The concept of ressentiment is increasingly being drawn upon to analyse current political developments, but in doing so it is important to have a clear understanding of its original meaning in the work of Nietzsche and Scheler, who applied it to the inner logic of democracy, rather than political movements opposed to liberal democracy. This article introduces an important essay written in 1937, ‘National Socialism as a doctrine of rancour’, by the Dutch modernist writer, Menno ter Braak. Despite having been (...) highly influential in Dutch literature and scholarship, he is virtually unknown in the Anglophone world, since none of his work has been translated. This article is an important contribution both as a rare examination of how ressentiment can be used to analyse 1930s National Socialism, and as an analysis of the role of ressentiment as a moral sentiment in democratic politics, especially its populist variants. (shrink)

Lack of attention to definitions of indigeneity is a problem in both political theory and practice. Defining indigeneity has at least two important consequences: it affects who has access to resources or rights reserved for Indigenous peoples; and it shapes the kinds of privileges and resources available to Indigenous peoples. In this article, I draw on Theodor Adorno’s concept of ‘nonidentity’ as a resource for exploring the power and limits of conceptions of indigeneity. I argue that recognizing the non-identical aspects (...) of indigeneity enables critical engagement with constellations of concepts that attend to the distinctive aspects of indigeneity in particular moments and locations. To illustrate my argument, I draw on one conception of indigeneity that could be characterized as non-identity thinking – a research approach called Kaupapa Māori. I suggest that non-identity is a promising resource for conceptualizing indigeneity as it has potential to respond to some of the key problems with current responses to indigeneity; notably, that universal definitions may not best represent what it means to be Indigenous, and that unreflective acceptance of current definitions fails to produce just outcomes. (shrink)

The concept of practice is thematically central to modern conservative thought, as evident in Edmund Burke’s writings on the aesthetic and his diatribe against the French Revolution. It is also the main organizing thread in the framework in the human sciences known as practice theory, which extends back at least to Karl Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. This article historicizes ‘practice’ in conservative thought and practice theory, accounts for the family resemblance between the two, and takes apart that family resemblance to (...) reveal differences. The ingredients of practice theory (historical inheritance, embodiment, cognitive limits, loose coupling between conscious thought and action) are in many cases also distinctive traits of conservative thought. But the similarity is deceptive. Practice theory and conservative thought constitute two distinct interpretations of practice, two disparate endeavours for connecting human science with political strategy, and two different formulas for opposing theory and practice. The present study will argue that this is primarily a political opposition for conservative thought, while it is a human-scientific opposition for practice theory. Conservative thought is initially political and then human-scientific; practice theory is initially human-scientific and then political. This article advocates for practice theory against conservative thought as differently amended versions of a politics that recognizes human finitude. (shrink)

Society has reached a new rupture in the digital age. Traditional technologies of biopower designed around coercion no longer dominate. Psychopower has manifested, and its implementation has changed the way one understands biopolitics. This discussion note references Byung-Chul Han’s interpretation of modern psychopolitics to investigate whether basic human rights violations are committed by Facebook, Inc.’s product against its users at a psychopolitical level. This analysis finds that Facebook use can lead to international human rights violations, specifically cultural rights, social rights, (...) rights to self-determination, political rights, and the right to health. (shrink)

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.

This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche's categories of master and slave morality. Disentangling Nietzsche's parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the (...) horrific violence visited upon the Gaza Strip by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault. (shrink)

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 223-239, July 2022. Contributing to the debate on decolonising the curriculum, this reflective article questions: What does a safe space in a decolonised classroom mean? For whom is it safe? And at what cost? Must we redraw the parameters of ‘safe’? Prompted by a real-life ‘n-word incident’ in the classroom, this article unpacks the collision of decolonising the curriculum to continue making teaching and learning more pluriversal and inclusive, with (...) the enactment of the ‘wounded attachments’ of identitarian politics and the playing of ‘Privilege or Oppression Olympics’. Using snippets from British parody and satire on decolonising the university, we query how far wokeness in a university setting can become political correctness taken to extremes that threaten decolonising efforts. In its concluding reflections, the article makes tentative recommendations for setting up safe spaces, away from self-silencing or censoring, and backing away from contention and provocation in the classroom. (shrink)

There has been a marked increase in the active involvement of children and young people in social research. This move is underpinned by rights based arguments that children and young people should have a voice, and that this voice should be listened to. However, concerns have been raised about the appropriateness of children’s and young people’s rights and participation in research. This is primarily due to queries over whether they have enough capacity to enact the individual agency required to be (...) rights holders and participate in research. In addition, a focus on their inherent vulnerability continues to be a key feature of research ethics protocols. In this paper I argue that both capacity and vulnerability should be seen as socially produced, meaning that the scope for capacity to be increased and vulnerability decreased also lies within the social. I draw from notions of relational autonomy or ‘associational presence’ to argue that what children and young people need to be active participants in research is the creation of spaces within which relational agency can be nurtured and sustained. Such techniques and values are found in participatory research approaches and can be used to create such emancipatory environments. (shrink)

Current models for individuation in academe exacerbate generational tensions between second and third wave feminists. Feminist pedagogues must be wary of getting caught in the "vicious circle of contempt," where students are expected to compensate for a teacher's past narcissistic wounds. Instead, we must be willing to mourn the wounds we have received at the hands of a contemptuous culture and to acknowledge same-gender attachments that are disavowed in dialectical models of subject production.

