Eduardo Mendieta

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

María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.

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.

This article argues that there are three key claims of postphenomenology: first, that there is no immediate access to a phenomena that is not always already embodied; second, that there is no science that is not determined by a technology, and that technologies are instances of certain theoretical assumptions and perspectives; third, that all technoscience is enabled and mediated by the embodied perception that takes place in and through instrumentation, which leads to the insight that all scientific evidence is manufactured perception. There is critical engagement with Ihde’s take on pragmatism and it is argued that he makes too severe a distinction between embodied praxis and communicative action, between practices of embodiment and practices of communicating. The argument is that the technoscientific body is a communicative body. The article closes with the consideration of Ihde’s provocative thesis that we ought to think of philosophical systems as having expiration or obsolesce dates. The author recalls the important work of German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders in order to think through the sense in which it is not so much our technologies that expire, but our ethical worldviews that are made discrepant and incommensurate with the challenges our technologies throw at us. It is argued that we have to make distinction between obsolesce, on the one hand, and error or failure, on the other.

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

i want to begin by thanking my good friend Richard Hart for the invitation to be part of this wonderful panel in which we are honoring while also being challenged by the work of Charles Johnson to think differently about our discipline. I also want to thank the organizers of SAAP for hosting this important series of lectures, in which we are invited to engage the work of thinkers who challenge us to think differently because they either come to our problems from different disciplines and fields, or teach us to see their problems as ours. From the outset, I must admit my trepidation at engaging Johnson’s work, which spans nearly half a century and a variety of genres. Johnson began as a cartoonist, then became a...

The so-called War on Terror has given rise to a virulent discourse that demonizes all those who allegedly seek to do harm and kill Americans. A veritable bestiary of demonic and bestial creatures has been thus ensembled, constituting what one cannot but call an “imperial bestiary.” Here we do not so much consider the contents of this imperial bestiary, as much as seek to analyze its grammar, that is, the way it operates on certain moral assumptions that have very pernicious moral consequences. Reconstructing the work of some recent critical philosophers, a possible way to dismantle all bestiaries, whether imperial or colonial, is elaborated. The work of Mary Midgley, Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway are brought together to develop what has been here called a politics beyond monsters, beasts, roguish animals, and infesting vermin that must be at best domesticated, and at worst exterminated

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker and observer