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The Creolization of Political Theory and the Dialectic of Emancipatory Thought: A Plea for Synthesis
Full text linkThe paper discusses Jane-Anna Gordon\u27s important idea of the Creolization of Poitical Theory with reference to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Frantz Fanon. It makes an argument for synthesizing this initiative with dialectical thought in order to transcend the analytical vision which gave birth to the creolizing of theory. This synthesis is proposed in order to make sense of the real of any politics of universal emancipation and to incorporate the theoretical inventions of popular actions
Creolizing Collective Memory: Refusing the Settler Memory of the Reconstruction Era
Full text linkThe collective memory of the Reconstruction era in US history is a good example of Jane Anna Gordon\u27s notion of \u27creolization\u27 at work. I argue that this is an era that could do with even further creolizing by refusing the influence of settler memory. Settler memory refers to the capacity both to know and disavow the history and contemporary implications of genocidal violence toward Indigenous people and the accompanying land dispossession that serve as the fundamental bases for creating settler colonial nations-states. One of the most important works on the Reconstruction Era is W.E.B. Du Bois’ canonical text, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, published in 1935. I examine both the creolizing elements of DuBois\u27 argument and also suggest how attention to settler memory can further creolize our grasp of this period through a re-reading of his text and putting it into the context of other developments occuring during the years he examines
Jean Améry, Commemoration and Comparative Engagement
Full text link2016 marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Jean Améry’s collection of essays dealing with his experiences at (and in the aftermath of) Auschwitz entitled Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten. Translated into English as At The Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By A Survivor On Auschwitz And Its Realities, Améry’s collection immediately set a standard for philosophical accounts of the camps that even today remains unchanged. More uncompromising than the texts of Wiesenthal, Levi, Borowski, and Wiesel, Améry’s collection philosophically explores the extreme limit of the survivor’s experience in the camps as well as the ensuing trauma of living in its wake.
‘a fine risk to be run’: Améry and Levinas on Aging, Responsibility, and Risk in the Wake of Atrocity
Full text linkDoes atrocity age? What I mean to ask is, does time heal wounds that were genocidal or otherwise broad, deep, and caused by a fatal combination of human depravity and widespread indifference? Jean Améry famously refused to let the past be past in his essay “Resentments.” He argued that even if, with regard to the Holocaust, logically speaking, what happened is in the past, there is no moral sense to that. Morality requires of us that we refuse to let the past be whenever we are faced with a past that should have been otherwise. For him, writing 20 years after he was freed from the camps, time had not healed all wounds. Atrocity was not aging gracefully.
Husserl and Ricoeur: The Influence of Phenomenology on the Formation of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutics of the ‘Capable Human’
Full text linkThe phenomenology of Edmund Husserl had a permanent and profound impact on the philosophical formation of Paul Ricoeur. One could truly say, paraphrasing Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s brilliant 1959 essay ‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’,that Husserl is the philosopher in whose shadow Ricoeur, like Merleau-Ponty, also stands, the thinker to whom he constantly returns. Husserl is Ricoeur’s philosopher of reflection, par excellence. Indeed, Ricoeur always invokes Husserl when he is discussing a paradigmatic instance of contemporary philosophy of ‘reflection’ and also of descriptive, ‘eidetic’ phenomenology. Indeed, I shall argue in this chapter that Husserl’s influence on Ricoeur was decisive and provided an eidetic, descriptive methodology which is permanently in play, even when it has to be concretized and mediated by hermeneutics, as Ricoeur proposes after 1960
At the Mind’s Limits and German-Jewish Symbiosis: Or, Améry on Guilt and the Possibility of Redemption
Full text linkAt the 50th anniversary of the Jean Améry’s Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Bewältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten, published in English as At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, this work is garnering increased attention in the Anglophone world. Perhaps it should not be surprising that there is increased interest in this book at this moment when our attention is repeatedly drawn to the plight of immigrants and exiles, state sanctioned use of torture, and police violence—all themes At the Mind’s Limits deals with at length. While this recent attention is certainly appropriate, it nevertheless tends to blur the specific and particular socio-political and cultural contours of the work. Améry becomes a writer about the plight of the victim in general, such that specificity of his Jewishness is lost and the already submerged theological dimensions of his work remain obscure.
