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Recently, Rebecca Kukla – among others – has argued that consent language is too narrow to adequately capture the ethical obligations and failures arising in the context of sex. Instead, she offers more nuanced scripts for the kinds of communication that occur throughout sex, not just at the beginning. I agree with Kukla that consent language is too narrow; however, I argue that she overlooks the fact that intimate personal communication requires an emotional attunement to context precisely because it cannot be fully scripted. To demonstrate this I turn to Cavell’s category of the passionate utterance which gestures at this dynamic dimension of performatives, but doesn’t deliver a detailed account. In this paper I will expand on Cavell’s idea of the passionate exchange in order to shed light on the active interpretive role of the audience, and how it contributes to performative success.

According to a pervasive and widespread literature, we came, whether we want it or not, to surround our existences with all sorts of narratives: retrospective interpretations of what came before us and how we were born, anticipative stories about what is to come and what we should expect, and, most of all, restless attempts to describe what our present is made of so that we know how to make sense of it. First-person narratives occupy a central position amongst these varieties of narratives, as they give each of us a chance to provide meaning to our lives and achieve some kind of self-understanding.

Taking a resolutely opposite stance, Sartre (in)famously declared through the voice of the main character of his novel La Nausée that stories cannot but betray the lives they claim to describe, and necessarily fail to be faithful to the very experiencing of life that constitutes its specific grain and texture. In which sense is this failure a failure? In which sense must we consider it a failure, if narratives are the privileged device we use to make sense of existences in general, and ours in particular? Wouldn’t it be both tragic and ironical, from that perspective, that we live our lives in a way that remains impervious to our attempts to bring some meaning over our existence, and that first-person narratives should be regarded as fundamentally inadequate to account for life as we live it?

This paper will address these questions in light of the definition of ‘tragic irony’ that Richard Moran draws from his interpretation of Sartre, understanding tragedy as a clash between forms of significance displayed by incompatible perspectives. We will examine in particular the problem raised by first-person narratives, which conflate the seemingly incompatible perspectives of the narrator and of the character of the story. I will argue that Moran’s view fails to show in which sense the failure of first-person narratives are also, according to Sartre, the condition of their success, and that the irony of life might rely first and foremost on its ability to succeed even when and where it fails. After all, isn’t it the most ironical of it all that Sartre, notwithstanding his harsh critique of the fundamental inadequacy of life narratives, ended his literary career with the publication of his most acclaimed autobiography?

Bio:

Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Assistant Professor of philosophy (phenomenology and contemporary German philosophy) at the University of Lyon. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les categories. Langage, pensée et perception, Paris, Vrin, 2015), co-edited a book on phenomenology of matter (Phénoménologies de la matière, with C.V. Spaak, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2020) and published many articles, in French and in English, on the phenomenological tradition and its connection with contemporary issues in philosophy of mind. He is a member of the Institut de recherches philosophiques de Lyon (IRPHIL) and an associate member of the Husserl Archives in Paris.

Book Panel with: 

Chiara Bottici (NSSR and Lang College), Judith Butler (UC Berkeley and NSSR) and Romy Opperman (NSSR and Lang College).

Abstract: 

How can we be sure the oppressed do not become oppressors in their turn? How can we envisage a feminism that doesn’t turn into yet another tool for oppression? By arguing that there is no single arche explaining the oppression of women and LGBTQI+ people, Chiara Bottici proposes a radical anarchafeminist philosophy inspired by two major claims: that there is something specific to the oppression of ‘the second sexes’, and that, in order to fight that, we need to untangle all other forms of oppression and the anthropocentrism they inhabit. On the basis of a Spinozist philosophy of transindividuality, Anarchafeminism calls for a decolonial and deimperial attitude and for a renewed awareness of the somatic communism connecting all different life forms on the planet. In this revolutionary vision, feminism does not mean the liberation of the lucky few, but liberation of the planet from both capitalist exploitation and an anthropocentric politics of domination. Either the entire planet, or none of us will be free.

External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.

Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.

Sponsored by the NSSR Philosophy Department & The Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI)

Abstract:

As a specific form of rights insecurity the revocability of reproductive rights manifests contradictory understandings (privative and productive) of the political status of pregnancy.

I ask how and why we should understand reproductive rights as revocable, giving a broad meaning to the term “revocability,” and suggesting a conjoined vocabulary that includes conditionality, exceptionality, and disqualifying qualification.

I ask: what kind of grammar might help us understand more specifically how the concurrent action of conflicting combinations of power (such as sovereignty, discipline, security, necropower, and neoliberal expectation) coordinate together in relation to reproductive rights-bearing, and how heterogeneous combinations of power also produce a mutual disruptiveness, even auto-critique, manifesting as conflictual embodiment.

External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here: https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors.

Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.

Even on a close reading of Hobbes’s corpus, it is difficult to extract a clear picture of his views on gender.

In the history of philosophy, most of the ‘great’ philosophers engaged with questions about women’s ‘nature’ and the appropriate role for women in the family, society, and state.

