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348Power Trouble: Performativity as Critical TheoryConstellations 5 (4): 456-471. 1998.Although Judith Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender has been highly influential in feminist theory, queer theory, cultural studies, and some areas of philosophy, it has yet to receive its due from critical social theorists. This oversight is especially problematic given the crucial insights into the study of power – a central concept for critical social theory – that can be gleaned from Butler’s work. Her analysis is somewhat unique among discussions of power in its attempt to theori…Read more
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42Allison Weir. Identities and Freedom: Feminist Theory between Power and Connection (review)philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 4 (2): 250-255. 2014.
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52The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical TheoryCambridge University Press. 2016.While post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School--Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst--have persistently defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this cri…Read more
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36Review of Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (2). 2006.
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58Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of CritiqueConstellations 23 (2): 244-254. 2016.In his account of critical theory as diagnosing social pathologies of reason, Axel Honneth has rehabilitated the analogy between critical theory and psychoanalysis – according to which the critical theorist stands in relation to the pathological social order as the analyst stands in relation to the analysand, and the aim of critical theory is to effect the diagnosis and, ultimately, the cure of social disorders or pathologies. In this article, I show that Honneth, like Habermas before him, has a…Read more
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39IntroductionJournal of Speculative Philosophy 27 (3): 217-219. 2013.This is an introduction to a volume of essays bringing together some of the highlights from the fifty-first annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Nazareth College from November 1-3, 2012. Our keynote speakers for the 2012 meeting were Adriana Cavarero and László Tengelyi, and we lead off this issue with their essays.
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195Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical ReappraisalConstellations 10 (2): 180-198. 2003.In a late discussion of Kant’s essay, “Was ist Aufklärung?,” Foucault credits Kant with posing “the question of his own present” and positions himself as an inheritor of this Kantian legacy.1 Foucault has high praise for the critical tradition that emerges from Kant’s historical-political reflections on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution; Kant’s concern in these writings with “an ontology of the present, an ontology of ourselves” is, he says, characteristic of “a form of philosophy, fro…Read more
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552The power of feminist theory: domination, resistance, solidarityWestview Press. 1999.Power is clearly a crucial concept for feminist theory. Insofar as feminists are interested in analyzing power, it is because they have an interest in understanding, critiquing, and ultimately challenging the multiple array of unjust power relations affecting women in contemporary Western societies, including sexism, racism, heterosexism, and class oppression. In "The Power of Feminist Theory," Amy Allen diagnoses the inadequacies of previous feminist conceptions of power, and draws on the work …Read more
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167Systematically distorted subjectivity?: Habermas and the critique of powerPhilosophy and Social Criticism 33 (5): 641-650. 2007.
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59Race, Empire and the Idea of Human Development by Thomas McCarthyConstellations 18 (3): 487-492. 2011.
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349Pornography and powerJournal of Social Philosophy 32 (4). 2001.When it was at its height, the feminist pornography debate tended to generate more heat than light. Only now that there has been a cease fire in the sex war does it seem possible to reflect on the debate in a more productive way and to address some of the questions that were left unresolved by it. In this paper, I shall argue that one of the major unresolved questions is that of how feminists should conceptualize power. The antipornography feminists and the feminist sex radicals presuppose radic…Read more
University Park, Pennsylvania, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality |
Continental Philosophy |