Il semble impossible, dans les théories contemporaines comme dans les discours politiques, de parler de reconnaissance sans parler de lutte. Que signifie alors précisément lutter pour la reconnaissance? Quelles sont les conditions de possibilité de l’affrontement? Qu’est-ce qui permet de l’identifier, puisqu’il existe des résistances qui restent invisibles? Pourquoi apparaît-il comme une condition nécessaire de la reconnaissance? Ce livre dégage autant une théorie du conflit qu’un diagnostic sur ce qui le contraint dans les démocraties capitalistes contemporaines. Il observe une grammaire (...) répandue de la contestation, la reconnaissance, tout en éclairant la manière dont elle est prise entre idéologie et réification. Il offre ainsi une réflexion sur les conditions d’un antagonisme réellement émancipateur. (shrink)

Questo articolo si sforza di ricollocare le teorie del care in seno alla teoria politica contemporanea, in cui si attesta un ritorno al tema della vulner­abi­li­tà corporea e morale come problema politico e morale in sé. Qui si distin­guono tre accezioni della parola vulnerabilità, accezioni che im­plicano ogni volta ragionamenti morali e legittimano ordini politici differenti: il modello del­la disponibilità alla ferita fisica e morale, quello dell’associazione stretta fra l’idea della vul­nerabilità e il concetto di dipendenza , e infine la (...) vulnerabilità come non possesso di sé.The article aims to reframe philosophical theories of care within con­tem­po­rary political theories, with particular respect to the idea of bodily and spi­ritual vulnerability. Here I will distinguish three meanings of the word vul­ne­rability, all connected to different moral reflections and political orders. The first meaning concerns the disposition toward physical and moral wounds; the second one explains the connection between vulnerability and de­pendence ; the third one defines vulnerability as a lack of self-possession. (shrink)

This paper aims to refute the idea whereby giving consideration to vulnerability can only lead to an ethics, or is only relative to a politics derived from morality. I first shed some light on the seeming impossibility experienced by a large number of contemporary theories of vulnerability to fully think the political. Second, I define what one overlooks in the political when one simply considers it as a sphere of implementation of moral principles. Finally, I interpret care theories as an (...) attempt to overcome the difficulty of thinking the political from the viewpoint of vulnerability, and I define the political as a movement of reengaging with and transforming what is already instituted. (shrink)

Although Judith Butler regards recognition as the theme unifying her work, one finds a striking absence of dialogue between her and the authors of the normative theories of recognition – Honneth, Habermas, Ricoeur, etc. In the present article I seek to call into question this sentiment, shared by the two sides, of a radical theoretical heterogeneity. First I seek to show that the theory of performativity which Butler developed initially, contrary to all expectations, sets her relatively apart from the tradition (...) to which she conforms (the French reading of Hegel), and brings her closer to the proposition represented by the normative theories of recognition in general, and that of Honneth in particular. Then I highlight how the recent modulations in her theory, through the appearance of the idea of a constitutive vulnerability, which enables her to found an ethics, undermine for once and for all the claim of irreducibility maintained by each of the two theories in relation to the other. (shrink)

No Current Hegelian theories of recognition assume a concept of the subject as always being available for harming. This emphasis placed on vulnerability, whose validity is not being called into question as such here, leave a certain number of elements on the nature of the harm threatening the person expecting recognition unclarified, especially the fact that it cannot be perpetrated without the victim being aware. At the same time, it fails to address the nature of the relationship of recognition, omitting (...) from consideration the exercise of power and the mechanisms inherent to this relationship. These omissions, as I show, cause a particular dimension of recognition-driven struggles to be neglected, a dimension which I will refer to as the politics of exit. (shrink)

Even before ‘economic precarity’ became the default explanation for the rise of defensive nationalism globally, scholars had already begun returning to ground their work in the economy and material...

Ferrarese develops our thinking about the social conditions of caring for others, while arguing for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political - always-already political.

