bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Element of Choice in Criteria of Death
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

In distinction from objective facts, whose existence is independent of human activity, and conventional facts whose existence depends wholly on our thoughts and actions, Lachs describes choice-inclusive facts as an intermediate or hybrid kind of fact that arises when “human choice and action build on preexisting things or conditions to create a novel object.” He contends that those who defer to scientists to articulate the criteria of death treat it as a merely factual affair, overlooking the fact that death's significance is in part its social consequences. By contrast, Lachs argues that “locating death along the continuum of organic decline involves a social choice”; indeed, death is best understood as a “biologically based social status.” When thinking about criteria for determining what is “dead,” we thus need to consider relevant social factors, such as the way technologies affect decisions about the costs and benefits of keeping alive those in organic decline. In keeping with his pluralism, Lachs endorses an individually centered, multiple-criterion approach that allows for a good death.
Grand Dreams of Perfect People
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Recognizing that designating states as “normal” rather than “diseased” is a choice-inclusive act, Lachs concludes that no simple appeal to the human genome can be used to defend the grand dreams of the proponents of eugenics. Acknowledging the limits of finitude gives us reason to reject perfection as an appropriate demand or goal. Such an acknowledgement leaves us better prepared to focus our attention on the concrete details of actual individuals.
To Have and to Be
Authors: Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs explores concrete problems in contemporary society concerning possession, progress, and indiscriminate experimentation. Behind these lies a preoccupation with the future—both its promise and its openness—that blinds us to the joys of the present and draws our attention from the very real consequences of our actions. Lachs proposes careful consideration of the assumptions of these problems (such as “the Consumer's Fallacy about the Ends of Human Life” and “the Fallacy of Separation” of means and ends) and offers the more promising prescription of an active life directed by self-knowledge.
Aristotle and Dewey on the Rat Race
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs examines Dewey's notion of means-end integrated actions by embracing his denotative method and so seeking its empirical warrant. Though love and play offer concrete examples of means-end integrated actions, Lachs concludes that these are limited and not representative of the range of human experiences. Though Dewey hoped that technology could aid us in making life more artful, Lachs's perspective is more guarded. Drawing on his theory of mediation, he stresses that technological mediation severs rather than integrates means and ends. Social advances, even when aimed at enhancing freedom and enabling us to enjoy more of our actions, are similarly limited.
Improving Life
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs focuses on three distinct ways in which we can understand the unity underlying means-end integrated action. In the first, every means is an end and every end a means; in the second, means are constituents of ends (as flour is to bread); and in the third, ends are fulfillments of means (so there is a unity of purpose and outcome). Lachs argues that the first is limited to a few activities (e.g., play, sports, or conversations) with little promise of extension, and he finds the latter two problematic, especially given the fragmentation mediation generates.
Stoic Pragmatism
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs grants that pragmatists see half of the human puzzle while Stoics see the other half. Pragmatists celebrate what we can accomplish by exercising intelligent freedom, while Stoics reminds us of the limiting conditions that precede and follow our accomplishments. Arguing that the two are not incompatible and need one another's insights, Lachs espouses a stoic pragmatism that generates a wiser pragmatism—one that knows how and when to stop pressing onward—and a more active Stoicism that does not retreat into itself. Stoic pragmatism accords with the seasons of life. Norms appropriate to the young need and often should not apply to the elderly, and vice versa.
The Relevance of Philosophy to Life
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs offers five reasons philosophers have a general obligation to make philosophy relevant to life, thereby unifying theory with practice—albeit in practice. The conviction that to believe something is to have a tendency to act on it, for instance, obligates us to embody our commitments.
Education in the Twenty-First Century
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs argues that schools cannot be replaced by computers, for they provide unique intergenerational connections that define the broader context in which learning and growth occur. The individualized investment teachers have in students and that students have in one another generate immediate and ongoing interactions that cannot be enacted by or on computers. The Internet can, however, help shift the educational focus from collecting information to investigating hypotheses and enhancing critical judgment and appreciation. Such a shift would allow for greater integration of the theoretical and practical components of the learning experience; Lachs argues that “better coordination of practical life on campus with the abstract materials of the classroom offers a splendid opportunity for improving education and providing a more attractive alternative to the Internet.” Moreover, teachers—but not computers—can teach students to challenge the status quo and explore alternate possibilities.
Learning About Possibility
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Lachs recognizes the limiting reality that, even with the protections of tenure, few foster an awareness of alternate possibilities for fear of upsetting the status quo. He nevertheless calls on educators to teach the young how to think and act on possibilities. Such a call is rooted not only in the need to integrate theory and practice but also in recognition of the optionality of our ways of framing the world. Educators who attempt to cultivate critical thinking skills without promoting critical reflection of the actual prove to be hypocritical. That our material prosperity has made available to us even more resources for thinking differently only strengthens the obligation to teach possibilities.
Moral Holidays
Authors: Shade Patrick , Lachs John
Published: September 2014

