Abstract:This short article considers an etymological observation that the word medium takes on two seemingly distinct, or even paradoxical, new meanings in the middle of the nineteenth century: first, in 1850, the word medium is used to discuss mass media as a form of increasingly decentralized technological syndication capable of great influence and power; second, in 1851, the word medium is used to describe a person with psychic or clairvoyant capacities—a spiritual medium. Following Jill Galvan’s argument that modern concepts of media are closely tied to gender difference, I argue that the feminine trope of the spiritual medium is siphoned off from rationalist discourses of modern mass media to mitigate its dangerous potential. The result is both a cultural and academic understanding of the object of media studies that is incompatible with a project like women in theory for both structural and epistemological reasons. An early twentieth century novel, Harriet Hume, by Rebecca West, models anti-subjective, non-representational practices of media in the form of telepathy and allows us to approach this fissure. By following the lines of intersection between mass media and spiritual media, by imagining they are more similar than different, this article opens up new lines of inquiry for understanding the real and potential contribution of women to media theory emerging in the nineteenth century, the production of women as theoretical media constructs, and speculations on the theoretical and material emplacement of women in the academic practice of media theory today.
{"title":"The Psychic Medium: A Feminism for Media Theory, in the Post?","authors":"K. Atkin","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This short article considers an etymological observation that the word medium takes on two seemingly distinct, or even paradoxical, new meanings in the middle of the nineteenth century: first, in 1850, the word medium is used to discuss mass media as a form of increasingly decentralized technological syndication capable of great influence and power; second, in 1851, the word medium is used to describe a person with psychic or clairvoyant capacities—a spiritual medium. Following Jill Galvan’s argument that modern concepts of media are closely tied to gender difference, I argue that the feminine trope of the spiritual medium is siphoned off from rationalist discourses of modern mass media to mitigate its dangerous potential. The result is both a cultural and academic understanding of the object of media studies that is incompatible with a project like women in theory for both structural and epistemological reasons. An early twentieth century novel, Harriet Hume, by Rebecca West, models anti-subjective, non-representational practices of media in the form of telepathy and allows us to approach this fissure. By following the lines of intersection between mass media and spiritual media, by imagining they are more similar than different, this article opens up new lines of inquiry for understanding the real and potential contribution of women to media theory emerging in the nineteenth century, the production of women as theoretical media constructs, and speculations on the theoretical and material emplacement of women in the academic practice of media theory today.","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":"42373996","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:Through the old Latin formula in vino veritas, I propose a deconstructive link between women, wine, and truth. Even though the phrase doesn’t involve an explicit reference to the feminine, I explore texts by Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in which women are implicitly associated with themes of inebriation. My aim is to construct a “drunken syllogism” or an onerologism, as I have named it, that operates as follows: women are like wine > truth is a woman > in vino veritas. I state that a series of destructive effects follows from this onerologism for philosophy, which allows me to sustain a stronger thesis about the exclusion of the feminine from the realm of philosophy: the fear of its own ruin.
{"title":"Women, Wine, and Truth","authors":"Valeria Campos Salvaterra","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Through the old Latin formula in vino veritas, I propose a deconstructive link between women, wine, and truth. Even though the phrase doesn’t involve an explicit reference to the feminine, I explore texts by Plato, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, in which women are implicitly associated with themes of inebriation. My aim is to construct a “drunken syllogism” or an onerologism, as I have named it, that operates as follows: women are like wine > truth is a woman > in vino veritas. I state that a series of destructive effects follows from this onerologism for philosophy, which allows me to sustain a stronger thesis about the exclusion of the feminine from the realm of philosophy: the fear of its own ruin.","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":"41574201","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 explores the categories of “women” and “theory” as apposite in light of the institutional practices specific to the neoliberal university. Sylvia Wynter’s exposition of the “silencing,” the “ontological absence” of Caliban’s “woman” clarifies the foundation and ongoing actualization of modernity/rationality that theory often represents. Considering Celenis Rodríguez Moreno and Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso’s work on Caribbean mimetic racial/gender formation, I expand on Wynter’s account of the binding of desire, rationality, and race that establishes Miranda as the only possible “genetrix” of humanity/rationality. Theory becomes more than an academic endeavor that actualizes, updates, the race/gender/class hierarchy distinctive of the modern colonial world through the dislocation that its debts to Caliban’s “woman” effect.