In _Vulnerability and Critical Theory_, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced.

In _Vulnerability and Critical Theory_, Estelle Ferrarese identifies contemporary developments on the theme of vulnerability within critical theory while also seeking to reconstruct an idea of vulnerability that enables an articulation of the political and demonstrates how it is socially produced.

Je tente de mettre en évidence trois pôles thématiques qui structurent la résurgence actuelle de l’idée de vulnérabilité, pôles qui sont à comprendre comme constitués dans un champ de tensions, et n’existant jamais sous une forme pure. Je distingue le modèle d’une disponibilité à la blessure physique et morale, celui d’une association stricte de l’idée de vulnérabilité au concept de dépendance, et enfin la vulnérabilité comme impropriété de soi. Et dans la mesure où la notion de vulnérabilité suppose davantage que (...) la susceptibilité de certains torts, mais implique qu’ils peuvent être prévenus, un large espace pour l’éthique et/ou à l’action politique, à l’organisation collective, s’ouvre à chaque fois, que je m’efforce d’esquisser. (shrink)

« Même si elles sont datées par bien des aspects, les thèses de l’École de Francfort sur le marché et la consommation permettent de mettre au jour les contours et les manques de la critique du capitalisme que constitue la consommation éthique contemporaine. Nous en discutons dans cet article deux éléments. D’une part, la consommation éthique repose sur le postulat qu’il est possible et nécessaire d’injecter des normes morales dans le marché, posé comme en étant dépourvu. Or, la question de (...) savoir si le marché est arraché aux normes, ou s’en donne simplement l’apparence, est le lieu d’un débat complexe au sein de la Théorie critique. Déplier les arguments avancés aide à comprendre comme nécessaire le désajustement des intentions morales des consommateurs et des effets de leurs pratiques sur le monde. D’autre part, la consommation éthique appelle à une forme de vertu qui serait à même de briser le fétichisme de la marchandise, engageant à ne pas oublier ce qui se tient derrière la relation entre des choses (des travailleurs, des personnes singulières, de la peine, etc.) dont l’illusion réificatrice est instituée par le marché. La discussion, par Adorno et Benjamin tout particulièrement, de ce thème marxien du fétichisme permet de mettre en évidence l’insuffisance du geste éthique pour amender ou réformer le capitalisme. ». (shrink)

Résumé De multiples théories contemporaines font de la politique une affaire de création d’une nouvelle forme de vie ; il est postulé que c’est en vivant (autrement) que l’on transforme le monde. Deux logiques se distinguent : une politique de la discipline, et une politique de l’exubérance ou de l’informe. Cet article s’en détache pour dégager de la pensée d’Adorno les éléments d’une politique du difforme : il confère à la forme (et non à la vie) le rôle de maintenir (...) une indétermination, pensant une forme qui n’oublie pas qu’elle est forme, qu’elle est issue d’un mouvement qui aurait pu être autre. (shrink)

I show how a notion of the political as emerging reality which does not derive from any other logic — as a phenomenon devoid of foundations, of predetermined elements — features in Habermas’s theory of society. There is certainly nothing obvious about such a claim, insofar as the political is conceived, across his entire oeuvre, in relation to the public sphere, which is presented as a social space in which the functions and properties he attributes to language in general are (...) made explicit and catalysed. It appears the public sphere coincides with the constitutive rules of universal pragmatics. More generally, the motif of the public sphere is bound up with topics which all curb the political “mode” — i.e., the validity attributed to political statements (1), the weight given, in myriad ways, to morality in the public sphere (2), and the concern to preserve science and complexity no matter what (3). I examine each one in turn, in order to demonstrate how, precisely, through the limits imposed on them, they enable us to grasp the specificity of the public sphere as political instance and, from this basis, identify a place for the political in Jürgen Habermas’s theory. (shrink)

