure meets agency. In short, the Role-Ideal Model explains how individual action contributes to structural change, justifies demands for action from each particular agent, specifies what kinds of acts should be undertaken, moderates between demanding too much and too little of individual agents, and provides an account of the critical responses appropriate for holding individuals accountable for structural injustice. (shrink)

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated (...) with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

What is objectionable about “blacking up” or other comparable acts of imagining involving unethical attitudes? Can such imaginings be wrong, even if there are no harmful consequences and imaginers are not meant to apply these attitudes beyond the fiction? In this article, we argue that blackface—and imagining in general—can be ethically flawed in virtue of being oppressive, in virtue of either its content or what imaginers do with it, where both depend on how the imagined attitudes interact with the imagining’s (...) context. We explain and demonstrate this using speech act theory alongside a detailed case study of blackface. (shrink)

Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.

Like some other human sciences, sociology has had a recurrent concern to clarify the ambivalent relationship between its professional accounts of social reality on the one hand and lay understandings of social reality on the other. Sociological ethnographers have claimed to accomplish this clarification by including in their accounts both direct representation and responsive interpretation of the vernacular voice of those human subjects whose actions and understandings comprise the focus of their inquiries. I briefly examine some of the practical and (...) textual strategies by which studies have accomplished this. I go on to note that the authenticity of ethnographic work has itself become a matter of dispute on the grounds of the ineradicable asymmetry between the professional voice of the researcher and the vernacular voice of research subjects. Drawing on work in literary theory, anthropology and feminist scholarship, a favoured solution to this problem has argued for the necessity of acknowledging the essentially dialogical character of the relationship between researchers and subjects and also of finding ways to make ethnographic texts reflect this character. This article draws attention to an alternative set of professional practices that prefer ‘co-construction’ to ‘dialogue’ as a term of art. Its use encourages and facilitates the close and detailed examination of the multiple ways in which subjects already speak of and for themselves and others within the local sites of their real-world activities. Studies of these matters accord the vernacular voice of human subjects renewed significance for sociological investigation as part of a radical ‘respecification’ of prior understandings of the proper relationship between vernacular and professional accounts of social reality. The article assesses the upshot of these claims for the current practice and future prospects of sociology as one of the human sciences. (shrink)

There has been consistent interest in telepathy within psychoanalysis from its start. Relational psychoanalysis, which is a relatively new development in psychoanalytic theory and practice, seems more receptive to experiences between patient and analyst that suggest ostensibly anomalous communicative capacities. To establish this openness to telepathic phenomena with relational approaches, a selection of papers recently published in leading academic journals in relational psychoanalysis is examined. This demonstrates the extent to which telepathy-like experiences are openly presented and seriously considered in the (...) relational community. The article then discusses those characteristics of the relational approach that may facilitate greater openness to telepathic experience. The argument is that relational psychoanalysis provides a coherent framework in which otherwise anomalous phenomena of patient–analyst interaction can be understood. (shrink)

This essay examines narratives about cadaver dissection through the lens of psychoanalytic theory in order to better understand the nature of medical students’ socialization into medicine and its implications for physician-patient communication. The theoretical framework provided by Julia Kristeva focuses attention on the nature of subject-formation in relation to abjection – that which reveals the contingent nature of the speaking self. Analysis of memoirs and other narratives by medical students demonstrates that students encounter the abject in the process of dissecting (...) a corpse, but are rigorously trained to map over this experience using the technical tools of biomedicine. Other students rely on dark and morbid forms of humor to develop a sense of emotional distance from their cadaver. This analysis reveals new insights about the nature of the gap between physicians and their patients. In particular, it indicates that this gap is not fixed or static but fluid and malleable. Physicians are always shifting between the symbolic realm of biomedicine and the affective, semiotic mode of encountering the abject. This malleability provides the key to training and educating medical students, socializing them in such a way that they are reflexive about this process of oscillation. How physicians handle the reality of their fluctuation between the semiotic and the symbolic is what will determine their ability to engage with patients. (shrink)

