Joshua M. Hall

Jean Genet was an existentialist philosopher, orphan foundling, child prisoner, thief, sex worker, and one of the first openly gay writers of his era. This article reinterprets two of his posthumous works, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, and A Loving Prisoner. Both books center Genet’s time living with two nonwhite revolutionary communities, the Black Panthers and the Palestinian Fedayeen. From this fertile Palestinian ground, I unearth his concept of revolutionary beauty, which I articulate as follows: the charisma of self-overcoming internalized shame from colonial violence via the cheerful counterforce of decolonizing revolution.

Contemporary philosopher Jacques Rancière has been criticized for a conception of “politics” that is insensitive to the diminished agency of the corporeally oppressed. In a recent article, Dana Mills locates a solution to this alleged problem in the most recent Rancière book translated into English, Aisthesis, in its chapter on Mallarmé’s writings on modern dancer Loïe Fuller. My first section argues that Mills's reading exacerbates an “homonymy” (Rancière's term) in Rancière's use of the word “inscription,” which means for him either a vicious literal carving on living bodies or else a virtuous figurative carving on nonliving bodies. The former, I call “bodily carving,” while the latter is the “corporeal writing” that I take Mallarmé to affirm in Fuller. My second section observes that Rancière himself misses a homonymy in Mallarmé on Fuller, namely, “dance,” meaning either “ballet” or dance in general (including Fuller's). My third section concludes that Rancière's chapter on Fuller includes another “dance” homonymy, meaning either “concert dance” or what I term a new “art of meta-movement” in Fuller. The latter art, I conclude, is equivalent to Mallarmé’s “corporeal writing” and can be understood as a new form of dance education, in pursuit of a worker-dancer utopia.

This essay is part of a larger project in which I construct a new, historically informed, social justice-centered philosophy of dance, centered on four central phenomenological constructs, or “moves.” This essay, in particular, is about the fourth move, “resilience.” More specifically, I explore how Judith Butler engages with the etymological aspects of this word, suggesting that resilience involves a productive form of madness and a healthy form of compulsion, respectively. I then conclude by showing how “resilience” can be used in the analysis of various Wittgensteinian “families” of dance, which, in turn, could facilitate positive educational changes in philosophy, dance, and society, with particular efficacy on the axis of gender. In brief, by teaching a conception of strength as vulnerability (instead of machismo’s view of strength as apathetic “toughness”), a pedagogy of dancing resilience provides additional support for feminists (including Anzaldúa, Haraway, Butler, and Concepción) who advocate a cautious openness toward seemingly unlikely resources and allies (including analytic methodologies, Machiavellian politics, and the discourses of the natural sciences).

This article is part of a larger project in which I construct a historically informed philosophy of dance, called “figuration,” based on new interpretations of canonical philosophers. Figuration consists of two major parts—namely, (a) four basic concepts, or “moves”—positure, gesture, grace, and resilience—and (b) seven types, or families, of dance—concert, folk, societal, agonistic, animal, astronomical, and discursive. The present article is devoted to the first of these moves, positure, regarding its importance for Aristotle and its applicability to my seven families of dance. One goal of figuration, and the central goal of this essay, is to model and justify a dancing aesthetic education, pursuant to psychological and political flourishing. More specifically, figuration holds that a maximally virtuous and flourishing community is one that facilitates dance, which requires dance education (in both theory and appreciation). Within this philosophy, positure’s specific contribution to aesthetic education lies in the concept of positure itself, which I define as “a poetically creative, politically situated, dynamic imitation of stasis.”

Building on a recent article that identifies a “dancing ecofeminist logic” in Australian logician Val Plumwood and pairs it with Australian sociologist Ariel Salleh’s “ethics of holding,” the present article further elaborates this logical ethics into a transgender ethics of “holding green commons” in Indian philosopher of science and ecological activist Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development (2016). I then bolster this ethics by partnering it with Spirit/Dance (a reconstruction of global spiritual practices of the poor) to highlight these spiritual practitioners as “spirit-lanterned guardians,” inspired by the heroic protestors of the Chipko land rights movement in India, who channeled Hindu spirits and carried lanterns in the daylight, to symbolize their silvicultural wisdom defending the forest. Finally, I identify five such guardians in the Global North today: three fictional “spirits” (Peter Pan, Green Lantern, and Robin Hood) and two present-day ecofeminist activists, namely martyred “Cop City” protestor and forest defender Tortuguita Terán and the interdisciplinary movement artist jill sigman/thinkdance.

