TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

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All Aboard for Copenhagen! — Joel Kovel

Ecosocialism, Global Justice, and Climate Change — Joel Kovel

The Liberal Foundations of Environmentalism: Revisiting the Rockefeller-Ford Connection — Michael Barker

Pondering Another Possible World — Robert Nichols

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Metaphor: James Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia — John Clark

Art and Environmentalist Practice — Kavita Philip

Open Letter to the Prime Minister of India and the Chief Ministers of the States of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Arunachal, Tripura and West Bengal — Kavita Philip

History and Hope from the Present Moment: Peter McLaren and Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy — Samuel Day Fassbinder

Beyond the Bowers-McLaren Debate: The Importance of Studying the Rest of Nature in Forming Alternative Curricula — Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro

Ecofeminist Cosmology in Practice: Genesis Farm and the Embodiment of Sustainable Solutions — Phoebe C. Godfrey

Reclaiming the Good Life (Now!) — Jane Hindley

Part 2

Foro Social Mundial México 2008

(h/t: Azadeh Erfani)

Penn State Press is publishing Sally Scholz’s latest book, entitled Political Solidarity:

From the publisher’s description:

Experiences of solidarity have figured prominently in the politics of the modern era, from the rallying cry of liberation theology for solidarity with the poor and oppressed through feminist calls for sisterhood to such political movements as Solidarność in Poland. Yet very little academic writing has focused on solidarity in conceptual rather than empirical terms.

Sally Scholz takes on this critical task here. She lays the groundwork for a theory of political solidarity, asking what solidarity means and how it differs fundamentally from other social and political concepts like camaraderie, association, or community. Scholz distinguishes a variety of types and levels of solidarity by their social ontologies, moral relations, and corresponding obligations. Political solidarity, in contrast to social solidarity and civic solidarity, aims to bring about social change by uniting individuals in their response to particular situations of injustice, oppression, or tyranny.

The book explores the moral relation of political solidarity in detail, with chapters on the nature of the solidary group, obligations within solidarity, the “paradox of the privileged,” the goals of solidarity movements, and the prospects for global solidarity.

More from the publisher, including the Table of Contents

Gianni Vattimo, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty are in no need of an introduction. They are three of the world’s most discussed philosophers, leading in the fields of hermeneutics, pragmatism, and moral philosophy. They are also influential public intellectuals commanding a broad audience throughout North America and Europe. This roundtable discussion on globalization was conducted in Italy in 2001 months after the inauguration of George W. Bush for his first term as president and months before the events of September 11. While it primarily concerns the economics of globalization, each of the interlocutors also identify some worrying trends they see in the early months of the Bush administration such as the unquestioned faith in the neo-liberal economic policies of free trade, the disregard for world opinion, and the inordinate influence of the military-industrial complex. Their conversation stands as a reminder of an earlier promise from then candidate Bush that he would conduct foreign affairs with a greater sense of humility. Since September 11th, however, he and his administration have harnessed and manipulated the politics of fright to tremendous effect by waging a perpetual war on terror in the name of democracy. With the possible exception of various regimes in Latin America, the Left has been unable to mount any meaningful political response. Vattimo, Rorty, and Taylor indicate here how the seeming impotence of the Left was and remains a cause for great concern and a matter demanding the most rigorous political debate and philosophical scrutiny. It is with that challenge in mind that the JCRT proudly offers up this important and still timely exchange for our readers.

Link (pdf)

Source: Via 

A review of Another Cosmopolitanism: Hospitality, Sovereignty, and Democratic Iterations

Cosmopolitanism, notes Seyla Benhabib, is a frequently invoked concept in modern political philosophy; it is a shame, therefore, that we so rarely define this term with the specificity it demands. In this volume, derived from her Tanner Lectures of 2004, Benhabib gives a specific gloss on one particular variant of cosmopolitanism, identifying and defending a specifically political version of cosmopolitan politics. It is an admirable vision, although not one without significant difficulties — as discussed by her commentators, whose contributions are included here.