La France contemporaine face au défi de la créolisation
Full text linkInspired by Jane Gordon\u27s book, Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon, this article examines the paradoxes of Creolization within the French context. How do post-colonial French identities of Maghrebi, Sub-Saharan African or Caribbean descent Creolize French society? Instead of being an opportunity that must be seized by the Nation, why is creolization perceived as an imminent threat to the Republic? How can one think of Creolizing politics in the former colonial power? How does Creolization compel us to rethink how we live together? And how does it require us to rethink freedom and equality for all? These are the questions at the heart of this article
Améry\u27s Duress
Full text linkIf truth hurts, this is no doubt because it is often enough forced on us. And the question as to whether the reception of “nice,” “easy” truths is similarly an outcome of coercion negates itself in its very formulation—we do not ask “why are things the way they are?” from a feeling of comfort; the plaintiff cry of “how, then, shall we live?” does not come to us out of a sense of security. Indeed, insofar as truth overtakes us and interrupts the conventions of our lives, it occurs to us quite apart from our ordinary desires and wants. We are thus faced with a paradox: what claim can truth make on a being that “doesn’t need it and doesn’t care about it—since it doesn’t at all concern his needs”? When one considers that the awareness of truth is indexed to lived experience, the paradox is only heightened.
Anticipatory Imagination in Aging: Revolt and Resignation in Modern Day France
Full text link“Rien n’arrive ni comme on l’espère, ni comme on le craint. Nothing really happens as we hope it will, nor as we fear it will.”1 Améry appropriates this quote of Proust to highlight how our imaginative powers can never approach its reality during an extreme event. This failure of what he coins our anticipatory imagination is depicted in his phenomenological account of torture, an event whose extremity is later compared to another embodied experience: that of aging. Equating torture with aging may seem shocking to some, and Améry was critiqued for suggesting such a parallel, particularly since he narrates a lived experience with the latter at the mere age of fifty-five. He revisits this critique in the preface to the fourth edition of On Aging: Revolt and Resignation where he states: "Today as much as yesterday I think that society has to undertake everything to relieve old and aging persons of their unpleasant destiny. And at the same time I stick to my position that all high- minded and reverential efforts in this direction, though indeed capable of being somewhat soothing- are still not capable of changing anything fundamental about the tragic hardship of aging." - Jean Améry, On Aging [Améry’s emphasis]The “today” of society that Améry referenced was 1977. But what about today? Is Améry correct in projecting that despite our best efforts nothing fundamental can change the quite unbearable experience of aging? Are attempts to aid the aging complicit in a “vile dupery” that ends in “metaphorically empty” phrases such as “rest in peace”?3 I would like to pose these questions in the wake of a heated debate in France regarding the legality of assisted suicide for aging persons (Améry took his own life and sees suicide as an acceptable form of revolt and resignation, the only authentic choices left to the aging). Thus, this paper seeks to not only dissect his account of aging (and the failure of anticipatory imagination in futural projections of it) but to ask whether his philosophy could be read alongside current French thinkers to better assess comment mourir dans la dignité.
The Persistence of Utopia: Plasticity and Difference from Roland Barthes to Catherine Malabou
Full text linkThe theorizing of utopia is a persistent theme throughout several generations of the French continental tradition, and alongside the process theory of Alfred North Whitehead to a large degree recuperates the concept of utopia from its supposed dismissal by Marx and his intellectual descendants. Most recently, attention to the notion of plasticity, popularized (relatively speaking) by Catherine Malabou, extends speculation on utopian possibility. Compelled to answer to Marx’s denigration of utopia as fantasy, the tendency was (still is, for many) to compensate for the absence of a programmatic politics by stressing what is “useful” about utopian dreaming, and therefore where or how exactly a utopian text reveals or creates political drive, or motivates political action. In this essay, I argue that theorists have overlooked the use of utopia as not only the reproduction of difference, or what Malabou calls positive plasticity, but also as, therefore, a disruption; Malabou might prefer the term accident here. Tracing the concept of plasticity from Roland Barthes to Malabou, with a nod at Miguel Abensour, this essay teases out the links between a contemporary notion of plasticity to argue, simply put, that utopia is plastic. This plasticity of the concept ensures its political force. These links, obscured in the essay “Plastic,” Barthes makes only later in his writing. But for Malabou, plasticity underlies a principle of futurity and/as generativity, such that new forms, new meanings, new concepts emerge through difference. Utopia’s horizons of potentiality depend on difference, and on non-achievement. Finally, I argue that the persistence of utopia (Abensour) as a form of thinking is the most important, and political, effect of utopian plasticity