Although Royce and James are wary of permitting moral holidays (the former forbidding them and the latter recommending against them), Lachs argues that downtime is both needed by finite creatures like us and justifiable, given our plural natures and diverse goods. Rather than supposing our obligations are infinite, we should acknowledge our limits, for this enables us to set clear achievable objectives and to hope for some degree of completion. Consequently, we can justifiably take a moral holiday when it is needed and circumstances permit, though determining when each of these conditions is met requires careful judgment.
Open Letter to the Enemy
Authors: Miller Steven
Published: September 2014

This chapter focuses on a text that was published—according to the instructions of Jean Genet—as the first page of his posthumous collection of political writings and interviews, The Declared Enemy. According to the editors, the text differs from other texts in the collection which consist of Genet’s occasional interventions in the public sphere. This text, written for Gysin, is one of his literary works. The different status of the ad is marked by the liminal place that it occupies in the book itself. It presents itself as a traditional paratext, situated on the threshold between book and its public. The chapter argues that the reading of these ambiguities that interfere with the attempt to understand how Genet’s personal open letter to the enemy fits in the collection of his political writings is essential for a precise measurement of what remains politically open in his later work. Both the placement of the text and the discreet “genre” of the personal advertisement itself suggest that Genet here seeks to displace the “openness” of its publication, to manifest that the very publication of this text does not necessarily pertain to the “public sphere.” Consideration of these material ambiguities is essential to understanding the address of this letter to “the declared enemy”.
The Law of the Indifferent Middle
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This chapter makes the case for the ethical worth of secular theology of language. To think theologically is to question one’s assumptions, to refuse the posture of certainty, to recognize that no position is ever absolute, and nevertheless, to embrace and forgive the fact that thinking can and does always carry violence. In particular, the chapter focuses on indifference as an a priori of thinking, as an inescapable dimension of entry into linguistic reality that cannot be overcome, but that must be forgiven. From Plato to Schopenhauer’s idealism, from Nietzsche and his loathing of Socratic rationalism to Cartesian certainty and its misplaced concreteness in clear and distinct ideas, and from Feuerbach’s critique of idealism to Arendt’s treatment of the Greek public space, indifference is put into relief as a dimension of linguistic reality and in its exposition, begs of us for mutual generosity, opens the real up to its internal possibility: a secular theological space.
Great Explanation
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This chapter continues the line of ethico-political analysis from the previous chapter. It is an exposéhat demonstrates the limitations of thinking and problem-solving by calling to witness contemporary modes of production, political spin on critical situations and religious conflicts. It looks at dairy industrial practices, Iraq war newspeak, and the concepts and recommendations of the 9/11 commission to expose the failure of thinking to preempt its own callousness. Though no thinking is safe, this is not an endorsement of faith against reason, but instead, it is a warning against any form of fundamentalism. Any assuredness we might have in the worth and the efficacy of our intelligent solutions comes without insurance against their unintended or far-reaching consequences. Theological thinking finds hope in this very human condition.
Rebellious Desire and the Real within the Limits of the Symbolic Alone
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This chapter argues that a theology after Lacan is not a theology according to Lacan. The role of a theology that has been permeated by Lacanian and postmodern discourses is not that which Lacan assigns religion to cover up the Real. It is to engage it. The first part of the chapter analyzes Lacan’s claim that there is a true religion whose meanings will likely supplant psychoanalysis. The second part shows how a theology of language, rather than answering a wish or covering up what is wrong, can galvanize the force of disillusioned desire to act against passive acceptance of a symbolic order and its discontents. A theology of language, as a theology centered on an Other that it knows is an illusion, is a theology destined to desire to no end. This desire to no end is a rebellious force against the dulling of life as construed by and siphoned through an inherited normative linguistic reality. Read against the Lacanian backdrop of accession to the symbolic order, the rebellious desire to no end is understood heuristically as the power of neurotic dissent, the power of masochistic perversion, and the power of paranoiac doubt.
Counter-Currents
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This chapter maintains that the artificial separation between theology and philosophy is untenable in a postmodern world, that the recent turn of phenomenology to religion only makes evident how language is theological and how thought is animated by theological desire, and finally, that the future of Continental philosophy of religion is most certainly not theology as it is proclaimed in most of today’s seminaries. The chapter makes the counter-current claim that the theological dimension of thinking is not a historical moment that can be overcome àa Feuerbach. At the same time, this theological dimension of a thinking that is open to desire is not the prerogative of theology alone. Theology is a secular discourse.
I love you more than a big sheriff
Authors: Vahanian Noëlle
Published: September 2014