Benhabib begins with a tension within the world of liberal democratic cosmopolitanism — a tension she believes can be mediated, but never completely overcome. We are committed, on the one hand, to cosmopolitan norms of human rights, which seek to articulate a concept of legal rights that are universal and unconditional. We are also, however, committed to a bounded notion of democracy, in which democratic authority is derived from the self-imposed nature of legal norms. This tension, argues Benhabib, is of crucial importance for our political future; the tension between the universal and the particular, the cosmopolitan and the local, requires more serious analysis the more unified and integrated our shared global network of institutions becomes.

The rest of the review

TOC: Special Issue on Solidarity 

"Measuring the Millennial Moment of Globalization against Heidegger's Summer Semester 1935, and Other Politically Incorrect Remarks"

Theodore Kisiel
Northern Illinois University

"Globalization" has literally become one of the most current of the modish concepts of the new millennium. Among other things, it conjures the very current image of a lightning-speed electronic circulation of vast sums of currency whipping around the world's financial markets in a global cash flow whose reverberations sometimes verge on a cascading collapse. Such a globally impelled "crash," whether by impersonal market forces or by computer hackers, would make the worldwide depression of 1929, at least in its velocity of impact, pale in insignificance, For globalization is essentially a time-space term, i. e., a dynamic term which spells out an infinite velocity in manoseconds through its virtual abolition of space into bilocative simultaneity and its instantaneous reduction of time differences. Of greatest interest is the movement that occurs literally across the surface of our "globe," therefore around the world understood as "the late great planet earth," if I might borrow a phrase from another millennial thinker of our late century. Small wonder that Hal Lindsey has recently added the new buzz-word "globalization" to the list of apocalyptic revelations already found in the old Bible to prefigure Armaggeddon.

But today we are interested in another millennial thinker earlier in our late great 20th century. For Martin Heidegger, as a German citizen as well as a philosopher and university teacher, had to face his own Armaggeddon forewarned by dire predictions of the decline of the West. Heidegger, in 1935 already an established philosopher of be-ing and time, space and the world, was himself no stranger to the modern historical phenomenon of globalization if not yet the precise word. For the early twentieth century had already undergone the first of two global world wars and the worldwide economic depression when Heidegger's native Germany proclaimed with much fanfare the rise of a millennial Third Reich as its indigenous home-grown response to the forces of globalization then working on it at the heart of old Europe, both from within and from without. As late as SS 1935, Heidegger is still hoping against hope that the "philosophy of National Socialism" would find its way to "its inner truth and greatness" as a movement and countermovement, which for him meant finding its way to a uniquely German resolution to the widespread crisis developing from the "encounter of globally defined [planetarischen] technology and modern man" (EM 152).1 We now know that this remark in the 1953 edition postdates the 1935 course by at least a year or two, when Heidegger first began to see clearly that technology was the essential driving force of globalization, serving to account for the phenomenon of total mobilization that Ernst Jünger first saw emerging during the First World War, for the titanic dimensions of the worldwide depression emanating from American capitalism and, worst of all, for the monstrous giganticism of total politization of a totalitarianism (already called a "total state" by the budding Nazi political philosopher, Carl Schmitt, in 1931).

Continue reading here

Editorial Community: Comme-un?

Kuisma Korhonen Textual Communities: Nancy, Blanchot, Derrida    

Ignaas Devisch The Sense of Being(-)with Jean-Luc Nancy    

Marie-Eve Morin Putting Community under Erasure: Derrida and Nancy on the Plurality of Singularities    

Dorota Glowacka Community and the Work of Death: Thanato-ontology in Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy    

Timothy J. Deines Bartleby the Scrivener, Immanence and the Resistance of Community    

Angela Mitropoulos and Brett Neilson Cutting Democracy’s Knot     

Paulina Tambakaki Global Community, Global Citizenship?    

Daniel H. Ortega ‘En Cada Barrio’: Timocracy, Panopticism and the Landscape of a Normalized Community    

John Paul Ricco The Surreality of Community: Frédéric Brenner’s Diaspora: Homelands in Exile    

Jake Kennedy Gins, Arakawa and the Undying Community

Petra Kuppers Community Arts Practices: Improvising Being-Together

Natalie Cherot Transnational Adoptees: Global Biopolitical Orphans or an Activist Community?