Shannon Sullivan

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Editors' IntroductionAlan D. Schrift and Shannon SullivanThe articles in this special issue of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy were selected from revised versions of papers that were originally presented at the sixtieth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas October 13–15, 2022.Michael Hardt of Duke University and Patricia Pisters of the University of Amsterdam gave the SPEP 2022 Plenary Addresses, and we are grateful to be able to include their plenary papers in this special issue. Hardt's paper, "The Politics of Articulation and Strategic Multiplicities," treated SPEP members to an early peek at his newest book, The Subversive 70s (Oxford University Press, 2023). In this work, Hardt digs into the powerful resources for social movements that activists and theorists from the 1970s developed. As he argues, in many ways those activists and thinkers were ahead of their times—and also ahead of ours—in understanding how to analyze interwoven multiplicities of power and how to articulate and organize liberation struggles based on those multiplicities. Hardt brilliantly demonstrates how analyzing the progressive and revolutionary social [End Page 237] movements of the '70s can help us not only understand the roots of contemporary social and political struggles but also reclaim critical resources for those struggles.Patricia Pisters's paper, "Thinking with Fire: Elemental Philosophy and Media Technology," draws upon Gaston Bachelard's "fire complexes" to address a variety of pyrotechnical images appearing in contemporary cinema. Noting that elemental philosophy is on the rise in media studies and elsewhere, not least because of current environmental crises, fire is particularly engaging for its metaphorical, "matterphorical," and technological associations. While acknowledging fire as a material medium—cooking, heating, burning, etc.—Pisters's primary focus in her paper is on fire as an immaterial medium, and it is here that she turns to Bachelard's constellation of fire complexes—the Empedocles, Prometheus, and Novalis Complexes—to which she adds her own fourth complex, the Sita Complex. With these complexes, she provides readings of four cinematic productions that elucidate the annihilating, transgressive, sexual, and purifying qualities of fire, and she suggests that these entangled fire complexes present different kinds of combustive knowledge in which the element of fire manifests itself as material phenomenon of nature, the engine for modern life, and immaterial affective reverie of destruction, transgression, and sexuality.The other articles in this special issue have been organized according to five broad groupings. The first grouping, "On Latin American Philosophy," brings together three papers that engage Latin American philosophy, particularly as found in Mexican, Columbian, and Venezuelan history and political movements. In "Radicalizing Localization: Notes on Santiago Castro-Gómez's Genealogies of Coloniality," Julian Rios Acuña argues that Columbian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez develops a radical method of localization. This method allows Castro-Gómez to transform Foucauldian genealogy into genealogies of coloniality that grapple with the complexities of extreme violence produced by colonialism. In "Stefan Gandler's Renewal of Critical Theory from Latin America," Jake M. Bartholomew argues for a version of Critical Theory that is not bound by Europe but also remains true to its first-generation Marxist roots. Relocating to Mexico and advocating for Mexican philosophers, German-born philosopher Stefan Gandler shows how Latin American philosophy can enrich Critical Theory, providing more than can the second and third generations of Critical Theory because of its ability to analyze capitalism from outside the economic perspectives of the Global North. In "Two Versions of the Mestizo [End Page 238] Model: Toward a Theory of Anti-Blackness in Latin American Thought," Miguel Gualdron Ramirez criticizes the anti-Blackness that he sees at the heart of mestizo models of latinidad, or lo latinoamericano. Focusing on the concepts of liberation offered by Venezuelan theorist and politician Simón Bolívar and Mexican philosopher José de Vasconcelos, Ramirez reveals the exclusion and erasure of Black bodies, lives, and histories that ground their versions of Latinx identity and Latin American history. Together these three articles showcase how Latin American philosophy can enrich and expand the scope of Continental philosophy.The second grouping, "Liberatory Limits and Misalignments," features three articles...

