Today’s debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of ‘hearing’ as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant’s position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures.
今天,美国和英国关于学术自由的争论常常与伊曼纽尔-康德和审查康德的君主们的论点和反驳相呼应,当时,现代洪堡大学将建立在批判和机构自治的双重原则之上。最近的立法发展和政治干预危及了这些基础,本文通过解读雅克-德里达(Jacques Derrida)对康德的《院系冲突》(Conflict of the Faculties)的解构参与,探讨了批判论的局限性。为此,该书转向耳朵,转向 "听觉 "的多种感官--听觉感知、反应力和判断力,以探索捍卫学术自由的另一种基础,这种基础激进了康德的立场,并将学术探索从其封闭中解放出来。
{"title":"Who Gets a Hearing? Academic Freedom and Critique in Derrida’s Reading of Kant","authors":"Naomi Waltham-Smith","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0440","url":null,"abstract":"Today’s debates about academic freedom in the US and the UK often echo arguments and counterarguments made by Immanuel Kant and the sovereign who censored him around the time when the modern Humboldtian university would be founded on the twin principles of critique and institutional autonomy. This article considers the limits of the criticist account by reading Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with Kant’s Conflict of the Faculties in the context of recent legislative developments and political interference which imperil these foundations. To do so, it makes a turn to the ear and to the multiple senses of ‘hearing’ as auditory perception, responsiveness and judgement to explore an alternative basis for defending academic freedom that radicalizes Kant’s position and liberates scholarly inquiry from its closures.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139292583","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a transcript of a dialogue between Lisa Downing and Maggie Nelson about Nelson’s recent book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021). The interlocutors discuss the rise of cultural authoritarianism, the role of care in shaping and delimiting freedom, the ways in which freedom and care signify differently according to the sex of the ‘free’ subject, and the vexed question of what freedom will mean in an uncertain future foreshadowed by the spectre of climate change — and potential apocalypse.
{"title":"On Freedom: The Dialogue","authors":"Lisa Downing, Maggie Nelson","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0443","url":null,"abstract":"This is a transcript of a dialogue between Lisa Downing and Maggie Nelson about Nelson’s recent book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (2021). The interlocutors discuss the rise of cultural authoritarianism, the role of care in shaping and delimiting freedom, the ways in which freedom and care signify differently according to the sex of the ‘free’ subject, and the vexed question of what freedom will mean in an uncertain future foreshadowed by the spectre of climate change — and potential apocalypse.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"69 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139291358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech that is both embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour.
{"title":"Self-Critical Freedoms: White Women, Intersectionality and Excitable Speech (Judith Butler, 1997)","authors":"Lara Cox","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0441","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0441","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how those subordinated for their gender and sexual orientation, but privileged for their race and class, may be better allies to people, especially women, of colour. Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) is a helpful aid. Butler offers us a strategy to think through — albeit by way of supplementary voices such as legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and philosopher George Yancy — how white women may find an ‘insurrectionary’ form of speech that is both embodied and attentive to how we stand in the pecking order of public sphere expression and exchange. The article considers how white women’s ‘critical freedoms’ have helped shape the discursive preclusions faced by Black women. It analyses the conditions by which white women may assert their freedom of speech without this being to the detriment of women of colour.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139304050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault's later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article firstly demonstrates some surprisingly similar arguments made in the oeuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how cultivation of the self/holding the self as one’s highest value (in Foucault's and Rand's respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. Secondly, the article examines the ways in which both ‘author functions’ (in Foucault's sense) have recently been deployed in political discourse to stand in for caricatured versions of the freedoms of right-wing greed and left-wing moral relativism. Foucault is doubly problematized, moreover, since, as well as being used as a metonym for the perceived dangers of identity politics by the right, his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism proves a problem to many scholars who wish to fit him squarely into a left-wing continental canon.
