Eduardo Mendieta

Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (2002), is considered in terms of three main virtues: first, it moves the question of political justice beyond the debate on the priority of recognition over distribution; second, it contributes to the expansion of the notion of communicative freedom and how it relates to rights; and third, it lays down the foundation for a cosmopolitan, post-nationalistic, form of citizenship that would have as its core the rights of association and existence. Three areas of concern and potential disagreement are discussed: first, whether Benhabib could be accused of a type of culturalism that celebrates too quickly postethnic America at the expense of the agenda of racial justice still to be addressed in the United States; second, whether in this work Benhabib has given enough attention to the political claims of memory, especially when these claims are enunciated from colonial pasts; third, in conclusion, how cultural justice, or respect for cultural diversity, can contribute to biodiversity’s preservation in the age of the coming largest extinction of biodiversity

Philosophy projects a certain understanding of reason that is related to the ways in which the city figures in its imaginary. Conversely, the city is a practice of spatialization that determines the ways in which agents are able, or unable, to live out their social agency. This essay focuses on the ways in which philosophy and the city's spatializing practices and imaginaries inform differential ways of living out social agency. The thrust of the investigation is to discern the ways in which sexism - differential engendering - results from the relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. To illustrate this link between philosophy, the city, and differential engendering, the work turns to a consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology, which is taken as an exemplary illustration of the entwinement between the philosophical imaginary, and the perception and reception of the city.

This anthology provides the definitive theoretical sources of contemporary thinking about identity, including explorations of race, class, gender, and nationality. Explores the long and rich tradition of philosophical analysis and debate over the genesis, contours, and political effects of identity categories. Provides the definitive theoretical sources and contemporary debates by leading theorists such as selections from Hegel, Marx, Freud, DuBois, Beauvoir, Lukács, Fanon, Hall, Guha, Hobsbawm, Wittig, Butler, Halperin, R. Robertson, Said, and LaClau. Combines general and specific analyses of particular identity categories: race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, class, nationality. Allows for a comparative study of identities through multiple theoretical frameworks.

Discourse ethics is one of the most contemporary and controversial theories of ethics. It is contemporaneous because it attempts to formulate a theory of ethics that takes into account all of the major advances in philosophical thinking and their challenges to the foundations of any future ethical theory It is controversial because of its elaboration of the ethical as the injunction to see everything from the standpoint of the generalized Other which simultaneously factors in the social conditions that enable moral subjects to orient themselves toward moral maxims . Discourse ethics may be understood as a synthesis of Hegel and Kant, vis-a-vis the mediation of pragmatism, more precisely via Peirce , and Mead . This dissertation is a reconstruction of the philosophical origins of discourse ethics, which in turn are investigated through a reconstruction of the path of development of its original formulator: Karl-Otto Apel. His Denkweq is characterized as a shift from Hermeneutics to Semiotics, indicating a transition in philosophical traditions from German hermeneutics and ontology to North American pragmatism. The work shows the extent to which Peirce, Royce, and Mead influenced Apel's understanding of ethics, leading him to formulate as early as 1967, the fundamental insights which have characterized discourse ethics. The dissertation begins with a discussion of Apel's doctoral dissertation, Dasein und Erkennen. This chapters shows how in this work Apel elaborated a philosophical-anthropological reading of Heidegger's existential hermeneutics with the intent of developing a theory of knowledge. Chapter two deals with Apel's Habilitation: Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico. It shows how this work marked Apel's turn to the study of language as the point of departure for all future philosophizing. Here Apel's four major traditions that determined today's philosophy of language are reconstructed and analyzed. The third chapter deals with Apel's magnus opus, Transformation der Philosophie. This work is analyzed from the standpoint of how it contributes to a linguistic turn of German philosophy, and how it inaugurates both "transcendental semiotics" and "discourse ethics." The fourth chapter is a comparative analysis between Apel's transcendental semiotics and Jurgen Habermas's "universal pragmatics." The last chapter deals with discourse ethics and its contemporary contenders: postmodern ethics and liberation ethics . This chapter answers the question whether discourse ethics is the appropriate answer to a postcolonial and postmodern world; that is, one that has superseded its eurocentrism and false universalism.

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions. Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. "The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society. Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens

