differences recent issues

The Future of the Human: An Introduction

Armstrong, N., Montag, W. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Anthropology

Balibar, E. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

The essay offers a series of reflections on the place of violence in politics and, at the same time, on the ways in which the relation between what might be understood as mutually exclusive categories (violence ceases where politics begins and vice versa) has been theorized, especially in the twentieth century. The condition of such an inquiry is not a set of abstract concepts, but a phenomenology of extreme violence that exceeds any rational political objective. Such violence is often theorized through such negative categories as evil or extermination and thus continues in some measure to resist efforts to comprehend it. To begin to acknowledge the historical and material forms of the existence of violence is to confront the "tragic" dimension of the practice of politics. Just as this practice can never abandon itself to violence, so it can never altogether abandon violence, especially in the forms of resistance and insurrection.

The Democratic Insect: Productive Swarms

Dubois, P. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

How does the insect swarm serve as a figure for humanity? In recent formulations by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the swarm buzzes for the anonymous multitude, achieving creative solutions to humankind's problems "through collective and distributed techniques of problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model." Such a vision constructs a benign and beneficent swarm that, although it lacks differentiation and specificity, accomplishes democracy without sovereignty. Achille Mbembe points out, nonetheless, that the swarm can have a more sinister and deadly aspect.

The ancient Greeks used the figure of the swarm to connote an anonymous and undifferentiated mass of human beings. Achilles' army of Myrmidons in the Iliad are at least antlike, perhaps even metamorphosed ants, ants become warriors. In the classical period, the comic poet Aristophanes uses the insect swarm of wasps to embody his crowd, his chorus of furious, cantankerous, militant, and class-conscious jurors. Such a swarm is depicted with affection even as Aristophanes seems to deplore their manipulation by demagogues. Their "becoming-animal" offers a riotous, exhilarating line of flight from the decorum of nouveau riche Athenian society, a form of politics as the demos, the people, demand their part. But the philosopher Plato removes the sting from the wasps and represents docile and obedient bees, model citizen-workers, and even cicadas, transformed from human beings who once loved the muses into tattletales for the gods; the swarm becomes an instrument of antidemocratic, philosophical espionage.

Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza

Montag, W. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Is Spinoza a theoretician of self-interest? Historians of philosophy have arrived at diametrically opposed answers to this question. His introduction of the term conatus, meaning endeavor or striving, in part 3 of the Ethics, together with his assertion that when human beings most seek that which is useful to them individually they are most useful to each other, might appear, as A. O. Hirschman argued, to render him both a follower of the Stoics and a predecessor of Mandeville and Smith. This essay takes the opposite view, arguing that Spinoza is above all the theoretician of the self-destruction and self-negation that societies of servitude require. The author calls these tendencies the inhumanization of politics, the forms in which the human is systematically subjected through affective imitation to what is incompatible with human existence.

Reinhabiting the Body Politic: Habit and the Roots of the Human

Heiner, B. T. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

Among the principal demands of contemporary political theory and practice is to determine habitable alternatives to (1) the violent and falsely two-sided dynamic of sovereignty and (2) the modern equation of the unitary, self-governing entity with the human itself. This essay contributes to this effort by conducting a genealogy of the political anthropology at the root of sovereignty, focusing on the notion of habit. It argues that the anthropology of sovereignty is deeply entrenched in a form of Christian metaphysics, which crystallizes in St. Augustine's conception of habit. Under Augustine's self-examining gaze, habit comes to be construed as the symptom of man's metaphysical "fallenness" into a state of "entanglement in the multitude": an inhuman structure of ontological constriction at the heart of the human. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty back to the early Christian discourse of the human soul's struggle to master the "habits of this life," the author calls attention to an alternative conception of habitual bodily being that gives expression to the latter's fundamental ambi-valence. The habitual body of the multitude is read as an ontological structure of disposedness that both limits and opens, contracts and dilates. Habit, in this expansive sense, can be redirected not only to refashion the routines through which we inhabit our shared habitats but also to transform the rituals through which we inhabit truth. The essay argues that, as the variable amplitude of existence, habit is the common structure through which humanity must grasp its future.