{"title":"Author Functions and Freedom: ‘Michel Foucault’ and ‘Ayn Rand’ in the Anglophone ‘Culture Wars’","authors":"Lisa Downing","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0439","url":null,"abstract":"Freedom was a core theme of Michel Foucault's later writings, as well the central tenet of the work of pro-capitalist writer Ayn Rand. This article firstly demonstrates some surprisingly similar arguments made in the oeuvres of these unlikely bedfellows regarding how cultivation of the self/holding the self as one’s highest value (in Foucault's and Rand's respective lexicons) can lead to an ethic of freedom. Secondly, the article examines the ways in which both ‘author functions’ (in Foucault's sense) have recently been deployed in political discourse to stand in for caricatured versions of the freedoms of right-wing greed and left-wing moral relativism. Foucault is doubly problematized, moreover, since, as well as being used as a metonym for the perceived dangers of identity politics by the right, his ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism proves a problem to many scholars who wish to fit him squarely into a left-wing continental canon.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139295514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into the present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity.
{"title":"‘Freeze Peach’: A Fruitful Formulation or a Recipe for Heated Discord? Followed by A Response to Keith Reader's ‘Freeze Peach’","authors":"Keith Reader, Ian James","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0438","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0438","url":null,"abstract":"Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive insight into the present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"2010 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139301127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.
在全球北方的许多环境中,变性和性别多元化自我认同的支持者与自称为 "性别批判 "的女权主义者之间的女权论述正在发生冲突,后者认为这有损于女权目标。我们认为,当代女权主义话语被引入防御性和对立性的渠道,这使得围绕性/性别自由的、更加细致入微的、面向未来的乌托邦式思考失去了空间,限制了行动者联盟的发展前景,这些行动者关注的不是差异,而是共性。通过与西蒙娜-德-波伏娃(Simone de Beauvoir)、舒拉米丝-费尔斯通(Shulamith Firestone)和卢斯-伊里格拉伊(Luce Irigaray)的经典女权主义作品进行对话,我们考虑了另一种以潜在性本体论为前提的自由方式,这种自由方式与接受二元性别等级制度的物质性相结合,但仍然是乌托邦式的、开放式的,显示出超越这些障碍并有可能克服这些分歧的能力。
{"title":"Gender, Sex and Freedom: Testing the Theoretical Limits of the Twenty-First-Century ‘Gender Wars’ with Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray","authors":"Lucy Nicholas, Sal Clark","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0442","url":null,"abstract":"Many Global North contexts are experiencing conflict in feminist discourses between supporters of trans and gender diverse self-identification and self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ feminists who consider this to undermine feminist goals. We argue that the channelling of contemporary feminist discourse into defensive and oppositional channels has foreclosed the space for more nuanced and future-oriented, utopian thought around freedom from sex/gender, limiting the prospect of developing a coalition of actors focused not on difference, but rather on commonality. Putting classic feminist works by Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone and Luce Irigaray into dialogue, we consider an alternative approach to freedom premised on an ontology of potentiality combined with acceptance of the materiality of the binary gender hierarchy, that nonetheless remains utopian and open-ended, demonstrating the capacity to transcend these impasses and potentially overcome these divides.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"102 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139302443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers the recent publications of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and offers an overview of contemporary scholarship in Beauvoir Studies. Beauvoir’s canonization in Gallimard’s La Pléiade collection in 2018 is discussed, specifically Gallimard’s choice of Beauvoir’s Mémoires for these first two volumes. Exploring the imbrication of Beauvoir’s philosophy with her own lived experience, the article traces what Annie Ernaux describes as the ‘running threads’ connecting us, namely the ways in which Beauvoir’s legacy is interwoven in our lives today. Surveying recent scholarship highlights the pertinence of Beauvoir’s work to contemporary contexts on issues ranging from sexual violence, subjective agency and female subjugation to emancipatory politics and transnational feminist solidarities. Thereafter, the importance Beauvoir placed on self–Other relations is explored in relation to scholarship on Beauvoir’s epistolary exchanges, the publication of her lost novella Les Inséparables, and on Beauvoir’s philosophy of alterity and old age in light of the pandemic.
