Paradoxes of Spectacular/Political Performativity: Dionysian Dance in Classical Greek Theater, Dubois’ Tragédie, Femen's Sextremist Protests, and Harrell's Antigone Sr.

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michel Briand
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
Ethics And Politics

In Athenian classical theater (especially in Dionysian choruses; the tragic in Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides; the satyric in Euripides’ Cyclops; or the carnivalesque in Aristophanes), aesthetics, ethics, and politics intermingle in kinesthetic, musical, and textual pragmatics. This paper questions the reference to classical performativity (especially the gendered bodies it stages) in contemporary performances, from Olivier Dubois’ Tragédie (2012) (and the committed nudity it enacts) to Femen's sextremist protests and Trajal Harrell's Antigone Sr. / Paris is Burning at The Judson Church (L) (2012). These issues are central to the philosophy of performance, from F. Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (1872) to J. Butler's and A. Athanassiou's Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013).

scholarly journals Sports, Transgender Rights and the Bodily Politics of Cisgender Supremacy

Laws ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Sharrow
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sports Teams ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Legislative Proposals ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
Political Right

Between 2020 and 2021, one hundred and ten bills in state legislatures across the United States suggested banning the participation of transgender athletes on sports teams for girls and women. As of July 2021, ten such bills have become state law. This paper tracks the political shift towards targeting transgender athletes. Conservative political interests now seek laws that suture biological determinist arguments to civil rights of bodies. Although narrow binary definitions of sex have long operated in the background as a means for policy implementation under Title IX, Republican lawmakers now aim to reframe sex non-discrimination policies as means of gendered exclusion. The content of proposals reveal the centrality of ideas about bodily immutability, and body politics more generally, in shaping the future of American gender politics. My analysis of bills from 2021 argues that legislative proposals advance a logic of “cisgender supremacy” inhering in political claims about normatively gendered bodies. Political institutions are another site for advancing, enshrining, and normalizing cis-supremacist gender orders, explicitly joining cause with medical authorities as arbiters of gender normativity. Characteristics of bodies and their alleged role in evidencing sex itself have fueled the tactics of anti-transgender activists on the political Right. However, the target of their aims is not mere policy change but a state-sanctioned return to a narrowly cis- and heteropatriarchal gender order.

scholarly journals ὁμόνοια: The Hinge of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics?

Dialogue ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
THORNTON C. LOCKWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nicomachean Ethics ◽  
Aristotle's Ethics ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Scholarship on the political ramifications of Aristotle’s account of friendship has focused on “political friendship” and has lost sight of the importance of his account of “like-mindedness” or “concord” (ὁμόνοια). Such a focus is mistaken for a number of reasons, not least of which is that, whereas Aristotle has a determinate account of like-mindedness, he has almost nothing to say about political friendship. My paper examines the ethical and political aspects of like-mindedness in light of a disagreement between Richard Bodéüs and René Gauthier about the autonomy of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a work of ethical theory.

V Teaching Virtue: The Sophists on Happiness and Success

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 96-110
Keyword(s):  
Ancient World ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Happy Life ◽  
Conceptual Schemes ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Human World ◽  
Ethics And Politics

One frequently overlooked aspect of the sophists’ reflection concerns the kind of problems that today might be included in an ethical treatise, such as happiness and pleasure. Usually it is claimed that the sophists shifted the focus of enquiry from nature to the human world, but then the emphasis is almost exclusively placed on the political side of these investigations (which is no doubt significant, as we have seen in the previous chapter). This is a misleading perspective, which applies modern conceptual schemes to the ancient world, creating distortions and misunderstandings. Before Aristotle, there is no point in distinguishing between the ethical and the political spheres, since ethics and politics ultimately constitute two aspects of the same problem: how to reach fulfilment and thus lead a happy life. Certainly, in order to answer this question it is necessary to embark on an analysis of political problems, such as justice or the best form of government: the fact that human beings live together is something that must be taken into account. But the ultimate goal is self-realization. This is the end towards which everyone tends.

