The point of departure of this article is that hospitality in education has not been theorized in terms of emotion and affect, partly because its law have been discussed in ways that have not paid much attention to the role of emotion and affect. The analysis broadens our understanding of the ethics and politics of hospitality by considering it as a spatial and affective relational practice. In particular, concepts from affect theory such as the notion of affective atmospheres and atmospheric (...) walls are discussed to highlight the notion of affective hospitality. It is argued that a greater awareness of the micro-politics of hospitality in its everyday enactment in various educational settings can show educators how specific practices of hospitality work to produce affective spaces in which the socio-historical context of privilege may be interrupted. The paper concludes with a discussion of the ethical, political and pedagogical implications of affective hospitality. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth in (...) Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

This article focuses on a small population of house crows in the town of Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, likely descendants of two birds that arrived by ship in the mid-1990s. In 2014, after twenty years of peaceful co-existence, the government began the process of eradicating this population. Just across the water from Hoek van Holland is the Port of Rotterdam – Europe’s largest port – and an “engine” for the global patterns of production, trade and consumption that are (...) today remaking our world, ushering in what many are calling “the Anthropocene.” Focusing on these crows and this port – in a way that is attuned to the broader placetimes that constitute our present – this paper explores the possibilities and limitations of hospitality as a basis for crafting shared worlds in difficult times. (shrink)

In today’s globalized world, nations cannot be totally isolated from or indifferent to their neighbors, especially in regards to medicine and health. While globalization has brought prosperity to millions, disparities among nations and nationals are growing raising once again the question of justice. Similarly, while medicine has developed dramatically over the past few decades, health disparities at the global level are staggering. Seemingly, what our humanity could achieve in matters of scientific development is not justly distributed to benefit everyone. In (...) this paper, it will be argued that a global theoretical agreement on principles of justice may prove unattainable; however, a grass-roots change is warranted to change the current situation. The UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights will be considered as a starting point to achieve this change through extracting the main values embedded in its principles. These values, namely, respecting human dignity and tending to human vulnerability with a hospitable attitude, should then be revived in medical practice. Medical education will be one possible venue to achieve that, especially through role models. Future physicians will then become the fervent advocates for a global and just distribution of health care. (shrink)

International education tests, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development International Student Assessment and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study , steer the debate about education, form the image of a school, and specify the goals and objectives of the curriculum. Thus praise, prizes and other positive reinforcements become common methods in school. Through Franz Kafka's Letter to his Father I examine encouragement and teacher praise, which are, when we look into it, held in the grip of (...) behaviourism. I take issue with this dominant thinking and make an attempt to go beyond praise and encouragement as positive reinforcements of desired behaviours that are postulated in advance. I make an educational argument out of Heidegger's phenomenological term, Ereignis, and suggest that teachers ought to praise that which the student is suited for and not only when they have fulfilled the demands of the curriculum. I also make an educational argument out of two Derridaean terms, hospitality and forgiveness, and claim that teachers ought to give back -- through praise and encouragement -- the students' self-respect, whatever their faults. Instead of being manipulative and serving narcissistic needs, praise ought to serve an education for democracy. (shrink)

(2008). B Is For Burqa, C Is For Censorship: The Miseducative Effects of Censoring Muslim Girls and Women's Sartorial Discourse. Educational Studies: Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 17-28.

Roberto Esposito (1998; 2002; 2008) examines how immunological apparatuses originally designed to protect communities end up undermining communities. This paper explores comparatively his view on the interplay between community and immunity with Giorgio Agamben’s and Jacques Derrida’s, although in their works these notions appear under other labels. Beyond pointing out their similarities, the paper concludes by analyzing what, in our view, constitute the raison d’être of their ultimate and irreconcilable differences: Agamben’s approach is _antinomic_, while Derrida’s is _aporetic_ and Esposito’s (...) is rather _dialectical_. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the role of tragedy in the ancient emergence of philosophical interiority and in the recent return of exteriority that marks the birth of theory. I argue that tragedy names a kind of epistemic threshold between systems of knowledge predicated on exteriority and interiority. I conclude by arguing that Derrida's late effort to articulate a messianic model of the tragic in Specters of Marx and elsewhere, his effort to “think the ghost,” both confirms and complicates tragedy's (...) place in the history of theory. (shrink)

Indigenous-Australian fiction offers Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices the opportunity to carve out an Indigenous space within as well as without Australian identity after more than two...