In this essay, I explore two interconnected figures of aesthetics and poverty. The first figure is aesthetics poverty, meaning the (a) literal (relative) poverty of the majority precariously-employed scholars in what has been called the “ghettoization of aesthetics” within academic philosophy, and (b) figurative poverty of the discipline in terms of its tendency to focus narrowly on pleasurable and individual phenomena to the neglect of disturbing and community phenomena. The second figure is poverty aesthetics, meaning (a) aesthetic values and practices associated with the absolute poverty of aesthetic practitioners, such as the “artisanal miners” of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), (b) the tendency to suppress, make-invisible, or “anesthetize” those aesthetics (in the sense of the negation of aesthesis qua “sense-perception”). The connection between these two figures is not only that enslaved and child labor in the DRC is necessary to power the devices on which scholars do their aesthetics research, but also that attempting to counter this anesthesia risks “professional suicide” (as in the numerous censorings and firings of U.S. scholarly critics of Israel's genocide of Palestine). Rolling those dice once more, I dig deep into Siddartha Kara’s Pulitzer Prize-finalist Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, unearthing the unifying figure of this investigation: “aesthetics of disturbance,” defined as a muddied offloading of the global northerners’ psychological turmoil onto global southerners, the cost of which includes the latter’s individual misery and political chaos. Thus, aesthetic scholars are ethically-politically obligated to help re-aestheticize the artisanal miners of the DRC, thereby proving ourselves worthy of the financial compensation to keep such research going.

This article reinterprets Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs) as a hybrid artform which, though complicit in the racist fascism of its source materials, nevertheless constitutes a vital antifascist counterforce, especially in the more recent wave I call “neo-JRPGs.” At its core is the figure of the “wizard,” derived from a Middle English word for “wise,” and used interchangeably with “philosopher” through the Middle Ages. In short, JPRG players can empower themselves and others to resist the racist fascism of mainstream society, like the police officer “wizards” of the KKK, by role-playing as medieval philosophy-inspired, Tolkien-inflected wizards. To flesh this out, I offer the case study of one of the greatest JRPGs, Phantasy Star IV, whose literal wizard character acts analogously to the Aristotelian “Active Intellect,” channeling ideas from game designer “wizard” Rieko Kodama (a female pioneer in that role) to actualize the potential intellect of the other playable characters, and thereby the player themself, into a gaming wizardry that can empower a second actualization into progressive philosophy.

Though Aníbal Quijano’s thought has been enormously influential in the Global North via the incorporation of key concepts by theorists such as Walter Mignolo and María Lugones, it was only last year (2024) that a full-length book manuscript by this most influential Peruvian theorist of his generation was finally translated into English. From that recent anthology, Foundational Essays: On the Coloniality of Power, the present investigation shows how the last three chapters of the recently translated anthology give us a new way to read Quijano, thereby generating an argument for decolonial revolution today. The present investigation’s three sections each rehearse a different premise of Quijano’s argument there, as follows: (1) Latin America (most obviously Peru), is the heart of colonial modernity; (2) utopian rebellious aesthetics is the heart of Latin American colonial modernity; and (3) Indigeneity is the heart of the utopian rebellious aesthetics of Latin American colonial modernity. And the concluding section identifies a beginning of this revolutionary aesthetics in Quijano’s casual reference to the Peruvian vernacular dance chicha, which with other Indigenous-infused dances like salsa is cutting through the “Arguedian knot” of colonialized identity.

This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as the film’s Merlin/Oberon. The Dionysian current of this Merlin-Oberlin-Grant flow I call “magical weakness,” a strategic male self-weakening for gendered democratic flourishing.

