Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

“Humanism” is a term that has designated a remarkably disparate set of ideologies. Nonetheless, strains of religious, secular, existential, and Marxist humanism have tended to circumscribe the category of the human with reference to the themes of reason, autonomy, judgment, and freedom. This essay examines the emergence of a new humanistic discourse in feminist theory, one that instead finds its provocation in the unwilled passivity and vulnerability of the human body, and in the vulnerability of the human body to suffering (...) and violence. Grounded in a descriptive ontology that privileges figures such as exposure, dispossession, vulnerability, and “precariousness,” this new humanism is a corporeal humanism. This essay probes both the promise and the limitations of this emergent humanism with particular reference to recent work by feminist philosophers Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero. (shrink)

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render “the familiar” a site of oppression for many. In Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race (...) theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. This volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Violence Is Not an Evil”Ambiguity and Violence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Early Philosophical WritingsAnn V. MurphyThe recent translation and compilation of several of Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical essays from the 1940s shed new light on Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between ethics and violence. While these essays predate the publication of The Second Sex (1949) and do not concern themselves with the subject of feminism per se, Beauvoir’s philosophy (...) of violence as it is outlined in both “Pyrrhus and Cineas” (1944) and “An Eye for an Eye” (1948) speaks to one of the more thoroughgoing concerns in contemporary feminist philosophy; namely, the nature of the relation between corporeal vulnerability, violence, and ethics. Together with The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), these early essays probe the difficulties in moving from an ontology in which violence appears to be inexorable to the terrain of ethical prescription. This essay urges recognition of the continuing relevance of Beauvoir’s philosophy in relation to the renaissance of interest in the theme of vulnerability in contemporary feminist theory. I argue that Beauvoir’s philosophy provides one of the most sophisticated accounts to date of the ethical problems posed by the experiential ambiguities of violence, and that her legacy in this regard is as important and redemptive as ever. More precisely, I read Beauvoir’s early conception of ambiguity as the philosophical predecessor to contemporary deconstructive accounts of corporeal vulnerability.Discourse on the body has governed the evolution of feminist philosophy. Recently, however, the nature of the body under investigation has changed. Whereas previously the critique of the nature/culture distinction dominated [End Page 29] feminist debates regarding the social construction of sex and gender, recent feminist work has consolidated around another conceptual pairing; namely, vulnerability and aggression. In reference to Beauvoir’s philosophical corpus, this recent development is interesting. Her magnum opus, The Second Sex, has attracted more attention because of its centrality in the debates over the social construction of sex and gender, a debate that has dominated feminist philosophy for the last several decades. Indeed, many laud this text for being ahead of its time with regard to the acknowledgement that “one is not born a woman,” but rather becomes one. This essay argues that Beauvoir’s early texts are similarly prescient with regard to the current preoccupation with the philosophical themes of violence and vulnerability. By tracing the development of Beauvoir’s idea of ambiguity, I argue that her conception of the body as the site of both aggression and vulnerability both anticipates and continues to productively address the problem of how one moves from a descriptive ontology to the terrain of ethics. This is a movement that Beauvoir arguably theorized more rigorously than either Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jean-Paul Sartre, neither of whom published such sustained philosophical work on ethics in his lifetime.1I. Ambiguity in Beauvoir’s Early WorkIn The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir’s reflections on ethics come from a resolutely secular, existentialist perspective. Beauvoir—like her contemporaries in French existential phenomenology—understood human existence to be essentially marked by failure. Importantly, this failure is not vicious; rather, it is the consequence of the fact that human freedom can only ever be determined in scenes of constraint. Despite her resistance to the universal aspirations of Kant’s ethics, Beauvoir’s understanding of subjectivity as failure is consonant with the Kantian rendering of the ethical agent as a being for whom reason does not infallibly determine the will; indeed, an agent for whom reason is necessarily undone by certain inclinations and contingencies.2 For Kant, it made no sense to speak of the will unless one was referring to a being that had the capacity to act in accord with reason but did not infallibly manage to do so. Hence, ethics is an issue for us precisely to the degree that we are capable of failure. In this sense, ambiguity and failure mark the human condition and our distance from the divine. Only a being whose existence is marked by this inadequacy would ponder right and wrong, would debate the nature of ethical atrocity and recovery, and would anguish over the... (shrink)

