Ontological Captivity

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-113
Author(s):  
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro

Departing from where Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Martin Heidegger’s gender-neutral Dasein left off, this article argues for “ontological captivity” as a critical analytic for questioning Being under conditions of racial capitalism. Based on a broad understanding of the Black Radical tradition, the author argues for the importance of connecting the analysis of ontological difference with the political critique of concrete historical and material conditions that structurally link what it means to be human to overlapping and mutually reinforcing technologies of capture. From the slave ship, the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the detention center, the penal colony, and the concentration camp to the ways in which injurious signifiers fix the body and arrest its mobility, ontological difference should be unthinkable outside a confrontation with its material conditions of possibility and impossibility. These are the material conditions that, from W. E. B. Du Bois’s analysis of the “color-line” to Calvin Warren’s analytic of “onticide,” from Lewis Gordon’s “antiblackness” to Nelson Maldonado-Torres’s “coloniality of being,” and from Hortense Spillers’s “being for the captor” to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s “ontological plasticization,” call for a political rather than an ethical interrogation of Being.

Author(s):  
Laura Hengehold

The critique of the subject in late twentieth-century continental philosophy is associated primarily with the work of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Deleuze. Driven by philosophical, political and therapeutic concerns, these thinkers question the subject’s ability to declare itself self-evidently independent of the external conditions of its own possibility, such as the language in which it expresses clear and distinct ideas, the body whose deceptions it fears, and the historical or cultural conditions in which it perceives reason or tyranny. Moreover, they fear that the ethical price of such insistence upon absolute self-possession is the exclusion and oppression of social groups whose supposed irrationality or savagery represent the self’s own rejected possibilities for change and discovery. Their work draws upon Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean insights concerning the dependence of consciousness upon its material conditions, unconscious roots, or constituting ‘outside’. However, their use of these influences is guided by a common fidelity to Kant’s search for the ‘conditions of possibility’ underlying subjective experience, as well as his scepticism regarding our capacity to know the self and its motivations as objects ‘in themselves’.


2021 ◽  
pp. 146349962110597
Author(s):  
Matteo (Teo) Benussi

This article explores the ecology of late-modern askesis through the concept of ‘ethical infrastructure’: the array of goods, locales, technologies, procedures, and sundry pieces of equipment upon which the possibility of ethicists’ striving is premised. By looking at the ethnographic case of halal living among Muslim pietists in post-Soviet Tatarstan (Russia), I advance a framework that highlights the ‘profane’, often unassuming or religiously unmarked, yet essential material scaffolding constituting the ‘material conditions of possibility’ for pious life in the lifeworld of late modernity. Halalness is conceptualised not as an inherent quality of a clearly defined set of things, but as a (sometimes complicated) relationship between humans, ethical intentionality, and infrastructurally organised habitats. Pointing beyond the case of halal, this article syncretises theories of self-cultivation, material religion, ethical consumption, and infrastructure to address current lacunas and explore fresh theoretical and methodological ground. This ‘ethical infrastructure’ framework enables us to conceptualise the embeddedness of contemporary ethicists in complex environments and the process by which processes of inner self-fashioning change and are changed by material worlds.


Author(s):  
Dana Baitz

This chapter shows that the methods used to approach queer musical subjects cannot adequately account for transsexual ones. To show this, I distinguish queer methods from transsexual methods, while acknowledging a continuum between those extremes. Queer aesthetic and interpretive models highlight a transcending of bodily and other material structures; transsexuality invests in the body. Transsexual studies situate embodiment and material conditions as primary sources of knowledge (or forms of “counterknowledge”), thereby providing new ways for musicologists to consider the meaning that musical structures hold. Likewise, transsexual artists become legible within musicology through an application of transsexual studies (notably including phenomenology and new materialisms) to music. Ultimately, by integrating transsexual epistemologies with queer ones, a new way of knowing music (a “trans* method”) is suggested.


2020 ◽  
pp. 171-214
Author(s):  
Sarah Waters

Chapter five examines a series of suicides at car manufacturer Renault, situating them in the transition from an industrial model to a knowledge economy, in which value is expropriated from the resources of the mind. Suicides did not take place in the emblematic spaces of the factory, where cars were once mass produced, but in a state-of-the art research centre, where cognitive workers conceptualised and designed cutting-edge cars of the future. In the knowledge economy, the mind is treated as an endlessly productive resource that reproduces itself continuously and is unencumbered by the physical limitations of the body. I argue that suicides were the end point of a form of vital exhaustion that transcends the corporeal defences of the physical body and depletes the mental and emotional resources of the self. Suicides do not reflect a deterioration in formal or material conditions of work, but rather a transformation in forms of constraint, as the individual worker internalises modes of discipline and becomes his or her own boss. Suicides affected workers who experienced a phase of chronic overwork in which the quest to achieve productivity targets pushed them to work continuously and obsessively.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-291
Author(s):  
Ien Ang

This article reflects on the state of cultural studies today. It asks to what extent cultural studies can move with the times, now that we live in a radically altered world dominated by global challenges such as climate change, the rise of China, and technological transformation. It points to the importance of focusing on cultural studies’ institutional and material conditions of possibility if it is to continue to exist as a distinct intellectual field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 76-94
Author(s):  
Marisa Solomon

AbstractGentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1327-1337
Author(s):  
Gaël Curty

Nancy Fraser is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent critical theorists of our time and is highly regarded for her work on feminism and capitalism. In this interview, she sets out the new conceptions of capitalism, crisis, and critique that she has been developing since her 2014 article “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode.” She begins by presenting an original conception of capitalism as an “institutionalized social order,” which includes not only its economic features, but also its social, ecological, and political background conditions of possibility. After defining the normative foundations of capitalism and the corresponding boundary struggles to which it gives rise, she then explores the multiple crises it is currently experiencing. Inspired by Marx’s tripartite critique, she concludes by proposing a new multi-stranded critique of capitalism, which combines a functionalist critique of capitalism’s tendencies to crisis with a normative critique of domination and a political critique of unfreedom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-57
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Tuszynska

Abstract This article examines the politics of transgressive pleasure and desire in Claude McKay’s novel Romance in Marseille, as a response to what Achille Mbembe, departing from Foucault’s notion of biopower, has termed necropolitics. In the novel, the interlocking hegemonic systems of racism and capitalism function as mechanisms of necropower—the power of determining whose lives are deemed worthy and whose bodies are deemed disposable—which is executed through the procedures of mutilation, surveillance, poverty, and sexual exploitation. Foregrounding the titular “romance,” McKay’s novel features characters who engage in romantic and sexual relationships that subvert the expectations of heteronormativity, sexual economy, and the color line. Anticipating the twenty-first-century theories that locate sovereign power in the body, McKay politicizes and radicalizes desire as a response to the racialization, criminalization, and dehumanization of his novel’s lumpen characters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Luis Eugênio Martiny ◽  
Larissa Zanetti Theil ◽  
Eloy Maciel Neto

INTRODUÇÃO: A Educação Física escolar construiu-se por meio de diferentes influências pedagógicas históricas que produziram interferências marcantes na escola, no fazer pedagógico dos profissionais imersos nesse contexto, e consequentemente, contribuíram para um estado de crise identitária da Educação Física. OBJETIVO: Diante este cenário o objetivo principal deste estudo é a reflexão acerca da legitimidade da Educação Física como componente do currículo escolar. MÉTODOS: Trata-se de um ensaio teórico que propõe a problematização da Educação Física escolar, com destaque para as intervenções pedagógicas dos conteúdos da cultura corporal de movimento. Primeiramente fez-se uma reflexão e discussão sobre o objeto de estudo da Educação Física, posteriormente sobre a sua relevância, seu lugar de pertencimento no sistema de ensino como componente curricular, e por último, sobre as suas condições de possibilidade de conhecimento a partir do saber científico e do saber do senso comum. RESULTADOS: A possibilidade de conhecimento da Educação Física e por conseguinte, sua legitimação, dar-se-á pela harmonização entre aquilo que a diferencia e aquilo que a integra, ou seja, do arranjo entre diferentes manifestações da cultura corporal do movimento e a linguagem. CONCLUSÃO: É importante destacar que não se pretendeu produzir respostas prescritivas, porém é necessário produzir e discutir acerca da responsabilidade curricular da Educação Física como disciplina, trazendo à tona maiores esclarecimentos do universo representativo dessa área do saber. Para além, tem-se consciência que este estudo não colocará um ponto final em toda esta temática. Antes pelo contrário, é um ponto de partida para que se possa realizar novas investigações e intervenções pedagógicas que consigam explorar os conteúdos da cultura corporal de movimento nas aulas de Educação Física. ABSTRACT. The legitimization of physical education at school: the body culture of movement as a language and condition for the possibility of knowledgeBACKGROUND: School Physical Education was built through different historical pedagogical influences that produced marked interferences in the school, in the pedagogical practice of professionals immersed in this context, and, consequently, contributed to a state of identity crisis in Physical Education. OBJECTIVE: In view of this scenario, the main objective of this study is to reflect on the legitimacy of Physical Education as a component of the school curriculum. METHODS: This is a theoretical essay that proposes the problematization of school Physical Education, with emphasis on pedagogical interventions on the contents of body culture of movement. Firstly, there was a reflection and discussion about the object of study of Physical Education, later about its relevance, its place of belonging in the education system as a curricular component, and finally, about its conditions of possibility of knowledge from the scientific knowledge and common sense knowledge. RESULTS: The possibility of knowledge of Physical Education and, therefore, its legitimation, will occur through the harmonization between what differentiates it and what integrates it, that is, the arrangement between different manifestations of the movement’s body culture and language. CONCLUSION: It is important to highlight that it was not intended to produce prescriptive responses, but it is necessary to produce and discuss the curricular responsibility of Physical Education as a discipline, bringing to the fore further clarifications from the representative universe of this area of knowledge. In addition, we are aware that this study will not put an end to this whole theme. On the contrary, it is a starting point for new investigations and pedagogical interventions that can explore the contents of body culture of movement in Physical Education classes.


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