This article casts its attention on acts of supplication in institutional settings. The article focuses upon institutions geared towards the provision of care, that is, sites that are designed to provide services to those in need. The article claims that every act of supplication is an act of violence deployed upon the supplicant by his/her interlocutor and the institution more broadly. This is not violence of an overt type; it is tacit and subtle and takes root at the very essence (...) of the supplicant, that is, his/her being. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s provocative reading of the impossibility of the gift, an analysis that is indebted to Marcel Mauss’ exposition of the gift as obligatory and, thus, an existential nullity. Drawing upon both theorists, the article theorizes the violence of the gift and proceeds to read the violence in/of care/caring. The article explicates the grounding of this violence and how it is written into each request for care. (shrink)

(2003). Non-violence and the other A composite theory of multiplism, heterology and heteronomy drawn from jainism and gandhi. Angelaki: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 3-22.

Respondiendo a la incitación a buscar otros mundos lanzada por Louis-Auguste Blanqui, el presente artículo aborda las posibilidades de una ética heterónoma en un sentido pluriversal. A partir de dicha ética se plantean ciertas potencialidades utópicas de la traducción en tanto cosmopolítica.

The series friends, rivals, enemies is a seemingly ‘natural’ classification for the relations of states, while the parallel series kin, neighbors, strangers functions as an informal classification system for social relations in general. That we may owe foreigners the hospitality due to strangers has become a matter of discussion among normative theorists, thanks to Kant's Perpetual Peace. Thus the conjunction of friendship and hospitality calls for a conceptual assessment. This assessment uses Aristotle's treatment of friendship (and Derrida's treatment of Aristotle's (...) ‘familial schema’) to establish three primary models of social relations (father to sons, husband to wife, brother to brother). Only ‘brothers’ (agents modeled as brothers) can be friends, rivals, or enemies. Only ‘fathers’ can be hosts who offer strangers the hospitality of the household. By the same token, only ‘fathers’ can be guests or take hostages. Such an assessment brings the conceptual concerns of two fields — international relations and political theory — closer together. In so doing, it rejects anarchy's conceptual hegemony in the field of international relations. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a deconstructive analysis of the relationship between humanitarian aid and state sovereignty. First, I sketch Derrida's analysis of the Christian roots of contemporary concepts of tolerance, forgiveness, and hospitality. Second, I trace the history and etymology of the word ‘humanitarian’ to reveal its Christian heritage; and argue that ‘humanitarian’ is bound to the violence of Christ's crucifixion, on the one hand, and to the sovereignty of God, on the other. Third, I set out three phases (...) in the politics of contemporary humanitarian aid in relation to an increasing concern for humanitarian warfare. I conclude that international humanitarian aid and humanitarian warfare are bound together through an autoimmune logic that simultaneously challenges and shores up state sovereignty. State sovereignty creates ‘refugees’, which necessitates humanitarian aid organizations to step in and literally fill the space between state borders, a space that has become a kind of ‘no-man's land’ beyond citizenship. Police and military respond to refugee camps by patrolling them to shore up national borders and state sovereignty. Non-governmental humanitarian aid organizations, supposedly operating outside of nation states, become a necessary supplement to state sovereignty. (shrink)

This article explores how our understanding of ambivalence would shift if we saw it as an inherent and essential part of the ordinary work of education. Following Bauman's sociology of the stranger and Derrida's deconstructions of hospitality, the article unfolds in three parts. In the first part we discuss the preconditions of modern education which since the Enlightenment has been guided by the postulate that there is and ought to be a rational order in the social world. In the second (...) part we consider the intolerance of strangers the modern will-to-order has caused. Since the stranger appears as a liminal category that falls between the boundaries of already established social categories, she can only be viewed as an antithesis of a well-ordered society. In the third part we ask how educational spaces hospitable to strangers can be opened up, and argue that we would do better not to construe living with ambivalence as a problem, but as a quest for humanity and justice. (shrink)