Il a été fréquemment, et à bon droit, relevé la minceur, voire l’absence du motif de l’antagonisme dans une théorie, celle de Habermas, entièrement préoccupée d’entente. Pourtant, s’il est à chercher, c’est dans la figure de la désobéissance civile que le conflit se trouve. De quels traits est alors paré le conflit politique tel qu’il apparaît chez Habermas? Fort classiques, ils sont pour la plupart empruntés à John Rawls. C’est l’architectonique théorique sur laquelle elle se trouve déposée qui donne à (...) la désobéissance civile sa spécificité et sa centralité. Elle se trouve en effet au croisement des thèmes de la légitimité, de la société civile, de la culture politique et de l’être-ensemble, qui constituent les points cardinaux de la politique délibérative de Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much it is an idea with assured academic success. In the United States, torturable, "mutilatable," and killable bodies are a wide topic of discussion, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In Europe, current reflection on vulnerability has emerged from a thematic of precarity and exclusion; the term evokes lives that are dispensable, evictable, deportable, and the abandoning of individuals to naked forces of the market. But if the theme has had (...) notable fortune, it also continues to come up against considerable reluctance. The political scope of vulnerability is often denied: it seems inevitably to be relegated to the sphere of "good sentiments." This book aims to address this criticism. It shows that by questioning our hegemonic anthropology, by reinventing the categories of freedom, equality, and being-in-common based on the body, by overthrowing the legitimate grammar of political discourse, and by redefining the political subject – the category of vulnerability, far from being conservative or a-political, works to undo the world such as it is. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Critical Horizons. _. (shrink)

With the notion of the form-of-life as a counter-figure to the notion of bare life, Agamben seems to invite us to place at the center of a critical theory of capitalism a reflection on bios. To envisage a form of emancipation that unfolds against bare life suggests, at first glance, another relation to the living body. Such a gesture seems to be inspired by the desire to think a natural life that would also be a politically qualified life. The idea (...) with which Agamben closes the Homo Sacer series, namely that of a use of bodies, also gestures in this direction. In this paper I show how the categories of bare life and of the use of bodies fail to live up to their promise, before demonstrating in what sense the idea of a subtraction of law as a political project which subsumes all others ends up weakening the critical potential of the idea of a form-of-life that is to be realised against the force of production of bare lives. (shrink)

Questo articolo si sforza di ricollocare le teorie del care in seno alla teoria politica contemporanea, in cui si attesta un ritorno al tema della vulnerabilitÀ corporea e morale come problema politico e morale in sé. Qui si distinguono tre accezioni della parola vulnerabilitÀ, accezioni che implicano ogni volta ragionamenti morali e legittimano ordini politici differenti: il modello della disponibilitÀ alla ferita fisica e morale, quello dell'associazione stretta fra l'idea della vulnerabilitÀ e il concetto di dipendenza, e infine la vulnerabilitÀ (...) come non possesso di sé. (shrink)

Parce qu’elles défendent l’intégration de problématiques relevant des études de genre pour construire de nouvelles représentations critiques du monde social et politique, les études sur le care sont pluridisciplinaires et intéressent la philosophie, la sociologie, la psychologie comme le droit, l’économie, les sciences politiques… et l’histoire. C’est la raison de ce compte rendu des deux premiers ouvrages publiés dans la collection « Perspectives du care » dirigée par Fabienne Brugère et Cla...

Digitization technologies applied to historical newspapers have changed the research landscape historians were used to. An Eldorado? Despite unquestionable merits, the new digital affordance of historical newspapers also brings drawbacks and possibl.

