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Rancièrean Atomism: Clarifying the Debate between Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou
Get PDFIn the late 1970s and the 1980s, a number of radical left political theorists focused their philosophical attention on the relevance of ancient atomism, revitalizing a tradition that went back to Karl Marx\u27s work on his dissertation. This essay looks at the uses of atomism by two thinkers in particular, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, in order to see how their discussions of and references to ancient materialism help to shed light on their fundamental disagreements about the nature of community and equality.First, this paper argues that what Badiou and Rancière most obviously share in their assessments of atomism is a negative judgment regarding the post-swerve constitution of the world, while what most obviously distinguishes their positions is their differing judgments regarding the preswerve rain of the atoms in the void (which Badiou assesses negatively and Rancière positively). Becoming clear both about how Badiou and Rancière respond to what comes before and after the atomistic swerve helps to clarify an implicit response on Rancière’s part to what has become Badiou’s chief objection to Rancière’s political theory. Second, this paper argues that the fact that Badiou assesses both what comes before and what comes after the swerve as negative, while Rancière assesses only what comes after the swerve as negative (because he assesses the pre-swerve rain of the atoms in the void positively), makes clear that their most essential point of difference concerns the status of the swerve that mediates between before and after. Working through the complexities of Badiou’s analysis of the swerve and uncovering Rancière’s extremely subtle analysis of the swerve helps to clarify a major aspect of what has become Rancière’s chief criticism of Badiou’s conception of philosophy
The Case for Incomprehension
Get PDFI argue that Glissant conceived of opacity first and foremost in his poetry and in his readings of earlier writers, from Mallarmé to Saint-John Perse to William Faulkner, whose moments of complication or incomprehensibility he found productive. By examining the literary valence of this concept of Caribbean philosophy, I claim that opacity not only protects the subject from the invasive grasp of (neo)colonial thought but also, more affirmatively, invites the reader to join the poet on equal footing in the process of sense-making. It is this kind of collective poetics, a collectivity created in opacity, that Glissant imagines in his broader world vision of Relation and the Tout-Monde
Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction, A Love Story
Get PDFIn The Right to Narcissism: A Case for Im-Possible Self-Love, Pleshette DeArmitt opens the space for an alternative to origin story so popular with political philosophers, namely, the social contract, which assumes a rational and self-identical subject. She does this obliquely by deconstructing narcissism as love of the self-same, or, love of what Kristeva might call “the clean and proper self.” Like Echo interrupting Narcissus’s soliloquy of deadly self-absorbed pleasure and his solitary auto-affection upon seeing his own reflection, Pleshette interrupts the seeming proximity of self-same, the closeness of near, and the propinquity of proper by deflecting the image of Narcissus onto the voice of Echo, who comes into her own by repeating his words. How, asks Pleshette, can Echo’s reiteration of the words of another be anything more than mere repetition or reduplication? Echoing Derrida, she answers that it is through a declaration of love. Echo’s repetition of the words of Narcissus take on new meaning, and allow her to express herself, and her love, through the words of the other. After all words are words of the other. Language comes to us from the other. Echo becomes a self, a “little narcissist,” through an address from and to the other, through the appropriation and ex-appropriation of the other’s words.
Book Review: Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
Get PDFA book review of Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015)
The Return of Mythic Voice in the Aporias of Narcissism: Pleshette DeArmitt’s Ethical Idea
Get PDFThe ordeal of mourning, being so much harder than any thought its experience may deliver, bears out the impression developed in Julia Kristeva’s opening to The Severed Head—that thought is swift. She has recognized as well as anyone the interplay of blindness and insight. Nothing brings all this into starker evidence than the premature death of a loved other, a friend, or a true assistant in life and thought. There is a reminder in this that the new narratives of subjectivity on which Kristeva places a high value, and certainly the long life of meaning in the world, come at the price of the loss and mourning of our loved others. Pleshette DeArmitt’s book, The Right to Narcissism: A Case for an Im-possible Self-Love, has given the condition of narcissism an intricate place in this difficult if promising work.