Toward an Analysis of the Corporate Ego: The Case of Richard Hakluyt

Turner, H. S. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

This essay examines the problem of the corporation as an "artificial person" and as a form of political organization in the early modern period, using Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations (1598–1600) to explore models of collective, corporate narration and competing images of group formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It turns to the work of Freud in order to propose an analysis of the "corporate ego," joining Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921) with the work of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour and the critic Roland Barthes in order to suggest ways of thinking and writing about impersonal institutional structures. The essay has been written in the voice of Freud, as a hypothetical lost lecture from the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis; its main goal is to model how we might replace key political concepts such as the "state," the "human," and the "person" with those of the "network," the "assemblage," and the process of "translation."

Sovereignty and the Form of Formlessness

Armstrong, N., Tennenhouse, L. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:07 PST

This essay argues that sovereignty, both the form of government and the law it constitutes, can be understood in terms of what it keeps out and at bay—namely, historically specific forms of formlessness. Assuming that formlessness does indeed have a form, the authors see it emerging in Jacobean tragedy whenever something happens to the body of the legitimate monarch and poses a threat to culture itself, endangering kinship along with the metaphysics of kingship. In Hobbes's Leviathan, sovereignty is no longer immanent in nature and the order of the universe itself but is a purely cultural or, in Hobbes's phrase, "artificial" thing. Hobbes designs the figure of Leviathan to render unthinkable the possibility of a many-headed body politic. Rather than set Hobbes in opposition to Locke and Defoe, who together arguably inaugurate the Enlightenment, the authors contend that such modern notions of self-sovereignty are defensive formations, responding to the same pressure of the multitude that shapes Leviathan.

Monstrous Individuations: Deleuze, Simondon, and Relational Ontology

Del Lucchese, F. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

Starting with Gilbert Simondon's theory of the individual (singular and collective) and its genesis, developed in his book L'individuation psychique et collective, this article discusses the principle of individuation and the critique of finalism. Simondon distinguishes and yet strictly binds together the two individuations that he calls psychique and collective, which is necessary, he argues, to avoid the double failure of psychologism and sociologism, by which he means the doctrines that assign a fixed (ontological) identity to man and his mind, on the one hand, and to society, on the other. Both psychologism and sociologism, according to Simondon, fail to understand their only reality, which is first and foremost relational. Influenced by Simondon's ontology, Gilles Deleuze's concept of nomadism is taken up in order to develop the idea of a principle of individuation intended as a critique of teleology. The question of individuation is thus referred to its ontological roots in the conflict between Aristotelian metaphysics (priority of act over power [potentia] and of final cause over efficient and material causes) and Spinozist metaphysics (power [potentia] existing only in act, absolute immanence, radical criticism of every teleology). This essay shows what is at stake between the two authors and what Deleuze could not have derived from Simondon, which Del Lucchese calls a Spinozistic problematic.

The Human Recycled: Insecurity in the Transnational Moment

Chakravorty, M., Neti, L. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

This article reads Stephen Frears's film Dirty Pretty Things (2002) to consider the questions of subjectivation and commodification motivating postcolonial critiques of power. The authors suggest that in the film, the assertion of sovereignty is articulated through the politicization of death and a reckoning of the dying body, through what Achille Mbembe refers to as "necropolitics." Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others, the authors contend that the limit of the human posed by the articulation of colonial frames within transnational ones conjoins modes of cultural subjection to an absolute devaluation of life itself. This reading of the film foregrounds the arena of the mass commodification of material bodies, resituating the foundations of capitalism within the slave trade, in contexts ranging from the sale of human organs to prostitution to trafficking in migrant laborers. The article posits a model of salability, based on disposable life and recycled humanity, where entry into the market as either subject or object is the condition of survival in the modern security regime. Against a terrain of precariously asserted and suspended subjectivity within the realm of state sanctions, readers are invited to consider the possibility the film presents of realizing a collective politics that subverts and seizes the management of life on the verge of death.

"I Insist on the Christian Dimension": On Forgiveness... and the Outside of the Human

Chow, R. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

The question explored in this article pertains to the type of exchange specific to human relations we call forgiveness. Hannah Arendt's comments on the subject provide a compelling justification for its necessity: "Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacks the magic formula to break the spell." Yet, precisely the imperative nature of forgiveness may be a source of epistemic conundrums. To elaborate this point, the author begins with a reference to a striking key episode at the heart of the South Korean film Miryang [Secret Sunshine] (2007), which stages forgiveness in the context of Christian evangelism. The article goes on to argue, through a discussion of the writings of Derrida and Auerbach, among others, that the connotations of forgiveness extend considerably beyond a strictly religious dimension, going so far as to bear on contemporary theoretical questions about translation and the secularization of representation.