Evidence from our research on young children's temporal understanding supports Hoerl & McCormack's view that young children rely on a temporal updating system to change representations over time. We propose that the shift from temporal updating to temporal reasoning is enabled by children's expanding representations of event sequences, along with developments in language, memory, and other cognitive competencies.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, governments implemented successive lockdowns that forced employees to work from home to contain the spread of the coronavirus. This crisis raises the question of the effects of mandatory work from home on employees’ well-being and performance, and whether these effects are the same for all employees. In the present study, we examined whether working at home may be related to intensity, familiarity with WFH, employees’ well-being and creativity. We also examined whether the psychological profile of employees, (...) combining preference for solitude and associated personality variables from the Big Five, may influence the effects of WFH. The data were collected via an online survey from November 13th to December 15th 2020 among 946 employees from various organizations during the second lockdown in France. In addition to identifying two distinctive psychological profiles for employees having to WFH, results revealed that those with a “Solitary” profile reported higher loneliness at work, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of job satisfaction and work engagement than those with an “Affiliative” profile. It was also found that employees with a “Solitary” profile perceived themselves as less creative and produced objectively fewer ideas than individuals with an “Affiliative” profile. The present study suggests the necessity to distinguish the profiles of teleworkers and to offer a stronger support for the less affiliative employees when working from home. (shrink)

Presenting the challenges that face digital age citizens as philosophical, as opposed to technological, this paper explores the underpinning structure of digital civics through an overview of its four foundational pillars and their informing scholarship. Through this framework and the literature that supports it, a set of five key concepts are identified as a useful guide for developing digital civics initiatives, including policy and educational interventions. In closing, this work urges the further exploration of the conceptual underpinnings of digital civics (...) to improve future formulations of digital civics and digital citizenship endeavours. (shrink)

Carnal Knowledge is an outcome of the renewed energy and interest in moving beyond the discursive construction of reality to understand the relationship between what is conceived of as reality and materiality, described as the "material turn." It draws together established and emerging writers, whose research spans dance, music, film, fashion, design, photography, literature, painting and stereo-immersive VR, to demonstrate how art allows us to map the complex relations between nature and culture, between the body, language and knowledge. These writings (...) are unique in the field because they represent the authors' commitment to a new materialism through the creative arts. The questions they address include: Does the material turn in the creative arts take a different turn from continental epistemology, philosophy and the humanities? How does the agency of matter, the material nature of artistic practice and the notion of "truth to materials" affect what we understand as the "new materialism?" In engaging with these questions the book offers perspectives on the emergence of this exciting fresh field of new materialism. (shrink)

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

L’article propose une étude lexico-syntaxique de la polysémie du nom truc en français, qui connaît cinq types d’emplois différents, dont certains le rapprochent de noms sous-spécifiés et/ou de noms généraux. L’analyse s’appuie sur un vaste corpus de données attestées et sur une batterie de patrons syntaxiques permettant à la fois de départager et de caractériser les différentes acceptions du nom truc. Il est ainsi montré que chaque type d’emploi de ce nom en tant que Nss se caractérise par une construction (...) privilégiée, tout en en admettant une ou plusieurs autres. Il s’avère en effet que chacun des sens du substantif truc peut être défini par une conjonction de propriétés discriminantes de nature syntaxique et sémantique. (shrink)

This commentary response presents two concepts that may address legal-political issues arising in the civics pillar of digital civics: the history of data and nomos. It suggests that we can draw from the history of data to supplement our understanding of datafication and formulate responses to surveillance capitalism. It then forwards the utility of the ancient concept of nomos as a means of approaching cultural and jurisdictional challenges arising in the infosphere.

Commenting on Ziyaad Bhorat’s discussion of despotism, contextualising comments are presented to discuss how unjust social stratifications and beliefs around ownership might be embedded through the deployment of law. I also suggest an additional response to his list of rebellious activities: Art.

As the media wrestle with ethical and legal problems in coverage of AIDS stories, such as privacy, terminology, and disclosure, a question is raised about the educational role the media will assume in the face of this health threat. Despite health department hopes for candor in dealing with the threat, blunt?language ads and commercials have been rejected by most New York City media and legislation may restrict the extent to which media deal with the question. Though the media alone cannot (...) bear the burden of AIDS education, they must provide point?man services. (shrink)