differences recent issues

In the Event: An Introduction

Pratt, L. — 2008-07-25

The Historical Event

White, H. — 2008-07-25

World History according to Katrina

Dimock, W. C. — 2008-07-25

Babo's Razor; or, Discerning the Event in an Age of Differences

Elmer, J. — 2008-07-25

Bourdieu, Ambiguity, and the Significance of Events

Aisenberg, A. — 2008-07-25

The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event

Wanzo, R. — 2008-07-25

Aftereffects of the End of the World ("I {heartsuit} NY")

Lippit, A. M. — 2008-07-25

Rethinking Working-Class Literature: Feminism, Globalization, and Socialist Ethics

Perera, S. — 2008-03-21

According to a corpus of representative texts and standard minimal Marxist definitions, the "proletariat" of proletarian literature is, by definition, revolutionary, and by implication, male; this is the specific subset of the working class entrusted with the historic mission of abolishing the class system. Women's texts of nonrevolutionary socialism from across the global North-South divide, however, confront us with new figures and concepts for thinking unorganized resistance, everyday exigencies, and the shape of the ethical within globalization. This essay studies the conventions and notations of such proletarian internationalist feminist texts from the global South, focusing specifically on the figure of a dispersed collective subject. It brings together contemporary protest literature published by Dabindu--a collective comprised of garment factory worker-activists and feminists from the free trade zone regions of Sri Lanka--with Tillie Olsen's classic field-defining literature from the proletarian moment in the U.S. Can we speak of a collective subject of feminism within economic globalization? Whose interest does staking a claim for such a heterogeneous class subject--one that figures "unity in dispersal"--serve? What are the conditions and constraints for conceptualizing historical agency and class struggle according to these terms, given that we occupy a conjuncture that has been described by some in epochal terms as the "feminization of the proletariat," by others as the "NGO-ization of feminism"? Toward answering these questions, "Rethinking Working-Class Literature" turns to the methodological resources of Marxism and comparative literature. This essay ultimately seeks to articulate the terms of a feminist class politics in the shadow of economisms like "comparative advantage" and "outsourcing."

Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History

Freeman, E. — 2008-03-21

Through a close analysis of Isaac Julien's short film The Attendant, this essay argues that sadomasochistic sex practice ought to be understood in temporal terms, as a play of pause against surprise, suspension against shock. In The Attendant, Freeman contends, Julien rethinks S/M precisely this way, thereby linking it with the possibilities of film as a particularly indexical, intercorporeal medium for shocking and reorganizing the senses. This rethinking of screen as a kind of skin in turn enables Julien to confront sadomasochistic role playing, in which players take up the signs and tools of historically specific injustices such as the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and especially the transatlantic slave trade. Rather than condemning this kind of role playing--especially as it takes place between black and white men--Julien offers sadomasochism as an embodied way to feel historical or to engage viscerally with the past. He thereby opens up new registers for taking in and taking account of the historical, registers that refuse to concede pleasure in the name of trauma, which has been treated as the more properly political affect by most criticism.

The In-tensions of Extensions: Compagnie Marie Chouinard's bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS

Thain, A. — 2008-03-21

This essay explores the affective intensity of movement in a recent choreography by noted French Canadian choreographer Marie Chouinard. In bODY rEMIX/ gOLDBERG vARIATIONS, dancers perform with all manners of prosthetics and bodily extensions--crutches, ski poles, coat racks, pointe shoes worn by men and women, on one or two feet or on hands--to a score that remixes Glenn Gould's recordings of the Goldberg Variations with his recorded interviews. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, José Gil, and André Lepecki, I argue that despite its engagement with forms of extension, the use of prosthetics in Chouinard's bODY rEMIX fundamentally explores the intensive movement of affect, particularly through its engagement with suspense (as the generation of an ambiguous image in the tension between extensive and intensive movement) and the sound image. This exploration of the in-tensions of extensions, when, rather than simply extending into the world, movement develops a centrifugal force, likewise argues that the movement of affective intensity is the way in which the body activates its inherent capacity for change. Extension is a fundamental attitude of the dancing body; dancing "projects lines into the invisible" in a movement of outward intentionality. Yet that movement is always doubled and deviated by a responsive (not simply reactive) intensity of movement, a dynamic activation of the body's potential charged by the encounter that pushes against and reworks the constitution of the very bodies that compose it, a movement of a different quality whose effects cannot simply be determined by a reverse calculation from extension.