"Terrorists Are Human Beings": Mapping the U.S. Army's "Human Terrain Systems" Program

Hill, M. — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:53:08 PST

This article puts an emerging war doctrine archive through the paces of its philosophical analogues. Establishing in the first part of the article the "weaponizing of culture" (a now-common U.S. military phrase), which is occurring autogenically, that is, within and without the remnants of the liberal representative state, the author argues that war is now a fully operational part of the organizational work that terms like community, culture, and humanity are now doing (and doing differently than before). War in the sense invoked here is activated at various levels of intensity and visibility (think Katrina, the Patriot Act, Wall Street) as a civil or civilian war within the United States that is everywhere present but is hardly recognizable as such. In addressing one essential area of governmentality—demographics—the author makes the case for a change in liberal governmental reason that is evident in the U.S. Census 2000, concluding that demography has taken a uniquely post–civil rights turn in the unprecedented context of a coming U.S. white minority. Categorical self-identification within the permeable race and ethnic categories that the state now endorses paradoxically releases it from whatever previous civil-rights obligations the state may have had. In unpacking how this process works—call it autogenic violence at the level precisely of "recognition"—this article revisits Habermas's reliance on a juridically grounded base for intersubjectivity. Habermas extends the appeal for liberal international law to an updated endorsement of Kant's quest for perpetual cosmopolitan peace. With the problem of history and the relationship between temporality and the "cultural" disciplines such as philosophy in mind, the author updates Habermas's updating of Kant in a context of perpetual war that neither figure is willing to imagine.

Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change

McNulty, T. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

The question at the core of this essay is whether the subjective stance of one person can initiate broad change or inspire collective action by means other than the group psychology, not by appealing to a particular set of values or ideals or by cementing the group through identification or libidinal cathexes but by foregrounding the experience of the desiring subject. It takes as its point of departure Jacques Lacan's definition of anxiety as "the affect that responds to the desire of the Other." If love is about the strategies of seduction that sustain the imaginary coherence of the ego, desire is linked to the anxiety induced by the loss of the ego ideals and the encounter with castration. The corollary is that the practice of psychoanalysis is founded on the confrontation with the anxiety provoked by the desire of the Other and the assumption that only this can result in real change.

This article examines three examples of social tie that are structured around the desire of the founder and the anxiety it induces: the interdiction of sacrifice and the worship of an absent God in the religion of Moses, the role of the transference in Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, and the "love of the enemy" in the discourse of Jesus. The author argues that the clinical context sheds light on the violent resistance and repression that greeted the founding acts of Moses and Jesus and offers insight into the structural antagonism between the founder's desire and the possibility of a collective movement. The examples of Moses and Jesus in turn develop a dimension of the analytic experience that is not always given sufficient weight: that desire must find expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.

Derrida and Lacan: An Impossible Friendship?

Shepherdson, C. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

This article explores the relation between the work of Lacan and Derrida, focusing on the use of modal logic in both writers (the categories of necessity, impossibility, contingency, and possibility). The author explores the structure of the aporia in Derrida as a peculiar conjunction of necessity and impossibility, distinct from previous forms of contradiction (antinomies in Kant and dialectical contradiction in Hegel) and therefore historically situated in relation to the tradition of metaphysics. He argues that the other two modal categories, possibility and contingency, are largely absorbed by the aporia of necessity and impossibility. In Lacan, by contrast, modal categories are introduced in Encore, his notorious seminar on sexual difference, to develop the distinction between masculinity and femininity. The author argues that the sexuation graph of Encore, which is written in symbolic logic, is later redescribed by Lacan in modal terms, and this later description alters Lacan's initial presentation, allowing for greater flexibility among these categories. The essay shows that Lacan eventually presents a model of discursive transformation in which each modal category is capable of being shifted into another. This produces a model of discursive transformation that brings Lacan closer to Foucault than most commentators have acknowledged. The broader horizon of the argument concerns psychoanalysis and historical change, and the author argues that Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida all address the problem of history and that the relations among these thinkers deserve more attention than their polemical reception has allowed, particularly with regard to attacks on psychoanalysis as ahistorical.

