Suchergebnisse

Abstract ; This essay offers a consideration of Levinas's philosophy of hospitality in relation to the terroristic figure of Grendel in the Old English poem "Beowulf," in order to raise some questions about the vexed connections between ethics, violence and sovereignty, as well as between ethics and politics, both in the early Middle Ages and in our own time. In the trauma that is created in the wake of disturbance of the violent, destroying stranger-Other, how is welcoming, or hospitality (the very foundation of ethicity), even possible? If the home constitutes the site of recollection (a coming–to–oneself) which is the condition for welcoming (a going–out–of–oneself to the Other), what happens to the ethical project of hospitality when the stranger-Other is actively trying to destroy that home? If, as Levinas argues, the "positive deployment of a pacific relation with the other, without frontier or any negativity, is produced in language," how can we make peace with those who refuse to speak, to contact us, across a great (yet also intimately proximate) distance, with language? In what way does terroristic violence (whether the anthrophagy of a Grendel or the belted bomb of a suicide terrorist) simultaneously summon and accuse us as those who are "irreplaceable"? How does Grendel, as an exorbitantly exterior (read: monstrous) figure of terrorism, signify and enact a type of violence (even, a type of radical evil) that the State (Heorot) itself simultaneously exercises and punishes? And finally, in what ways does terroristic violence enact a politics (or, perhaps, more negatively, an active political nihilism) that articulates an interstitial relationship that is both distant from and also within the territory of the state?

Abstract ; This essay considers Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of hospitality in relation to the "isolated and heroic being that the state produces by its virile virtues," through an analysis of female Chechen suicide terrorists in contemporary Russia and the figure of Grendel in the Old English poem "Beowulf," in order to raise some questions about the relation between violence, justice, and sovereignty, both in the Middle Ages and in our own time.

Recent forms of realism in continental philosophy that are habitually subsumed under the category of "speculative realism," a denomination referring to rather heterogeneous strands of philosophy, bringing together object-oriented ontology (OOO), non-standard philosophy (or non-philosophy), the speculative realist ideas of Quentin Meillassoux and Marxism, have provided grounds for the much needed critique of culturalism in gender theory, and the authority with which post-structuralism has dominated feminist theory for decades. This publication aims to bring forth some of the feminist debates prompted by the so-called "speculative turn," while demonstrating that there has never been a niche of "speculative realist feminism." Whereas most of the contributions featured in this collection provide a theoretical approach invoking the necessity of foregrounding new forms of realism for a "feminism beyond gender as culture," some of the essays tackle OOO only to invite a feminist critical challenge to its paradigm, while others refer to some extent to non-philosophy or the new materialisms but are not reducible to either of the two. We have invited essays from intellectual milieus outside the Anglo-Saxon academic center, bringing together authors from Serbia, Slovenia, France, Ireland, the UK, and Canada, aiming to promote feminist internationalism (rather than a "generous act of cultural inclusion").

his collection of essays by one of medieval studies' most brilliant historians argues that the analysis and critique of biopower, as conventionally defined by Michel Foucault and then widely assumed in much contemporary theory of sovereignty, is a sovereign mode of temporalization caught up in the very time-machine it ostensibly seeks to expose and dismantle. For Michel Foucault, biopower (epitomized in his maxim "to make live and to let die") is the defining sign of the modern, and he famously argued that the task of political philosophy was to cut off the head of the classical (premodern) sovereign, the one "who made die and let live." Entrapped by his supersessionary thinking on the question, Foucault argued that the maxim of "to make live and let die" of modern sovereignty superseded a premodern sovereignty characterized by the contrasting power "to make die and let live." The essays collected in Biddick's book (some reprinted and some published here for the first time) argue that Foucault spoke too soon about the supposed "then" of the classical sovereign and the modern "now," and this became painfully apparent in his analysis of Nazism in his later lectures, Society Must be Defended. There Foucault groped to articulate an anguishing paradox: How could it be that the Nazis, as the ultimate biopolitical sovereign machine, would insist on an archaic (premodern) mode of sovereignty in their death camps? Here is how he posed the question in that lecture: "How can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?" Foucault left this question hanging.

The ACEs checklist is not yet widely used as a diagnostic tool within Aotearoa New Zealand child welfare services but its relatively low visibility at this point does not mean that some of the science behind this tool, and comparable tools and evidence, are not being used. This article will consider the ramifications of using this sort of tool within the cultural context of Aotearoa New Zealand, a country with a specific history of colonisation of Māori, and more recently a shifting demographic that has been influenced by successive waves of immigration of large numbers of Pacific Island and Asian families. This article will ask if the use of deceptively 'common sense' tools, like the ACEs checklist, can take into consideration structural factors such as racism, colonisation and poverty.