Abstract:How do we think aesthetically with the gendered and fleshly life of blackness, which cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime, yet is everywhere “bound to appear”? How do we begin to approach the splayed corpus of blackness without recourse to a conceptual grammar for and from which blackness is the ultimate declension? These questions compel us to rethink the relationship between blackness and the aesthetic, and to consider the metaphysical violence which is given in and through a racial regime of aesthetics that is indispensable to the reproduction of the modern world. Emphasizing the ways this aesthetic regime, and the antiblack metaphysics it endeavors to sustain, are predicated upon and imperiled by blackness, I argue that blackness is a problem of and for “the body.” This paper enters this problem through the quotidian operations of the visual and proceeds to interrogate the elliptical deconstruction of the body in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, stressing the commonalities between Nancy’s philosophical gesture and the guiding tendencies of the recent “bodily turn” within the theoretical humanities. Reading Nancy and the bodily turn through Denise Ferreira da Silva and Calvin Warren’s critiques of the modern human subject and its genesis, I argue that philosophical and aesthetic inquiries which begin with the departure from the ontology of the proper body risk reinscribing that very same figuration by eliding the ontologically negated improper body, which bears the racial and gendered violence of the former’s displacements. Turning to Hortense Spillers, I contend that to speak of the impropriety of black enfleshment is to approach the limits of phenomenology, for which, I maintain, the “black body” can only appear as a dissimulation. Taking seriously Warren’s question — “How does one think with the improper?” — I engage in a strategic corruption of Jacques Rancière’s concept of “aisthesis.” I propose a theory of black aesthesis as that which emerges in the cut between the violent dissimulation of the “black body” and a black enfleshment that has always been both more and less than the phenomenological body.
{"title":"On Black Aesthesis","authors":"Rizvana Bradley","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0033","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:How do we think aesthetically with the gendered and fleshly life of blackness, which cannot be represented within modernity’s aesthetic regime, yet is everywhere “bound to appear”? How do we begin to approach the splayed corpus of blackness without recourse to a conceptual grammar for and from which blackness is the ultimate declension? These questions compel us to rethink the relationship between blackness and the aesthetic, and to consider the metaphysical violence which is given in and through a racial regime of aesthetics that is indispensable to the reproduction of the modern world. Emphasizing the ways this aesthetic regime, and the antiblack metaphysics it endeavors to sustain, are predicated upon and imperiled by blackness, I argue that blackness is a problem of and for “the body.” This paper enters this problem through the quotidian operations of the visual and proceeds to interrogate the elliptical deconstruction of the body in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, stressing the commonalities between Nancy’s philosophical gesture and the guiding tendencies of the recent “bodily turn” within the theoretical humanities. Reading Nancy and the bodily turn through Denise Ferreira da Silva and Calvin Warren’s critiques of the modern human subject and its genesis, I argue that philosophical and aesthetic inquiries which begin with the departure from the ontology of the proper body risk reinscribing that very same figuration by eliding the ontologically negated improper body, which bears the racial and gendered violence of the former’s displacements. Turning to Hortense Spillers, I contend that to speak of the impropriety of black enfleshment is to approach the limits of phenomenology, for which, I maintain, the “black body” can only appear as a dissimulation. Taking seriously Warren’s question — “How does one think with the improper?” — I engage in a strategic corruption of Jacques Rancière’s concept of “aisthesis.” I propose a theory of black aesthesis as that which emerges in the cut between the violent dissimulation of the “black body” and a black enfleshment that has always been both more and less than the phenomenological body.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45961185","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}
Abstract:This paper offers a historico-political exegesis of V-I Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa, reading how these texts respond to a post-independence African context of political and epistemic despair. This despair reflects at once the desire for a non-Western claim to knowledge and life, for political and economic autonomy from the West, and the seeming impossibilities (confirmed by the political ordinary) of enacting these. Retracing Mudimbe’s analysis of African political thought in the wake of Négritude and his critique of representation, this essay works through Mudimbe’s intellectual historical methods to draw out a subtextual response to questions of historicity, political commitment, and the role of intellectual thought in Black resistant response. I argue that these questions are instantiated in the concept of “absolute discourse.” This concept reveals a theory of speech, inhabitation, and contingency critically aligned with postcolonial Marxist demands for authenticity, sovereignty and authority. Moreover, through this, and against any presumption of futility, I argue that Mudimbe constitutes a theory of politics—of resistance, claim, and seizure, and their limits—and contingency amidst seeming and real epistemic and material closures.