This article discusses three different conceptions of ethics within contemporary feminist theory and how they depict the connection between ethics and politics. The first position, represented by Wendy Brown, mainly describes ethics as a sort of anti-political moralism and apolitical individualism, and hence as a turn away from politics. The second position, represented by Saba Mahmood, discusses ethics as a precondition for politics, while the third position, represented by Vikki Bell, depicts it as the ‘external consciousness’ of the political, and (...) as destabilising political discourse by confronting it with singularity and ‘radical’ difference. Though they represent distinct positions, the article argues, all three suffer from a tendency to reify ethics by failing to give a contextualised account of it. The article then introduces the ethical perspective of Judith Butler, arguing that she – while offering both a transhistorical and a contextualised dimension – tends to psychologise and individualise ethics and politics. The last part of the article introduces Terry Eagleton and what, in a Marxist vein, could be called a ‘materialist ethics’ or an ‘ethics of socialism’, and argues that this way of framing the relationship between ethics and politics provides a solution to the trap of reification identified in the three described positions. This part also discusses how Eagleton’s theory relates to – but also differs from – arguments made by Butler. One advantage of Eagleton’s work, the article argues, is that it does not psychologise and individualise ethics and politics as Butler’s work does. (shrink)

Contemporary queer interrogations of heteronormativity are fraught with the traces of feminist contestations of the intimate domains of women's `ordinary' lives during the era of the women's liberation movement. These traces remain enigmatic within contemporary theories of public affect and emotion rather than incorporated into their critiques of the present political moment. This essay argues that the work of the early women's liberationists — their attempts to bring the personal into view as the dense, affect laden, site of social reproduction (...) — can offer us a countermemory to the enduring and alluring force of the `private' domains of love and ordinary feeling in the contemporary US national public sphere. In order to hear the echoes of that moment — the time of women's liberation — in this one, the essay stages a comparative reading between two novels, Doris Lessing's A Ripple from the Storm (1958) and June Arnold's The Cook and the Carpenter: A Novel by the Carpenter (1973). Although the two novels were written over a decade apart, both have as their subject the dense and complex relations between political action, personal relationships and feelings within a (broadly conceived) feminist paradigm. By taking the risk of an odd conjunction, and reading the two novels side-by-side, the essay aims to open up the messiness and contingencies of an era in which both `the political' and `the personal' were contested terms, their meanings challenged, their domains struggled over, their practices altered and, in some cases, transformed. (shrink)

At times, radical theory can propose a singular story of the nature of power, suggesting that it must either be taken or abolished. This then becomes intertwined with a pedagogical strategy of recruitment, whereby others are encouraged to share in this ideological framework and the political practices based upon it. In this article, we propose an alternative based on practices of freedom and the role of love in subverting interdependent patterns of normativity and hierarchy. Bringing together anarchist, feminist, and queer (...) theories alongside authoethnographic accounts from classrooms and other spaces of pedagogy, we highlight the value of a multiplicity of stories, of telling stories and doing roles differently, and of releasing stories for the immediacy of connection. (shrink)

Duncan Bell’s Empire, Race and Global Justice is an edited volume that makes an important intervention in philosophical debates about global justice. Its contributors argue that global justice scholarship has paid insufficient attention to the role of imperialism and racism in generating global hierarchies. This review considers the contributions of this volume from three perspectives: as a critique of the global justice literature, as a guide for what methods global justice scholars should use and as a reconsideration of what texts (...) should be incorporated into the global justice canon. Empire is an important book for anyone who researches and teaches in the area of global justice because it demonstrates both why a different approach to this topic is necessary and how a different approach is possible. (shrink)

This article offers the critical concept misfit in an effort to further think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting that I offer here elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability by extending a consideration of how the particularities of embodiment interact with the environment in its broadest sense, to include both its spatial and temporal aspects. The interrelated dynamics of fitting (...) and misfitting constitute a particular aspect of world-making involved in material-discursive becoming. The essay makes three arguments: the concept of misfit emphasizes the particularity of varying lived embodiments and avoids a theoretical generic disabled body; the concept of misfit clarifies the current feminist critical conversation about universal vulnerability and dependence; the concept of misfitting as a shifting spatial and perpetually temporal relationship confers agency and value on disabled subjects. (shrink)

