•  653
    Like lynching and other mass hysterias, xenophobia exemplifies a contagious, collective wave of energy and hedonic quality that can point toward a troubling unpredictability at the core of political and social systems. While earlier studies of mass hysteria and popular discourse assume that cooler heads (aka rational individuals with their logic) could and should regain control over those emotions that are deemed irrational, and that boundaries are assumed healthy only when intact, affect studie…Read more
  •  640
    Perhaps no other novel has received as much attention from moral philosophers as South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace . The novel is ethically compelling and yet no moral theory explains its force. Despite clear Kantian moments, neither rationalism nor self-respect can account for the strange ethical task that the protagonist sets for himself. Calling himself the dog man, like the ancient Cynics, this shamelessly cynical protagonist takes his cues for ethics not from humans but from ani…Read more
  •  580
    The Seriously erotic Politics of feminist laughter
    with Julie Willett and Yael D. Sherman
    Social Research: An International Quarterly 79 (1): 217-246. 2012.
  •  399
    In an era of global interdependence, the concept of autonomy may no longer name our core moral need. Shifting friendships and enmities across political boundaries bear significant consequences for the individual. Perhaps social alliances and hostilities have always had an impact on the flourishing of individuals and communities. But globalization (especially as viewed through the technology of the information age) magnifies the impact of external forces on sovereign bodies. These forces remind i…Read more
  •  387
    Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across Species: Expanding the Ethical Scope of Eros
    philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 2 (2): 111-130. 2012.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading i…Read more
  •  339
    Any interspecies ethics could do well to flip the claim of human exceptionalism several times on its head. Before entertaining a claim to re-naturalize human beings (with the risk of a reductive model of biology), the remarkable communicative, cultural, and cognitive skills of other creatures deserve more investigation. The usual line-up of metaphysical suspects for shoring up human superiority—impartial reason, moral or spiritual freedom, and self-awareness—have been used to gravely overstate o…Read more
  •  214
  •  83
    Analyzing Oppression, by Ann Cudd (review)
    Radical Philosophy Review 10 (1): 91-96. 2007.
  •  82
    Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate (edited book)
    Wiley-Blackwell. 1998.
    This wide-ranging anthology of classic and newly-commissioned essays brings together the major theories of multiculturalism from a multiplicity of philosophical perspectives
  •  72
  •  69
    Ethical Life After Humanism
    In Hasana Sharp & Chloë Taylor (eds.), Feminist Philosophies of Life, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 67-84. 2016.
    In this essay, we aim to ground an alliance between Cynthia Willett’s theory of an ethics of eros and Hasana Sharp’s argument for a politics of renaturalization. Both approaches seek a vocabulary and practices for ethical life, which is not circumscribed by the requirement of rationality and is deeply attentive to relationships. The relations to which an ethics of eros and renaturalization must attend include social relations – the tender ministrations of mothers, lovers, and friends that sustai…Read more
  •  51
    Response to Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello on Irony in the Age of Empire
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 24 (1): 96-99. 2010.
    What a pleasure to have such subtle thinkers and scholars as Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello reflect on the relation of irony and comedy to politics and philosophy through their commentary on my new book. To set the tone, Martin begins with a koan, or a parody of one, “What if a tree told a joke in the woods and there was no one there to hear it?” He means, I believe, to sound a warning on the limits of irony in our serious, or perhaps, Martin would say, our seriously idiotic, times. By the en…Read more
  •  39
    Recenterings of Continental Philosophy
    with Leonard Lawler
    Philosophy Today 54 (Supplement): 3-4. 2010.
  •  35
    Cornel West Matters (review)
    Radical Philosophy Review 9 (1): 93-96. 2006.
  •  34
    In ____Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities__ which includes the first extended philosophical discussion of the works of Frederick Douglass, Cynthia Willett puts forward a novel theory of ethical subjectivity that is aimed to counter prevailing pathologies of sexist, racist Eurocentric culture. Weaving together accounts of the self drawn from African-American and European philosophies, psychoanalysis, slave narratives and sociology, Willett interrogates what Hegel locates as the core of th…Read more
  •  28
    Interspecies Ethics
    Columbia University Press. 2014.
    Interspecies Ethics explores animals' vast capacity for agency, justice, solidarity, humor, and communication across species. The social bonds diverse animals form provide a remarkable model for communitarian justice and cosmopolitan peace, challenging the human exceptionalism that drives modern moral theory. Situating biosocial ethics firmly within coevolutionary processes, this volume has profound implications for work in social and political thought, contemporary pragmatism, Africana thought,…Read more
  •  26
    Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia Willett interact in this exchange with different aspects of Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad’s book Human Being, Bodily Being. Through “constructive inter-cultural thinking”, they seek to engage with Ram-Prasad’s “lower-case p” phenomenology, which exemplifies “how to think otherwise about the nature and role of bodiliness in human experience”. This exchange, which includes Ram-Prasad’s reply to their interventions, pushes the reader to reflect more about different …Read more
  •  24
    Philosophical Thresholds
    with Leonard Lawler
    Philosophy Today 55 (Supplement): 5-7. 2011.
  •  23
    The Political Force of the Comedic
    with Julie Webber, Mehnaaz Momen, Jessyka Finley, Rebecca Krefting, and Julie Willett
    Contemporary Political Theory 20 (2): 419-446. 2021.
  •  23
    Tropics of desire: Freud and Derrida
    Research in Phenomenology 22 (1): 138-151. 1992.
  •  22
  •  22
    Cognition and Eros (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 23 (1): 137-138. 1991.
  •  21
    Comedy, from social ridicule to the unruly laughter of the carnival, provides effective tools for reinforcing social patterns of domination as well as weapons for emancipation. In Irony in the Age of Empire, Cynthia Willett asks: What could embody liberation better than laughter? Why do the oppressed laugh? What vision does the comic world prescribe? For Willett, the comic trumps standard liberal accounts of freedom by drawing attention to bodies, affects, and intimate relationships, topics whic…Read more
  •  21
    The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and Others
    with Julie Willett
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (4): 535-546. 2020.
    ABSTRACT The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret …Read more