En este artículo se discute el reciente libro de Jürgen Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur. Auf dem Weg zu einer liberalen Eugenik (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001). Se presta especial atención al argumento central relacionado con los efectos negativos que podría tener la aceptación general de la clonación y el diagnóstico génico preimplantacional (DGP) sobre la autocomprensión moral y política de las generaciones presentes y futuras. La discusión continúa con una crítica a los argumentos centrales de Habermas contra el DGP, y desarrolla al menos dos razonamientos que están en armonía con su defensa general de la democracia procedimental y la moral deontológica. Se apela a Peter Singer y John Rawls para desarrollar argumentos que no se oponen ni al DGP ni a la ingeniería genética y que, no obstante, están totalmente de acuerdo con el espíritu de la modernidad política, tal y como lo defiende y define Habermas. La conclusión insta a una crítica de las biotecnologías desencadenadas por la revolución de la información que tenga un carácter menos moralizante y más político-económico.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Surviving American Culture:On Chuck PalahniukEduardo MendietaIn an age in which American culture has become the United States' number one export, along with its weapons, low intensity conflict, carcinogenic cigarettes, its "freedom," and pornography, it is delightful and even a sign of hope that there are writers who have taken on the delicate and perilous task of offering a prognosis of what ails this culture. In the following essay I argue that Chuck Palahniuk's works ought to be read as a mortician's report on American culture. Chuck Palahniuk broke into the literary world by way of the movie version of his first novel: Fight Club (1995). He has gone on to write six other novels: Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (2000), Choke (2001), Lullaby (2002), and Diary (2003). He also has published an interesting travel book, Fugitives and Refugees; A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), but since this is not properly fiction, I will not discuss it in this essay.1Clearly, Palahniuk has already produced a corpus worthy of careful consideration and analysis. Yet, as a west coast writer, far from the literary circles and brokers of the east coast, indeed far away from the clubs of self-promotion and self-monitoring that censure and hold in tight grip the monopoly of criticism that highlights "worthy literature," Palahniuk has not attracted a lot of critical attention. It is only with his most recent work Choke that he has began to be widely reviewed and commented on. In the following I provide a thematic reconstruction of each one of the six published novels, in chronological sequence. I will argue that Palahniuk is not trying to write the "great American novel," although he is profiling himself as a quintessential "American" writer in the midst of post–Cold War megalomania and celebrated Pax Americana. He has taken on a culture that has become so gargantuan, [End Page 394] fragmented, and differentiated but at the same time so rich, so self-reflexive, so historicized and also so mimicked that one novel cannot tell its story in one narrative with one dramatic thread. Many novels, many short cuts, many vignettes, are necessary: one polyphonic, asynchronous, temporally bi-directional, hyper-textual, and cyber-encyclopedic novel made up of individual novels, where each novel is the Bildungsroman of an American hero but told in reverse. These heroes, I will argue, are testimonies to the resilient power of individuals to resist even the most invasive and persistent onslaughts by culture on the physic life of freedom and individuality. I will also argue that he is neither a commercial nor academic writer; that is, he is not the kind of writer who writes either in order to maintain a living or secure tenure. He is a writer with a mission, a vision, and a very distinctive style. The stories that Palahniuk tells are stories that begin at the end, and end at the beginning: they are turned around Bildungsromans. They are, in other words, about unmaking, uncoupling, and disentangling our selves from the normal self into which we have been socialized. These stories are, thus, about the discovery of moral resources that lay dormant in the very simplicity of human solidarity and trust in our will to survive morally untainted, or at least redeemable. I will conclude by arguing that Palahniuk's novels are about surviving American Culture, and about how deviance is the health of the individual in a sick society.One could characterize Fight Club as the intelligent man's response to Robert Bly's Iron John (1990),2 or the fictionalized version of the Michael Kimmel's Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996).3 Alternatively, one could argue that Fight Club is the fin-de-sieclé response to Barbara Ehrenreich's prognosis in her The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) of 1970s and 1980s narcissistic and hedonistic masculinity.4 Chuck Palahniuk's first novel is a biting and poignant look at men in American culture after the end of affluence and the simultaneous "feminization" of masculinity. It is at the same time about the struggle for a viable sense of masculinity in an age in...

"The essays in this book make it elegantly clear that there is a vigorous and rigorous Latin American philosophy... and that others dismiss it at their peril." —Mario Sáenz The ten essays in this lively anthology move beyond a purely historical consideration of Latin American philosophy to cover recent developments in political and social philosophy as well as innovations in the reception of key philosophical figures from the European Continental tradition. Topics such as indigenous philosophy, multiculturalism, the philosophy of race, democracy, postmodernity, the role of women, and the position of Latin America and Latin Americans in a global age are explored by notable philosophers from the region. An introduction by Eduardo Mendieta examines recent trends and points to the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions that have inspired the discipline. Latin American Philosophy brings English-speaking readers up to date with recent scholarship and points to promising new directions.

This essay urges us to complement work on the philosophy and social science of race that has focused on the “visual” and “epistemic” dimension of racism with work on affect or what is here called the somatological dimensions of racism. The racist self hears race before he sees it. The racist self is convulsed by race before she experiences it as an epistemic affair. It is argued here that we dwell in the sound house of race. Before racism is chromocratic, it is phonocratic. The technologies of the racist self are the technologies of racializing aurality and phonology. Racism brands us sonically. Race, it will be argued, is a sonic stigmata. More specifically, the focus will be on voice, accent, what here is called the prosody of race. The aim is make those racialized and racializing accents in philosophy resound, echo, and reverberate so that we can hear the prosody of race. The racist does not dwell in the silent chamber of the mind’s “I.” The viscera of racism dwells in the body our racist habits have domesticated

Introducción : la translocalización discursiva de "Latinoamérica" en tiempos de la globalización / Eduardo Mendieta, Santiago Castro-Gómez / - Posoccidentalismo : el argumento desde América Latina / Walter D. Mignolo / - Fragmentos globales : latinoamericanismo de segundo orden / Alberto Moreiras / - Hegemonía y dominio : subalternidad, un significado flotante / Ileana Rodríguez / - Más allá del accidentalismo : hacia categorías neohistóricas no imperialistas / Fernando Coronil / - Modernidad, posmodernidad y poscolonialidad : una búsqueda esperanzadora del tiempo / Eduardo Mendieta / - Latinoamericanismo, modernidad, globalización. Prolegómenos a una crítica poscolonial de la razón / Santiago Castro-Gómez / - Realismo mágico y poscolonialismo : construcciones del otro desde la otredad / Erna von der Walde.

Focusing on West's recent work Democracy Matters, this essay argues that West's work has been guided by three major acts of translation. First, he has sought to translate the memory of suffering and the history of struggle into the foundations for democratic maturity. Second, combining Socratic questioning, prophetic practice and dark hope, West translates suspicion, action and hope into an ethos of collective education, which he calls democratic paideia. Finally, West's work has sought to translate the aesthetic, and in particular vocal and musical, creativity of African Americans into a source of democratic vitality