Stories of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Final Section ◽  
The Political ◽  
Peace And Security ◽  
Ethics And Politics

After introducing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, this chapter offers a brief discussion of the political significance of stories and storytelling, drawing on narrative theory. This is followed by a brief elaboration of the ethics and politics of working with narrative. The inevitable partiality of narrative accounts and the decision to focus on the UN in New York are just two of the ethical tensions that run through the project presented here, and the chapter explores these tensions not in an effort to resolve them but rather to acknowledge the work that they do in prompting thinking around the issues that arise in the course of this analysis. The final section explains the book’s argument and outlines the development of this argument over the course of the chapters that follow.

The separation between ethics and politics: Max Weber on ancient Judaism and modernity

2021 ◽  
pp. 136843102110464
Author(s):  
Eyal Chowers
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Human Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
Ancient Judaism ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Tragic Conflict ◽  
Ethics And Politics

For Max Weber, modernity is characterized by a tragic conflict among value spheres, each claiming to possess the ‘true meaning’ of human life. In particular, Weber argues that while the political sphere is dominated by the unifying, exclusionary, power-driven, and war-prone nation state, the ethical sphere is characterized by the universalization of individually based, deontological norms. For Weber, I argue, the modern separation between the ethical and political spheres originates in ancient Judaism. His work on Judaism, mostly neglected by political theorists, describes the emergence of politics as an autonomous, naturalistic sphere with the establishment of kingship. Biblical prophets, simultaneously, were the inventors of an idealistic, mulish, universal ethics Weber termed the ‘ethics of ultimate ends’. Thus, against the Greek model harmonizing ethics and politics, Judaism invented an antagonistic model of the two. This Jewish imagination lay dormant for almost two millennia but returned to the stage in secularized modernity.

Afterword: An exhibition about hospitality. A more sensitive perception of vulnerability

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 379-385
Author(s):  
Fabienne Brugère
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
The Political ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Art Exhibition ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Right ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This afterword reflects on the tension between art, politics and philosophy at the thematic core of this Special Issue, ‘Migrants and Refugees Between Aesthetics and Politics’. Brugère calls attention to a recent art exhibition – one that came out of her book with Guillaume Le Blanc, The End of Hospitality – at the Museum of the History of Immigration, in Paris, as a way to frame a conflict between two ideas of hospitality, or the broad ethical gesture to welcome others and the political right that more and more governments are unable to uphold as borders tighten around the globe. The afterword elaborates on the aims of the exhibition, namely, to show ‘a correspondence between art and philosophy on the question of hospitality’. Rather than a mere representation of discourse around migration, the artwork displays a praxis of the imagination, one in which cultural production by and about refugees brings spectators to recognize a shared sense of vulnerability and to question received ideas on migration. In this manner, contemporary art forms become an essential link in the ongoing struggle between ethics and politics.

Stanislavsky in Poland: Ethics and Politics of the Method

1989 ◽  
Vol 5 (20) ◽  
pp. 361-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliusz Tyszka
Keyword(s):  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Russian Art ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Moscow Art Theatre ◽  
Ethics And Politics

The reception of most manifestations of Russian art and culture in Poland is linked inextricably with the political situation, and official and popular attitudes are often widely divergent. From the first visit of the Moscow Art Theatre to Warsaw in 1908, when most Poles boycotted the performances, through enthusiasm tempered by ignorance in the inter-war period, to the 'Stalinization' of Stanislavsky as official mediator of socialist realism in the late 'forties, Polish attitudes to the 'method' which was Stanislavsky's legacy are here examined by Juliusz Tyszka. Today, he concludes, Poles have largely consigned Stanislavsky to the lumber-room of history – though there are a few cautionary voices who urge his continuing relevance.

