Environmental chemicals accumulate in all human bodies and have the potential to affect the health of men and women, adults, and children. This article advances “precautionary consumption”—the effort to mediate personal exposure to environmental chemicals through vigilant consumption—as a new empirical site for understanding the intersections between maternal embodiment and contemporary motherhood as a consumer project. Using in-depth interviews, I explore how a group of 25 mothers employ precautionary consumption to mediate their children’s exposure to chemicals found in food, consumer (...) products, and the home. Most of the mothers in the study situate their children’s chemical “burdens” within their own bodies and undertake the labor of precautionary consumption as part of a larger and commodity-based motherhood project. In actively expanding the sphere of responsible motherhood to include managing children’s body burdens, these mothers navigate multiple and overlapping contexts that hold women accountable for children’s futures and value the agency of the proactive consumer. Yet, as the sphere of responsible mothering expands, women without financial resources, time, and family stability are pushed to the margins of normative motherhood. (shrink)

This article argues for a rethinking of Jürgen Habermas's understanding of religion. Taking into consideration some of Habermas’s recent writings on the topic, it is argued that his conception of religion is untenable. Recent critical studies on the discourse of religion and its historical context have rendered the classic conception of religion suspect. Instead of describing a unique sphere of life, religion can and should be redescribed as something ordinary, embedded, and conceptually inseparable from a larger array of social imaginary (...) institutions and networks. (shrink)

This book argues that Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory can be productively developed by incorporating a wider understanding of fantasy and imagination as part of its conception of communicative rationality and communicative pathologies. Given that meaning is generated both linguistically and performatively, MacKendrick argues that desire and fantasy must be taken into consideration as constitutive aspects of intersubjective relations. His aim is to show that Habermasian social theory might plausibly renew its increasingly severed ties with the early critical theory of (...) the Frankfurt School by taking account of these features of practice life, thus simultaneously rekindling the relevance of the nearly forgotten emancipatory intent in his earlier work and rejuvenating an emphasis on the contemporary critique of reason. This innovative new study will be of interest to those focusing on the early writings of Habermas, the writings of the Frankfurt School, and the relation between critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This book argues that Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory can be productively developed by incorporating a wider understanding of fantasy and imagination as part of its conception of communicative rationality and communicative pathologies. Given that meaning is generated both linguistically and performatively, MacKendrick argues that desire and fantasy must be taken into consideration as constitutive aspects of intersubjective relations. His aim is to show that Habermasian social theory might plausibly renew its increasingly severed ties with the early critical theory of (...) the Frankfurt School by taking account of these features of practice life, thus simultaneously rekindling the relevance of the nearly forgotten emancipatory intent in his earlier work and rejuvenating an emphasis on the contemporary critique of reason. This innovative new study will be of interest to those focusing on the early writings of Habermas, the writings of the Frankfurt School, and the relation between critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Philosophers have long and skeptically viewed religion as a source of overeasy answers, with a singular, totalizing "God" and the comfort of an immortal soul being the greatest among them. But religious thought has always been more interesting--indeed, a rich source of endlessly unfolding questions. With questions from the 1885 Baltimore Catechism of the Catholic Church as the starting point for each chapter, Karmen MacKendrick offers postmodern reflections on many of the central doctrines of the Church: the oneness of (...) God, original sin, forgiveness, love and its connection to mortality, reverence for the relics of saints, and the doctrine of bodily resurrection. She maintains that we begin and end in questions and not in answers, in fragments and not in totalities--more precisely, in a fragmentation paradoxically integral to wholeness. Taking seriously Augustine's idea that we find the divine in memory, MacKendrick argues that memory does not lead us back in time to a tidy answer but opens onto a complicated and fragmented time in which we find that the one and the many, before and after and now, even sacred and profane are complexly entangled. Time becomes something lived, corporeal, and sacred, with fragments of eternity interspersed among the stretches of its duration. Our sense of ourselves is correspondingly complex, because theological considerations lead us not to the security of an everlasting, indivisible soul dwelling comfortably in the presence of a paternal deity but to a more complicated, perpetually peculiar, and paradoxical life in the flesh. Written out of MacKendrick's extensive background in both recent and late-ancient philosophy, this moving and poetic book can also be an inspiration to anyone, scholar or lay reader, seeking to find contemporary significance in these ancient theological doctrines. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thou Art Translated! The Pull of Flesh and MeaningKarmen MacKendrickIn A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare offers us a particularly comic instance of translation. In the first scene of the third act, the mischievous fairy Puck has set into motion all manner of havoc, including the substitution of a donkey’s head for the ordinary head of poor Nick Bottom, a weaver who had been innocently engaged in rehearsing a (...) play that he and other “rustics” intended to perform for visiting royalty. Bottom is, understandably, a little cranky and confused about this buffoonish substitution—he had offered to play the far nobler part of a lion (Shakespeare 2004, Act 1, scene 2, 68–70)—and he does not react happily to the responses that it generates among other members of his company. The first to see him is the tinker Tom Snout, who declares, “O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee?” (Act 3, scene 1, 114). And Snout is followed by Peter Quince, a carpenter and the author of the ill-fated play that had been in rehearsals, who will give us our relevant line, as he exclaims in surprise, “Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated” (Act 3, scene 1, 118).Indeed he is. Bottom, when he declares the events a dream, proposes that Quince shall write a ballad of this transformation (Act 4, scene 1, 224–26).1 This ballad might be seen as a further translation, of the sort Umberto Eco calls “intersemiotic”—a translation across forms, rather like that of interpretive dance, which is sort of famous for translating badly. What is not quite clear, though, is how layered this translation may already be just in Nick Bottom’s appearance. The use of “ass” for buttocks—that is, for the bottom—is first attested only in 1860,2 more than two and a half centuries after A Midsummer [End Page 36] Night’s Dream was written (sometime in the 1590s). But there is some speculation that the pun may already have been current, even if cutting-edge, when Shakespeare translated Bottom to ass, and certainly such a pun would not have been out of character for the author—after all, we also find a snout among the would-be actors, and Shakespearean brilliance is hardly incompatible with crude punning. The translation of the flesh is in this instance also a translation of the word, not just in parallel but somehow of one another, and the visible head of the indignant ass betrays the indignity of the rustic weaver sporting the name of Bottom.We don’t so often think of bodies being translated, but before turning to more abstract considerations here, let me offer one further instance, one a little closer to the main current of my own research. The translation of relics (that is, of pieces or close possessions of saints) is their movement from one location—specifically, from one church congregation—to another. This sounds markedly unexciting, I grant, but that’s only if you don’t know that throughout the Middle Ages the relics were sometimes said to have translated themselves, moved of their own volition. This was held to demonstrate the desire of the relevant saints for the newly privileged location—which means their desire to patronize and to bless the new church or congregation. This happened especially often when those of us with less devotion would more likely say that the relics had been stolen by members of their new communities.In the translation of relics, an original—a whole, unified original in the form of an intact body—is the very source of meaning. The relic matters because it belonged to the body of a saint, and each fragment is held to contain, somehow, the wholeness of saintly power and sancitity (for more detail on this very complex subject, see MacKendrick 2008, 102–31). But as a rule, that original is impossible to find; the meaningful pieces are only ever fragments. (In fact, studies of older relics often show that they are not even fragments of humans.) Now the relic means what it is translated to mean: the saint’s blessing upon... (shrink)