This final chapter explores the politics of love at the heart of a secular theology of language. It evaluates interpretations and critiques of Christian universal love. In order to do so, love is read through the heuristic lens of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. The chapter draws on Freud, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Guevara, Zizek, and Caputo.
The Raw and the Half-Cooked
Authors: Williams Patricia J.
Published: September 2014

This chapter invites readers to consider their captioning of the world. The author describes a class she teaches, Law, Media, and Public Policy, where she asks students to caption a series of images. She shows how captions redirect attention and channel sympathies quite effectively. She also addresses the question of how the humanities became a product rather than a relation. She raises concern about how things live in language and how we objectify in a way that is eventually translated in and into law.
Conquering the Obstacles to Kingdom and Fate
Authors: Hexter Ralph J.
Published: September 2014

This chapter discusses four challenges faced by a university leader who desires and attempts to read ethically: the epistemological problem of ethical understanding; corporate reading; conflicting subject matter, conflicting technologies of reading; and ethical courage. It argues that as readers we should be ethical in our process rather than use ends to justify unethical means. If we cannot be relied upon to read in good faith, with accuracy and without ulterior motive, the solid ground of truth is lost in our larger discourse, and our communities become fragmented and acrimonious.
Concluding Discussion
Authors: Jewett Hilary
Published: September 2014

This chapter presents discussions between panelists during the symposium on humanities in the public sphere. In these discussions, the focus often came back to what was always the central question of the symposium: Can we claim that there is an ethics in the humanities, derivable from the kind of work done in the humanities?
Thresholds of Illiteracy, or the Deadlock of Resistance in Latin America
Authors: Acosta Abraham
Published: September 2014

This chapter traces the emergence of postcolonial theory in Latin American studies during the 1990s, a disciplinary shift that sparked a serious and hotly contested debate over the terms and conditions of intellectual exchange between metropolitan institutions of interpretation in Europe and the United States and those in Latin America. Latin American scholars opposed to this disciplinary trend drew attention to the foundational singularity and irreducibility of Latin American history and identity; asserted the categorical impropriety of drawing from European theoretical models—as well as postcolonial intellectual production from former British colonies—to reflect on Latin America; and appealed to Latin America’s own intellectual tradition as a means to counter and resist what are perceived as homogenizing and subordinating globalized narratives. The chapter returns to these debates in order to trace the political implications and cultural effects of this disciplinary deadlock. It introduces the central thesis and lays the theoretical and critical groundwork for establishing the relation between these larger claims and the claims made in subsequent chapters.
Secrets Even to Herself: Testimonio , Illiteracy, and the Grammar of Restitution
Authors: Acosta Abraham
Published: September 2014

This chapter proposes a critical genealogy of the testimonio form as crystallized through the controversy surrounding I, Rigoberta Menchú. Testimonio emerged in the 1960s as an alternative narrative form that proposed a new mode of social articulation in Latin America for marginalized and oppressed communities in the wake of the success of the Cuban Revolution. Defined explicitly in opposition to the novel, the testimonio form facilitated the direct expression of insurgent and subordinated voices and was heralded as the genre prefiguring a revolutionary age in the Americas. However, current scholarship fails to account for the fact that there are actually two competing theories of testimonio. The chapter critically juxtaposes these competing theories of testimonio and reads them against one other. In light of this analysis, it turns to a critical rereading of I, Rigoberta Menchú that highlights the testimonio genre’s confused and often contradictory formalization as a vehicle for narrating subaltern revolutionary history.
Silence, Subalternity, the EZLN, and the Egalitarian Contingency
Authors: Acosta Abraham
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the political implications and cultural effects of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in Mexico. It discusses the extent to which the EZLN’s emergence in 1994 has altered the political landscape in Mexico and the Mexican political system. Specifically, it illustrates how the EZLN’s public discourse represents a far more radical presentation of democratic, subaltern politics than previously understood. The chapter reads from the EZLN’s various “Declarations” and other official proclamations in order to analyze the critical ground of their discourse. Current scholarship concludes that the EZLN’s discourse is essentially a translation of indigenous “silence” into Western speech. It is argued that the EZLN instead incites a direct challenge against such transcultural interpretive conventions, provoking a condition of semiological ungovernability that makes it possible to ask: What counts as speech? Who counts as a speaking being? On what grounds?
Hinging on Exclusion and Exception: Bare Life at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Authors: Acosta Abraham
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the US-Mexico border as the site of a contemporary and unprecedented crisis of global immigration. Drawing from recent critical discussions on sovereignty and the state of exception in political theory, it reflects on critical questions of the border in neoliberal times and explores the “bare life” that inhabits it. The chapter reads The Devil’s Highway (2005), Luis Alberto Urrea’s documentary narrative account of a failed expedition across the border in 2001 that killed fourteen migrants. It reads Urrea’s narrative reconstruction of the Wellton 26, a case that remains the single worst migrant death event in Arizona border history, as revealing the existence of a negative territoriality and community of migrants, without which this border ceases to be. It argues that the US-Mexico border, along with the heterogeneous figure of the contemporary migrant itself, disallows any attempt to serve as the ground for any culturally resistant claims.
Not Turning the Ethiope White
Authors: Britton Dennis Austin
Published: September 2014

