-
51Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman (edited book)Routledge. 1997.The first-ever compilation of articles that highlights the intersection of Derridean and feminist theories--a work that represents the extensive and diverse response feminist theorists have had to Derrida, particularly to the issues of gender, identity, and the construction of the subject.
-
10The Drama of IndependenceIn Laura Hengehold & Nancy Bauer (eds.), A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir, Wiley. 2017.This chapter looks at how Beauvoir appropriates Lacan's account of the family complexes in The Second Sex, and in particular how Lacan's conception of infantile prematurity and instinctual (vital) insufficiency illuminates a conceptual conundrum in The Second Sex, namely the tension between the value of independence, autonomy, and active agency and the suspicion of its origin in familial life, an origin that also provides the foundations for hierarchical sexual difference. The complexities of th…Read more
-
27Between Two Betweens: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of EducationJournal of Speculative Philosophy 31 (1): 119-134. 2017.ABSTRACT This article argues that Hannah Arendt provides an illuminating perspective on the “crisis” of education. The meaning and purpose of education, in Arendt's view, its fundamental role in civilization, is to impart an old world to new beings, preparing children for “renewing a common world” by establishing an active bond to the past that does not just encumber but enables agency. Because her work does not cohere with either contemporary liberal or contemporary conservative criticisms or j…Read more
-
6Fear of Breakdown: Politics and Psychoanalysis, by Noëlle McAfeePhilosophy Today 67 (1): 231-238. 2023.
-
9Feminist takes on post-truthPhilosophy and Social Criticism 49 (2): 125-138. 2023.This volume argues that feminist theory can provide distinctive and potent resources to confront and take on post-truth. By ‘post-truth’, we refer to a variety of discourses and practices that subvert the sense that we share a common world. Because post-truth undermines the norms and conditions that make possible shared political practices and institutions, post-truth politics is fundamentally anti-democratic. The most common response to post-truth has, however, come from those who call for rein…Read more
-
15Truth, Illusion, and Their (Dis)ContentsJournal of Speculative Philosophy 37 (1): 99-116. 2023.ABSTRACT This article returns to Freud’s 1927 The Future of an Illusion in order to explore and elaborate the relations among identity, belief, and affect. Reading the competing authorial and opponent voices in the text, I ask whether realism about illusion is consistent with a belief in the ultimate victory of reason in human civilization. I return to Future of an Illusion for two reasons: first, we can see in this work the ambiguous and tumultuous intersection between “group psychology” and “p…Read more
-
26The Image of the People: Freud and Schmitt's Political Anti-ProgressivismTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2011 (157): 84-107. 2011.ExcerptIn “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud defines nations as “the collective individuals of mankind” and suggests that their development recapitulates individual development.1 Like individuals, nations provide a structure for the internal organization of the passions, and, also like individuals, each nation has ideals that exhort, order, and orient its constitution and forces, imparting an image of unity that establishes borders, delimits hostilities, and guards equilibrium. In …Read more
-
30Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual DifferenceHypatia 15 (3): 19-44. 2000.By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference, I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sp…Read more
-
29Flirting with the Truth: Derrida's Discourse with'Woman'and WenchesIn Ellen Feder, Mary C. Rawlinson & Emily Zakin (eds.), Derrida and Feminism: Recasting the Question of Woman, Routledge. pp. 21--51. 1997.
-
1Inheriting the Law: The Birth of Sexual DifferenceDissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook. 1997.This dissertation develops a psychoanalytic model of ideology which accounts for the formation of sexual difference. I attempt to distinguish both the origin of sexually differentiated identity and the necessity of a political force at work in founding that origin. With Lacan, I locate the origin in the subjects's psychical accession to the Law of the Father, an accession that is linked to the individual establishment of a relation to the phallus as transcendental signifier. I advance a critique…Read more
-
21Crisscrossing Cosmopolitanism: State-Phobia, World Alienation, and the Global SoulJournal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (1): 58-72. 2015.ABSTRACT This article argues that there is an elemental confluence between the moral ideal of cosmopolitanism and the economic and commercial practices of globalization. By looking at Foucault's and Arendt's readings of Kant, I show that the cosmopolitan premise of humanity is bound to an eschatological vision of the end of politics. In aligning Foucault's discussion of state-phobia with Arendt's discussion of world alienation, I argue that the eclipse of the public realm is intrinsic to the lib…Read more
-
Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytic Social Theory (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2001.Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subj…Read more
-
90
-
490Bridging the social and the symbolic: Toward a feminist politics of sexual differenceHypatia 15 (3): 19-44. 2000.: By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unco…Read more
-
260Differences in equality: Beauvoir's unsettling of the universalJournal of Speculative Philosophy 14 (2): 104-120. 2000.
-
20Beyond the Sexual Contract: Traversing the Fantasy of Fraternal AllianceIn Kelly Oliver & Steve Edwin (eds.), Between the psyche and the social: psychoanalytic social theory, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 159. 2002.
-
21Book review: Kelly Oliver. Subjectivity without subjects: From abject fathers to desiring mothers. Lanham, md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998 (review)Hypatia 16 (3): 176-182. 2001.
-
38Godless Jews and Secular Christians: A Commentary on Gil Anidjar's “Jesus and Monotheism”Southern Journal of Philosophy 51 (S1): 184-195. 2013.Responding to Gil Anidjar's “Jesus and Monotheism” and its posing of the “Christian Question,” in this paper I return to Freud's Moses and Monotheism and its narrative of Jewish self-division. In highlighting the retroactive formation of identity, I note both its temporal dimension and the force of exclusivity it generates. This reading suggests a contrast between such theo-political communities, with their legacies of affiliation, and Christian self-absolution (the refusal of constitutive self-…Read more
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |