Eduardo Mendieta

But in the age of the disintegration of experience human beings are no longer subjectively disposed to letter writing. For the present it looks as though technology is eliminating the preconditions for the letter. Because letters are no longer necessary, given the speedier possibilities of communication and the shrinking of spatio-temporal distances, their inherent substance is disintegrating as well. Benjamin brought to letter writing an antiquarian and uninhibited talent; for him the letter represented the wedding of something in the process of disappearing and the utopia of restoration.In the intimate sphere of the conjugal family privatized individuals viewed themselves as independent even from the private...

Until now, North American and European philosophies have been engaged in debates about the possibility of a postmetaphysical philosophy and the consequences of the linguistic turn for the assessment of modernity; they have done so, however, without departing from the narrow horizons of their respective nationalistic perspectives. In this incisive critique, Dussel demonstrates how most of thse philosophies have either failed to give historically faithful analyses of the genesis of the "myth" of modernity, or have never engaged in a serious questioning of their own Eurocentric presuppositions. He shows how North American and European philosophers have presupposed a no-longer-acceptable philosophy of history that has led them to fall into a "developmental fallacy," the belief that there is a linear sequence that moves from the premodern, underdeveloped, or on the way to industrialization, to the modern, developed, and industrialized.

This article discusses the fortuitous genesis of the book of my conversations with Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy (Seven Stories, 2005) and traces some of the intellectual and philosophical sources that informed the specific questions and approaches that inform the dialogue. Davis’ relationships to Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, as well as to Foucault, are discussed. Similarly, Davis’ place within a critical black American political-philosophical tradition is analyzed. The essay focuses mainly, however, on the way in which Davis’ work on the prison industrial complex profiles an unsuspected contribution to political philosophy that links up the disciplinary origins of American democracy with its racial contract to give rise to the prison contract. In the tradition of Charles Mills, Davis’ radical theory of penality unmasks and denounces the over-determined relationship between surplus punishment and the racial character of the US polity in terms of theproductivity of the prison system.

In the first part of this essay, I develop the argument that Michel Foucault's work should be read with geographical and topological ideas in mind. I argue that Foucault's archeology and genealogy are fundamentally determined by spatial, topological, geographical, and geometrical metaphors and concepts. This spatial dimension of genealogy is explicitly related to racism and the regimes that domesticate agents through the practices, institutions and ideologies of racialization. The second part offers a genealogical reading of US history and spatiality in terms of its racial institutions. I suggest that if we want to read the US geographies of topographies and cartographies of racism in a Foucauldian manner, then we must focus on plantations, ghettos, and prisons as the spaces‐institutions‐geographies that consolidated the racial matrix of US polity. My goal is to acculturate Foucauldian racial genealogy to the US racial matrix, and, conversely, to read US geo‐history in terms of racializing spatialities.

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.