The Belgian philosopher of science and trained chemist Isabelle Stengers is famous for her creative conception of “cosmopolitics,” an ontological pluralism and a practicing scientist’s pragmatic compromise between reductivist orthodoxy and postmodern(ish) solipsism. In Stengers’ cosmopolitics, each science’s reality-claims are limited by its history, disciplinary guardrails, and laboratory or field constraints on the production of new “factishes” (Bruno Latour’s term for entities, such as neutrinos, discovered in history but retroactively timeless). One implication of Stenger’s cosmopolitics for the human sciences (exemplified by anthropology) is that every encounter between a researcher and a subject is, and should be approached as, a kind of dance. In Stengers’ recent Making Sense in Common, she repeatedly describes the staging of such scientific dances as “ontological choreography,” seeking a coalition of progressive members of the “commons”: a cosmopolitical dance of all beings.

In recent decades, global social movements have increasingly coalesced around the pursuit of recognition. This article scrutinizes an enduring and far-reaching popular movement in Iran sparked by the tragic death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, which stands as a poignant embodiment of the collective quest for recognition across multiple dimensions. This article systematically addresses three pivotal inquiries. First, it meticulously traces the historical trajectory of issues involving the hijab within contemporary Iran, unearthing its origins as far back as the 1930s. Second, it employs Axel Honneth's multifaceted theory of misrecognition to unveil the intricate layers of misrecognition closely linked with the hijab in Iran. This encompasses the coercive regulation of women's bodies, legal disparities, and societal pressures culminating in diminished self-esteem and the inflation of male self-confidence. Third, this article emphatically underscores the integral significance of recognition, redistribution, and representation, particularly in the context of marginalized groups within Iranian society. While originating as a protest against a mandatory wearing of the hijab, the "Woman, Life, Freedom " movement transcends the confines of this singular issue to include more extensive struggles encompassing women's rights, resistance to religious oppression, and the assertion of individual freedoms. This comprehensive and rigorously analyzed investigation furnishes nuanced insights into the intricate socio-political landscape of contemporary Iran, underscored by the irrefutable significance of recognition as a transformative and indispensable facet of the broader pursuit of social justice.

I will begin this comparative analysis with Quine, focusing on the front matter and first chapter of Word and Object (alongside From a Logical Point of View and two other short pieces), attempting to illuminate there a (1) basis of excessive, yet familiar, chaos, (2) method of improvised, dramatic distortion, and (3) consequent neo-Pragmatist metaphysics. Having elaborated this Quinian basis, method and metaphysics, I will then show that they can be productively translated into James Mercer’s poetic lyrics for The Shins, with an emphasis on the first song, entitled “Caring is Creepy,” from their debut studio album, Oh, Inverted World! Finally, I will explain why Quine and Mercer are particularly suited to this translation (in contrast to other philosophically-rich pop lyricists such as Bob Dylan, and other pragmatist philosophers like Robert Brandom), in the course of which important implications will emerge for our globalized world today.

Because my students are always telling me I'm too subtle, and (to quote the Brazilian liberation pedagogue Paolo Freire) I "love and trust" my students - please (re)watch the oldest Star Wars film (Episode IV - A New Hope) in light of the following analysis, whose conclusion is as follows: since (1) Star Wars is pro-Viet Cong, (2) today’s closest analogy to the Viet Cong is Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, (3) Star Wars is also pro-Asian religious philosophy (East Asian Daosim), (4) Palestinian liberation theology is a (West) Asian (Christian) religious philosophy, and (e) Star Wars is implicitly pro-genderfluid; thus (5) Star Wars logically affirms the Palestinian right to genderfluid armed resistance, whose (6) Jedi Knights = Daoist sage/knights = Viet Cong = Al-Qassam Brigades. In sum, Star Wars (1977) logically affirms the Palestinian right to genderfluid armed resistance.

