This essay reports on phenomenological research conducted with people who describe having been harassed, having been accused of harassment, and/or having mediated or adjudicated harassment disputes. The authors review recent legal conceptions of sexual harassment and articulate a methodology for analyzing individual narrative accounts. The analysis of six selected interviews (three alleged harassers and three declared harassees) depicts how, through discourse with others, persons in ambiguous cases of harassment come to perceive themselves as harassers or harasseesgradually, how intention is inferred (...) from conductcontingently, and how perceptions and expressions are often reified as certainties in the effort to secure some sense of justiceinstitutionally. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan concern for the whole world is often treated as oppositional to particular collectivities, to corresponding sensibilities and to the obligations that follow from them. Tensions revolve around demands made upon the self (depending on the emphasis on the local or the global) and infuse educational discourse accordingly. Culturalism approaches the self as a culturally or multiculturally shaped identity, monopolises the terrain of cosmopolitan debate and narrows the scope of cosmopolitan education only to encouraging hybridity of selfhood and to cultivating (...) respect and tolerance of global diversity. In this article, I discuss Jeremy Waldron’s conception of cosmopolitan selfhood by drawing on the exemplary status attributed to specific manifestations of hybrid identity. What will gradually emerge from my discussion is, hopefully, a broadening of cosmopolitan demands upon the self and an emphasis on the transforming and reforming rather than the forming or informing significance of cosmopolitan education. This trans/re-forming significance is attached to a critical positioning of the subject regarding the ethico-political responsibilities of one’s home (-land, culture, commitments) that often go unnoticed. Doing one’s homework is shown to be a precondition for a cosmopolitanism understood within the order of treatment of, rather than agreement with, the Other. (shrink)

Emancipation is a legitimate human interest. It may be said that Foucault in his last works is concerned with putting forward a strategy for emancipation. The strategy consists in an aesthetic construction of the self. It is argued that this strategy ultimately fails and that, instead of retreating to the self, we need to return to the community level and to examine the rules of discourse that operate there. Contrary to Foucault's strategy, Habermas argues that what we need is a (...) communicative rationality capable of correcting discursive distortions. Coming from a different angle, Lyotard argues that what we need at the community level is a set of rules that prevent any one discourse totalizing all others. Such rules would ensure just gaming. Together, Lyotard and Habermas offer us an ethics that has the potential to serve the human interest in emancipation. (shrink)

This essay looks at the relationship between formative aesthetics, language and the historical anticipation that begins with Antonio Gramsci's discussion of Kant's idea of noumenon. In Gramsci both education (as formazione) and aesthetics stem from a concern for power in terms of the hegemonic relations that are inherent to history as a political horizon. The title cites Gramci's suggestion that Kant's noumenon should be read as a proviso set apart by a ‘relative ignorance’ of reality [‘relativa ignoranza’ della realtà] to (...) be resolved by a future science. Yet far from another epistemological layering, a future science must also resolve those hegemonic relations of power that emerge from formation as a political act figured in the agonistic character of language as lingua and linguaggio. Further down the lane of our ‘relative ignorance’ we are confronted by a Post-Taylorist condition that precludes any false hopes of a reversal of society's educational, economic and political misfortunes. Yet, while Post-Taylorism confirms that this state of affairs is irreversible, a deeper inquiry into the aesthetic-agonistic character of formation could afford us answers that are in no way solutions but, because adept to struggle and are characteristically aesthetical, might provide an understanding of the logic of irreversibility. Because it remains conscious of its ‘relative ignorance’, this assumption offers a hopeful approach that comes to us sideways; thereby avoiding the predicament of what Lyotard and Thébaud regarded as a condition where ‘the prescriptive is derived from the descriptive’. (shrink)

: Grebowicz argues from the perspective of Jean-François Lyotard's critique of deliberative democracy that the project of democratizing knowledge may bring us closer to terror than to justice. The successful formulation of a critical standpoint requires that we figure the political as itself a contested site, and incorporate this into our theorizing about the role of dissent in the production of knowledges. This essay contrasts Lyotard's notion of the differend with Chantal Mouffe's agonistic model.

Two studies of women in philosophy, Michéle Le Doeuff's biography of Simone de Beauvoir Hipparchia's Choice (1991) and Fritz Mauthner's historical novel Hypatia (1892), question what kind of power and authority are available to philosophers. Mauthner's philosophy of language expands on Le Doeuff to outline how philosophy acts parallel to other sociohistorical discourses, relying on public consensus and on the negotiation of stereotypes to create a viable speaking subject for the female philosopher.