{"title":"Simone de Beauvoir the Memorialist: The Running Threads Connecting Us","authors":"P. Henry-Tierney","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0433","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the recent publications of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, and offers an overview of contemporary scholarship in Beauvoir Studies. Beauvoir’s canonization in Gallimard’s La Pléiade collection in 2018 is discussed, specifically Gallimard’s choice of Beauvoir’s Mémoires for these first two volumes. Exploring the imbrication of Beauvoir’s philosophy with her own lived experience, the article traces what Annie Ernaux describes as the ‘running threads’ connecting us, namely the ways in which Beauvoir’s legacy is interwoven in our lives today. Surveying recent scholarship highlights the pertinence of Beauvoir’s work to contemporary contexts on issues ranging from sexual violence, subjective agency and female subjugation to emancipatory politics and transnational feminist solidarities. Thereafter, the importance Beauvoir placed on self–Other relations is explored in relation to scholarship on Beauvoir’s epistolary exchanges, the publication of her lost novella Les Inséparables, and on Beauvoir’s philosophy of alterity and old age in light of the pandemic.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42040974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0434","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0434","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135264776","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion of the Swedish pop group ABBA, via Vilém Flusser’s concept of the digital apparition. It first argues for these virtual performers (dubbed ‘ABBA-tars’) to be understood as externalized computational codes which shift the grounds of ownership over and consent to the use of one’s likeness. They are also key to disproportionate and as yet unaccountable power held by technology companies. Secondly, ABBA Voyage’s presentation of ABBA as their past selves places time in a capitalism of immateriality profiting from the protean temporality of bodies. This temporal discombobulation thwarts finitude and confounds time in meanings of life, death and growth. The article thus addresses urgent confrontations between actual and virtual humans placed in the same physical environment, and paves the way for thinking about how we are going to deal and live with their virtuality.
{"title":"Spooker Trouper: ABBA Voyage, Virtual Humans and the Rise of the Digital Apparition","authors":"J. Ng, Nick Bax","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0427","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0427","url":null,"abstract":"This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion of the Swedish pop group ABBA, via Vilém Flusser’s concept of the digital apparition. It first argues for these virtual performers (dubbed ‘ABBA-tars’) to be understood as externalized computational codes which shift the grounds of ownership over and consent to the use of one’s likeness. They are also key to disproportionate and as yet unaccountable power held by technology companies. Secondly, ABBA Voyage’s presentation of ABBA as their past selves places time in a capitalism of immateriality profiting from the protean temporality of bodies. This temporal discombobulation thwarts finitude and confounds time in meanings of life, death and growth. The article thus addresses urgent confrontations between actual and virtual humans placed in the same physical environment, and paves the way for thinking about how we are going to deal and live with their virtuality.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43726849","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sigmund Freud’s biologism has historically come with a negative valence, seeming to consign us to passive determination by irrational drives. While the nonhuman turn has recently highlighted the underacknowledged creativity of animal life, this re-evaluation of biology has hardly implicated Freud. I contend that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals a nascent ‘other Freud’ able to inform the nonhuman turn, one that sees the human animal as the basis of the free and relational psychoanalytic subject. I follow Merleau-Ponty in reading Freud as engaged with the question of how a shared, intersubjective world is possible. Both thinkers realized that it is in the domain of life, not cognition, that we verify this seemingly human relational potential. Elaborating the Merleau-Pontian Freud, I argue for a psychoanalytic subject that necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality. Ecological thinking is not an obstacle to the relationality prized by psychoanalysis, but a necessity.
{"title":"Doing a Psychoanalysis of Nature: Freud and Merleau-Ponty after the Nonhuman Turn","authors":"McNeil Taylor","doi":"10.3366/para.2023.0431","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2023.0431","url":null,"abstract":"Sigmund Freud’s biologism has historically come with a negative valence, seeming to consign us to passive determination by irrational drives. While the nonhuman turn has recently highlighted the underacknowledged creativity of animal life, this re-evaluation of biology has hardly implicated Freud. I contend that Maurice Merleau-Ponty reveals a nascent ‘other Freud’ able to inform the nonhuman turn, one that sees the human animal as the basis of the free and relational psychoanalytic subject. I follow Merleau-Ponty in reading Freud as engaged with the question of how a shared, intersubjective world is possible. Both thinkers realized that it is in the domain of life, not cognition, that we verify this seemingly human relational potential. Elaborating the Merleau-Pontian Freud, I argue for a psychoanalytic subject that necessitates nonhuman life as its ecstatic unmooring towards the Other and reality. Ecological thinking is not an obstacle to the relationality prized by psychoanalysis, but a necessity.","PeriodicalId":44142,"journal":{"name":"PARAGRAPH","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42420004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}