In his 1992 Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song, process philosopher Charles Hartshorne argues that an important causal factor (alongside natural selection) of birdsong is their joy in singing. In this article, I offer a new interpretation of this work, focusing on one of its star species, the northern mockingbird (mimus polyglottos), tentatively concluding that at least this one songbird should be recognized as an artist in the medium of vocal music, which constitutes at least one case of what I term “metahuman artistry.”

This article, composed six months after the Oct. 7th Hamas operation “Al-Aqsa Flood,” in the shadow of Israel’s retaliatory genocide, was catalyzed by a viral social media video with alternating clips of Palestinian and Native American people dancing in defiant resistance to ongoing white settler colonial ethnic cleansing and genocide, in loving embrace of their own Indigenous ways of being. After an introductory setting of the stage for this video, the first section rehearses the two historical chapters of dance scholar Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Always Danced, emphasizing the paradoxical late nineteenth-century campaigns (1) criminalizing Indigenous American dances, and (2) appropriating these dances and dancers for non-Indigenous audiences. The second section then pivots to Australian choreographer Nicholas Rowe’s Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, emphasizing the appropriation of a traditional shepherd dance (Dabke) into the Zionist project of fabricating an orientalist tradition to justify their colonization. Finally, the concluding section spotlights Palestine’s Birzeit University and the El-Funoun folkdance troupe as exemplars, captured in the Palestinian hip hop song’s neologism “Palest-Indians,” of loving Indigenous death-defying dance resistance.

Despite Spinoza’s prominence in Joyce’s Ulysses, almost nothing in the Joyce Industry’s hundred years has been written about him. My first section reviews three exceptions to this trend, which view the character Leopold Bloom as modeled on Spinoza’s (1) life, (2) redefinition of prophecy, and (3) the “attribute” of thought thinking thought. My second section follows a fourth Joycean to the Marxist Antonio Negri’s essay on Spinozist freedom and Joyce, from which I derive a fourth figure of Bloom as (4) a liberating prosthesis for infinite democracy. And my final section applies my previous interpretation of Spinoza’s “intuition” as poetry to Ulysses, interpreted as an epic prose poem where Joyce as a Spinozist God poly-conjugationally persecutes a poly-subjugated Bloom, including with pervasive antisemitism, thus making Ulysses more satirical Inferno than happy Divine Comedy. However, strategically channeling Spinoza and his philosophy more powerfully into Bloom renders him an ethically-politically Stoic hero, defiantly prophesizing a democratization of Joycean conjugation, from persecuting poly-subjugated Others to joyful self-conjugating in search of radical democracy and just peace.

As I have explored elsewhere, the Birmingham Philosophy Guild, which my former students and I re-founded in 2012, is a team of community members who engage in theoretical discussion, support group self-cultivation, and community activism. To further promote the guild as a catalyst for progressive social change, the present article connects it to both the popular cultural phenomenon of the “X-Men” – to make the guild more appealing to students and laypeople – and to the cutting-edge contemporary French philosophy of Étienne Balibar – to make the guild more appealing to professors and culture workers. Moreover, the article connects these low- and high-brow phenomena to each other as well, thereby illustrating the political relevance of the lower, as well as a weakness in the higher, pursuant to social justice activism today.

In this article, I apply Australian logician and ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, specifically its alternative logic of “the dance of interaction,” to a controversial community-engagement program in my home state of Alabama. At Rural Studio, Auburn University students design free housing and public works for one of the poorest regions in the United States, known as the “Black Belt.” Through the lens of Plumwood’s ecofeminist dancing logic, the marginalized source of Rural Studio’s survival is revealed to be the resilience of the disempowered majority-Black community. Inspired thereby, I sketch an ecofeminist choreography with three “dancing” concepts (namely Plumwood’s “the master model,” Vandana Shiva’s “nature’s logic,” and Ariel Salleh’s “holding”), acknowledging the resilience of the disempowered as a necessary step toward an ethically-sustainable aesthetics.