The introduction suggests that exploration into Reformation theology can help flesh out an underexplained truism in early modern race studies: the inextricable link between race and religion. The introduction then considers how a simultaneous “turn to religion” and to historical formalism opens avenues for examining early modern literary responses to an emergent theology of race. Finally, it provides a brief history of the infidel-conversion motif in romances by medieval and early modern Roman Catholic writers, showing how Chanson de Roland, “The Captive’s Tale” in Don Quixote, The King of Tars, and other romances uphold Catholic notions of baptism’s unquestionable ability to create Christian identity.
Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality
Authors: Britton Dennis Austin
Published: September 2014

Chapter 3 considers John Harington’s distinctly Protestant translation of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic romance, Orlando Furioso. It suggests that Harington’s translation gained legitimacy by creating a reading experience that was similar to that of reading the Bible. Like early modern English Bibles, Harington’s translation uses paratextual materials—prefaces, marginal glosses, “Moralls” and “Allegories”—in order to guide readers’ interpretations and foster moral and spiritual transformation. Just as reading the Bible (alongside preaching) was deemed necessary for spiritual transformation, Harington’s translation and subsequent allegorizing of Ariosto’s poem seek to transform and indeed convert readers. Moreover, Harington’s translation is itself a convert: The formerly infidel text, a repugnant Romish romance, is transformed into an English Protestant poem. Harington thus likens the translation and allegorizing of Orlando Furioso to religious conversion.
Reproducing Christians
Authors: Britton Dennis Austin
Published: September 2014

Whereas numerous infidel women convert to Christianity on the early modern English stage, relatively few infidel men convert. Chapter 5 explores the interplay of race, gender, and salvation in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The frequency with which Jewish, Turkish, and Moorish women convert to Christianity in English drama more generally responds to the convergence of theological and medical discourses that highlighted the role of male seed in creating a child’s identity, and reflects as well Reformation theology’s linkage of spiritual and sexual reproduction. Nonetheless, anxieties about what an infidel mother might pass on to her children, even when she is married to a Christian man, prompt Fletcher’s and Massinger’s plays to employ the discourse of martyrdom in order to verify the women’s acquisitions of true Christian faith.
Displacements
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

This chapter reconstructs Rousseau’s account of the origins of the property system and the state system as a kind of genealogy of morality that helps make sense of the infamous statement, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The chapter argues that Rousseau’s tendency to hyperbole (overstatement) must be taken seriously. Even if it is not literally true that all humans everywhere are literally slaves, Rousseau’s hyperbole truthfully expresses a structural feature of life after the passing of the state of nature: in civil society territorial states and the regime of private property effectively have conquered all territorial space and do claim total global dominion. Hence, even if not all humans are chattel slaves, the interlocking systems of states and private property do generate an abstract mode of domination that renders most humans morally or civilly unfree. The chapter traces Rousseau’s presentation of the gradual changes by which such abstract domination displaces physical force as the means to keep humans in chains. Space and place are central categories for making sense of Rousseauian freedom.
and Condensations
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

This chapter rejects the view that Rousseau’s representations of “slavery” ignored the transatlantic trade in Africans for chattel slavery in the Americas because he was only interested in ancient slavery. Rousseau’s writings betray a more complicated play of meanings, by which the representation of domination becomes urgent through both metaphor and metonymy (displacement and condensation). By analyzing the resemblances and significant differences between Rousseauian and Stoic representations of slavery and slavishness, this chapter shows how Rousseau both condenses the brutal personal subjection of chattel slavery into the image of chains and displaces it onto civil-moral and political modes of domination. Nevertheless, in spite of his complex rhetoric of slavery and freedom, Rousseau does occasionally fail to register the political consequences of his representation of universal slavery in civil society, as, for example, when he hews too closely to Stoic views in his narrative of Émile’s Barbary captivity.
Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

