Hope in a Vice: Carole Pateman, Judith Butler, and Suspicious Hope

Hypatia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 597-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Billingsley

Eve Sedgwick critiques paranoid methodologies for denying a plurality of affective approaches. Instead, she emphasizes affects such as hope, but her description of hope's openness does not address how hope can avoid discourses that appear to offer amelioration while deceptively masking subjugation. In this context, I will argue that suspicion in feminist political philosophy, as shown in the earlier work of Carole Pateman and Judith Butler, provides a cautious approach toward hope's openness without precluding hope altogether. This analysis will reconsider the domination and empowerment debates in relation to affect, pointing toward compatibilities between the two perspectives. First, I will expand Sedgwick's analysis of hope to explain its potential as a feminist political affect. Second, I will examine the techniques of suspicion employed by Pateman and Butler and how they risk denying possibilities for hope. This will lead to a discussion of how Amy Allen's theory of power indicates that suspicion is compatible with hope. Finally, I will explain how the suspicious approaches of Pateman and Butler illuminate hope as an inherently risky, fragile project. This will show that suspicion does not necessarily take up the totalizing position of paranoia, but rather can productively ensure that hope is not led astray.

Author(s):  
Christel Stormhøj

The article examines queer as critique by performing a series of parallel readings of leading queer thinkers, including Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner. Introducing two philosophical traditions and strategies of social critique, immanent and intervening critique, along with their criteria of what is right and good, I discuss how these scholars engage in these strategies and wrestle with their in-built problems within the orbit of the research foci and ambitions of queer studies. Queer critique aims at challenging dominant knowledges, social hierarchies and norms related to sex, sexuality, and gender by exposing the limits they impose on us, including the sufferings associated with them. The article closes with considering queer political visions and their normative underpinnings.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 48-50
Author(s):  
Katerina Kolozova et al.

Author(s): Katerina Kolozova et al. Title (English): Q&A session following the lecture: Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 48-50 Page Count: 3 Citation (English): Katerina Kolozova et al., “Q&A session following the lecture: Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 48-50. Author Biography Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. At the Institute, she teaches policy studies, political philosophy and gender studies. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College, Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley in 2009, under the peer supervision of Prof. Judith Butler. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle, WA. Kolozova is the first co-director and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004). Her most recent monograph is Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK in 2019, whereas Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press, NY in 2014, remains her most cited book.  


2021 ◽  
pp. 195-206
Author(s):  
Rita de Kássia de Aquino Gomes ◽  
Rosanne Bezerra de Araújo
Keyword(s):  

O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar a condição relacional dos personagens Lucius e Lucas, em Rútilo Nada (1993), a partir da teoria queer. Apoiando-nos em autores como Judith Butler (2003), Eve Sedgwick (2007) e Richard Miskolci (2012), o estudo refletirá sobre importantes questões, como o regime de heteronormatividade, heterossexismo e heterossexualidade compulsória no qual os personagens de Hilda Hilst estão inseridos, analisando ainda a trajetória da relação em questão, bem como o seu desfecho, sob o viés dos estudos queer.


Author(s):  
Neil McArthur

Although David Hume never produced a single comprehensive work that encapsulated his views on politics, his various writings address a broad range of topics of relevance to political philosophy. He critiques the social contract theory of Hobbes and Locke, and he offers an alternative, evolutionary account of the origins of government. Hume sees all governments as the result of a struggle between authority and liberty, with the best of them achieving a balance between the two by implementing systems of “general laws.” Hume’s cautious approach to social change may fairly be called conservative. However, he is willing to endorse efforts at gradual reform when these efforts do not threaten the stability of the society. His legacy for modern political philosophy remains contested.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 40-46
Author(s):  
Katerina Kolozova

The non-philosophical conceptualisation of the self, and I am expanding the category to include the other forms of theoretical-methodological exit from philosophy’s sufficiency as its principle, thus also Marx, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, does not reduce the radical dyad of physicality/automaton to one of its constituents. It is determined by the radical dyad as its identity in the last instance and it is determined by the materiality or the real of the last instance. The real is that of the dyad, of its internal unilaterality and the interstice at the center of it. We have called this reality of selfhood the non-human: the interstice is insurmountable; the physical and the automaton are one under the identity in the last instance but a unification does not take place. It is the physical, the animal and nature, it is materiality of “use value” and the real production that needs to be delivered from exploitation, not the “workers” only, especially because many of the global labor force are bereft of the status (of workers). And the need to do so is not only moral but also political in the sense of political economy: capitalism is based on a flawed phantasm that the universe of pure value is self-sufficient on a sustainable basis, based on an abstracted materiality as endlessly mutable resource. A political economy detached from the material is untenable. Author(s): Katerina Kolozova Title (English): Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020) Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Page Range: 40-46 Page Count: 7 Citation (English): Katerina Kolozova, “Marxism without Philosophy and Its Feminist Implications: The Problem of Subjectivity Centered Socialist Projects,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 17, No. 2-3 (Winter 2020): 40-46. Author Biography Katerina Kolozova, Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities - Skopje Dr. Katerina Kolozova is senior researcher and full professor at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. At the Institute, she teaches policy studies, political philosophy and gender studies. She is also a professor of philosophy of law at the doctoral school of the University American College, Skopje. At the Faculty of Media and Communication, Belgrade, she teaches contemporary political philosophy. She was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkley in 2009, under the peer supervision of Prof. Judith Butler. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the New Centre for Research and Practice – Seattle, WA. Kolozova is the first co-director and founder of the Regional Network for Gender and Women’s Studies in Southeast Europe (2004). Her most recent monograph is Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy published by Bloomsbury Academic, UK in 2019, whereas Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy, published by Columbia University Press, NY in 2014, remains her most cited book


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-121
Author(s):  
Kate Ince

This article introduces some contemporary philosophical approaches to vulnerability including that of Judith Butler, while focusing on feminist legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman's concept of the vulnerable subject, developed out of Fineman's earlier critiques of the autonomous, self-sufficient subject of liberal political philosophy. It then looks closely at the different forms of vulnerability exhibited by the leading protagonists of Mia Hansen-Løve's All Is Forgiven (2007), Father of My Children (2009), Goodbye First Love (2011), Eden (2014) and Maya (2018), all of whom except one are men, drawing on Lawrence Schehr's writing about French postmodern masculinities and work by Geneviève Sellier on the changing dynamics of heterosexual gender relations in French cinema in order to forge an account of vulnerable male bodies and masculinities appropriate to the contemporary context(s) of the films discussed. To conclude, it returns to Fineman to suggest that her at least implicitly feminist concept of the vulnerable subject can offer a more persuasive account of the gendered character of vulnerability in Hansen-Løve's films than can Butler's recent ethical writings.


Paragraph ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-183
Author(s):  
Kate Ince

This article adds philosopher Judith Butler to the list of thinkers whose work underpins the interest in ethics and/in film that began in earnest in the 2000s. Beginning with Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Butler has published several volumes that blend ethical thinking with moral theory and political philosophy, focusing on the concepts of precariousness and vulnerability. This article suggests that two films directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, Bamako (2006) and Timbuktu (2014), as dramas of precariousness and vulnerability respectively, can inform thinking about cinematic ethics: the staging of a trial of global institutions in Bamako dramatizes the possible universalization of an ethic of precarity, while in Timbuktu the condemnation to death of a Tuareg shepherd by Ansar Dine, the militant Islamist group that occupied parts of Mali in 2012, allows Sissako to give full rein to his talent for filming the vulnerability of both victims and oppressors.


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