Descartes, Individualism, and the Fetal Subject

Wilkin, R. — 2008-03-21

The fetus was able to think and was conscious of doing so, Descartes claimed in his Response to Antoine Arnauld's Objection to the Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641). This essay traces the fortunes of the cogitating fetus in Descartes's published works and correspondence, showing that he eventually came to use the example of the fetus to exemplify what he meant by the "union" of mind and body. Although Descartes is usually considered a dualist, particularly in feminist criticism, he took for granted that we experience ourselves as mind/body composites. The fetus presented an extreme version of the experiences devolving from mind/body union. Far from suggesting that fetuses, like born human beings, were individuals (as they are portrayed in pro-life rhetoric), Descartes invited his readers to consider that born human beings, like fetuses, comprised embodied minds, connected to and in varying degrees dependent on other people. This investigation of the "fetal subject" in Cartesian metaphysics reveals a relational side to the Cartesian "cogito," a surprising revelation insofar as Descartes often takes the blame (or credit--depending on one's adherence to liberal ideals) for providing the foundations of an individualistic conception of personhood.

Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference: An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero

Cavarero, A., Bertolino, E. — 2008-03-21

This interview with the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero situates Cavarero's thought among the philosophical positions of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Hannah Arendt, as well as engaging the feminist theory of Judith Butler. While addressing such topics as globalization, terrorism, violence, and vulnerability, the question of ontology is central to the interview. Cavarero refines Arendt's perspective and emphasizes an ontology of singularity characterized by the materiality of human uniqueness together with its necessary relationality and vulnerability. Sceptical of postmodern, poststructuralist, and deconstructive theories that share a refusal of ontology and an avoidance of metaphysical closure, Cavarero points out that such a refusal tends to think ontology as something necessarily metaphysical. In contrast, for Cavarero ontology, must be reconsidered and treated with cattive intenzioni, bad intentions, because if it is simply questioned or deconstructed, and thus avoided, then ontology itself is not transformed. By focusing on the uniqueness of the individual as an ontological category, Cavarero disrupts the sacrificial economy of traditional ontology.

God and Country: An Introduction

Castelli, E. A. — 2007-12-03

A Tale of Capital, Philanthropy, and the Supreme Court

McBride, J. — 2007-12-03

Theologico-Political Resonance: Carl Schmitt between the Neocons and the Theonomists

Runions, E. — 2007-12-03

Sex, Law, and Other Reasonable Endeavors

Skerrett, K. R. — 2007-12-03

Capital Punishment, Atonement, and the Christian Right

Styers, R. — 2007-12-03

The Sexual Politics of the "New Abolitionism"

Bernstein, E. — 2007-12-03

Persecution Complexes: Identity Politics and the "War on Christians"

Castelli, E. A. — 2007-12-03

Sexual Violence at the Border

Fassin, E. — 2007-10-01

Girls Will Be Boys: Gender, Envy, and the Freudian Social Contract

Stewart-Steinberg, S. — 2007-10-01

"A Home Made Sacred by Protecting Laws": Black Activist Homemaking and Geographies of Citizenship in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Rifkin, M. — 2007-10-01

"We" in Redux: The Combahee River Collective's Black Feminist Statement

Norman, B. — 2007-10-01

Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility

Mills, C. — 2007-10-01

Toward a Nonviolent Ethics: Response to Catherine Mills

Jenkins, F. — 2007-10-01

Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins

Butler, J. — 2007-10-01