Psychoanalysis without Symptoms

Cheng, A. A. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

This article meditates on the possibility of thinking about both psychoanalysis and contemporary critical analysis without the drive toward symptomatic reading. It argues that the instrumental expectation placed on the diagnosis of symptoms (of illness and of ideology alike) and the subsequent promise of transformative change have led to a series of critical impasses in liberal criticism. This essay contends that the failures of psychoanalysis (failures to produce stable meaning, to procure cure, to exorcize the past, to segregate health from illness, and so forth) may be precisely all the places that render psychoanalysis not only interesting but ethically vital to social critique and political consideration.

"What Does Death Represent to the Individual?" Psychoanalysis and Wartime

Stonebridge, L. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

Why is it that we respond to the deaths of others in wartime with an apparent indifference? What is it about our desire that so readily accommodates the representation of the death of others? This article addresses these questions through a reading of Freud's 1915 essay on war and Klein's 1940s writing on mourning and the fear of death. Between them, Freud and Klein produce a compelling narrative about what it means to live in fear not only of death, which is where Freud begins his critique of the normalizing pathologies of war at the beginning of the century, but also of one's own violence, which is where Klein takes that critique fifteen years later. What starts as a question for Freud about how it is that war legitimizes a murderous representation of the other becomes, in Klein, a question about the morality of mourning. In wartime, this morality becomes political, as Klein's pressing therapeutic question—how might one mourn without violence?—is yoked to a more immediately historical imperative: how is it possible to live in terror without reproducing an annihilating denial of the other?

A Wider Social Stage

Stewart-Steinberg, S. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

This article investigates the problematic relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Specifically, it wonders if an inherent conflict exists between these two domains. If psychoanalysis has as its central object the unconscious, and politics the construction of a relatively stable ego, then how can psychoanalysis productively contribute to the analysis of the democratic political sphere? This article treats this question through an analysis not only of Sigmund Freud's incursions into what he called "a wider social stage" but also of his daughter's particular contributions to the topic. Anna Freud was the official inheritor of the psychoanalytic movement, and it was her task to transform the movement into a stable (political) organization with rules of conduct and of the transmission of knowledge. The author traces this transformation through the debates that surrounded professional psychoanalytic training, in particular through the problem of the so-called training analysis. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis has much to tell us, she argues, about the problems inherent in the institutionalization of politics.

Society of Choice

Salecl, R. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

Postindustrial society thrives on the idea of choice. The individual is not only perceived as able to choose among various consumer objects; he or she is also taken as someone who can choose his or her identity, sexual orientation, body shape, and so on. In the ideology of postindustrial capitalism, one's life is perceived as a work of art and as a particular kind of enterprise. The overemphasis of choice, however, does not seem to bring contentment to the individual, but rather increases feelings of anxiety and insecurity. In order to appease feelings of anxiety, people often resort to following random advice on how to fashion their lives.

Psychoanalysis questions how the malaise of civilization affects the malaise of the individual and vice versa. A pessimistic conclusion about the changes in today's society holds that the increase of psychosis and of anxiety are related in a particular way to the ideology of choice. Psychoanalysis, however, has always understood choice in a complex way. Instead of perceiving the act of choosing as a purely rational gesture, psychoanalysis understands choice as linked to the unconscious. Since choice always involves a loss, it is per se anxiety provoking. Today's society has problems precisely with the idea of loss, which is why we see the emergence of options promising to impose control on what is often uncontrollable.

Disposability

Khanna, R. — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:19:43 PDT

This article discusses disposability in light of what psychoanalysis can offer to an analysis of that term, understood as a contemporary characteristic of the human and its liminal condition. The essay questions why a program of social change is demanded of psychoanalysis but also shows that psychoanalysis offers an account of social change that is nondeterministic. It shows how psychoanalysis can be a useful analytic frame through which to understand the pleasures and pains of disposability or the waste that one might associate with it, and thus brings psychoanalysis into conversation with its historical allies, Western Marxism and feminism. The author engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Françoise Vergès, and Bertrand Ogilvie through a psychoanalytic framework shaped by her understanding of contemporary disposability. She associates disposability with melancholia and an impoverishment of ego that, she maintains, ultimately provides a critical agency.

Right to Vote or Right to Revolt? Arendt and the British Suffrage Militancy

Ziarek, E. P. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

Building on studies that recover suffrage as an important political, historical, and cultural phenomenon, this article considers the political implications of the British suffragettes' redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt. Such a definition means that the suffragettes' contribution to political modernity is not limited to the enfranchisement of women, although this was an enormous victory. Equally significant is the suffragettes' discourse of revolution, which, as Hannah Arendt argues, reveals the inextricable connection between freedom, the emergence of female political and artistic subjectivities, and the creation of new forms of political life. This study focuses primarily on the militant stage of the British suffrage campaign (1903–1914) because it was the experience and justification of female militancy that propelled suffragettes to redefine the right to vote as a more fundamental women's right to revolt.

"Where' your people from, girl?": Belonging to Race, Gender, and Place Beneath Clouds

Diprose, R. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

This article explores the impossibility and necessity of belonging to gender, race, and place. It does so against the background of Ivan Sen's Australian film Beneath Clouds (2001), with the specificities of Australian landscape and the rural/urban divide that it captures, and of race politics in contemporary Australia. In the context of the film, the question "Where' your people from, girl?" implies the recognition of the addressee's indigenous heritage at a time when she has been passing as white. Such a question could be viewed as sexist or racist, as a call to identify oneself in terms of fixed, hierarchical, and discriminatory categories of gender, race, and family. But given who asks the question and where, this article argues that the question is an offer of community, though not community understood as shared group identity based on mutual recognition and understanding. Rather, the idea of community developed in this article is of an open sense of belonging together to race, gender, and place, a sensibility of belonging that expresses one's indeterminate difference, that opens one toward a future and a past, that must be continually renewed through relations with others, and that is essential to one's life. The paper also argues that this belonging is corporeal, lived, and that it engenders and transforms sociopolitical meaning. On the basis of this model of community, the harm of racism and sexism lies not in the effects of categorization and objectification, but in the impact of any political denial of the uniqueness and openness of belonging and in the disabling of the capacity for community that accompanies this denial. These ideas are explored with reference to the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Nancy and contemporary theorists of race and gender including Alcoff, Haslanger, Langton, and Ziarek.

Drifting Decision and the Decision to Drift: The Question of Spirit in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping

Mattessich, S. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

This essay builds on previous criticism highlighting the semiotic dimensions of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to identify in its metaphors of spirit and spiritual haunting a performative logic of social implication. This logic appears within a metaphysics of subjectivity that the essay draws out in the novel with the help of Derrida's meditations on religion and Nancy's revision of dialectical reason. The "house" of identity, the essay argues, is for Robinson less an enclosure than "a way of going outside" that reveals the negative ground of every determined or external difference. "Keeping" house, then, is figured in leaving it, at a formal level of indistinction between inside and outside. At this level, the novel suggests a model for thinking agency, or decision, predicated on the uncertainty of identification and the need for self-critical reflection on the thetic foreclosure (or forgetting) of the negative ground. Housekeeping is only incidentally about outsiders who escape the conventional world and insiders who do not. In the first instance it concerns the space of unknowing, where we always are, or live, however normative our actions or emphatic our positions (or oppositions) might be. "Drifting Decision" seeks to open up this space in the novel, with an eye to its ethical significance for readers and writers alike.

Nietzsche/Pentheus: The Last Disciple of Dionysus and Queer Fear of the Feminine

Schotten, C. H. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

This article examines the scholarly preoccupation with the hypothesis that Nietzsche was gay by offering a reading of Nietzsche's texts as autobiographical that puts them in conversation with Euripides's drama The Bacchae. Drawing a number of parallels between Nietzsche, self-avowed disciple of Dionysus, and Pentheus, the main character of The Bacchae and demonstrated antidisciple of Dionysus, I argue that both men experience their sexual attraction to women as somehow intolerable, and they negotiate this discomfort—which is simultaneously an unjustified paranoia and fear of the feminine—through the appropriation of feminine capacities and qualities for themselves. This appropriation ultimately expresses these men's fear of the erosion of male power and the coherence of distinct gender categories that I call a "queer fear of the feminine." However, this is neither a sign of incipient homosexuality nor a feminist move; rather, it is good old-fashioned patriarchy dressed up in drag. I conclude by offering a symptomatic reading of the popularity of the thesis that Nietzsche was gay, arguing that this reflects our own twenty-first-century tendency to read gender deviance as only ever a sign of sexual "orientation," which is always already presumed to be homosexuality.