{"title":"Whither Theory? Debts to Caliban’s “Woman”","authors":"Rocío Zambrana","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0016","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the categories of “women” and “theory” as apposite in light of the institutional practices specific to the neoliberal university. Sylvia Wynter’s exposition of the “silencing,” the “ontological absence” of Caliban’s “woman” clarifies the foundation and ongoing actualization of modernity/rationality that theory often represents. Considering Celenis Rodríguez Moreno and Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso’s work on Caribbean mimetic racial/gender formation, I expand on Wynter’s account of the binding of desire, rationality, and race that establishes Miranda as the only possible “genetrix” of humanity/rationality. Theory becomes more than an academic endeavor that actualizes, updates, the race/gender/class hierarchy distinctive of the modern colonial world through the dislocation that its debts to Caliban’s “woman” effect.","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":"46187781","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 reconsiders the deconstructive claim that political terms, and specifically the term woman, are catachrestic. By tracing genealogies of rhetoric in deconstruction and grammar and representation in Black feminisms, I show how racial categories overdetermine reference. In order to address this vis-à-vis feminist theories that employ deconstructive, poststructural, transnational, or critical Black analytics, I trace conversations around catachresis and how these theoretical insights might afford a rhetorical concept that has no literal referent but emerges from lack and need. Thinking in this tension that better attends to the material conditions of those considered as referent, the risk of catachresis offers one possible way to think at the limit of the term woman with an attention to ethics in theory.
{"title":"Risking Catachresis: Reading Race, Reference, and Grammar in “Women”","authors":"Christina A. León","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay reconsiders the deconstructive claim that political terms, and specifically the term woman, are catachrestic. By tracing genealogies of rhetoric in deconstruction and grammar and representation in Black feminisms, I show how racial categories overdetermine reference. In order to address this vis-à-vis feminist theories that employ deconstructive, poststructural, transnational, or critical Black analytics, I trace conversations around catachresis and how these theoretical insights might afford a rhetorical concept that has no literal referent but emerges from lack and need. Thinking in this tension that better attends to the material conditions of those considered as referent, the risk of catachresis offers one possible way to think at the limit of the term woman with an attention to ethics in theory.","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":"44388799","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:Antigone is, arguably, the feminine figure most examined and exalted both by and in the philosophical tradition. For just this reason, Antigone has also repeatedly been reclaimed by generations of women working in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, political theory and literature. This paper explores the thought that Antigone is not a “woman” in any simple sense at all. As a virgin/sister who dares to appeal to a law beyond the polis, Antigone occupies the position of a phallic virgin whose power and authority are inextricable from a certain (essentially male) fantasy of phallic infallibility—a fantasy that is, paradoxically, often incarnated by an exceptional form of femininity. But whether she is understood as uniquely authorized to appeal to a law beyond the human or read as a figure that discloses a fissure within the human, Antigone challenges what it means to be a woman in theory.
{"title":"Anti Antigone","authors":"Elissa Marder","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0024","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Antigone is, arguably, the feminine figure most examined and exalted both by and in the philosophical tradition. For just this reason, Antigone has also repeatedly been reclaimed by generations of women working in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, political theory and literature. This paper explores the thought that Antigone is not a “woman” in any simple sense at all. As a virgin/sister who dares to appeal to a law beyond the polis, Antigone occupies the position of a phallic virgin whose power and authority are inextricable from a certain (essentially male) fantasy of phallic infallibility—a fantasy that is, paradoxically, often incarnated by an exceptional form of femininity. But whether she is understood as uniquely authorized to appeal to a law beyond the human or read as a figure that discloses a fissure within the human, Antigone challenges what it means to be a woman in theory.","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":"46477699","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:Argentinean sociologist Verónica Gago argues for an expanded understanding of extractivism. Extending the conventional meaning of the term beyond the agricultural and mineral export economies of the former colonial world, Gago repurposes the word in order to refer to contemporary forms of accumulation via rent. The present text discusses the author’s recent account of the 2017 women’s strike in Argentina, one of whose aims is to reframe debates about the social reproduction of labor among an earlier generation of theorists. Reading with and against Gago, the present intervention asks how to conceive of the specifically feminine nature of the collective subject/object of contemporary accumulation beyond either descriptive notions of femininity or historicist approaches to the issue of so-called primitive accumulation. It goes on to argue that Lacan’s logical approach to sexual difference might serve as the starting point for a more nuanced historical view of the expropriation of feminine sociality, knowledge, and work.