{"title":"Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency, and the African Political","authors":"Alírio Karina","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0035","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper offers a historico-political exegesis of V-I Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa and Idea of Africa, reading how these texts respond to a post-independence African context of political and epistemic despair. This despair reflects at once the desire for a non-Western claim to knowledge and life, for political and economic autonomy from the West, and the seeming impossibilities (confirmed by the political ordinary) of enacting these. Retracing Mudimbe’s analysis of African political thought in the wake of Négritude and his critique of representation, this essay works through Mudimbe’s intellectual historical methods to draw out a subtextual response to questions of historicity, political commitment, and the role of intellectual thought in Black resistant response. I argue that these questions are instantiated in the concept of “absolute discourse.” This concept reveals a theory of speech, inhabitation, and contingency critically aligned with postcolonial Marxist demands for authenticity, sovereignty and authority. Moreover, through this, and against any presumption of futility, I argue that Mudimbe constitutes a theory of politics—of resistance, claim, and seizure, and their limits—and contingency amidst seeming and real epistemic and material closures.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46171038","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}
Abstract:The article interrogates notions of resistance and will against the Black Radical Tradition vis-à-vis a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power and through Hortense Spiller’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In reading Spillers alongside Nietzsche, the essay argues that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate: that the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body is left to express its “power”—only to highlight (black) resistance as a question.
{"title":"Rethinking the Black Will: The Cosmological Body, Nihilism, and Resistance","authors":"C. Warren","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The article interrogates notions of resistance and will against the Black Radical Tradition vis-à-vis a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power and through Hortense Spiller’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In reading Spillers alongside Nietzsche, the essay argues that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate: that the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body is left to express its “power”—only to highlight (black) resistance as a question.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46473194","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}
Abstract:This paper takes Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a weak-theoretic body of work conditioned and characterized by weak affectivity: a philosophy that similarly avoids strong stances and strong feelings. This renders it vulnerable not only to attack, but to defense: attempts to defend Wittgenstein from accusations of complacency and quietism tend to resort to affectively and theoretically strong interpretations that move against the grain of his own writings. What, then, is generative or productive about weakness, if it invites attacks against which it cannot defend itself? Drawing from Sianne Ngai's studies of weak affects and aesthetics, I argue that Wittgenstein's persistent replication of weak affects is a condition of his inquiry into ordinary life and language—that ordinariness has a structural weakness, which Wittgenstein's writings invite us to practice.
{"title":"Weak Affects in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy","authors":"Vidya Venkatesh","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0029","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper takes Wittgenstein's later philosophy as a weak-theoretic body of work conditioned and characterized by weak affectivity: a philosophy that similarly avoids strong stances and strong feelings. This renders it vulnerable not only to attack, but to defense: attempts to defend Wittgenstein from accusations of complacency and quietism tend to resort to affectively and theoretically strong interpretations that move against the grain of his own writings. What, then, is generative or productive about weakness, if it invites attacks against which it cannot defend itself? Drawing from Sianne Ngai's studies of weak affects and aesthetics, I argue that Wittgenstein's persistent replication of weak affects is a condition of his inquiry into ordinary life and language—that ordinariness has a structural weakness, which Wittgenstein's writings invite us to practice.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45197700","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}
Abstract:In this article I stage an encounter between Adriana Cavarero's account of uniqueness and Hortense Spillers's account of the flesh. Doing so is valuable for two reasons: First, it forces Cavarero's thought to consider not only the exclusion of women from the Western tradition, but also the anti-Blackness foundational to this tradition. This both expands and contorts Cavarero's thought, affirming her key claims while also altering them in the process. Second, reading Cavarero and Spillers together allows me to explore the way forms of life that evade representation can be known. Both uniqueness and the flesh are evasive of representation; by reading them together—supplementing Cavarero's consideration of the embodied character of uniqueness with Spillers's distinction between body and flesh—I develop an account of apprehension that emphasizes touch as a way of knowing apart from representation. Apprehension takes seriously the ambivalence in Spillers's account of the flesh, whereby it is both revealed through violence as well as through practices of care, which, as Saidiya Hartman has made clear, are often in a proximate relation in the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery.