This paper has been translated from the French by Cosmin Toma. It focuses on Jacques Derrida's very last lecture, given in Rio de Janeiro, on the 16thof August 2004, which Derrida drew from his ‘Le parjure et le pardon’ (‘Perjury and Forgiveness’) seminar held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), in Paris, from 1997 to 1999. In reference to this final lecture in which Derrida deals with ‘forgiveness,’ ‘truth’, ‘reconciliation’, ‘testimony’ and ‘genre’, the paper also takes (...) up the question of justice as well as of what he calls the ‘worst violence’ via testimonial writings by Sarah Kofman and Antjie Krog so as to rethink forgiveness. (shrink)

This paper will address the political and ethical ramifications of Derrida's concern for friendship in relation to his concerns with the future of democracy, rights of hospitality and cosmopolitics. The questions addressed read as follows: Is there a way we can get beyond this stance which not only consolidates a friendship of the ‘perhaps’ with a friendship of the promise, but also implicates their consolidation with the very future of what we today call democracy? Is there a way in which (...) we can substantiate something more than a romanticized call for a future integration of friendship and democracy while avoiding the pitfalls of on one hand, substantiating a model of friendship for politics or, on the other, offering a disguised and naïve return to a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity? Through a close reading of the conclusion to Politics of Friendship as well as his concerns with friendship in Spectres of Marx and Rogues: Two Essays on Reason it will be argued that Derrida's insistence on the future of friendship is bound up with the notion of an ethical promise to the thought of friendship as the condition for its political and ethical relevance. (shrink)

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears (...) at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis? (shrink)

Come in. Welcome. Be my guest and I will be yours. Shall we ask, in accordance with the Derridean question, "Is not hospitality an interruption of the self?" What is the relationship between the interruption and the moment one enters the host's home? Derrida calls us toward a new understanding of hospitality - as an interruption. This paper will illuminate the history of hospitality in the West as well as trace Derrida's discussions of hospitality throughout many of works. The overall (...) goal of this project is to provide readers of Derrida with a sort of reference guide for his discussions on and deconstructive approach to hospitality. (shrink)

Stay! That is to say, either stay with your decision or stay your hand. Demeure: either remain or delay. Morari or moriri: either life or death. The alternation is also a hyphenation, a connection-disconnection, as with that of Judaeo-Christianity and the ethicoreligious. How are these hyphenations construed in Kierkegaard's divergence from Kant and Hegel and in the responses of Derrida and Levinas to Johannes de silentio's story of what happened and did not happen on Mount Moriah? Perfect duties and imperfect (...) duties fall under the responsibility of absolute duty. If the ethical is externally related to natural life, the life that is internal to the ethical is due to another externality, that of responsibility to the absolute other - or God, if you like. Another alternation. Another hyphenation? Or a dash? And would it be a dash that separates justice from love? And is love ever separate from self-love or from narcissisim? What sort of narcissism is exemplifed in Kierkegaard's search for salvation? Meanwhile Abraham waits, and with him or against him but without demur, so do Isaac, the ram, and a host of hostages, guests, and asylum-seekers, one by one. (shrink)

Deconstruction and duration are arguably the two most important theories of time to emerge from French philosophy in the twentieth century. Yet, despite the resurgence of interest in Bergson, scholars have ignored Derrida’s own discussions of Bergson, both positive and negative, throughout his career. This lack of attention obscures an important influence on Derrida’s early thought, and hampers our ability to understand the nature of Derrida’s relationship to fields such as new materialism, posthumanism, and affect studies, that frequently turn to (...) Bergson for inspiration. This paper addresses this gap by tracking Derrida’s readings of Bergson and comparing two related pairs of their concepts: duration and différance, and intuition and spacing. The paper concludes by arguing that Derrida’s critical engagement with Bergson leads to an anti-presentist model of life, which gains new relevance in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Does democracy lead to more ethical or just systems of welcoming, of hospitality? Derrida considers an analysis of sovereignty as pivotal to any re-evaluation of contemporary politics and ethics, tying such a project in with deconstructions of democracy and hospitality: ‘what is “living together”? …must one live together only with one's like, with someone semblables?’ he asks in Rogues, prompting us to think through what it means to be, at once, democratic and hospitable. In this paper I propose that Derrida (...) provides us with a way of re-orienting democracy and hospitality that complicates conditions of citizenship and belonging, of the nation-state and sovereignty and of justice and unconditionality. It is the contention of this paper that deconstructing sovereignty is essential for any re-orientation of practices of hospitality within liberal democratic countries. The figure of the foreigner and questions of hospitality reveal a deep ambivalence at the core of democracy in the sense that it provokes the desire for openness and closure simultaneously. In closing, I raise questions concerning the potential for deconstructive practice to engage in a future politico-ethics of the border in light of this critical evaluation of democracy. In so doing, I consider the role of deconstruction in relation to liberal modalities of hospitality. (shrink)