{"title":"Sexual Difference or the Desire to Change It All","authors":"Karen Benezra","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Argentinean sociologist Verónica Gago argues for an expanded understanding of extractivism. Extending the conventional meaning of the term beyond the agricultural and mineral export economies of the former colonial world, Gago repurposes the word in order to refer to contemporary forms of accumulation via rent. The present text discusses the author’s recent account of the 2017 women’s strike in Argentina, one of whose aims is to reframe debates about the social reproduction of labor among an earlier generation of theorists. Reading with and against Gago, the present intervention asks how to conceive of the specifically feminine nature of the collective subject/object of contemporary accumulation beyond either descriptive notions of femininity or historicist approaches to the issue of so-called primitive accumulation. It goes on to argue that Lacan’s logical approach to sexual difference might serve as the starting point for a more nuanced historical view of the expropriation of feminine sociality, knowledge, and work.","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":"41289228","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 a footnote to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir takes issue with the representation of the feminine in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Published just two years after Levinas’s 1947 works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, Beauvoir refers critically to Levinas’s of femininity with otherness, and with his masculinization of the subject. Since then, many feminist scholars have alternately attacked and defended Levinas, arguing in favor of a feminist conception of ethical subjectivity and ethical responsibility. What would happen if we were to reverse this gesture, and read de Beauvoir’s work critically from and through the thought of Levinas? Can the mutual critique of and between these ethically and politically powerful thinkers yield productive readings, readings that would expand the possibility of responsibility, moving beyond the dichotomy between subjectivity and alterity? This paper proposes that by reading both de Beauvoir and Levinas against the grain, and by reading them with and against one another, we can begin to think a feminist ethics and politics that pushes beyond identity and difference.
{"title":"Irritating Subjects","authors":"Erin Graff Zivin","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0014","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In a footnote to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir takes issue with the representation of the feminine in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Published just two years after Levinas’s 1947 works Existence and Existents and Time and the Other, Beauvoir refers critically to Levinas’s of femininity with otherness, and with his masculinization of the subject. Since then, many feminist scholars have alternately attacked and defended Levinas, arguing in favor of a feminist conception of ethical subjectivity and ethical responsibility. What would happen if we were to reverse this gesture, and read de Beauvoir’s work critically from and through the thought of Levinas? Can the mutual critique of and between these ethically and politically powerful thinkers yield productive readings, readings that would expand the possibility of responsibility, moving beyond the dichotomy between subjectivity and alterity? This paper proposes that by reading both de Beauvoir and Levinas against the grain, and by reading them with and against one another, we can begin to think a feminist ethics and politics that pushes beyond identity and difference.","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":"48132089","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 rise of biopolitical governmentality and its interest in the optimal administration of the life of populations gave a new political relevance to women’s reproductive capacity and conduct—while not automatically converting their pre-political status. While reproduction takes on a different status and meaning for different forms of power, these can also coincide rather than replace each other. In consequence, the oscillations between rights and health within modern debates over reproductive justice concern more than a politically strategic choice between alternative languages. Instead, the friction between the formulations of reproductive justice and biopolitical interest are better understood as articulated together in an interlocking grammar of different forms of power whose relationalities have given rise to new means for understanding the paradoxes of rights, necroresistance, and corporeal contradictions.
{"title":"Paradoxes of Reproduction, Grammars of Power","authors":"Penelope Deutscher","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0018","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The rise of biopolitical governmentality and its interest in the optimal administration of the life of populations gave a new political relevance to women’s reproductive capacity and conduct—while not automatically converting their pre-political status. While reproduction takes on a different status and meaning for different forms of power, these can also coincide rather than replace each other. In consequence, the oscillations between rights and health within modern debates over reproductive justice concern more than a politically strategic choice between alternative languages. Instead, the friction between the formulations of reproductive justice and biopolitical interest are better understood as articulated together in an interlocking grammar of different forms of power whose relationalities have given rise to new means for understanding the paradoxes of rights, necroresistance, and corporeal contradictions.","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":"46734483","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 special issue, then, we propose an experiment: what would happen if “women” who work in “theory” (in the broadest, wildest sense of both terms) were to thematize and discuss the question of women in theory? How does this issue inflect literary studies and related fields? Here, scholars whose work emerges from distinct areas of critical theory and philosophy—deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, classical philosophy, political theory, media theory, in short: areas of “theory” in which women are comparatively scarce—come together to engage with the problem of gender in philosophy and critical theory from and through their methodological and conceptual areas of interest.
{"title":"Introduction: Women in Theory","authors":"Erin Graff Zivin","doi":"10.1353/dia.2021.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2021.0023","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:In this special issue, then, we propose an experiment: what would happen if “women” who work in “theory” (in the broadest, wildest sense of both terms) were to thematize and discuss the question of women in theory? How does this issue inflect literary studies and related fields? Here, scholars whose work emerges from distinct areas of critical theory and philosophy—deconstruction, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, classical philosophy, political theory, media theory, in short: areas of “theory” in which women are comparatively scarce—come together to engage with the problem of gender in philosophy and critical theory from and through their methodological and conceptual areas of interest.","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":"43237123","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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