Iris Marion Young’s influential Social Connections Model of responsibility offers a compelling approach to theorizing structural injustice. However, the precise nature of the kind of responsibility modelled by the SCM, along with its relationship to the liability model, has remained unclear. I offer a reading of Young that takes the difference between the liability model and the SCM to be an instance of a more longstanding distinction in the literature on moral responsibility: attributability vs. accountability. I show that interpreting the (...) SCM as a conception of accountability resolves a number of objections, while also highlighting the SCM’s distinctive stance on the relationship between ethics and politics. (shrink)

I propose a new concept of solidarity, which I call “solidarity from below,” that highlights an aspect of solidarity widely recognized in popular uses of the term, but which has hitherto been neglected in the philosophical literature. Solidarity from below is the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change. I situate this concept with respect to four distinct but intertwined questions that have motivated extant theorizing about solidarity. I explain what it means to conceptualize (...) solidarity from below as a form of power, rather than as a feeling, disposition, duty, or scheme of social arrangements. Finally, I suggest that the moral-relational aspects of solidarity emerge secondarily from the process of collective power, and not the other way around. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 4, April 2022.

Feminist philosophers have challenged a wide range of gender injustices in professional philosophy. However, the problem of precarity, that is, the increasing numbers of contingent faculty who cannot find permanent employment, has received scarcely any attention. What explains this oversight? In this article, I argue, first, that academics are held in the grips of an ideology that diverts attention away from the structural conditions of precarity, and second, that the gendered dimensions of such an ideology have been overlooked. To do (...) so, I identify two myths: the myth of meritocracy and the myth of work as its own reward. I demonstrate that these myths—and the two-tier system itself—manifest an unmistakably gendered logic, such that gender and precarity are mutually reinforcing and co-constitutive. I conclude that feminist philosophers have particular reason to organize against the casualization of academic work. (shrink)

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the (...) back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street. (shrink)

Primary works on Huang-Lao Taoism and Yin-yang philosophy, lost for more than two thousand years, are translated and prefaced with an informative introduction.

Consider a health policy issue like child car seats in the U.S., mosquito netting in the third world, preschool education for poor children, or the immunization of immigrants. Imagine that for this issue there were many good studies over several decades, including some recent studies. Imagine that after controlling for many factors, these studies usually found that variations in spending or usage were significantly, substantially, and positively related to variations in health. Furthermore, imagine this result was confirmed by a thirty (...) year old randomized experiment. (shrink)

My horoscope today says, “Focus on the small stuff.” Now, such advice does have content. It predicts that when readers interpret its words in the usual way as a guide to action, those who do what they think it recommends will, on average, feel they got more of what they wanted than those who ignored it. Even so, astrologers sure don’t make it easy for us to test their claims. If they wanted to make it easier, they would do what (...) forecasters in weather, sports, and business do: issue forecasts in a clear, standardized form. A horoscope is like a weather forecast that says, “Some rain likely nearby, soon.” It’s much easier to evaluate a forecast that a particular rain gauge has a.. (shrink)

Why do we regulate the substances we can ingest, the advisors we can hear, and the products we can buy far more than similarly-important non-health choices? I review many possible arguments for such paternalistic policies, as well many possible holes in such arguments. I argue we should either be clearer about what justifies our paternalism, or we should back off and be less paternalistic.

Processed pseudogenes may serve as a genetic reservoir for evolutionary innovation. Here, we argue that through the activity of long interspersed element‐1 retrotransposons, processed pseudogenes disperse coding and noncoding sequences rich with regulatory potential throughout the human genome. While these sequences may appear to be non‐functional, a lack of contemporary function does not prohibit future development of biological activity. Here, we discuss the dynamic evolution of certain processed pseudogenes into coding and noncoding genes and regulatory elements, and their implication in (...) wide‐ranging biological and pathological processes. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/iUY_mteVoPI. (shrink)

A work in progress, where our two friends exemplify logical fallacies, types of causation and other cool stuff. Quotations are from memory, and so may not be entirely accurate, e.g. I may have substituted "buttmunch" for "buttknocker"...