Was Levinas an Antiphilosopher? Archi-ethics and the Jewish Experience of the Prisoner
Get PDFThis paper explores Levinas’s Carnets de captivité and Écrits sur la captivité in light of Badiou’s category of ‘antiphilosophy’. We make four movements: firstly, a description of what antiphilosophy is; secondly, an explanation of why the category of antiphilosophy is important to a reading of Levinas; thirdly, an exposition of the antiphilosophical elements of the Carnets and Écrits on captivity; and fourthly, we situate our reading of the notebooks within the larger context of Levinas’s post-captivity work.
The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies
Get PDFThis essay mobilizes Fanon as a point of entry into mapping the current state of postcolonial studies, and within that, reflects on what constitutes the postcolonial canon. Over a gradual course of the eighties and nineties, there has come about a transition from the field’s founding moments in which anti-imperialism, tricontinentalism, Third World nationalism and aesthetics of realism and resistance thrived, to the current trends that show a slant toward postmodernist fragmentation, multiculturalism, issues of diaspora, metropolitan narratives as well as a proclivity toward theorizing the field itself. There are many reasons for this: the specific dynamics of the post-Cold War American culture within which these works were received; the compromised relationship between academic and commercial publishing culture, which made a jump from narratives of decolonization and neocolonialism to metropolitan multiculturalism; and the sway of postmodernism over academia as a whole, which led to a disregard for Marxist theories and, more importantly, to a neglect of realism as a mode and aesthetic in postcolonial theory. These factors have worked together to shape how the genealogy of postcolonial studies and its theory have come to be accepted as “obvious.” This has, in turn, had strong repercussions for the kind of literature and theory that have come to be celebrated and canonized within the field. The essay draws on Anthony Alessandrini\u27s Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different (2014) and Neil Lazarus\u27 The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) to offer a reconstructed genealogy of the field of postcolonial studies.
Not to be European would not be \u27to be European still\u27: Undoing Eurocentrism in Levinas and others
Get PDFIn this essay I return to the difficult relation between the ethics and politics of Emmanuel Levinas through his critique of "paganism" and "primitivism." I argue that Levinas\u27 central philosophical claims are fundamentally constituted by his problematic conceptions of so-called primitive life. Thus unlike current scholarship which has tried to put a wedge between Levinas\u27 ethics and his politics (a wedge I aim to refute in the beginning of the essay), I suggest that one way to make Levinas\u27 contributions meaningful in a global world is to unhinge the philosophy from the beginning. Building on the dialogue between Levinas and Derrida, as well as contemporary anthropology, I argue that we can make an orginary agnostic moment prior to his work, which might allow us to think through a plurality of ethical subjectivities
Irigaray’s Alternative Buddhist Practices of the Self
Get PDFIn lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph of the essay:Luce Irigaray’s critics charge that her attempt to carve out a space for nature and the feminine self through an engagement with Buddhism smacks of Orientalism. Associating Buddhism with a philosophy of nature can lead to feminizing and exoticizing the non-Western other. Because she relies more on lessons learned from yogic teachers than Buddhist texts or scholarship, her work seems to be an appropriation of Buddhist ideas and a critique of Western ideology3 rather than a reflection of Buddhist philosophy. I trace Orientalist readings of Buddhism, including those of Irigaray, back to Hegel’s influence on comparative philosophy. Indeed, her analysis of the feminine self and nature often seem more like a response to Hegel than an examination of Buddhist principles. Some scholars resist Hegel’s reading by arguing that the Buddhist Absolute manifests in the indeterminately disjunctive and alternative versions of reality and self. Others suggest that the meaning of Buddhism can be found in examining its practices rather than its logic.
Pedagogies of Revolt, Politics of the Self
Get PDFIn "New Forms of Revolt," Julia Kristeva maintains that intimate revolt is a necessary, if imperiled, mode of contemporary resistance. This essay reflects on the pedagogical dimensions of intimate revolt and its fate in university contexts, especially in the United States. I argue that a Kristevan pedagogical revolt involves upheavals of thought supported by loving listening relationships