This article contributes to conversations on hospitality in educational settings, with a focus on higher education and the online context. We integrate Derrida’s ethics of hospitality framework with a focus on practices of hospitality, including its affective and material, embodied dimension. This article offers empirical examples of practices of what we termed ‘virtual academic hospitality’: during a series of online collaborative and cross borders workshops with teachers of English based in the Gaza Strip, we performed academic hospitality through virtual convivial (...) rituals and the sharing of virtual gifts, which are illustrated here. We propose a revision of the concept of academic hospitality arguing that: firstly, academic hospitality is not limited to intellectual conversations; secondly, that the relationship between hospitality and mobility needs to be revised, since hospitality mediated by the technological medium can be performed, and technology may even stretch hospitality towards the unreachable ‘unconditional hospitality’ theorised by Derrida ; and thirdly, that indigenous epistemics, with their focus on the affective, may offer alternative understandings of conviviality within the academy. These points may contribute to the collective development of a new paradigmatic understanding of hospitality, one which integrates Western and indigenous traditions of hospitality, and which includes the online environment. (shrink)

This paper explores the meaning of teacher–student relationships in the light of Derrida’s notions of hospitality and trust. Drawing on Derrida, the author delineates two aspects of educational hospitality: hospitality without determinacy and hospitality as self-surrender. It is argued that educational hospitality is underpinned by trust. A sound teacher–student relationship, the paper concludes, consists in educational hospitality and embedded trust.

While the concept of internationalization plays a key role in contemporary discussions on the activities and outcomes sought by universities, it is commonly argued that it is poorly understood or realised in practice. This has led some to argue that more work is needed to define the dimensions of the concept, or even to plot out stages of its achievement. This paper aims not to provide a definition of internationalisation for those working in higher education. On the contrary, it seeks (...) to open up discussion on internationalisation by considering Derrida's reflections on hospitality and the metaphysics of presence. In so doing, it will be shown that internationalisation is an ethical demand that is as much about being unsettled by thinking about ourselves and others, as it is about mobility programs and online education, and about being ‘late’ rather than surrendering to the space‐time compression of modernity. (shrink)

Recently, indigenous struggles against ongoing colonial violence have become prominent in the context of growing environmental destruction and the ascendancy of the far right in the United States and parts of South America. This article suggests that European radical theory is not always equipped to provide normative frameworks of allyship with such struggles. Exploring the ‘messianic tone’ in European radical theory, and in particular the works of Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, the article argues that the analytical tendency to render (...) the subject entirely dissolute acts against indigenous demands for justice built around the latter’s sovereignty. In an effort to excavate a ‘European’ tradition that might enable relations of allyship between those in relatively privileged positions and indigenous peoples, the article foregrounds the life and thought of Gustav Landauer, a German, Jewish, anarchist revolutionary who lost his life during the 1919 German revolution. Landauer’s anarchism was suffused with his reading of his Jewishness, and as such, although he prefigures Derrida and Agamben in many ways, he ultimately refused to completely reject the sovereignty of the subject, providing a means by which to engage European political theory with indigenous struggles in the world today. (shrink)

Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. The contemporary international regime of law and politics regarding human migration largely follows Immanuel Kant’s contradictory approach, supporting the cosmopolitical rights of humans to move and expect hospitality while privileging the rights of sovereign states to assert territorial security against movement. International Relations scholars informed by Jacques Derrida’s ethical theory argue that one may press this tension to positive dynamics through affirmation of the aporia that a secured home is a requirement for (...) the possibility of the hospitality that might undo conflict between migrants and emplaced citizens. Yet, the attraction of Derrida’s critical Kantianism and this revival of hospitality depends on asserting the primacy of habitation to how citizen subjects stand with respect to foreigners who move. It depends on neglecting how any assumption of home is not based on a given home but, rather, on movements to impose the boundaries and bounty of a home. No one faces the movement of others who seek to make home from the position of home but only also in movements of homemaking. Both the citizen and the migrant move in forms of imposition. And it is only in a politics of imposition that rights to move can be affirmed and gain respect. (shrink)