‘Overflown bodies’ as critical-political transformations

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-481
Author(s):  
Begonya Enguix Grau
Keyword(s):  
Social Transformation ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gender And Politics ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Gendered Bodies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships

In order to explore the political and transformative potential of bodies in relation to gender and affects, I discuss how bodies, gender and politics are entangled through the figuration of ‘overflown bodies’. Departing from a material-discursive feminist conceptualisation of bodies, ‘overflown bodies’ are assemblages embedded in complex relationships of matter, discourse, emotions, affects, ideologies, protest, norms, values, relations, practices, expectations and other possibilities of (for) social and political action. Three ethnographic cases illustrate how ‘overflown bodies’ assemble matter and discourse, and how matter, bodies and gender matter. They are used to explore the political possibilities of gendered bodies and show how matter is entangled, embedded and assembled with our politics of being. The three cases interrogate the limits and boundaries of bodies and the modes and modalities of (political) agency. Finally, the article argues that it is through visibility and recognition that ‘overflown bodies’ become critically and creatively transforming, which can be useful for addressing issues related to exclusion, domination, political emancipation and social transformation.

Business Ethics and Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 693-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Betz
Keyword(s):  
Business Ethics ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Business Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Sexual Harrassment ◽  
Ethical Norms ◽  
Political Differences ◽  
Ethics And Politics

Abstract:What is the relation of business ethics to politics? My answer has two parts. First, business ethics exists quite apart from politics in matters of simple, basic ethical norms like those prohibiting lying, wanton injury, sexual harrassment. One would be foolish to unsettle this settled ethics as A. Z. Carr does in this article, “Is Business Bluffing Ethical?” For the business community thus loses the public’s trust and invites a government regulation of business smothering to business and burdensome to government.Second, there are issues in business ethics which do not represent a settled and shared and common ethics because they represent a choice between competing, almost equally attractive, values. These problems in business ethics can only have a political solution. Politics here represents the commitment to different basic values and will represent liberal and conservative extremes or some compromise in-between. The solution acceptable for these problems will change with the political climate and will be unstable. We should strive to keep the basic, simple, settled, ethical issues in business out of politics, and we should strive to be frank about our political differences as we needfully politicize the solutions to the more complex unsettled problems in business ethics.

scholarly journals Formations of the Secular

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-114
Author(s):  
Amr G. E. Sabet
Keyword(s):  
The Self ◽  
The Political ◽  
P 16 ◽  
Secular Institutions ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Ethics And Politics

This most interesting and ground-breaking study presents a Foucauldian andNietzschean genealogical tracing of the concept of the secular, workingback from the present to the contingencies that have coalesced to producecurrent certainties. It asks what an “anthropology of secularism” might looklike and examines the connection between the “secular” as an epistemic categoryand “secularism” as a political doctrine. Asad attempts to avoid thetrap of making pronouncements about secularism’s virtues and vices, irrespectiveof its origin, and to proffer instead an anthropological formulationof its doctrine and practice.According to the author, secularism is more than a mere separation ofreligious from secular institutions of government, for it presupposes newconcepts of religion, ethics, and politics; as well as the new imperativesassociated with them, and is closely linked to the emergence of the modernnation-state (pp. 1-2). In contrast to pre-modern mediations of nontranscendedlocal identities, secularism is a redefining, transcending, anddifferentiating political medium (representation of citizenship) of the self,articulated through class, gender, and religion (p. 5).Concomitantly, he questions the secular’s self-evident character evenwhen admitting the reality of its “presence” (p. 16). His main premise is that“the secular” is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism, thesecular being that formation caused by a variety of concepts, practices, andsensibilities that have come together over time (p. 16). He concludes that the“secular” cannot be viewed as the “rational” successor to “religion,” butrather as a multilayered historical category related to the major premises ofmodernity, democracy, and human rights.Within the above introductory framework, the book’s seven chapters aredivided into three parts. The first part, comprising three chapters, explores theepistemic category of the secular. The following three chapters of part 2 ...

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