This chapter argues that Rousseau tries, but fails, to join two projects at the end of Émile: the social contractarian project, inspired by Locke, of political obligation via express consent to a polity and the cosmopolitan project of humanistic education. By travelling across Europe and comparatively observing political life under the tutor’s guidance, Émile purportedly will better be able to find a suitable home where he can plant roots. However, Rousseau’s anxieties about moral corruption lead him to see a kinship between conquest and cosmopolitanism: both are products of errant selves. Consequently he must neutralize the status of travel as an activity that might be given to errancy. Drawing on moral insights from Lucretius and Seneca, Rousseau thus depicts the tutor as restricting travel in such a way that Émile is destined to reject political idealism and to learn only the disenchanted and countercosmopolitan lessons the tutor wants him to learn. Forming no autonomous political judgment, Émile thus seems not to be free, and his response to Barbary captivity in the sequel to Émileconfirms this lack of freedom.
Nativism
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

While Chapter 3 explored the subjectivity of Émile the traveller, this chapter reconstructs Rousseau’s representation of authentic native communities: Émile’s mobility and putatively autonomous choice of a home correspond to natives’ fixity and autarky (self-sufficiency). Largely accepting Hobbesian premises, Rousseau values nativist autarky as a means for small states or marginal peoples to cope with an international state of war. Intensive and collectivized self-care, based on Epicurean and Stoic principles, may allow Corsica, Poland, or Geneva to opt out of hazardous interstate rivalries and to fortify themselves against external conquest. While Stoic and Epicurean principles pull Rousseau’s international political theory in irreconcilable directions, they do nevertheless share the effect of stoking anxiety about foreign influences on the collective self of the body politic. Rousseau’s argument for nativism thus may tend toward xenophobia.
Fugitive Freedom
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

While Chapters 3 and 4 exposed failings in other Rousseauian projects of freedom, this final chapter draws together seemingly unapologetic moments of political resistance across Rousseau’s writings. What these scattered instances of resistance hold in common is a practice of freedom in flight from domination. This chapter reads together the flight of the “Hottentot” (the subject of both an important endnote and the frontispiece of the Discourse on Inequality), Rousseau’s complex metaphorics of the body politic in “Discourse on Political Economy” and Of the Social Contract, and finally his idealized portrait of the Jewish people: taken together, they sketch a theory of fugitive freedom. The chapter draws out this understanding of freedom as fugitive by way of several counterpoints: Walzer’s influential analysis of the political meanings of Exodus, the history of marronnage in the Americas, and readings of Behn’s Oroonokoand Voltaire’s Candide.
Afterword
Authors: Klausen Jimmy Casas
Published: September 2014

The Afterword argues that the political effects of Rousseauian fugitive freedom represent an important alternative to liberal cosmopolitanism (Appiah) and to recent radical currents emerging from France and Italy (Badiou, Hardt, Negri, Rancière, Virno). Rather than imagining the world in a way that emphasizes universality, uniformity, or politics on a global scale, fugitive freedom reveals instead mutual spatial distance, intercultural discontinuity, and the heterogeneity of general wills. Consequently, fugitive freedom shares much with Sheldon Wolin’s theory of fugitive democracy and also with theories of diaspora. The Afterword closes by arguing that Josephine Baker and transatlantic African-American modernism may best emblematize the cultural vitality of fugitive freedom.
Introduction
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

Babylon is intriguing in the way that it is both loved and hated, often in tandem. Conflicting reactions to Babylon come through an original biblical ambivalence that has made it an excellent figure for representing and managing the centering and decentering tensions within global capitalism. This introduction provides an overview of the biblical texts as well as apocalyptic and orientalist interpretive traditions that crystallize into the culturally recognizable figure of Babylon. It then gives a sense of the wide prevalence and malleability of this image in U.S. culture, politics, and media, indicating the patterns of its appearance. Finally, it suggests that the Bible and Babylon help to shore up what Michel Foucault has called the biopolitics of liberal governmentality, which prioritize and promote the “subject of interest” over the “subject of right.” This move cultivates and striates populations beyond social contracts and boundaries of national sovereignty to facilitate the circulation of global capital in ways that both secure and threaten U.S. interests. It is precisely this predicament that allusions to Babylon try to manage.
From Babel to Biopolitics
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