Focusing on The Second Sex, this chapter examines concerns about the divisions of gender and race in Beauvoir's work and provides an intersectional reading of the role of physical violence in the gendering and racing of young girls in “The Girl” chapter of the book. The chapter then highlights the role of biology in the existential infrastructure provided in the first three chapters of The Second Sex to argue that Beauvoir can be viewed as a forerunner of contemporary critical understandings of how race becomes biologically real.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America by Jack TurnerShannon SullivanJack Turner Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. xv + 199pp, incl. index.Don’t let the size of this slim volume fool you: Awakening to Race is chock-full of fresh insights and original arguments regarding individualism and race in the American democratic tradition. Individualism in America often takes atomistic forms that are antithetical to a rich sense of the social constitution of the self. For that reason, individualism often is viewed as antithetical to a critical consciousness of how race and white racism operate. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner boldly takes the bull of American individualism by its horns. He argues that the rhetoric of individualism can be used against, rather than in service of an allegedly colorblind society in which independent, post-racial individuals pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The result of Turner’s skillful intervention into American political philosophy is to take back individualism from conservative forces and refashion it into a progressive tool for racial justice movements.Turner sets the stage for his intervention in chapter one, which provides an overview of the book. Beginning with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Awakening to Race proceeds to focus on Frederick Douglass and Ralph Ellison and concludes with James Baldwin. One of the primary tasks of chapter one is to outline the book’s major Emersonian theme, which is that an individualist notion of self-reliance should lead a person to become more, rather than less aware of structural and social injustices. Properly understood, individualism should lead to an awakening to race, as Turner’s book is aptly titled, not to ignoring or failing to see it. An individual who wishes to be self-reliant should be wary and watchful of the ways in which she depends on social structures, including those of social injustice. An atomistic notion of the individual is not adequate to this task; an Emersonian democratic individual is needed instead. As Turner explains with reference to adherents of atomistic individualism, “their failure to awaken to the socially indebted nature of the self desensitizes them to structural—and thus racial—injustice” (11).Chapter two turns to Tocqueville, Emerson, and (to a lesser extent) Thoreau to flesh out this idea. In this chapter, Turner develops [End Page 170] Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as “a politically dynamic ethical ideal, one that can motivate and energize democratic political action” rather than withdrawal from society (29). To do so, Turner references Tocqueville’s analysis of race in the United States, which reveals an affinity between white individualism and white supremacy. White individuals could contrast themselves with black slaves to reassure themselves that they were free while simultaneously ignoring their dependence on social and legal structures of white supremacy to ensure their psychological and personal sense of personhood. Individual self-sufficiency can operate as a racialized marker of freedom that is in bad faith because it evades its dependence on race and racism. With Emerson, Turner argues that genuine self-sufficiency requires reckoning with all sorts of ways that one is dependent on and complicit with societal structures, including those of white supremacy. Drawing on Emerson’s anti-slavery addresses, Turner develops a theory of democratic individual responsibility that requires of genuine self-reliance that it not interfere with the self-reliance of others. This requirement obligates the individual to take political and other forms of action to ensure that his or her free, self-reliant life is not dependent on the exploitation of others (45).In addition to its nonexploitation obligation, democratic individualist responsibility includes a democratic egalitarian obligation. Turner develops the latter idea in chapter three through the work of Frederick Douglas. While Douglas’s notion of self-help often is read as atomistically individualist, Turner shows how it is instead tied to social responsibility. In the case of Douglasian self-help, “ought implies can” and so requiring of people that they help themselves means ensuring that they have the resources available to do so (62). While dominant notions of self-help have been used in the United States...

This article examines how people of color can biologically inherit the deleterious effects of white racism. Drawing primarily on the field of epigenetics, I demonstrate how transgenerational racial disparities are in fact racist disparities that can be manifest physiologically, helping constitute the chemicals, hormones, cells, and fibers of the human body. Epigenetics can be used to demonstrate how white racism can have durable effects on the biological constitution of human beings that are not limited to the specific person who is the target of white racism, but instead extend to that person's offspring. In this way, the field of epigenetics can help philosophers and others understand the transgenerational biological impact of social forces such as white racism. It reveals that the damage done by white racism is more extensive than critical philosophers of race might have realized, and also that interventions against white racism must address not just the economic, geographical, social, and psychological, but also the biological aspects of human existence. In particular, the article examines racist disparities in preterm birth rates and argues that the scope and significance of prenatal care for African American women must be expanded intergenerationally and include wide-scale forms of racial justice.