In this article, I argue that Dante's philosophical goal is what I term "self-angelizing," an ennobling philosophical education granting one the knowledge and power of an angel, which the medieval scholastics conceived as celestial intelligences. Dante's own path to self-angelizing begins in his early New Life, which approaches a living Beatrice as exemplar of terrestrial angels. Next, Dante's middle-period Banquet discusses following Beatrice into self-angelizing through an education in philosophical virtue. Finally, in his climactic Paradise, Dante performs his own self-angelizing. The upshot of this journey is Dante's prophecy of an egalitarian transhumanism.

In this article, I offer a new philosophical interpretation of Virgil's _Aeneid_, dually centered on the queens of Olympus and Carthage. More specifically, I show how the philosopher-poet Virgil deploys Dido's Junonian _furor_ as the Aristotelian matter of the unjust Roman _imperium_, the feminist counterforce to the patriarchal force disguised as peaceful order. The first section explores Virgil's political and biographical background for the raw materials of a feminist, anti-imperial political philosophy. The second section, following Marilynn Desmond, situates the continuing misogynist condemnation of Virgil's two goddess-queens in the context of their honored centrality in Roman and Carthaginian culture. The third section reinterprets Virgil's goddess-queens as agents of _furor_ as (apparently mad) feminist counterforce to the (actually mad) unjust force of the Roman empire via its agents Jupiter and Aeneas. The fourth section translates these poetic-philosophical interpretations into prose, arguing that Dido's Junonian _furor_ is the Aristotelian matter constituting the unjust forms of Roman _imperium_. And the conclusion applies the latter analysis to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's _Empire_, suggesting Dido as a model for the "multitude" in the fight against the imperial injustice of today's globalized empire.

Partiendo de mi exploración previa sobre el papel de la danza en la obra del filósofo político francés contemporáneo Jacques Rancière en su libro Aisthesis, publicado por primera vez en francés en 2011, el presente ensayo se centra en otro libro publicado originalmente en el mismo año, Las distancias del cine. Después de haber establecido previamente que el núcleo del método filosófico de Rancière implica un análisis de homónimos filosóficos en parejas conceptuales figurativas de baile, comienzo aplicando ese método al primer capítulo de Distancias titulado “El vértigo cinematográfico: Hitchcock-Vertov y vuelta”. Allí identifico dos series de tales parejas de baile de la siguiente manera: la caída vertiginosa capitalista controlada por la imagen de Hitchcock y el baile equilibrado y comunista de Vertov que iguala los movimientos. Luego, critico la marginalización implícita de las mujeres y los cuerpos femeninos en las películas y el capítulo, incluyendo a la mejor amiga y ex prometida del protagonista de Hitchcock, así como a las cosmetólogas y operadoras de centralita de Vertov. Finalmente, ofrezco una corrección basada en la vida protofeminista de mi abuela, una vez cosmetóloga, operadora de centralita y modelo amateur de Glamour Shots, mi abuela Louise Nunnelley o “Mamaw”. Estos son la base material no reconocida de la filosofía democrática radical de Rancière, las bailarinas específicamente encarnadas y posicionadas que siguen perdiéndose en su baile figurativo.

Though Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner’s _On Trade Justice_ admirably incorporates the history of European philosophy and U.S. government, their otherwise reasonable proposals rest on dubious grounds. The book derives both much of its appeal, and its primary vulnerability, from a cluster of central terms that are situated precariously at the intersection of metaphors and concepts, or what Lakoff and Johnson call “metaphorical concepts.” In this article, I explore the three most important such terms, as featured in the following paraphrase of theirs: “_Trade_ is an _embedded ground_ of justice.” For each italicized term, I conclude, Risse and Wollner vacil-late between its most conceptual and metaphorical meanings, thereby attempting to (a) stretch “trade” to identify prehistoric exchange with global capitalism, so as to (b) rebrand the contextual “ground” of this universal activity as a foundation, even though (c) foundations “embedded” in other foundations simply reduce to their lowest common denominator. The latter, in this case, is global capitalism, the most immoral practices of which they are thereby pressured to defend, including temporary forms of the very exploitation that they so persuasively reconceive and otherwise condemn.