{"title":"Apprehending Care in the Flesh: Reading Cavarero with Spillers","authors":"Timothy J. Huzar","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0027","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this article I stage an encounter between Adriana Cavarero's account of uniqueness and Hortense Spillers's account of the flesh. Doing so is valuable for two reasons: First, it forces Cavarero's thought to consider not only the exclusion of women from the Western tradition, but also the anti-Blackness foundational to this tradition. This both expands and contorts Cavarero's thought, affirming her key claims while also altering them in the process. Second, reading Cavarero and Spillers together allows me to explore the way forms of life that evade representation can be known. Both uniqueness and the flesh are evasive of representation; by reading them together—supplementing Cavarero's consideration of the embodied character of uniqueness with Spillers's distinction between body and flesh—I develop an account of apprehension that emphasizes touch as a way of knowing apart from representation. Apprehension takes seriously the ambivalence in Spillers's account of the flesh, whereby it is both revealed through violence as well as through practices of care, which, as Saidiya Hartman has made clear, are often in a proximate relation in the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44223394","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}
Abstract:Giorgio Agamben has recently expanded upon the positive and immanent potential of his archaeology of biopolitics from the perspective of inoperativity rather than work as the fundamental ontologico-political problem today. In doing so, he teases out an inoperative praxis and poetics that consists in deactivating human institutions, functions, and operations based on the metaphysical paradigm of sovereignty, all the while opening them to new possible uses. Though Agamben insists on the uncharted trajectory of his research, I argue that it closely resembles other approaches to inoperativity (or désœuvrement) undertaken by a loose filiation of French-language writers from which he departs, notably including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Achille Mbembe. Whereas Agamben's theory of inoperativity emphasizes a certain mode of destituent potential and use in view of the coming politics, these writers affirm the excess of finitude as a resource for refusal that animates literary and artistic creation at a distance from politics. Nevertheless, I contend that the effort of reading together the divergent formulations of inoperativity from Bataille to Agamben maps a more capacious theoretical and methodological framework for situating the dual tasks of abolishing sovereignty and improvising nonsovereign ways of doing and being in common. Their elucidations of the ethical and literary-aesthetic spheres of inoperativity in particular affirm the demands of freedom, resistance, and justice heard in nonsovereign forms of common life and shared finite existence.
{"title":"Nonsovereign: Inoperativity from Bataille to Agamben","authors":"Michael Krimper","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0026","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Giorgio Agamben has recently expanded upon the positive and immanent potential of his archaeology of biopolitics from the perspective of inoperativity rather than work as the fundamental ontologico-political problem today. In doing so, he teases out an inoperative praxis and poetics that consists in deactivating human institutions, functions, and operations based on the metaphysical paradigm of sovereignty, all the while opening them to new possible uses. Though Agamben insists on the uncharted trajectory of his research, I argue that it closely resembles other approaches to inoperativity (or désœuvrement) undertaken by a loose filiation of French-language writers from which he departs, notably including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Achille Mbembe. Whereas Agamben's theory of inoperativity emphasizes a certain mode of destituent potential and use in view of the coming politics, these writers affirm the excess of finitude as a resource for refusal that animates literary and artistic creation at a distance from politics. Nevertheless, I contend that the effort of reading together the divergent formulations of inoperativity from Bataille to Agamben maps a more capacious theoretical and methodological framework for situating the dual tasks of abolishing sovereignty and improvising nonsovereign ways of doing and being in common. Their elucidations of the ethical and literary-aesthetic spheres of inoperativity in particular affirm the demands of freedom, resistance, and justice heard in nonsovereign forms of common life and shared finite existence.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43371346","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}
Abstract:This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread of the virus, these curfew events gave new aesthetic and political meaning to a familiar visual genre: photographs of empty streets. For more than a century, and especially in the summer of 2020, images of crowds and mass protests have provided both governments on the one hand, and protesting multitudes on the other with an aesthetic representation of the people. But this interest in collective assemblies has tended to engage only one side of the equation. To fully appreciate the visual power of the people, it is also necessary to understand those images from which people are strikingly absent.