The contemporary international regime of law and politics regarding human migration largely follows Immanuel Kant’s contradictory approach, supporting the cosmopolitical rights of humans to move and expect hospitality while privileging the rights of sovereign states to assert territorial security against movement. International Relations scholars informed by Jacques Derrida’s ethical theory argue that one may press this tension to positive dynamics through affirmation of the aporia that a secured home is a requirement for the possibility of the hospitality that might undo (...) conflict between migrants and emplaced citizens. Yet, the attraction of Derrida’s critical Kantianism and this revival of hospitality depends on asserting the primacy of habitation to how citizen subjects stand with respect to foreigners who move. It depends on neglecting how any assumption of home is not based on a given home but, rather, on movements to impose the boundaries and bounty of a home. No one faces the movement of others who seek to make home from the position of home but only also in movements of homemaking. Both the citizen and the migrant move in forms of imposition. And it is only in a politics of imposition that rights to move can be affirmed and gain respect. (shrink)

There is a robust body of research that examines problems women with criminal‐legal system involvement face, the support they need, how they get it, from whom, and how they use it. Rarely do we pause to consider what resources such women already have, the support they give, or what those experiences teach us about how to support them. In this study, my purpose was to reflect on the phenomenon of giving as experienced by women who have few material resources and (...) whose lives have been disrupted by repeat incarcerations. I analyzed four lived experience descriptions of giving from interviews conducted in 2016–2017 with 10 women who had significant histories of criminal‐legal system involvement, unstable housing, and little or no income. Using concepts from hermeneutic phenomenology and the practice of phenomenological study described by Max Van Manen, I analyzed giving wholistically, selectively, and in detail. I discerned that the women's experience of giving was relationally structured as exchange, with both past and future aspects. In selective and detailed analysis, themes of “taking in” and “being there” and a gem or essential feature of automaticity/personhood presented themselves. Women found meaning, value, and a sense of belonging in giving to others even when they struggled to meet their own needs. The findings suggest potential directions for nursing practice, research, and advocacy, including work to recognize, build on, and remunerate women's affiliative care‐giving and support—while also putting pressure on community health and social services delivery systems to better serve those in need. (shrink)

The question of the foreigner, especially as elaborated by Jacques Derrida in the first of his two essays Of Hospitality, is at the heart of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, a play in which the fifty daughters of the Egyptian king Danaus appeal to the Argive king Pelasgus for asylum. Indeed, Aeschylus structures much of the initial encounter between the Danaids and Pelasgus in the interrogatory mode: as an exchange of questions to the foreigner, of the foreigner. Beginning with queries about identity, the (...) play moves quickly to pose questions about authority, ultimately running aground upon Pelasgus’ inability to decide what to do about these Egyptian-Argive women whose demands for hospitality threaten his control over the city. Where previous scholarship on the play has focused on its representation of foreignness or its introduction of democratic rule, a close reading in light of Derrida’s work on hospitality elaborates the important relationship between hospitality and democratic sovereignty that the play develops. For the real question of the foreigner asks how the people can wield power in a city; in response, the play imagines the origins of democracy as an act of civic hospitality or metoikia. (shrink)

In Verfassungslehre, Carl Schmitt spells out the radical implications of his own analysis in Der Begriff des Politischen of the concept of the political. He argues in this respect that the political component of modern constitutions, which is suppressed by liberal thinking through its privilege of the rule of law, is the most important component of these constitutions. The political component refers essentially to the form of the political unity of a people. In showing the priority of the political component, (...) Schmitt inter alia insists on drawing a distinction between the constitution and constitutional laws, the resurrection of the concept of sovereignty, understanding equality as first of all and necessarily implying an inequality in respect of those who are excluded from the political unity, and on the subjection of freedom to the political component of the constitution. What would the implications be for constitutional theory if one were to take seriously Derrida’s deconstruction of Schmitt’s concept of the political in Politiques de l’amitié? This essay takes the first tentative steps in this direction, by exploring in detail Derrida’s analysis as well as the new structure of the political that comes to the fore in this text. (shrink)

Kant’s 1795 essay on perpetual peace has been lauded as one of his most important and influential political texts as well as one of the most important texts on peace. Kant’s text was largely forgotten until the 1980s and 1990s, with numerous commentaries appearing around the time of its 200 years existence. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s interest in Kant’s text appears to have arisen around the same time, and his analyses of this text continued after the turn of the (...) century. The references to Kant’s essay in Derrida’s texts appear mostly in the context of a discussion of the concept of hospitality. The latter concept is understood by Derrida as including both a demand for absolute hospitality, that is, hospitality without the imposition of any limitations, as well as a demand, in the interests of survival, for such limitations or conditions. A negotiation between these dimensions of hospitality is ultimately required. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s essay, specifically his recasting of the concept of peace as absolute hospitality, as well as to briefly outline its implications for international and cosmopolitan law. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 125-133, December 2013.

