Althusser’s Dream: The Materialist Dialectic of Rationalist Empiricism

Chapter 2 offers a detailed elaboration of Louis Althusser’s brief reference to “rationalist empiricism,” deploying this elaboration toward a reading of Meillassoux’s After Finitude as a work of “Marxist philosophy.” Althusser considers the defense of philosophical materialism as integral to the critique of idealist ideology, and therefore as essential to defending historical materialism (Marxist science) against ideological deviations. I flesh out this framework by comparing After Finitude to Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, arguing that Meillassoux fulfils more rigorously the project of Lenin’s early philosophical intervention.

Sensual Excess

This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. In addition, the book identifies and analyzes moments that exceed these constraints—the sensual excess that is theorized as brown jouissance. Brown jouissance is a political and philosophical intervention into what constitutes selfhood, knowledge, and fleshiness. The book works through several examples of brown jouissance in the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, Xandra Ibarra, Amber Hawk Swanson, Cheryl Dunye, Carrie Mae Weems, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, and Maureen Catbagan by dwelling on the analytic possibilities opened by the artwork’s entanglement with the sensual. The sensual, in turn, leads us to imagine possibilities for orienting relationality around queer femininity.

The Norm___ and the Pathological

<p>In this paper, I read <em>The Normal and the Pathological</em> by French philosopher Georges Canguilhem for what it can offer disability theory. I examine how the field has already taken up the text but further, I argue for <em>The Normal and the Pathological</em> as a keystone of disability theory (currently taken up with curiously reserved energy). I start with a précis on the text before offering a condensed citation analysis of the book. In the latter part of the paper, I suggest how the monograph might inform current conversations and I offer possibilities for it to deepen and complicate core notions about disability, including the social model, norms, normalcy, and the normate. I conclude by suggesting that Canguilhem’s philosophical intervention can be understood as "propulsive atavism" – an excavation of medical epistemology in order to map and reconfigure its legacies – and I propose this as one methodological template for disability scholarship.</p>

Providing the Missing Link: Law after Latour’s Passage

A decisive philosophical intervention pitched at the level of law’s ontology, Gutwirth’s ‘Providing the Missing Link’ renders the difference between law as an institution or a body of norms and law as a mode of existence or value a crucial point of passage for any future philosophy of law. The first, Gutwirth argues, isn’t really law at all, but a political and organisational phenomenon easily confused with other norms and normative systems, from the rules of sporting groups or trade associations to ethical codes. The second is a far narrower concept keyed to the production of novel solutions under a particular kind of constraint and has nothing to do with the establishment of standards to be followed. Gutwirth’s finely tuned theorisation of law, which resonates with the work of Isabelle Stengers and Gilles Deleuze, sounds a laudable alarum designed to compel legal theorists to disencumber law of the formidable demands of the Rechtsstaat, while holding firmly to the evasive thread of legal enunciation. For Gutwirth, statements in the key of [LAW] require, as an absolute condition, the ‘anticipat[ion of] how and what a judge or court would decide’, and we are all jurists engaged in the practice of law, or at the least, we ‘speak legally’ and not merely ‘about law’, insofar as we projectively reason on the basis of that anticipation. The passage of law depends on this anticipatory structure, from which Gutwirth derives the signal operations of law (qualification, hesitation, imputation and so on), which work in essentially the same way as they did for the Romans. Law alone, he concludes – even after it has been unburdened of the political, economic, moral and other duties recklessly imposed on it – remains ‘the rightful and ultimate provider of stability and security’, as the loops of its unique temporality ensure that a resolution to any controversy can indeed be fashioned, even where every other mode fails.

Catherine Malabou’s Plasticity in Translation

Translating Catherine Malabou’s La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction (2005) for its 2009 English publication, I was struck by how suggestive Malabou’s concept of plasticity is for a reworking of conventional notions of translation. In this philosophical autobiography of her encounters with Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, Malabou introduces “plasticity,” suggesting that the more contemporary notion of plasticity supersede Derrida’s proposal of writing as motor scheme. Reviewing and developing Derrida’s innovative discussions of translation, this article argues that the giving, receiving, exploding, and regenerating of form described by plasticity changes change, and therefore alters the transformation that is translation. Adapting Malabou’s philosophical concept to the field of translation studies, I make a distinction between elastic translation and plastic translation, which allows us to break free of paradigms of equivalence that have for so long constrained translation theories and practice. While plasticity drives Malabou’s philosophical intervention in relation to identity and gender, it also enables a productive reconceptualization of translation, one which not only privileges seriality and generativity over narratives of nostalgia for a lost original, but which also forges connections across different identity discourses on translation.

Alain Badious Paulus-læsning

In philosophical and theological circles there has been a tendency to read Alain Badiou’s book Saint Paul – La fondation de l’universalisme as part of a more widespread ‘return to religion’ in the field of philosophy. This article argues that if we read Badiou’s book in this context we risk a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between philosophy and religion and religion and politics in Badiou’s work. The argument proceeds in two stages. Firstly, by examining Badiou’s ‘formalistic’ approach to Paul, a more general view of the relation between philosophy and religion is uncovered in his work. Secondly, the subsequent discussion aims to illustrate how we can understand Badiou’s claim in Saint Paul that his intention in the book ‘is neither historicizing nor exegetical, but subjective through and through’. This ‘subjective intention’ is illuminated through a survey of three more or less coherent issues in Badiou’s book, summarized under the following headings: Badiou’s Paul as a ‘literary instantiation’, a ‘philosophical intervention’ and a ‘political inspiration’. At the heart of all three issues is the same concern, namely a concern for a specific conception of truth, which Badiou believes can be found in Paul.