Nicole Yokum

Feminist philosopher Lisa Tessman argues that sensitivity and attention to others’ suffering is a burdened virtue: virtuous insofar as it serves as a ground of possibility for other virtues, but also burdensome because, taking into consideration the background condition of extreme suffering in the world, it evokes anguish by always being joined to its opposite, indifference. For Tessman, indifference is horrifying and an irredeemable meta-vice. However, in this essay, I bring Tessman into conversation with critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno to argue for a more nuanced feminist ethical appraisal of indifference. Adorno’s critique of coldness shares several important elements with Tessman’s critique of indifference; for Adorno, coldness made the Holocaust possible, and overcoming it means striving to cultivate identification-based solidarity. But Adorno’s dialectical approach to coldness has important implications for a character-focused liberatory ethical project, and his testimony to his own coldness, as a Holocaust survivor, introduces further complexity to this picture. Drawing on and moving beyond Adorno’s work, I argue that certain kinds of coldness—in particular, critical coldness and self-protective coldness—can have liberatory feminist potential. I introduce the concept of liberatory vices to delineate this new category of dispositions.

I pay tribute to bell hooks in this essay by reflecting on the multiple provocations she offers to me and my feminist philosophy students: on revolutionary vs. reform feminism; the need for self-love and healing in the quest for social transformation; and deeply entrenched racist and sexist barriers to multiracial feminist coalition building. I consider hooks’s position, within academic spaces, as a Black Feminist killjoy who distinctively rejects respectability while offering sanctuary to those, like me, who come to theory from a place of pain. I conclude by raising questions about hooks’s approach to the relationship between theory and praxis, arguing that she envisions a radical critical praxis theory while acknowledging that there may have been some limits on her “revolutionary” love.

ABSTRACT The Marquis de Sade’s Juliette—well-known as an outrageously murderous, hedonistic anti-heroine—captured the attention of some of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Most of these engagements with Sade have received some critical attention. However, Foucault’s distinctive remarks on Juliette in The Order of Things have gone overlooked. I situate Foucault’s interpretation of Juliette alongside and against Adorno’s and Lacan’s: exploring his positioning of her as a liminal figure, situated in the Classical age on the cusp of modernity, and his allusion to the way in which her “solitary—and endless” “prosperities” exceed our grasp.

Frantz Fanon’s analysis of white negrophobic women’s masochistic sexuality and sexual fantasies in Black Skin, White Masks, is, as T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting notes, among his most contentious work for feminists. Susan Brownmiller, in her 1975 classic Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, charges Fanon not only with hating women but also with being personally confused and anguished, on account of this portion of the text. In this essay, I examine Fanon’s approach to theorizing white female negrophobia in light of his sociogenic project and the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition with which he was working; I also take a close look at his potentially most problematic remarks, from a feminist angle. I argue against Brownmiller's interpretation of Fanon as condoning rape or expressing personal attitudes through these lines, maintaining instead that he is ultimately calling for psycho-affective change.