Somatic Ontology: Comments on Alison Stone's Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Mader, M. B. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

This commentary opens with an exposition of Alison Stone's novel reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This reading proposes that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference is a realist essentialism that reposes upon a general ontology of natural rhythm whose philosophical source is the nature philosophy of Schelling. Distinguishing between two accounts, a rhythmic account of natural, human sex difference and a relational account of cultivatable human, sexual difference, Stone's book unites these accounts to provide a comprehensive reading of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. This article raises questions about the content of this new reading. The commentary asks whether and to what extent the rhythmic account of sex difference is established independently of a prior nonrhythmic or more conventional, biological notion of sex difference. It questions the classification of rhythmic processes that are purportedly differentiated by sex and offers a note of skepticism about the comparative classifications of reproductive and sexual impulses by sex. Finally, it treats the work's metaphysics of expression and tendency, inspired by Schelling's metaphysics, so as to inquire into its utility. The suggestion is that the value of this metaphysics may be undermined by the epistemological difficulty of distinguishing between a suppressed tendency and an absent one. The conclusion identifies this metaphysics of expression as a serious point of divergence between Stone's thought on sexuality and that of one of her interlocutors in the text, Judith Butler.

Recastings: On Alison Stone's Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Deutscher, P. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

Following criticisms of Alison Stone's treatment of Judith Butler on nature and embodiment, this article argues that Stone has reconfigured Butler so as to accommodate Stone's interpretation of Irigaray. The project can be used to draw attention to forms of prior reconfiguration that may occur when differing theoretical frameworks are brought into dialogue with each other. The need for such forms of implicit, prior reconfiguration helps draw attention to the differences and relationships between different frameworks and the only apparently similar terms and concepts embedded in them. In the light of a staged encounter between Butler and Irigaray, Stone widens the conceptual space within Butler's project, into which she drops an alternative, reconfiguring understanding of Butler's work as requiring an absent concept: original, multiple, self-differentiating nature. She argues that the concept has the potential to serve as a useful intervention into the work of Butler and, among others, Schelling. Although this potential is not directly addressed by Stone, the reading serves as an occasion to reflect on a number of interpretative questions concerning not only the tacit work that occurs in one author's reconfiguration of another but also the varied methodologies that may be appropriate to the interpretation of Luce Irigaray's work in particular.

Unthought Nature: Reply to Penelope Deutscher and Mary Beth Mader

Stone, A. — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 08:28:21 PDT

In response to Mader's and Deutscher's questions, the author defends her approach to reading Irigaray and Butler, which entails extending the ideas of these thinkers into areas of thought with which they do not engage directly themselves. This involves relating Irigaray's ideas to the tradition of the philosophy of nature and interpreting Butler as offering, in spite of her focus on the genealogy of claims about sex, also a theory of sex itself, a theory of sex as an effect entirely of gender. This approach to reading differs from Irigaray's own reading method of expanding and transforming philosophies in light of their constitutive exclusions. An example of this, explored here, is Irigaray's expansion and transformation of Merleau-Ponty's late ontology of flesh in light of its constitutive exclusion, the "maternal sojourn." This article also asks whether rhythmic sexual difference, which the author has attempted to differentiate from biological sex difference, ultimately remains tied to biological sex difference. This commentary suggests that it does but that reference to biological sex difference need not be politically problematic. Finally, the author asks whether the metaphysics of potentials and tendencies that she attributes to Irigaray impedes social change by inevitably reinstalling the actual as the horizon of possibility. Irigaray's strategy of reading texts and cultures for their constitutive exclusions offers a solution to this problem.

In the Event: An Introduction

Pratt, L. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

The Historical Event

White, H. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

World History according to Katrina

Dimock, W. C. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

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

Elmer, J. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

Bourdieu, Ambiguity, and the Significance of Events

Aisenberg, A. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

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

Wanzo, R. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT

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

Lippit, A. M. — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 08:16:56 PDT