In this paper, I examine the friction between xenophobic discourses on migration and the crisis caused by the politics of austerity in Greece. On the one hand, an ‘excessive’ influx of migration is managed through violent means by the state and the para-state; on the other, a ‘scarcity’ of domestic resources is blamed for a ‘rise’ in racist attitudes, and the political ascent of a fascist movement-cum-parliamentary party, Χρυσή Αυγή (Golden Dawn). ‘Crisis’ is said to give rise to ‘austerity’—and hostility. (...) Inverting the inverted causal relationship between crisis, austerity and hostility, I problematise representations of hostility toward migrants which construct racism as a consequence of economic conditions or even as the antidote to the ‘bitter pill’ Greeks have been forced to swallow. I examine how racialised and gendered violence secures the politics of austerity in Greece. Specifically, through an examination of three eruptions of violence (the feminicidal acid attack on Konstantina Kouneva, the murder of Shehzad Luqman, and the drowning of eleven refugees near the island of Farmakonisi), I make concrete connections between the politics of austerity and what, drawing on Sara Ahmed, might be termed an ‘affective economy of hostility’ that articulates racialised and gendered modes of belonging and estrangement. Some bodies are rendered vulnerable and precarious, while others assert an entitled relation to national space while being economically disentitled by austerity measures. (shrink)

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It (...) is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer. (shrink)

In this late story, Truman Capote celebrates a peculiar form of object relations to expand definitions of sexuality beyond conventional identity categories and thus suggest a more expansive model of social inclusion and civil rights. Building on work in animal studies, queer theory, and the new materialities, I argue that the literalism of these object relations decenters the human and reimagines a wider ethics of belonging. The story describes an elderly widow who keeps all of her deceased cats in a (...) freezer because she cannot bear to be parted from them. Although the story prepares us to expect that the frozen cats could be symbols or surrogates for her dead husband, it becomes clear that she loves her cats literally as cats and nothing more. Capote pushes us to acknowledge and accept this love for her cats just as it is. And by doing so, he invites us to imagine a more hospitable world in which we accommodate other kinds of object-choice beyond the confines of heterosexual marriage, including but certainly not limited to his own homosexuality. (shrink)

This article puts Shani Mootoo’s novel, Polar Vortex (2020), in conversation with the vitalist philosophy of Rosi Braidotti, as illustrated in the study Posthuman Feminism (2022) and Libe García Zarranz “Sustainable Affects” (2017a, 2020b). I look at the centrality of affective relations in the transformation of queer subjectivity under processes of the growing (un)happiness in the diasporic homeSpace. Shani Mootoo’s (non)diasporic cross-border narrative proposes contrastive figurations of the subject through temporal and spatial frameworks. Mootoo’s “transposable moves” resist a naïve return (...) to sentimentality or nostalgic love to advocate instead a turn to sustainable affects. (shrink)

This paper revisits Giorgio Agamben’s text The Time That Remains and through a comparative analysis contrasts the author’s reading of St Paul’s Romans to relevant Derridean thematics prevalent in the text. Specific themes include language, the law, and the subject. I illustrate how Agamben attempts to revitalise the idea of philosophical anthropology by breaking away from the deconstructive approach. Agamben argues that language is an experience but is currently in a state of nihilism. Consequently, the subject has become lost; or, (...) more specifically, the subject and its object have not disappeared in language but through language. The resuscitation of experience is thus required to defeat this condition: only in language does the subject have its site and origin. Unlike deconstruction, which highlights an inherent paradox within a situation unearthing a questionable foundation, Agamben argues that, by investigating the “exception,” one finds neither a norm nor an inherent truth of the situation, but the confusion which surrounds them both. (shrink)