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"Bell argues that the dialogue that emanate from the aesthetic realm cannot be understood through a solely art-historical approach; instead, they must be understood as part of a collective endeavour. In this sense, the 'art' of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations engage with questions of response, ethics and justice; and, in so doing, re-align themselves in relation to the past and to the future. This book provides a valuable resource for those interested in the law, politics, art and sociology of contemporary Argentina. It will be of immense use to those studying in these areas and to those concerned more widely with transitional justice and memory politics"--

"Bell argues that the dialogue that emanate from the aesthetic realm cannot be understood through a solely art-historical approach; instead, they must be understood as part of a collective endeavour. In this sense, the 'art' of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations engage with questions of response, ethics and justice; and, in so doing, re-align themselves in relation to the past and to the future. This book provides a valuable resource for those interested in the law, politics, art and sociology of contemporary Argentina. It will be of immense use to those studying in these areas and to those concerned more widely with transitional justice and memory politics"--

Reading feminist theory as a complex imaginative achievement, Feminist Imagination considers feminist commitment through the interrogation of its philosophical, political and affective connections with the past, and especially with the `race' trials of the twentieth century. The book looks at: the 'directionlessness' of contemporary feminist thought; the question of essentialism and embodiment; the racial tensions in the work of Simone de Beauvoir; the totalitarian character in Hannah Arendt; the 'mimetic Jew' and the concept of mimesis in the work of Judith Butler. Vikki Bell provides a compe

Northern Ireland's Civic Forum is a key civic participation mechanism agreed as part of the Belfast Agreement and established under the Northern Ireland Act 1998. It brings together representatives from various sectors to act as a 'consultative forum' on 'social, economic, and cultural issues'. This article argues that 'civic society' has to be understood as a 'transactional reality' in the Foucauldian sense, such that the task of the Civic Forum – to allow the participation of 'civic society' – entails the continual construction of its own boundaries and remit. These are contested, not only outside the forum where political considerations have made it somewhat controversial, but also within. It is argued here that this is necessarily so, given the need for the forum to carve out a position between its constitutive outsides. Of particular concern has been the meaning of 'consultative', as competing understandings of this key term position the forum differently with respect both to the legislative Northern Ireland Assembly and to Northern Irish society as a whole. Additionally, the ethical imperative to give voice to wider society is examined, as it influences the way members of the forum articulate their role. Finally, I discuss the forum's sense of its unique identity – as given by its opportunity to enact an inclusive and diverse political space. The argument draws throughout on a qualitative sociological study that employed observation of the forum's plenary sessions over an eighteen-month period (2000–2002) and semi-structured interviews with selected members.

Understanding the Civic Forum in Northern Ireland as part of a new modeof governance that the Belfast Agreement and the Northern Ireland Act 1998 sought to make possible, the Forum can be analysed as a technology of Peace that has in turn invited the fashioning of a new democratic subject. This 'subject', moreover, is operating not merely within a new institutional space and within new processes but within a new ethical landscape. Thus while the participatory ethos links the Forum's work to much wider changes in the notion of 'democracy', the specificities of the Forum's context - its role as part of the Peace process set against Northern Ireland's history of conflict - give its work a further particular purpose with a complex temporal dimension. The new landscape is one in which the 'call to Peace' is foregrounded, initiating a complex relationship to what has been, what 'is' and what the future potentially holds. Peace, it is argued here, requires a performative call to the future, a call for a new spirit. But this new spirit is one that cannot be simply conjured, marketed and distributed like an easy sentimentality, not least because sentimentality simply ignores the present's tie to the past. Rather, the pursuit of Peace has to be sought in the messiness of the present, and has therefore to be open to the heterogeneity of 'the past'. Competing injunctions arise from the spirits of the past, urging those in the present to follow divergent paths. Following Derrida's Spectres of Marx(1994), it is argued that these ghosts cannot be simply banished. As this study of the Civic Forum illustrates, how the Forum positions itself, both institutionally and procedurally, necessarily involves the negotiation of notions of past and future. The successful pursuit of Peace will be dependent upon how those in the present receive the ghosts of the past and how they can allow for their enjoining as a condition of that future's very possibility.

In this article I argue that, if one is persuaded by the arguments of Emmanuel Levinas, the pursuit of something called 'ethical feminism' is rendered difficult, for, according to Levinas, there is a hiatus between ethics and politics in so far as politics does not flow from ethics. Indeed, politics obliges one to engage in the non-ethical, so that the ethical cannot be understood as a basis for feminist politics. I contend that one can argue that it is in the way that the dangers of the non-ethical are handled that politics begins. If this is so, one can refigure the question of ethics within feminism. Ethics becomes a check on freedom and politics rather than its originary source. However, I argue, along with Michel Foucault and William Connolly, that ethical responses, while coming from the other, have also to be subjected to genealogical critique, so that their conditions of possibility are not naturalized.