Metaphors of Invention and Dissension PDF Download

Author: Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786603187
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book engages with recent philosophical interventions into democracy, equality, and human rights to demonstrate their relevance to the field of Francophone Postcolonial Studies. The book explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Algerian novel.

Author: Rajeshwari S. Vallury
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781786603173
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The book explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Algerian novel, examining six novels written by two Algerian authors of French expression, Tahar Djaout and Rachid Mimouni.

Author: Daniel Loick
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786600404
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
In this important new book, Daniel Loick argues that in order to become sensible to the violence imbedded in our political routines, philosophy must question the current forms of political community – the ways in which it organizes and executes its decisions, in which it creates and interprets its laws – much more radically than before. It must become a critical theory of sovereignty and in doing so eliminate coercion from the law. The book opens with a historical reconstruction of the concept of sovereignty in Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant. Loick applies Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of a ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’ to the political sphere, demonstrating that whenever humanity deemed itself progressing from chaos and despotism, it at the same time prolonged exactly the violent forms of interaction it wanted to rid itself from. He goes on to assemble critical theories of sovereignty, using Walter Benjamin’s distinction between ‘law-positing’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence as a terminological source, engaging with Marx, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben and Derrida, and adding several other dimensions of violence in order to draw a more complete picture. Finally, Loick proposes the idea of non-coercive law as a consequence of a critical theory of sovereignty. The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publisher & Booksellers Association)

Author: Daniel Benson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607018
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
A melancholy defeatism has become a hallmark of critical thought and leftist politics. A consequence of this has been an exaggerated focus on domination among critical theorists, leaving emancipation—along with questions of political organization and strategy—undertheorized at best, or disregarded as delusional, at worst. If emancipation still plays a role in critical reflection, it is most often in a “domesticated” form, made into a bedfellow of centrist liberalism. Recent events necessitate a different outlook, especially since the financial collapse of 2008 and the myriad movements—emancipatory as much as reactionary—it has spawned throughout the world. Through a series of dialogues and reflections by leading thinkers, scholars, and activists, Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique seeks to rebuild the emancipatory pole of critique and bring forward theoretical work that is in step with the struggles and aspirations of the moment.

Author: Santiago Castro-Gómez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786613786
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Operating within the framework of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory, this important work starts from the assumption that the violence exercised by European colonialism was not only physical and economic, but also ‘epistemic’. Santiago Castro-Gómez argues that toward the end of the eighteenth century, this epistemic violence of the Spanish Empire assumed a specific form: zero-point hubris. The ‘many forms of knowing’ were integrated into a chronological hierarchy in which scientific-enlightened knowledge appears at the highest point on the cognitive scale, while all other epistemes are seen as constituting its past. Enlightened criollo thinkers did not hesitate to situate the Black, Indigenous, and mestizo peoples of New Granada in the lowest position on this cognitive scale. Castro-Gómez argues that in the colonial periphery of the Spanish Americas, Enlightenment constituted not only the position of epistemic distance separating science from all other knowledges, but also the position of ethnic distance separating the criollos from the ‘castes’. Epistemic violence—and not only physical violence—is thereby found at the very origin of Colombian nationality.

Author: Cornelius Castoriadis
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786610965
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 130

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Book Description
In this vibrant debate with intellectuals influenced by Marcel Mauss, including Alain Caillé and Chantal Mouffe, the incisive Greek-French activist and philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis addresses the challenge of critical thinking in an international context. The first half explores the tradition of radical self-critique and the prospect of affirming its value in a non-ethnocentric way. While defending ancient Greek contributions to the Western tradition of radical self-critique — including the practice of “relativizing” one's own culture, of engaging in philosophical interrogation, and of establishing democratic institutions — Castoriadis is challenged to explore the trans-contextual features of any self-critical, or “autonomous,” social institution. In the second half Castoriadis offers a penetrating critique of representative democracy, and the discussion makes important strides toward a new conception of direct democracy, of political education, and of the institutional prerequisites for the continuation of radical self-critique in politics and philosophy.

Author: Sophie Wahnich
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 178661619X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
It is time to re-examine the French Revolution as a political resource. The historiography has so far ignored the question of popular sovereignty and emancipation; instead the Revolution has been vilified as a matrix of totalitarianisms by the liberals and as an ethnocentric phenomenon by postcolonial studies. This book examines why. More so than historians, it is philosophers that have played the leading role in the portrayal of this major event in French political history. The philosophical quarrels of the 1960s placed the French Revolution at the heart of their debates. The most well-documented among these is the conflict between Jean-Paul Sartre and Claude Lévi-Strauss and subsequently, Michel Foucault. Do we need an ethics of the history of the French Revolution? Rancière, Derrida, Balibar, Lefort, Robin, and Loraux can help answer this question, in an epistemological approach to history. These successive explorations allow us to move away from a myth of identity and to rediscover a real Revolution, capable of offering Enlightenment and political utility and interrogating what democracy and emancipation mean for us today.

Author: Eduardo Beira
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1786607204
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This important collection of essays by Andrew Feenberg presents his critical theory of technology, an innovative approach to philosophy and sociology of technology based on a synthesis of ideas drawn from STS and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. According to critical theory of technology, technologies are neither neutral nor deterministic, but are encoded with specific socio-economic values and interests. Feenberg explores how they can be developed and adapted to more or less democratic values and institutions, and how their future is subject to social action, negotiation and reinterpretation. Technologies bring with them a particular "rationality," sets of rules and implied ways of behaving and thinking which, despite their profound influence on institutions, ideas and actions, can be transformed in a process of democratic rationalization. Feenberg argues that the emergence of human communication on the Internet and the environmental movement offer abundant examples of public interventions that have reshaped technologies originally designed for different purposes. This volume includes chapters on citizenship and critical theory of technology, philosophy of technology and modernity, and Heidegger and Marcuse, two of the most prominent philosophers of technology.

Author: Laura Quintana
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538143585
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Is it due to lack of critical agency that precarious persons opt, time and again, for political views that contribute to their marginalization? How should we understand that alleged loss of critical agency and how could it be countered? Influential perspectives in critical theory have answered these questions by highlighting how certain ideological mechanisms, incorporated thoughtlessly by the most vulnerable bodies, function to obscure their interests and the causes of the condition they find themselves in. Through an original interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s thought, but also going beyond it, The Politics of Bodies establishes a different horizon of reflection. Laura Quintana’s main hypothesis is that the lack of critical agency today has more to do with a loss of the desire for transformation, fostered by neoliberal consensual dynamics, than with techniques of deceit and manipulation. In developing her interpretation of Rancière’s thought, Quintana provides an analysis of certain aesthetic-political and socioeconomic conditions of the historical present, anchored mainly in Latin America. Thus, she addresses the corporeal transformations produced by emancipatory practices, the ways in which they affect configurations of power, and the manner in which they can be disseminated in and, in turn, alter the political landscape.

Author: Shubha Ghosh
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113956059X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
What are the normative implications of patenting in the area of personalized medicine? As patents on genes and medical diagnoses have increased over the past decade, this question lies at the intersection of intellectual property theory, identity politics, biomedical ethics and constitutional law. These patents are part of the personalized medicine industry, which develops medical treatments tailored to individuals based on race and other characteristics. This book provides an overview of developments in personalized medicine patenting and suggests policies to best regulate such patents.