If good ethics is the process of ongoing dialogical deliberation on basic normative questions for the purpose of instituting principles for action, then the COVID crisis, or any crisis, is not a good time for developing ethical precepts on the run. Given dominant ethical trends, such reactive ethics tends to lead to either individualized struggles over the right way to act or hasty sets of guidelines that leave out contextualizing questions concerning regimes of care. Good people will find themselves suggesting (...) strange things, from setting up lifeboat scenarios to supporting structural racism. This essay argues against both these paths—crisis-ridden agonism or algorithmic resource-allocation—and turns instead to a form of ethics of care which takes its departure from older forms of ethics, while recognizing that modern and postmodern challenges no longer allow their grounding in animated relations, natural rights, or cosmological truths. (shrink)

Reconciliation and the Technics of Healing Content Type Journal Article Pages 235-237 DOI 10.1007/s11673-011-9318-y Authors Paul A. Komesaroff, Monash Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society, Monash University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Elizabeth Kath, Global Cities Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Paul James, Global Cities Institute, RMIT University, Melbourne, Vic., Australia Journal Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Online ISSN 1872-4353 Print ISSN 1176-7529 Journal Volume Volume 8 Journal Issue Volume 8, Number 3.

While popular debate grapples with the legality of gay marriage, networks of medical, political, and juridical discourses produce and situate sexuality in a field of knowledge that is constantly under examination and administration. The rationalization of sexuality, and its dispersion into multiple fields of knowledge, has become part of a system of power relations that produces identities and manages them. Within this context, this paper places Horkheimer and Adorno's excursus on Sade's Juliette in conversation with Foucault's first volume of the (...) History of Sexuality. It explores how instrumental reason and power/knowledge relationships produce discourses of sexuality, which have come to dominate Western society. It also explores possible sites of resistance, through the notion of performativity, that exist within these modes of rationalization and power. I argue that this interlocution of Horkheimer and Adorno with Foucault helps us see sexuality as a site of both domination and resistance. It also shows how sexuality is produced in a field of contestation where possibilities of practices of freedom are always circumscribed by modes of rationalization and networks of power. (shrink)

Alpine climbing in the US has increased in popularity since the 1970s and despite the high objective risk involved it has continued to find new devotees. For professionals involved in this sport, the risks are encountered through near‐death experiences and the real deaths of close friends. This essay uses interviews with climbers in the state of Washington, discussing their experiences with death, and uses written accounts. First, I discuss the many risks involved in climbing and how these risks are perceived (...) and accepted by climbers. Next, 1 look at the immediate reaction to alpine deaths, and finally, to the long term effects on the lives and climbing practices of this group. Despite repeated confrontations with death, all informants continue exposing themselves to these risks. Every year more and more acquaintances die while the ideas and values that these climbers hold allow them to resist the fear of their own death and continue to climb. Keywords: death, risk‐taking, sports. (shrink)

What is the relationship between right-wing populism and contemporary fascism? How has fascism changed since the 1920s? And how do the answers to these questions concern a global shift that can be called the Great Unsettling—including a postmodern fracturing of prior modern ‘certainties’ about the nature of subjectivity, political practice and meaning, deconstructing the consequences of ‘truth’? This essay seeks to respond to these questions by first going back to foundational issues of defnition and elaborating the meaning of populism and (...) fascism in relation to their structural ‘moving parts’. Using this alternative scaffolding, the essay argues that right-wing populism and an orientation to postmodern fascism represented by Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have converged. The context of this convergence is a globalizing shift that now challenges democratic politics. (shrink)

Apart from a few notable exceptions, the current retreat from Grand Theory has been accompanied by a reluctance to think about how we might theorize different forms of social formation. The present study began as an attempt to understand one such community form, the nation. However, in delineating an analytical method that allowed the theoretical space for exploring the ontological contradictions endemic to living as part of a national community, it became necessary to work comparatively across history and across different (...) social forms. In doing so, the article argues for a method that conceives of the various kinds of human community as formed in the changing and contradictory intersections of (diacritically distinguishable) levels of integration—from the most embodied ties of face-to-face reciprocity to the most abstract relations of strangers-in-association such as exemplified in the electronic communications of "information capitalism.". (shrink)

Globalization is now at its most disjunctive phase in human history. The planetary COVID-19 crisis has combined with the vulnerabilities of global capitalism to break down social routines. Yet, the current moment of the Great Unsettling also offers a critical opportunity to take stock of the present state of globalization. To this end, this article revisits and re-engages some pertinent themes raised in the pathbreaking 1990 TCS Global Culture issue. In particular, the article explores the crucial role of structural divergences (...) that have been developing among major formations of globalization. Gaining a better understanding of the current globalization system requires a new conceptual framework that captures different formations of globalization, ranging from the embodied to the disembodied. The multiple disjunctive relationships that have developed among and within these formations shape not only the morphology of the contemporary globalization system but also cast a long shadow on its future dynamics. (shrink)

Arguing that today’s burgeoning globalization literature still neglects the investigation of powerful subjective dynamics of growing social interconnectivity, this article explores how various ideological articulations of globalization have shaped its material designs and in­stantiations. The thickening of global consciousness can be conceptualized along the three interrelated dimensions or layers of ideology, imaginary, and ontology. Each of these three layers of subjective globalization is constituted in practice at an ever-greater generality, durability, and depth. Normative contestations continue, but they tend to have (...) a common global point of reference—albeit not to the exclusion of the national. (shrink)