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120Ethical Life After HumanismIn 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
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36 Engage the Enemy: Cavell, Comedies of Remarriage, and the Politics of FriendshipIn Shannon Sullivan & Dennis J. Schmidt (eds.), Difficulties of ethical life, Fordham University Press. pp. 88-111. 2008.
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10Water and Wing Give Wonder: Trans-Species CosmopolitanismPhaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 8 (2). 2013.An interspecies ethics flips the claim of human exceptionalism several times on its head. Here we consider not only our own species’s animality but also the sacred experiences discovered across a range of species. The essay begins with an excursion alongside wild baboons who, as witnessed by Barbara Smuts, display a sense of wonder before a river’s still pools of water. From there we travel up and down the vertical vector of spiritual experience. The disgusting and the ridiculous at the bottom e…Read more
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23The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and OthersJournal 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
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1Uproarious: How Feminists and Other Comic Subversives Speak TruthUniversity of Minnesota. 2019.A radical new approach to humor, where traditional targets become its agents Humor is often dismissed as cruel ridicule or harmless fun. But what if laughter is a vital force to channel rage against patriarchy, Islamophobia, mass incarceration? To create moments of empathy and dialogue between #Black Lives Matter and the police? These and other such questions are at the heart of this powerful reassessment of humor. Placing theorists in conversation with comedians, Uproarious offers a full-fron…Read more
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33The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial HubrisCornell University Press. 2018.Cynthia Willett brings together diverse insights from social psychology, classical and contemporary literature, and legal and justice theory to redefine the basis of the moral and legal person. Feminists, communitarians, and postmodern thinkers have made clear that classical liberalism, with its emphasis on individual autonomy and excessive rationalism, is severely limited. Although she is sympathetic with the liberal view, Willett finds it necessary to go further. For her, attention to the soci…Read more
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29Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad in Conversation with Bruce Janz, Jessica Locke, and Cynthia WillettJournal of World Philosophies 4 (2): 124-153. 2019.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
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32Response to Bill Martin and Andrew Cutrofello on Irony in the Age of EmpireJournal 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
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11Ethics for a Layered Self: Laughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomephiloSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism 5 (1): 70-79. 2015.In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics for a Layered SelfLaughter, Reciprocity, Generosity, HomeCynthia WillettI can imagine no better way to respond to these insightful readings than to turn the spotlight on the important books that Ann Murphy and Megan Craig have written on affect and ethics! Craig’s book, Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, weaves radical empiricism into phenomenology as only a philosopher who is also an artist could. Her evocat…Read more
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19The Shadow of Hegel's Science of LogicProceedings of the Hegel Society of America 10 85-92. 1990.
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Tropes of Orientation: Between Dialectic and DeconstructionDissertation, The Pennsylvania State University. 1988.The dissertation seeks to locate a post-Hegelian response to the question of orientation. Such a response would neither return to the "totalizing drive" of dialectic nor yield to the "nihilistic gestures" of deconstruction but would traverse and transfigure both modes of thought. Part 1 isolates non-dialectical tropes which implicitly orient crucial transitions in Hegel's Logic, Phenomenology, and Aesthetics. Textual analyses of these tropes suggest that dialectical movement depends paradoxicall…Read more
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33Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture. By Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY, 2006Hypatia 23 (3): 224-226. 2008.
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11Philosophical Feminism and Popular Culture (edited book)Lexington Books. 2012.The eight essays contained in this book explore the portrayal of women, and various philosophical responses to that portrayal in contemporary post-civil rights society. They bring feminist voices to the conversation about gender and attests to the importance of feminist critique in what is sometimes claimed to be a post-feminist era
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The Sting of Shame: Ridicule, Rape, and Social BondsIn Naomi Zack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race, Oxford University Press Usa. 2017.
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27Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and FreedomIndiana University Press. 2008.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
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36Book review: Joan Williams. Unbending gender: Why family and work conflict and what to do about it. oxford: Oxford university press, 2000 (review)Hypatia 19 (3): 228-231. 2004.
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713Going to Bed White and Waking Up Arab: On Xenophobia, Affect Theories of Laughter, and the Social Contagion of the Comic StageCritical Philosophy of Race 2 (1): 84-105. 2014.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
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438Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across Species: Expanding the Ethical Scope of ErosphiloSOPHIA: 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
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376Water and Wing Give Wonder: Cross-Species CosmopolitanismPhaenEx 8 (2): 185-208. 2013.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
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