Hobbes, however, seems to have far less to say on the subject than most, and what he does say is often ambiguous or paradoxical.

It is a fundamental tenet of Hobbes’s political theory that all people are equal in the state of nature, women included; yet he makes reference to the general superiority of men as regards physical strength, courage, wit, and suitability for rule.

Hobbes denies the naturalness, inevitability, and godliness of patriarchy, and he even argues for natural maternal right; however, he describes families in civil societies in terms of fathers ruling over their servants and children—leaving women out of the picture altogether.

His texts are peppered with various offhand comments, allusions, and intimations about women and sexuality more generally, many of which are provocative and undeveloped.

One of the most intriguing parts of his analysis is his repeated appeal to the example of the ancient Amazonian warrior women who engaged in procreative contracts with men from neighboring tribes.

In this paper, the speaker uses Hobbes’s discussion of the Amazons to examine his views about gender and, thereby, his place in the history of philosophy as seen from a feminist perspective. 

External visitors must comply with the university’s guest policy as outlined here:

https://www.newschool.edu/covid-19/campus-access/?open=visitors

Audience members must show proof of a full COVID-19 vaccination series (and booster if eligible), ID, and remain masked at all times.

still scheduled, but zoom link for those who can’t travel: https://NewSchool.zoom.us/j/8479688193

Throughout the 21st century, philosophers of language have increasingly concerned themselves with the hateful, coercive, dehumanizing, and deadly. In particular, ‘non-ideal’ philosophers of language question whether received conceptual toolkits from philosophy of language manage to make contact with our non-ideal world at all. This paper takes up that methodological interest from a Wittgensteinian perspective. Drawing on critical interventions by Nancy Bauer, Avner Baz, Alice Crary, Cora Diamond, and Toril Moi, I argue that non-ideal philosophers of language neutralize their ideology-critical bite when they presume an authoritative force for their words by virtue of a normatively neutral conception of reason. This neutralization is driven and sustained by an idle picture of language that isolates our words from the activities into which they are woven. To make discursive phenomena available in their political import, we philosophers of language must acknowledge our own non-neutral involvement in the very discursive practices we’re theorizing – and this will require us to relinquish the entitlement to impose authoritative requirements on language through theories of meaning.

To illustrate the need for normatively non-neutral methods in philosophical practice, I focus on cases where philosophers’ curious gaze treats trans people
as fascinating objects of knowledge, as opposed to acknowledging us as interlocutors and recognizing the political stakes of our discursive practices. What inhibits the cultivation of acknowledgement, of normatively resonant modes of attention, is a picture of philosophical theorizing that forbids us from articulating our political solidarities through our work (and thus obfuscates what we ourselves are doing with words when theorizing). The non-ideal philosopher’s critical concept of idealization, seen aright in a normatively non-neutral light, exemplifies the sort of theoretical resource that is mobilized by members of marginalized groups to invite such modes of attention – to shape not only our epistemic resources, but also our senses of what matters.

The virtually ubiquitous view of seeing-as experiences in Wittgenstein scholarship interprets them as conceptually-laden (with some exceptions, e.g. Travis 2016). The claim is that we can see the same image differently due to switching the conceptual filters, as it were, through which we experience the image (e.g. Schroeder 2010; Mulhall 2001). In this paper I focus on a specific kind of a seeing-as experience for which Wittgenstein’s example of suddenly noticing the similarity between faces is the paradigm. I argue that it is possible to have no concepts involved in this experience, and propose an understanding of what I call “the imagistic seeing-as” as a similarity association, of the kind that grounds poetic means of expression, such as metaphors. The associative nature of this imagistic seeing-as experience may also contribute to the understanding of biases – both personal (e.g. displaced offence) and social (e.g. sexism).

This talk reads contemporary debates about structural racism and US history from the perspective of philosophical questions about identity and difference. While many people have argued that America needs to come to terms with or “work through” the racism in its history that has shaped and continues to shape its present structures, it remains difficult to explain what connects this past and the present. Are we talking about one racism with many different past and present forms? Or are there multiple racisms that only share some similar features? In this talk, I draw attention to how these divisions play out particularly in contemporary Black Studies and argue that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze can offer us resources for thinking about these questions through his discussions of repetition. I argue that understanding our conversations about structural racism and history as conversations about a racism that repeats, can help us to better understand why racism seems to reappear, how to think its disparate forms together, and what presuppositions operate in many attempts to “work through” the past.

Bio: Eyo Ewara is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. His teaching and research explores the relationships between 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Queer Theory.  His work has appeared in Theory and Event, Puncta, Philosophy Today, Critical Philosophy of Race, Political Theology, and other venues. His current research project is particularly interested in engaging work in Continental Philosophy, Queer Theory, and Black Studies to address questions of identity and difference amongst concepts of race, forms of racism, and forms of anti-racism. How can we better account for the relations between at times radically disparate concepts, structures, and practices such that they can all specifically and recognizably be called racial? What might our account of these relations say about our ability to address racism’s harms?