This chapter looks at how the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 becomes a facilitator of biopolitics. The Jewish historian and Roman apologist Josephus, writing in the first century of the Common Era, is the first to turn the story into one about proper modes of governance. The political ideals that Josephus conveys in his version—drawn from Greek and Roman ideals—were largely transmitted via Christianity and have indelibly marked transmission of this story. This chapter shows that Josephus’s version, including his addition of the tyrant Nimrod, carries with it a suspicion of ancient democracy as an impious and tyrannical locus of pleasure and moral dissolution and a threat to established hierarchies. Josephan allusions to the Babel story can still be heard in U.S. partisan politics, from Nimrod name-calling, to fear of Tocqueville’s “soft despotism” and demands for self-sacrifice. Both sides of the partisan divide use the story to promote theodemocracy: They require faith in the Christian God, democracy that preserves social hierarchies, and heteropatriarchal sexual regulation. The chapter shows how theodemocracy works to promote (bio)political subjectivity (the subject of interest), to secure the free flow of capital, and to control its distribution.
Tolerating Babel
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

This chapter shows how biopolitics, Babel, and the discourse of tolerance are imbricated in two important films: D. W. Griffith’s 1916 film Intolerance: Love’s Struggle through the Ages, and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel. Both films articulate a wish to rebuild Babel: They propose cinema as a tolerant universal language. While advocating tolerance, they sexualize and negatively appraise the otherness of Babylon in ways that uphold the normative sexual relations of the white heteronormative family. The ambivalence of these films toward their central metaphor is also consistent with the shifts in political subjectivity in biopolitics. Together, they reveal how Bible, film, family, and tolerance discourse all work together to authorize U.S. empire, to normalize biopolitical divisions of populations and to model a political subjectivity (the subject of interest) that is free but not too free.
Who Lives in Babylon? The Gay Antichrist as Political Enemy
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

This chapter explores places where the “war on terror” and sexual regulation explicitly overlap, via depictions of Babylon’s prince, the antichrist. The chapter looks at popular images of political enemies as homosexualized antichrists in apocalyptic thought and also at images of homosexualized Muslims, such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, in secular political humor (liberal and conservative). These images provide an entry point into thinking about the way in which exception to law and torture are bound up with apocalyptic notions of sexuality, the human, and the future. The apocalyptic reasoning that produces the homosexualization of the enemy as antichrist is the same future-oriented logic that is central to the delimitation of the in/human that enables the imperial project its dehumanizing techniques. The chapter argues that legal attempts to regulate sexuality and ban same-sex marriage from U.S. polity were integrally related to U.S. disregard for international law (the state of exception) that allows for torture overseas; both draw boundaries around the human in ways that accord with apocalyptically oriented desire.
Babelian Scripture
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

This chapter considers how biblical texts can be approached differently. Taking its cues from the Babel story, and the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, it outlines a detranscendentalizing reading practice that values liminality and impossibility, and that provokes the politically productive feeling of the sublime instead of the bellicose feeling of terror. It rereads the sexualized evil of the Whore of Babylon and the antichrist via metonym and metalepsis rather than allegory. The antichrist and the Whore of Babylon are read as perverse destabilizing figures that queerly share mythic lineages with what is taken as “truth.” Their mythological derivations (Canaanite and Roman) connect them to the Christ figure. Babylon, the antichrist, and the Whore are thus included and excluded in the political and religious symbolic order. In theoretical terms, the liminal alterity of these figures might be read as the sublime—not in the traditional way as reason’s confrontation with the inestimable, dangerous, sublime object but as that scary incomprehensibility of meaning in the face of social difference. In this sense, a liminal, sublime, alterity signifies a queer Babelian place of the impossibility of full communication.
Postlude
Authors: Runions Erin
Published: September 2014

This postlude draws together the arguments made in the book about the Babylon complex: The United States fights Babylonian tyranny and evil on behalf of the world, while it consolidates a sense of sovereignty for itself; at the same time, images of Babylon and the antichrist also advance the subjectivities, interests, and bodies most conducive to a free market that weakens political sovereignty. Babylon centers, decenters, and recenters, alternately valuing or derogating diversity or unity, as needed. Going beyond theodemocracy, war, and sexual regulation means working beyond hierarchies to stage—in protest—new modes of listening and new kinds of rhetoric that do not rely on transcendence. Zones of unknowing, of difference, of queer, sublime impossible connectedness must be foregrounded.
The Fluid Body
Authors: Rapp Jennifer R.
Published: September 2014