Today, body and language are prominent themes throughout philosophy. Each is strange enough on its own; this book asks what sense we might make of them together. Words reach out. Hands pick up books; eyes or fingertips scan text. But just where, if at all, do words and bodies touch? In a trio of paired chapters, each juxtaposing an illustrative story or case study to a theoretical exploration, MacKendrick examines three somatic figures of speech: the touch, the fold, and (...) the cut. In the first pairing, resurrection stories in the Gospel of John are set against a chapter on touch, which draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory modes in which the resurrected body is presented. T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an intriguing set of devotees-medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and tattooed punks-in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea of inscribed bodies, of the cut. Theologically and philosophically sophisticated, indeed masterly, the book never loses its ground in real, specific bodily experience, performing both at the highest levels of abstraction and at the most quotidian levels of everyday life. (shrink)

Though the exact dating is contentious, philosophy at some point took a “linguistic turn,” or maybe a few of them. Certainly late in the twentieth century, influenced by literary theory, the discipline began to attend to language with nearly Talmudic care. “Everything is a text,”1 we read, and since, after all, we were reading it, the notion seemed persuasive. Soon enough, of course, critics perceived that those playing about in this approach to language were having entirely too much fun, getting (...) a little too literary for philosophical tastes. Whether ill tempered or simply tempering, insightful or sullen, criticism noted not only that some theorists seemed insufficiently attentive to historical context—a claim .. (shrink)

Introduction: from the presence to the sign -- Seductive epistemology: thinking with assent -- Reading rites: sacraments and the community of signs -- Because being here is so much: ethics as the artifice of attention -- Prayer: addressing the name -- Take and read: Scripture and the enticement of meaning -- In place of a conclusion: thoughts on a prior possible.

Theology usually appears to us to be dogmatic, judgmental, condescending, maybe therapeutic, or perhaps downright fantastical--but seldom enticing. Divine Enticement takes as its starting point that the meanings of theological concepts are not so much logical, truth-valued propositions--affirmative or negative--as they are provocations and evocations. Thus it argues for the seductiveness of both theology and its subject--for, in fact, infinite seduction and enticement as the very sense of theological query. The divine name is one by which we are drawn toward (...) the limits of thought, language, and flesh. The use of language in such conceptualization calls more than it designates. This is not a flaw or a result of vagueness or imprecision in theological language but rather marks the correspondence of such language to its subject: that which, outside of or at the limit of our thought, draws us as an enticement to desire, not least to intellectual desire. Central to the text is the strange semiotics of divine naming, as a call on that for which there cannot be a standard referent. The entanglement of sign and body, not least in interpretations of the Christian incarnation, both grounds and complicates the theological abstractions. A number of traditional notions in Christian theology are reconceived here as enticements, modes of drawing the desires of both body and mind: faith as "thinking with assent"; sacraments as "visible words" read in community; ethics as responsiveness to beauty; prayer as the language of address; scripture as the story of meaning-making. All of these culminate in a sense of a call to and from the purely possible, the open space into which we can be enticed, within which we can be divinely enticing. (shrink)

Evil: A Critical Primer argues that our colloquial conception of evil, as related exclusively to the moral domain, is usefully illuminated by attending to historical and cultural context and cross-cultural comparison.

Treats time, eternity, language, and silence in an original way.

The central claim of this essay is that Habermas' program of discourse ethics fails to establish the necessary immanent connection between the universality of discourse ethics and the quasi-transcendentalism, which is supposed to provide its ground. Habermas' attempt to avoid the spectre of subjectivism leads him to develop an understanding of universalism that hinges on a critical error, the confusion of subjectivity with ethical substance. Using Castoriadis' theory of the imagination to illuminate this failure, I demonstrate the way in which (...) Habermas' moral theory of discourse inadvertently harbours a moral-imaginary horizon, a pre-political kernel which undercuts its capacity to serve as a universalist ethic. (shrink)