This article introduces the concept of white priority and challenges the false universalism built into the concept of white privilege. Proceeding from the perspective of “trash crit,” the article analyzes white domination from the perspective of poor and working class white people. While racial advantages exist for poor and working class white people, the concept of white privilege does not capture them well. The concept of white priority—the sense of coming before another, of not being at “the bottom of the well” —is needed to help America grapple with race and class in a post-Obama era.

This article analyzes the changing relationship of race and class in the work of Charles Mills. Mills tells the story of his career by tracing an arc “from class to race,” which includes “an evolution of both focus and approach” that shifts the terms of his work “from red to black.” The article complicates this story by reading Mills's evolution through an intersectional lens. An intersectional approach to Mills's work allows a better appreciation of how he does not move from class to race in the sense of abandoning the former for the latter, nor in the sense that race is utterly absent from his earlier work on class. Race and class are entangled with each other, and with gender and other axes of identity and power, in complex ways throughout his corpus. Mills's work remains red in certain respects—sometimes problematically from an intersectional perspective—even as it takes on black concerns and perspectives. On the flip side, as the end of the article asks, can Mills's work remain sufficiently red—that is, explicitly grapple with class concerns—as it tries to add some color to a whitewashed liberalism?

i am pleased to have the opportunity to respond to Josina Vink’s rich paper on “Designing for Plurality in Democracy by Building Reflexivity.” Vink suggests that design has its roots in pragmatism and that by returning to them, design can improve itself by becoming more pluralistic and less colonizing in its effects. Focusing on health care systems in particular, Vink emphasizes reflexivity as crucial for the decolonizing of design. As Vink argues, reflexivity can help cultivate epistemic humility on the part of designers, acknowledge the important role of embodiment in design practices and outcomes, reject allegedly universal approaches to solving design problems, and recognize that the tools of design are not...

i am honored to have the opportunity to think with Patricia Hill Collins about community as a political construct. Collins has argued that, like concepts of family and love, community often has been considered to be part of a nonpolitical sphere, something personal and private even as it is not individualistic. As feminists have shown, however, the personal is political, and as Collins urges, an intersectional understanding of the political can and also should apply to the concept of community. In Collins's words, "instead of being a natural, apolitical space, or even an empty category that can be used for political purposes, the construct of community may lie at the heart of politics itself". The concept of...

I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. I’m not alone in thinking and...

Drawing on the work of John Dewey (but addressing non-foundational epistemologies generally), the author argues that if academic philosophers take seriously the claim that theory and practice are reciprocally determined, then they should take seriously the task of intelligently experimenting with teaching practices in order to refine theories of knowledge and, on this basis, improve teaching practices. This paper explores one way of relating non-foundational epistemology to classroom practices. The author elaborates a “transactional” model of knowledge, according to which knowledge is what arises from historically- and contextually-situated agents interacting with each other and the world. One pedagogical application of this model is a “transactional classroom.” Such a classroom employs “Group Inquiry,” a teaching strategy that involves the teacher and students sharing responsibility for the results of inquiry as well as for the development of standards to which inquiry is held. After detailing several courses built on this teaching strategy and offering advice for avoiding a foundationalist position in the classroom, the author addresses criticisms of this teaching method and reflects on its results. With the help of student surveys, the author concludes that while students found these courses demanding, Group Inquiry successfully decentralized the classroom and improved student participation.

This paper outlines the effectiveness of films as a pedagogical tool for teaching philosophy. For the author, a film skillfully explores philosophical issues, capturing students’ attention and providing a setting for discussion. The author focuses on the use of Lars von Trier's Zentropa as a beneficial tool for discussion of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. The film adequately illustrates the two positions of the aesthete and the judge, and demonstrates the adverse affects of avoiding choice in one's life. The film can also be useful in an introductory course and a class on existentialism because it attends to the larger philosophical questions of how one should live their life.