This article examines religious and gendered identities through an ethnographic study of unmarried evangelical Christian women in London. Moving away from an approach that shows that women feel empowered through their conservative, male-dominated religious environment, or else they find it constraining and leave the church, this article investigates the experiences of women who feel limited by their church, and still remain embedded in their Christian environment. The article begins by exploring the normative figure of the ideal Christian woman operative in (...) this context. It then describes the experiences of women who do not fit the norm, outlining the affective toll they suffer through marginality. Finally, the article examines how some women rely on hope in order to change the normative framework within their church. This article argues that leaving and staying are not static categories; instead evangelical women, frustrated with their marginal positions, revealed a continuum of investment underlain by resilience and hope. (shrink)

Picking up the question of what FLaK might be, this editorial considers the relationship between openness and closure in feminist legal studies. How do we draw on feminist struggles for openness in common resources, from security to knowledge, as we inhabit a compromised space in commercial publishing? We think about this first in relation to the content of this issue: on image-based abuse continuums, asylum struggles, trials of protestors, customary justice, and not-so-timely reparations. Our thoughts take us through the different (...) ways that openness and closure work in struggles against violence, cruel welcomes, and re-arrangements of code and custom. Secondly, we share some reflections on methodological openness and closure as the roundtable conversation on asylum, and the interview with Riles, remind us of #FLaK2016 and its method of scattering sources as we think about how best to mix knowledges. Thirdly, prompted by the FLaK kitchen table conversations on openness, publishing and ‘getting the word out’, we respond to Kember’s call to ‘open up open access’. We explain the different current arrangements for opening up FLS content and how green open access, the sharedit initiative, author request and publisher discretion present alternatives to gold open access. Finally drawing on Franklin and Spade, we show how there are a range of ‘wench tactics’—adapting gifts, stalling and resting—which we deploy as academic editors who are trying to have an impact on the access, use and circulation of our journal, even though we do not own the journal we edit. These wench tactics are alternatives to the more obvious or reported tactic of resignation, or withdrawing academic labour from editing and reviewing altogether. They help us think about brewing editorial time, what ambivalence over our 25th birthday might mean, and how to inhabit painful places. In this, we respond in our own impure, compromised way to da Silva’s call not to forget the native and slave as we do FLaK, and repurpose shrapnel, in our common commitments. (shrink)

In this age of DIY Health—a present that has been described as a time of “ludic capitalism”—one is constantly confronted with the injunction to manage risk by means of making healthy choices and of informed participation in various self-surveillant technologies of bioinformatics. Neoliberal governmentality has been redacted by poststructuralist scholars of bioethics as defined by the two-fold emergence of, on the one hand, populations and on the other, the self-determining individual—as biopolitical entities. In this article, we provide a genealogical-phenomenological schematization (...) (GPS analysis) of the narration of cancer in relation to “sexual minority populations.” Canonical discourses concerning minority sexualities are articulated by means of a logic of “inclusion and reification” that organizes the interiorization of norms of embodied relationality, and a positive liaison with biomedical technologies and techniques in the taking up of a rhetorical style of biographical compliance. Neoliberal DIY Health logics conflate participation with agency, and institute norms of recognition that constrain visibility to: citizens who make healthy choices and manage risk, heroic cancer stories, stories of the reconstruction of states of normalcy, or of survival against all odds. Alternatively, we trace the performative articulations of queer narrative practices that constitute an ephemeral, nomadic praxiology—a doing of knowledge in cancer’s queer narration. Queer cancer narrative practices represent a relationship to health and embodiment that is predicated, not on normalcy, but predicated on troubling norms, on artful failure, and on engaging in a kind of affective mapping that might be thought constitutive of a speculative bioethical relation to the self as other. (shrink)

This article recapitulates and develops the attempts in the Nietzschean traditions to address and overcome the proliferation of nihilism that Nietzsche predicted to unfold in the next 200 years (WP 2). Nietzsche approached nihilism not merely as a psychology but as a labyrinthic and pervasive historical process whereby the highest values of culture and founding assumptions of philosophical thought prevented the further flourishing of life. Therefore, he thought nihilism had to be encountered and experienced on many, often opposing, fronts to (...) be fully consumed and left behind. Thus, just as Nietzsche captured the subtle reinventions of nihilism in new forms in his time, in the new doers assumed behind new deeds (WP 488), this article focuses on the contemporary tectonic shifts brought by digital technology and challenges subjectivation and narrativization of algorithmic will to power in human-like interfaces such as ChatGPT. Having identified philosophers and himself as the most advanced nihilists in their overvaluation of truth, in the 4th part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche grappled with the difficult, perhaps impossible, temporality of post-nihilistic historicity that oscillates between highest creativity and highest truths, especially in the sections entitled The Shadow and At Noon whereby he explored new temporal techniques to evade the relapses into temporal nihilisms of the notions of linear progress or eternity (TSZ, 4). By drawing on this juncture, this article offers ways to address transfigurations of nihilism behind new technological performances of subjectivity. The article points toward creative temporalities beyond narrativity and subjectivity insofar as the statistical operations and probabilistic estimations of language-models exceed grammatical construction of meaning. This multifaceted application of his thought on the contemporary ontic reality is necessary to perceive our comet's incalculable movement as a veritable ray of sunshine. (shrink)