Marguerite La Caze

Iris Marion Young argues we cannot understand others' experiences by imagining ourselves in their place or in terms of symmetrical reciprocity (1997a). For Young, reciprocity expresses moral respect and asymmetry arises from people's greatly varying life histories and social positions. La Caze argues there are problems with Young's articulation of asymmetrical reciprocity in terms of wonder and the gift. By discussing friendship and political representation, she shows how taking self-respect into account complicates asymmetrical reciprocity

To elucidate the tensions in the relation between ethics and politics, I construct a dialogue between Kant, who argues that they can be made compatible, and Derrida, who claims to go beyond Kant and his idea of duty. For Derrida, ethics makes unconditional demands and politics guides our responses to possible effects of our decisions. Derrida argues that in politics there must be a negotiation of the non-negotiable call of ethical responsibility. I argue that Derrida's unconditional ethics cannot be read in precisely Kantian terms because his 'impossible reals' can be destructive. Moreover, Derrida expands the reach of ethics beyond Kant by making all ethical demands unconditional or perfect, yet he does not articulate a politics that would enable us to respond to these demands. We need to take account of these difficulties in theorizing how ethics should constrain politics and how politics can provide the conditions for ethics.

Immanuel Kant is often thought of as an excessively austere figure of the enlightenment, eschewing especially the emotions. Yet his contribution to the enlightenment includes a distinctive sensitivity to the role that love and the beautiful, particularly in nature, play in our ethical lives. There are a number of arguments scattered through Kant’s work that aim to establish a connection between love of the beautiful and morality. My goal is to connect the most significant of these to build a picture of his concern with the topic, and to assess the arguments for their insight and their revelation of complexity and significance of Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. What I show here is that love of the beautiful is meaningfully connected to morality in a range of ways; thus this love of the beautiful indicates the crucial, if not predominant, role of emotions in Kant’s moral philosophy.

In ‘History of the Lie: Prolegomena’ (2002) Jacques Derrida examines Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the modern lie in politics in her essays ‘Lying in Politics’ (1972) and ‘Truth and Politics’ (1968/ 1993). Arendt contrasts the traditional lie, where lies were told and secrets kept for the greater good or to defeat the enemy, with the modern lie, which comprises deception and self-deception on a massive scale. My paper investigates the seriousness of different kinds of lies in political life in the light of Arendt and Derrida’s reflections on lying and contemporary lies in politics and shows where concern should focus.

This article focuses on how the work of Iris Marion Young (1949-2006) has contributed to legal and political theory. Her ground-breaking book Justice and the Politics of Difference and her later work Inclusion and Democracy, as well as numerous articles, have been very influential. These texts involve the articulation of the numerous structural ways in which oppressed groups can be treated unjustly and the kind of legal, political, and social structures that need to be put in place to overcome these injustices. The axes of injustice include gender, race and ethnicity, disability, age, and sexual orientation. The article will consider her contribution to thought concerning achieving justice and overcoming oppression and domination, especially in relation to marriage, citizenship, democracy and international relations. Let me begin with her best-known work on justice and oppression.

The work of Iris Marion Young (1949–2006) comprises major contributions in the areas of feminist phenomenology, international justice, political theory, and ethical responses to differences. Many of Young's articles, such as ‘Throwing like a Girl’, ‘Pregnant Embodiment’, ‘Women Recovering our Clothes’, ‘Gender as Seriality’, and ‘House and home’, in addition to her books Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) and Inclusion and Democracy (2000) are particularly significant. My paper shows how Young's earlier essays in feminist phenomenology concerning the lived body can be linked to her later political thought, despite her own separation of these two strands in her work. Furthermore, I explore her legacy by examining how feminists have challenged her self-criticisms and have also developed Young's ideas in these fields, including her work on oppression and responsibility.

I begin by examining the logic of autoimmunity as characterized by Jacques Derrida, ‘that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘‘itself’’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its own immunity’ (Borradori, 2003: 94). According to Derrida, religion, democracy, terrorism and recent responses to the trauma of terrorism can be understood in terms of this logic. Responses to terrorism are ‘autoimmune’ and increase the trauma of terrorism as well as risking democratic values. I argue that the risks of autoimmunity can be negotiated in better ways if we see how autoimmunity relates to another important Derridean concept, hospitality

Government refusals to apologise for past wrongful practices such as slavery or the removal of indigenous children from their parents seem evidently unjust. It is surprising, then, that some ethical considerations appear to support such stances. Jacques Derrida's account of forgiveness as entirely independent of apology appears to preclude the need for official apologies. I contend that governments are obligated to apologize for past injustices because they are responsible for them and that official apologies should not involve a corresponding expectation for forgiveness. My argument is that an apology and forgiveness are asymmetrical because an apology is based on respect, a perfect duty, and can be a public act, whereas forgiveness is based on love, is an imperfect duty, and is a personal undertaking. It follows from this asymmetry that an apology is a prerequisite for reconciliation, but forgiveness is discretionary. Refusals to apologize tend to impede the reconciliation process and make the possibility of forgiveness remote. The concept of reconciliation has also been criticized on the grounds that reconciliation implies a former harmony that should be restored and fault on both sides. However, I argue it should be understood as a willingness to work together without a presumption of having overcome the past.

Derrida's purpose in ‘Death Penalties’ (2004), is to show how both arguments in favour of capital punishment, exemplified by Kant's, and arguments for its abolition, such as those of Beccaria, are deconstructible. He claims that ‘never, to my knowledge, has any philosopher as a philosopher, in his or her own strictly and systematically philosophical discourse, never has any philosophy as such contested the legitimacy of the death penalty.’ (2004, 146) Derrida also asks how it is possible ‘to abolish the death penalty in a way that is based on principle, that is universal and unconditional, and not because it has become not only cruel but useless, insufficiently exemplary?’ (2004, 137) In my paper, I examine Derrida's claim about the lack of systematic opposition to the death penalty on the part of philosophers and suggest an answer to his question concerning the possibility of a universal and unconditional opposition to capital punishment

The unthought means that which it is possible to think, but which has not yet been thought, and also what we are prevented from thinking. Philosophical systems can prevent us from thinking otherwise and restrictions on women’s access to knowledge can prevent women from thinking apart from what is prescribed as suitable. The unthought is both what hasn’t been thought and what could be thought if there wasn’t a barrier of some sort. Michèle Le Dœuff directs us towards the unthought as a measure of the extent to which writers on women’s education have allowed the possibility of women’s access to the unthought, not just to received knowledge to date. This unthought is also connected to creativity and originality, and philosophy that is not systematic. In this paper, I elucidate the nature of Michèle Le Dœuff’s project and the structure of her argument in The Sex of Knowing (2003) through the idea of the unthought.

My paper explores the power that forgiveness and the promise, as potentialities of action, have to counter the two difficulties that follow from the possibility of being able to begin something new or what Arendt calls the ‘frailty of human affairs’: irreversibility and unpredictability. Acts of forgiving and promising are expressions of freedom and natality, as they begin human relations anew: forgiveness creates a fresh beginning after wrong-doing, and the promise initiates new political agreements. Arendt argues that forgiveness and the promise depend on plurality. They also create more favorable conditions for people to live together in the public world. Historically, forgiveness has been important in political thought in the form of pardon. In contrast, promises have been conceptualised in political thought primarily in contract theories.

One of the few philosophers who comments on fashion, Kant claims in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View that fashion should be classified as vanity and foolishness. He writes ‘it is novelty that makes fashion popular, and to be inventive in all sorts of external forms, even if they often degenerate into something fantastic and somewhat hideous, belongs to the style of courtiers, especially ladies. Others then anxiously imitate these forms, and those in low social positions burden themselves with them long after the courtiers have put them away. – So fashion is not, strictly speaking, a matter of taste (for it can be quite contrary to taste), but of mere vanity in giving oneself airs, and of rivalry in outdoing one another by it.’ (Anthropology, 2006, 7: 246) Kant’s condemnation of fashion depends on him associating fashion exclusively with mere novelty in production (as opposed to true originality) and imitation in fashion’s wearers. In this paper I distinguish fashion understood as invention for its own sake followed by slavish imitation with a true fashion, which like art, involves both taste and ‘genius’ as understood by Kant. Taste involves a judgement of a particular to be, for example, beautiful. This judgement must be one that we can communicate to others. Genius is in fashion that is original and provides a model to others. (See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 308) While notable designer fashion provides the most obvious examples, this way of looking at fashion does not preclude the possibility of this kind of genius developing outside or alongside the fashion industry. Furthermore, wearers of fashion have to exercise their sense of taste in choosing what to wear and how to wear it. This sense of taste appeals to others and requires an enlargement of our thought just as our taste in art does. Thus seen, fashion and interest in fashion has a potential for improvement of the self as other forms of taste arguably do.

A consideration of what are sometimes known as the reactive attitudes is useful to outline more positive conditions of ethical restoration. This paper focuses on the ways in which perceptions and experiences of guilt and shame are shaped by political conceptions of who belongs to the more guilty and shameful parties. I use the debate between Karl Jaspers and Arendt over guilt and responsibility, as well as Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Giorgio Agamben’s work on shame, to develop an account of the political aspects of perceived and felt guilt and shame in people who are oppressed. I discuss how some philosophers, for example Cheshire Calhoun, have argued that the oppressed should accept the burdens of guilt and shame expected of them because of the social nature of our ethical experience; and then show how that view can be questioned. However, I argue that the view that members of oppressed groups should experience the guilt and shame expected of them by dominant groups ought to be challenged. In this paper, I demonstrate that the debate concerning shame and guilt has obscured emotions that are responses to the actions of others, such as humiliating treatment, thus leading to an inappropriate focus in philosophical discourses on the victims of wrongdoing rather than the perpetrators. This focus implicitly supports the dynamics of humiliation, as I will show.

Sartre reflected on questions related to terror and terrorism throughout his career and these questions shaped his understanding of ethics and politics. In exploring these connections I link Sartre’s controversial remarks about the terrorism he observed during his lifetime to our more recent experiences of terrorism in the USA, Bali, Madrid and London. In Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism, Robert Young claims that Sartre moves from ethics to politics in his account of colonialism, understanding that shift as one from a concern with individual freedom to commitment to political causes. (2001a, viii) In contrast, Azzedine Haddour says that Anti-Semite and Jew (1995) and ‘Black Orpheus’ (2001b) demonstrate ‘the inextricable link between ethics and politics in his critiques of anti-Semitism, racism and colonialism.’ (2001a, 8) While Sartre condemns these phenomena in ethical terms, some of his statements in response to them appear to suggest that ethical assessment is irrelevant. I aim to make some sense of this seeming inconsistency in Sartre’s views, and consider how differing conceptions of ethics are inflected in his political statements, particularly those concerning terrorism.