Elyse Purcell

The character and extent of disabilities, especially cognitive disability, have posed significance problems for existing moral theories. Certain philosophers have even questioned the moral personhood of people with disabilities and have argued that people with profound cognitive impairments should not be granted the same moral status as those who are cognitively able-bodied. This paper proposes an alternative understanding of moral personhood as relational rather than individuated. This relational moral personhood finds its foundation in the clinical practice and psychoanalysis of Julia Kristeva and the hermeneutic narrative identity of Paul Ricoeur. One consequence of this relational personhood is a new understanding of moral status through narrative co-authorship rather than intellectual or social capacity. Another consequence is a refiguration of narrative identity as narrative interdependence

Recently Slavoj Žižek has critiqued certain "feminist" readings of Lacan's feminine structure of desire, including Julia Kristeva, for postulating a feminine discourse which is supposedly beyond the phallic economy. This paper defends Kristeva's position, both by noting how Žižek Hegelian ontology prevents him from utilizing the resources of sexual difference and by clarifying Kristeva's double account of maternity. One consequence of this investigation is that a Kristevean theory of desire will provide one with a new form of political intervention by isolating sites of resistence that Žižek disavows. Another consequence is a refiguration of "feminist" psychoanalytic practice.

In many ways, globalization created the problem of representation for feminist solidarity across the borders of the nation state. This problem is one of presenting a cohesive identity for representation in the transnational public sphere. This paper proposes a solution to this problem of a cohesive identity for women’s representation by drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur. What these women seem to have in common are shared political aims, but they have no basis for those aims. This paper provides a basis for these aims by turning to Ricœur’s work on collective memory from Memory, History, Forgetting. The paper concludes that it is the shared testimony through narrative hospitality, which can provide a foundation for a social bond for those with common political aims. More specifically, this common knowledge provides a justification for the representation of women and their allies in the transnational public sphere.

In the latter part of the eigthteenth century, philosophers faced a problem with respect to moral freedom. They were concerned not only with an account of how one could be free in the Newtonian system of nature but also with how it might be possible to represent that freedom. The imagination provided an answer. The imagination, thought to have limitless potential through aesthetic experiences and judgments, provided the bridge between our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world and the conditions of our morality. In constructing a system of knowledge, the possibility of moral freedom set the rational limit to our abstract, intellectual understanding of the world.1 For Immanuel Kant, this possibility of...

Recently Slavoj Žižek has critiqued certain "feminist" readings of Lacan's feminine structure of desire, including Julia Kristeva, for postulating a feminine discourse which is supposedly beyond the phallic economy. This paper defends Kristeva's position, both by noting how Žižek Hegelian ontology prevents him from utilizing the resources of sexual difference and by clarifying Kristeva's double account of maternity. One consequence of this investigation is that a Kristevean theory of desire will provide one with a new form of political intervention by isolating sites of resistence that Žižek disavows. Another consequence is a refiguration of "feminist" psychoanalytic practice.