It is one of Jacques Derrida’s later texts, Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy , wherein one finds his most sustained commentary on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Derrida’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in this text conceal a significant proximity between his own elaboration of sensibility and that of Merleau-Ponty. Their respective accounts of sensibility are similar in two respects. Firstly, for them both, sensibility is born of a parsing of the self in a hiatus or interval that disrupts the movement (...) of auto-affection. The self can only be known as such through this exposure to alterity. Secondly, this exposure and opening is in no way normative for either thinker, which is to say that their accounts of sensibility are similar not only in structure but also insofar as sensibility for them both is a non-normative opening to ethics; it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics, and the problem of response, but can provide little by way of a normative ethics. (shrink)

This thesis examines the relationship between ethics and politics in relation to the problem of history. More precisely, this work is concerned with the particularly phenomenological approach to this problem demonstrated in the work of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and to the important critique of phenomenological historicity that emerges in the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault claims that there is something in the phenomenological account of history---and the attendant structure of transcendental subjectivity---that is totalizing. This thesis attempts to diagnose the validity (...) of this accusation with an eye towards its ethical implications, and point to the moments where Merleau-Ponty and Sartre may evade this criticism. (shrink)

This essay tracks Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the relationship between ontology and the practice of philosophy. More specifically, it aims to situate the later Merleau-Ponty’s conviction that philosophy would be reborn in a “return” to ontology alongside recent shifts in what we understand ontology to be and in the widely variable ways in which ontology is figured over the half-century since his death. Cet essai retrace la compréhension merleau-pontienne de la relation entre l’ontologie et la pratique de la philosophie. Plus spécifiquement, (...) il vise à situer la conviction du dernier Merleau-Ponty que la philosophie pourrait renaître d’un “retour” à l’ontologie, par rapport aux récents changements dans la compréhension de celle-ci, ainsi qu’aux manières très différentes dont elle a été conçue au cours d’un demi-siècle après sa mort. Questo articolo ripercorre la concezione merleau-pontiana della relazione tra ontologia e pratica della filosofia. In particolare, l’articolo mira a contestualizzare la convinzione, che ritroviamo nell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty, che la filosofia possa rinascere attraverso un “ritorno” all’ontologia, in riferimento ad alcune recenti oscillazioni nel modo in cui quest’ultima viene intesa e ai molteplici modi in cui essa è stata concepita nel corso dei cinquant’anni successivi alla sua morte. (shrink)

Derrida's discourse on forgiveness is importantly a discourse on heritage. More precisely, he is interested in our split inheritance of this concept and what this inheritance implies. Of concern to Derrida is the link that he draws between our Abrahamic religious inheritance and the proliferation of various therapeutic discourses in the political realm. Derrida's deconstruction of forgiveness turns on his understanding of what is in fact unforgivable, of those deeds that are so horrendous that it is inconceivable or unthinkable that (...) forgiveness would be granted. By far and away the Derridean project to which the deconstruction of forgiveness is most proximate is Derrida's deconstruction of the gift. This proximity exceeds that which is gestured to by the etymological bond between the two, don and pardon, forgiveness and gift. In spite of Derrida's criticisms of phenomenology, he remains relatively attuned to the experiences that are implied by his various deconstructive projects. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Cartesian Legacies: The Sexual Body in Existential Phenomenology Sexual Being as Becoming: Merleau‐Ponty and Sexual Being Performativity as Existential Practice Queering Phenomenology from Beauvoir to Butler.

This essay explores the dynamics of shame as they relate to genocidal rape in Debra Bergoffen’s work, as well as her diagnosis of the traffic in women’s bodies that motivates genocidal rape and is responsible for its deployment as a weapon of war.

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the phenomenology of hunger in reference to work by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Considering the wealth of references to hunger in phenomenological literature, very little has been written that acknowledges the importance of hunger in French existential phenomenology in particular. With reference to work by the above authors, this essay examines how hunger alters one’s basic experience of space and time, no less one’s sense of social belonging. Phenomenology illuminates dimensions of the human (...) experience of hunger that remain veiled in other discourses, and it is vital that efforts to understand hunger engage the profound narratives of disorientation, illness and shame that come to the fore in this body of work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on the (...) couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)