Devin Zane Shaw

This article introduces Francis Jeanson's “Preface” to the first edition (1952) of Black Skin, White Masks by examining how it situates Fanon's work in relation to liberal antiracism, existentialism, and Marxism. In the first section, I criticize Homi K. Bhabha's and Kwame Anthony Appiah's forewords to Black Skin, White Masks for vitiating the theoretical and practical grounds of Fanon's work. In the second section, I show how Jeanson critiques liberal antiracism, defends the revolutionary character of Fanon's work, and responds to Fanon's criticisms of Sartre's “Black Orpheus”—indeed, it is the only contemporary response to Fanon from within Sartre's inner circle. I conclude by examining how Jeanson fails to identify how whiteness, in an antiblack society, operates as false universality, when it is unmarked racial particularity.

In this essay, I read Mabogo More’s work as a philosophy of emancipation, which I define as an approach to philosophy that aims to contribute to struggles for liberation. I show that there are numerous similarities between his work and Simone de Beauvoir’s thought as set out in The Ethics of Ambiguity. I argue that both of them critique mainstream philosophy’s so-called neutralism. I then reconstruct More’s argument that Sartre’s concept of contingency contributes to antiracist discourse and practice. I conclude by arguing that More’s concept of contingency also subverts the claim, made by practitioners of the Western philosophical tradition, that the problems it considers are necessary and endogenous to that tradition – a claim that has been used to preclude a radical critique of this tradition from the approaches that it excludes.

In this essay, I examine Diagne’s claim that the fundamental intuition of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s thought is this: African art is philosophy. Diagne argues that it is from an experience of African art and an encounter with Bergson’s philosophy that Senghor comes to formulate his philosophical thought, which is better understood as vitalist rather than essentialist. I conclude by arguing that Senghor’s vitalism is a philosophy of becoming which nevertheless lacks an account of radical political change.

Schelling is often thought to be a protean thinker whose work is difficult to approach or interpret. Devin Zane Shaw shows that the philosophy of art is the guiding thread to understanding Schelling's philosophical development from his early works in 1795-1796 through his theological turn in 1809-1810. Schelling's philosophy of art is the 'keystone' of the system; it unifies his idea of freedom and his philosophy of nature. Schelling's idea of freedom is developed through a critique of the formalism of Kant's and Fichte's practical philosophies, and his nature-philosophy is developed to show how subjectivity and objectivity emerge from a common source in nature. The philosophy of art plays a dual role in the system. First, Schelling argues that artistic activity produces through the artwork a sensible realization of the ideas of philosophy. Second, he argues that artistic production creates the possibility of a new mythology that can overcome the socio-political divisions that structure the relationships between individuals and society. Shaw's careful analysis shows how art, for Schelling, is the highest expression of human freedom.

Jacques Rancière's work has challenged many of the assumptions of contemporary continental philosophy by placing equality at the forefront of emancipatory political thought and aesthetics. Drawing on the claim that egalitarian politics persistently appropriates elements from political philosophy to engage new forms of dissensus, Devin Zane Shaw argues that Rancière's work also provides an opportunity to reconsider modern philosophy and aesthetics in light of the question of equality. In Part I, Shaw examines Rancière's philosophical debts to the 'good sense' of Cartesian egalitarianism and the existentialist critique of identity. In Part II, he outlines Rancière's critical analyses of Walter Benjamin and Clement Greenberg and offers a reinterpretation of Rancière's debate with Alain Badiou in light of the philosophical differences between Schiller and Schelling. From engaging debates about political subjectivity from Descartes to Sartre, to delineating the egalitarian stakes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art from Schiller to Badiou, this book presents a concise tour through a series of egalitarian moments found within the histories of modern philosophy and aesthetics.

This essay presents an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’ supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition, I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects

In this essay, I propose a mutually constructive reading of the work of Jacques Rancière and Jean-Paul Sartre. On the one hand, I argue that Rancière's egalitarian political thought owes several important conceptual debts to Sartre's Being and Nothingness , especially in his use of the concepts of freedom, contingency and facticity. These concepts play a dual role in Rancière's thought. First, he appropriates them to show how the formation of subjectivity through freedom is a dynamic that introduces new ways of speaking, being and doing, instead of being a mode of assuming an established identity. Second, Rancière uses these concepts to demonstrate the contingency of any situation or social order, a contingency that is the possibility of egalitarian praxis. On the other hand, I also argue that reading Sartre with Rancière makes possible the reconstruction of Sartre's project within the horizon of freedom and equality rather than that of authenticity

In this essay I attempt to defend Badiou's conception of inaesthetics, drawn from the Handbook of Inaesthetics, from the pertinent criticisms of Rancière. In doing so, it is possible to delimit the intra-philosophical effects (truth effects) of artistic events (this combination being the domain of inaesthetics). Badiou can be defended from all of Rancière's objections, save the objection that inaesthetics asserts a 'propriety of art.' However, in granting this objection, it is possible to open a different question regarding Badiou's work: what is the status of Badiou's comments on art outside of the Handbook of Inaesthetics? Through a reading of Le siècle, I show that, for Badiou, the importance of art extends beyond inaesthetics to other domains of thought. Yet Badiou has yet to answer the question of how art and truth relate outside of the domain of inaesthetics

In this essay, I attempt to show that the “war on terror” intensifies the use of biopolitical techniques. One such example, which I take as a point of departure, is Guantánamo Bay. We must place this camp in its proper genealogy with the many camps of the twentieth century. However, this genealogy is not a genealogy of the extremes of political space during and after the twentieth century; it is a genealogy of the transformation of political space itself. I will attempt to show this in three steps: first, a description and critique of the biopolitical in both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who I take as exemplary in their analyses; second, an analysis of contemporary biopolitical techniques (including the camp), which enables us to avoid the liberal-democratic ideological misunderstanding of the war on terror; and third, a discussion regarding resistance to biopolitical techniques.