This chapter carries forward a structuring thread of the book: Rapp's turning over of the uncarved, integrated animal analogy presented in the closing section of the Phaedrus as a way to understand the shape and methods of the text as a whole. Here she considers the movement and transformation of the argument across the dialogue's main speeches in the terms of the text's unfixed, fluid porosity, a strategic mode of discursive displacement needed to talk about human phenomena distinguished by surfeit. Rapp considers the work of psychoanalytic theorist and literary critic Richard Wollheim in order to uncover the distinctive type of account of eros Socrates offers, one that is set in contrast to the sophists’ methods in which the fixation of ideas within words is mistakenly regarded (or purveyed) as a legitimate source of knowledge.
Is Technology a Fatal Destiny?
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

The work of Martin Heidegger has often been used to argue against any efforts at reform or revolution because such efforts will inevitably become ensnared in what Heidegger means by technology. This chapter reads Heidegger against himself, to suggest that his work can be effectively deployed as a critical reminder of the dangers of some of our simplistic notions of technological development as a solution to the problems of poverty in the third world.
Socialism or Radical Democratic Politics?
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

Laclau and Mouffe have rightfully become known as two of the most powerful thinkers in leftist political theory. They have defended a notion of radical democracy, that relies on a cutting-edge interpretation of the works of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida amongst others, to promote a vision of egalitarian radical democracy that fights against any form of economism as the way to a more just society. In this chapter, I argue that their rightful critique of economism, and their strong interpretation of Antonio Gramsci cannot be used to argue that struggles against capitalism are equivalent of all other struggles against hegemonic forms of inequality. Simply put, the chapter argues that while we must heed the warning of economism and its dangers, there can be no radical democracy within neoliberal capitalism.
Dignity Violated
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

The AZAPO decision of the South African constitutional court was extremely controversial, both within and outside of south Africa because it supported conditional amnesty for those who had committed violent crimes in the name of their politics, and at the same time removed such individuals from the reach of civil liability. The constitutional court did so in the name of the mandate of reconciliation and social justice, and argued that conditional amnesty was necessary for the avoidance of civil war and for the new dispensation to survive in South Africa. Key to their argument was that their judgement was consistent with the African ethic of uBuntu, which they argued provides an important understanding of why vengeance always turns against itself, and leads to further violence and hatred.
uBuntu, Pluralism, and the Responsibility of Legal Academics
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

This chapter argues that uBuntu as an important foundational ethic to the entire new South Africa. The chapter also raises the question about why it has been so difficult for the academy in South Africa to recognize value pluralism in the diverse population as a whole, and to take this into account in the way courses are taught, and indeed the languages in which they are taught. It is a call for responsibility on the part of academics to live up to their part in the substantive revolution of the new South Africa.
Rethinking Ethical Feminism through uBuntu
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

This chapter revisits my own notion of ethical feminism, through an engagement with the recent work of Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak. The central argument is that not only must we recognize that all universals are incomplete, and call for translation, but that the step to take seriously that other intellectual traditions are equal to Anglo-American and European schools of thought means that we may have to re-evaluate our own notions of freedom and equality. This re-evaluation is particularly important for transnational feminist alliances, if they are to truly be based in an egalitarian feminist politics that is not blocked by particularistic notions of the significance of Europe.
Where Dignity Ends and uBuntu Begins
Authors: Cornell Drucilla
Published: September 2014

This chapter was written by an Emeritus Consttutional Judge and a South African Professor as a response to Chapter 8. Emeritus Justice Yvonne Mokgoro is known as one of the leading scholars of uBuntu, and was one of the leading judges in the development of the constitutional jurisprudence of uBuntu.
Talking About Homosexuality by the (Church) Rules
Authors: Jordan Mark D.
Published: September 2014

This chapter begins with a thought experiment in which the text contemplates the range of doctrines that would need to be altered if the Vatican decided to change its teaching on homosexuality. But such contemplation, it concludes, is not likely to bear fruit in the end due to the futility of continuing to advance pastoral, historical, philosophical, or theological arguments with the powers that suppress speech about homosexuality within the church. The chapter compares the historical trajectories of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in their considerations of homosexuality as part of the analysis of the underlying conditions and mechanisms of the silencing of speech. The chapter reflects upon the need for transformation of the structures of power in a gendered organization in which such power is the object of strong desire. Rather than continuing to engage in the tired debates of past decades, it encourages the development of new language about Catholic homosexuality as the way to move forward. The chapter also includes a response to this argument, which links his decision to the silencing of women.
Lesbian Nuns
Authors: Gramick Jeannine
Published: September 2014