A logic-enriched type theory is a type theory extended with a primitive mechanism for forming and proving propositions. We construct two LTTs, named and , which we claim correspond closely to the classical predicative systems of second order arithmetic and . We justify this claim by translating each second order system into the corresponding LTT, and proving that these translations are conservative. This is part of an ongoing research project to investigate how LTTs may be used to formalise different approaches (...) to the foundations of mathematics.The two LTTs we construct are subsystems of the logic-enriched type theory , which is intended to formalise the classical predicative foundation presented by Herman Weyl in his monograph Das Kontinuum. The system has also been claimed to correspond to Weyl’s foundation. By casting and as LTTs, we are able to compare them with . It is a consequence of the work in this paper that is strictly stronger than .The conservativity proof makes use of a novel technique for proving one LTT conservative over another, involving defining an interpretation of the stronger system out of the expressions of the weaker. This technique should be applicable in a wide variety of different cases outside the present work. (shrink)

What does it mean to be truly human? And, relatedly, what does it mean to be treated as truly human, and with dignity, by the state, or community, of which one is a part? To be fully human, Martha Nussbaum has argued for the better part of two decades, and argues in greater detail in “Women and Human Development”, is not only to be rational, and not only to be happy, but also to be capable - capable, for example, of (...) loving others, of thinking rationally about one's own life, of engaging in dignified labor, of interacting with the natural and political environment, of participating in a society's cultural life. A truly human life is defined by, or perhaps constituted by, these capabilities; to lack anyone of them is in some way to lack a fundamental pillar of one's humanity. Therefore, she continues, a citizen in a constitutional government is treated as fully human by the state when that person's fundamental capabilities - the capabilities which define her humanity - are, at least minimally, protected, promoted or nurtured by the state's governing authorities. Constitutional governments, then, whatever else they do, must protect, promote, or create whatever conditions are necessary for citizens to possess these fundamental capabilities... I will highlight and then amplify what I think is missing or underplayed in Nussbaum's treatment of capabilities and women, and that is the role that authority plays - and the role it should and should not play - in guiding states toward a recognition of their obligation to nurture, promote, or protect women's - and men's and children's - human capabilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ways that phenomenological concepts like intercorporeality and mutual incorporation offer new tools in trying to make sense of human experiences via mediating systems. In particular, I think about how the COVID-19 pandemic hastened a large population into mediated interactions, and what is lost, perhaps contingently or perhaps intrinsically, when human experiences are mediated in this way. I look to research in presence, skillful interaction, and enactive social cognition to argue that there remains something ineffable (...) or at least extremely hard to pin down about intercorporeality, and embodied togetherness has not yet been replicated in the mediating systems we currently embrace. (shrink)

In this article, the author proposes a dynamic, interdisciplinary, network conception of expertise that differs from conventional static, linear conceptions. Using a range of graphic images, the author propose specific visualizations of this network conception of expertise. First, he discusses attempts to pin expertise down in a definition. Then he considers the network of notions from which expertise emerges. The author briefly describes representative nodes in the network, such as experience and excellence. He concludes with the view that there is (...) no need to compromise the many existing conceptions of expertise by forcing them into a false common ground. Instead, he shows that existing accounts of expertise can be better understood by viewing them as connected parts of a complex network. (shrink)

This article reviews the literature on Holocaust and genocide studies to consider the question, ‘what is the sex doing in the genocide?’ Of the three answers usually given: sexual violence is like other forms of genocidal violence, sexual violence is a coordinate in genocide and sexual violence is integral to genocidal violence, the author argues for the third position, but takes issue with Catharine MacKinnon’s claim that sexual violence destroys women as a group, thereby destroying the ethnic, racial, religious, or (...) national group to which women belong. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, the author argues that sexual violence is an attack on a fundamental condition for the possibility of the existence of human groups. When political violence is used to force biological birth in the service of death, it is a form of thanatonatality. (shrink)