Judith Butler,‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’

Robert J.C. Young,‘Foucault on Race and Colonialism’

Scu’s new blog, Critical Animal, entries on Foucault’s ‘Society Must Be Defended’

A new SEP entry on Race

Link

Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

Obits: NYT, Le Monde, IHT

A video where Cesaire speaks of his childhood (in French):

In her wonderfully crafted book, Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender, Ellen K. Feder provides an original philosophical account of the complex relationships between race and gender. Feder’s analysis begins where most others end: with the complaint that we seem unable to attend to both race and gender at the same time. Many philosophers, especially feminists of color, have worked hard to get others to notice our inability to discuss race and gender together. Feder builds on that work, with a particular indebtedness to that of Hortense Spillers, to provide an account of how and why we repeatedly fail to attend to multiple differences simultaneously, even though we know that they are intertwined. Feder achieves this by telling stories that reveal the different ways that power acts both within and on families to shape us as gendered and raced persons.

Continue reading the review

Interviews with Spivak, entitled The Post-Colonial Critic.

Link

The Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy’s fall 2007 is about Noelle McAfee’s “Two Feminism”.

Link

The previously mentioned book by Jonathan Judaken, Sartre and the Jewish Question, has been reviewed by Ron Aronson in the TLS. 

Click here for the review 

TOC:

Adorno’s aesthetic concept of aura — Yvonne Sherratt

Critique of teleology in Kant and Dworkin: The law without organs — Alexandre Lefebvre

Towards a critical theory of whiteness — David S. Owen

The ethical residue of language in Levinas and early Wittgenstein — Søren Overgaard

Questioning and the materiality of crisis: Freud and Heidegger — Jeffrey M. Jackson

Title: Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996)
Directed by Isaac Julien
Languages: French with English subtitles

Recommendations:

“It is a tribute to Julien…that we are now confronted with a Fanon that articulates both the great mid-century moment of anti-colonial struggle and the insurgencies and intimacies of our own post-colonial condition.” Homi Bhaba

“Visually stunning and intellectually provocative, Isaac Julien’s film is an eloquent and complex exploration of the life and legacy of this century’s most compelling theorist of racism and colonialism.” Angela Davis

More details about the documentary.

Via piankhy.com