{"title":"Empty Streets","authors":"K. O’Neill, James Rodríguez","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This visual essay invites renewed reflection on the iconography of the people. In the spring of 2020, Guatemala's President Alejandro Giammattei prohibited citizens from leaving their homes to help contain the spread of the novel coronavirus known as Covid-19. Doing little to manage the spread of the virus, these curfew events gave new aesthetic and political meaning to a familiar visual genre: photographs of empty streets. For more than a century, and especially in the summer of 2020, images of crowds and mass protests have provided both governments on the one hand, and protesting multitudes on the other with an aesthetic representation of the people. But this interest in collective assemblies has tended to engage only one side of the equation. To fully appreciate the visual power of the people, it is also necessary to understand those images from which people are strikingly absent.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49020902","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}
Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity.
{"title":"Foreclosures of Finitude: On Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology","authors":"J. Godley","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0030","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to \"eternalize\" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-09-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46981146","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}
Abstract:This essay examines the undertheorization of Afro-Latin American women and the underrepresentation of Afro-Latin American women as thinkers within the field of Latin American cultural theory. In particular, it elucidates how the bodily dismemberment, silence, and absorption of Afro-Latin American women is necessary for the constitution of mestizaje as a still-prevailing foundational cultural theory of Latin America. The essay unfolds via a critical reading of the decapitation of an Afro-descendant woman in Puerto Rican-Dominican writer Pedro Cabiya’s science-fiction tale La cabeza. It reads the dismemberment and transplantation of the Black woman’s remaining body in Cabiya’s text as an exemplary allegory of mestizaje, and links the emancipatory gesture of mestizaje to the condition of possibility of other forms of freedom that, ultimately, require the coercion, violation, and erasure of Afro-Latin American women. It asks how we might make space for the constitution of Black feminist studies in Latin America by remaining attentive to the severed presence of Afro-Latin American women.
{"title":"The Head That Remains","authors":"Natalie L. Belisle","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the undertheorization of Afro-Latin American women and the underrepresentation of Afro-Latin American women as thinkers within the field of Latin American cultural theory. In particular, it elucidates how the bodily dismemberment, silence, and absorption of Afro-Latin American women is necessary for the constitution of mestizaje as a still-prevailing foundational cultural theory of Latin America. The essay unfolds via a critical reading of the decapitation of an Afro-descendant woman in Puerto Rican-Dominican writer Pedro Cabiya’s science-fiction tale La cabeza. It reads the dismemberment and transplantation of the Black woman’s remaining body in Cabiya’s text as an exemplary allegory of mestizaje, and links the emancipatory gesture of mestizaje to the condition of possibility of other forms of freedom that, ultimately, require the coercion, violation, and erasure of Afro-Latin American women. It asks how we might make space for the constitution of Black feminist studies in Latin America by remaining attentive to the severed presence of Afro-Latin American women.","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43224958","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}
Abstract:Abstraction, objectivity, impersonality, and universality are all faculties of theory which have frequently roused theory’s ire. Although this ire characterizes such diverse tendencies as queer anti-nomianism, postcolonialism, rote deconstruction, and vitalist materialism, it gestates most abidingly in feminism. Thus feminist theorists have often understood their work as the rejection of generalization, conceptuality, phallogocentrism, and even argument, promoting instead a standpoint epistemology and écriture feminine which sacralizes particularization, hybridization, concretization, testimony, and genre-blending. Taking stock of these tendencies and trends, this essay asks whether the theoretical project of feminism, including its practical license, is well served by the perpetual eschewal of theory’s abstractions, and it answers “no.”
{"title":"In Defense of Feminist Abstraction","authors":"Anna Kornbluh","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Abstraction, objectivity, impersonality, and universality are all faculties of theory which have frequently roused theory’s ire. Although this ire characterizes such diverse tendencies as queer anti-nomianism, postcolonialism, rote deconstruction, and vitalist materialism, it gestates most abidingly in feminism. Thus feminist theorists have often understood their work as the rejection of generalization, conceptuality, phallogocentrism, and even argument, promoting instead a standpoint epistemology and écriture feminine which sacralizes particularization, hybridization, concretization, testimony, and genre-blending. Taking stock of these tendencies and trends, this essay asks whether the theoretical project of feminism, including its practical license, is well served by the perpetual eschewal of theory’s abstractions, and it answers “no.”","PeriodicalId":46840,"journal":{"name":"DIACRITICS-A REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47041527","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}
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