Continental Philosophy

Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives

Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 2 (2009)
Edited with an introduction by Monique Roelofs

Bringing together postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theorists, aestheticians, political philosophers, and artists, this special volume explores the connections between aesthetics and race.  Eleven essays on “looks and images,” “framing encounters,” “the global and the cosmopolitan,” “taste,” and “ethics and politics” address philosophical questions in this multidisciplinary field.

Contributors include Nalini Bhushan, Namita Goswami, Robin James, Mariana Ortega, Mickaella Perina, Monique Roelofs, Crispin Sartwell, Falguni A. Sheth, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Ronald Sundstrom, and Paul C. Taylor.

Freely available at http://www.contempaesthetics.org/

Abstract

This paper makes the case that discourse analytic approaches in social psychology are not adequate to the task of apprehending racism in its bodily, affective and pre-symbolic dimensions. We are hence faced with a dilemma: if discursive psychology is inadequate when it comes to theorizing pre-discursive forms of racism, then any attempts to develop an anti-racist strategy from such a basis will presumably exhibit the same limitations. Suggesting a rapprochement of discursive and psychoanalytic modes of analysis, I argue that Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides a means of understanding racism as both historically/socially constructed and as existing at powerfully embodied, visceral and subliminal dimensions of subjectivity. Kristeva’s theory of abjection provides us with an account of a pre-discursive (that is, a bodily, affective, pre-symbolic) racism, a form of racism that comes before words, and that is routed through the logics of the body and its anxieties of distinction, separation and survival. This theory enables us, moreover, to join together the expulsive reactions of a racism of the body to both the personal racism of the ego and the broader discursive racisms of the prevailing social order. Moreover, it directs our attention to the fact that discourses of racism are always locked into a relationship with pre-discursive processes which condition and augment every discursive action, which escape the codifications of discourse and which drive the urgency of its attempts at containment.

Hook, Derek (2006) ‘Pre-discursive’ racism. Journal of community & applied social psychology, 16 (3). pp. 207-232

Link

What is a Political Event? — Iain MacKenzie

Transgression as a specific form of enjoyment in the criollo world — Gonzalo Portocarrero

The Horror of Self-Reflection: The Concealment of Violence in a “Self-Conscious and Critical Society” — Roberto Farneti

Law, Grace, and Race: The Political Theology of Manderlay — Vincent Lloyd

Empire, Tragedy, and the Liberal State in the Writings of Niall Ferguson and Michael Ignatieff — Jeanne Morefield

Politics and Connolly’s Ethics: Immigrant Narratives, Racism, and Identity’s Contingency — Paul Apostolidis

Elevators, social spaces and racism: A philosophical analysis — George Yancy

Deleuzian capitalism — Frédéric Vandenberghe

Politics as the quest for unity: Perspectivism, incommensurable values and agonistic politics — Brian T. Trainor

Berlin, value pluralism and the common good: A reply to Brian Trainor — George Crowder

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