This chapter focuses on extensive public silence about the lives of lesbian religious women. It describes decades of ministry and dialogue that have nonetheless taken place within New Ways Ministry and other groups. It explores three main themes that have been part of this development in the lives of lesbian nuns since the 1970s: sexual identity, coming out, and celibacy. Within these developments, it explores the hidden treasures of intimate friendship as symbol for the love of God; of countercultural witness, service, and education aligned with the marginalized and rejected; and of mentorship and role modeling for those coping with rejection and pain. The chapter also includes a response suggesting that lesbian nuns, like all women, have also been excluded from significant voice or function within the Roman Catholic Church by virtue of their biology as women.
Seminary, Priesthood, and the Vatican’s Homosexual Dilemma
Authors: Jacobitz Gerard
Published: September 2014

This chapter describes a range of problems that conflicting church teachings create for seminarians and their vocation directors, for practicing priests, and for the Vatican. It argues that the church extols the foundational principles of the essential dignity of the person and the reliability of human reason informed by practical experience, but that these together militate against the arguments the church advances in its teachings about homosexuality. It analyzes theological anthropology, the fruits of human sciences, and the human experience of sexual orientation as dilemmas for the church in attempting to retain its notion of homosexuality as intrinsically disordered. It argues that the rigid exclusion of gay men from seminaries presents a similar dilemma, especially in the light of the human experience of lay Catholics who demonstrate increasing support for LGBT issues. Finally, the implications for considering the charism of celibacy apart from the call to priesthood are discussed.
Same-Sex Marriage, the Right to Religious and Moral Freedom, and the Catholic Church
Authors: Perry Michael John
Published: September 2014

This chapter addresses the legal dimensions of same-sex marriage from the vantage of the legal categories of religious and moral freedom as well as of widely accepted international doctrine on human rights. It disputes the assertions advanced by the church hierarchy in the political actions it has undertaken to combat—on moral grounds—the legalization of same-sex marriage. It argues that the religious or moral claims of one sectarian group may not be legitimately used by governments to displace the moral freedom of other groups or persons, especially in societies in which various religious groups may differ on the question at hand. There is, indeed, a religious freedom argument to be made about same-sex marriage, but it is not the one championed by the Catholic bishops.
Domine, Non Sum Dignus
Authors: Cheng Patrick S.
Published: September 2014

This chapter draws parallels between the classroom bullying of LGBTQ youths (with its resultant harms) and the “theological bullying” by the Roman Catholic hierarchy of those who dissent from the church’s teachings on homosexuality (with its resultant harms). It argues that by its ongoing and deliberate actions, the hierarchy intends to silence dissenting voices through the use of terror (spiritual, economic, and political) and unbridled authority. It calls for the need to stop this repetitive cycle of bullying and the importance of witnesses who speak out and demand that all people be treated with dignity and respect as beings created in the image of God. It finds hope in the development of queer theologies, especially by theologians of color; the courage of queer theologians who have stayed within the Roman Catholic Church; the appearance of the many new voices of nonacademic Catholic theologians; and the emergence of new genres of affirming queer Catholic writings.
Wild(e) Theology
Authors: Roden Frederick S.
Published: September 2014

This chapter discusses the implications for the church and its faithful members of the divine commandment to love, particularly in the context of Catholic ministry to LGBTQ youth. It confronts the deceptiveness of a church that proclaims both the evil of homosexual activity and the evil of hate crimes directed at homosexuals. It traces the hierarchical silencing of dissident Catholic voices on sexual morality resulting in the inhibition of development of new moral theologies since the early twentieth century. The development of Catholic theologies of homosexuality was then, as now, left to the laity. Meanwhile, the souls of LGBTQ youth cry out in suffering for the mercy of God and are left without the comfort of a receptive Catholic moral theology that might be found in Christ’s loving identification with the suffering and marginalized.
The Maintenance of Innocence
Authors: Abbas Sadia
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines an episode from the popular British television show Spooks/MI-5 entitled “Who Guards the Guards?” (2004) and the films Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. It reveals the importance of the history of racial slavery and incarceration to current imaginings of Islamists in cultural production in the UK and the US. The imagined power of Islamists functions to disappear the historical violence of Empire, as the continuity of practices that date to racial slavery and to the eradication of the Native Americans is erased. Practices fundamental to the making of colonial modernity are redeemed, their history effaced, by making them seem only products of the War on Terror.
How Injury Travels
Authors: Abbas Sadia
Published: September 2014

This chapter examines the impact of linking injury, blasphemy, religious pain, and Muslim identity together. It considers two academic representations of the varieties of Muslim hurt. One is a consideration of Muslim responses to the Rushdie affair and another to the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons. Both are concerned with the specificity of Muslim pain in response to insults to the Prophet of Islam.