Claire Colebrook

Certeau and Foucault: Tactics and Strategic Essentialism

For some time now feminist theory has found a wealth of material for reflection and critique in the work of Michel Foucault. As in other domains of political theory, what Foucault’s immanent approach to power enabled was a way of thinking beyond the reactive logic of ideology. If political theory begins by assuming that power is located, repressing, and negative, then what follows will take the form of a strictly dichotomous logic. In the case of feminism, this dichotomy issued in a problematic relationship between patriarchy and its female victims. Either there was some essential feminine excluded by its masculine other or there was no feminine other than its ideological construction (in which case opposition to patriarchy would stem from a ‘‘strategic essentialism’’ without any actual foun-

Incorporeality: The Ghostly Body of Metaphysics

For the past two decades, the issue of the body and essentialism has dominated feminist theory. In general, it is assumed that the body has been devalued and repressed by the Western metaphysical tradition. In this article, I make two claims to the contrary. First, as poststructuralist theory has tirelessly demonstrated, Western thought has continually tried to ground thought in some foundational substance, such as the body. Second, the most provocative, fruitful and radical aspects of recent feminism and poststructuralism concern the event of incorporeality. What makes incorporeality such an urgent issue is its tie with anti-foundationalism. If there is not a direct or proper passage between what is and what is thought, then thinking can be considered as a force or event in its own right. By disrupting the traditional philosophical series that ties thought to some grounding body, thinkers as diverse as Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray and Foucault have opened the possibility of a theory of the incorporeal.

STRATIGRAPHIC TIME, WOMEN'S TIME1

Is it possible for feminist engagements to avoid historicism, and why would they want to do so? It could be argued that certain versions of historiography presuppose a masculinist ethics. The most extreme form would be Hegelianism, where all that appears to be other than the active, self-forming life of the subject ultimately appears as nothing more than the medium through which the subject comes to recognise himself. History, then, would be coterminous with the ethics and politics of the subject: an ethics and politics grounded on self-recognition and internalisation. It was just such a notion of the subject that goes through a ‘dead time’ only to rediscover what it always properly was that was criticised so forcefully by Luce Irigaray (1985), 252), who recognised the ways in which philosophy had appropriated images of birth, generation and relation to privilege self-generation. Man is that animal who has no nature, essence or being other than the form that he gives to himself, and history and generations are merely the matter through which man creates himself. Nothing should be beyond appropriation and recognition; nothing should remain radically other. (There are residues of this absolute idealism in Marxism and Marxist feminism; history should ultimately be a recognition of the ways in which our supposedly free subjectivity has been determined by what is not ourselves, leading to a utopia of complete self-governance and the overcoming of alterity.) The idea of a proper human subjectivity that is naturally oriented towards the true and the good implies a subject of reason for whom time is the passage towards complete actualisation. Change and becoming are essential to self-realisation, but the self to be realised*rational man, finally free from the distortions of prejudice and ideology*would be the proper end towards which all time would tend. A great deal of feminist work of retrieval, which looks to a past of artists and philosophers not realised (or what Virginia Woolf [1929] referred to as ‘Shakespeare’s sister’), has suggested that one line of progressive and unfolding time precludes recognition of those who have offered other models of selfhood than that of rationally self-constituting man. Perhaps there are more accommodating and other-directed forms of reason (Green 1995) or ideals of the self that emphasise the passions and relations to others (Mellor 1993). To adopt such a project of revision, which looks back to the past in order to redefine who we are, would neither be a denial of historicism nor a fall into historical relativism (Colebrook 1996). Feminist arguments of retrieval and revision may rely on constructing a counter-canon just for renewal’s sake, but more often than not they imply a more accurate, complete and nuanced history that includes women and gives a more workable account of the moral and political agent. Feminism could then be included within broader projects of historical recognition, and an overall goal of achieving a richer and more ethical humanism. This was certainly the case for liberal feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, who argued that accepting the liberal idea of history (where the past is no legitimation of the present, and where reason is capable of

The meaning of irony

Any books that you read, no matter how you got the sentences that have been read from the books, surely they will give you goodness. But, we will show you one of recommendation of the book that you need to read. This meaning of irony is what we surely mean. We will show you the reasonable reasons why you need to read this book. This book is a kind of precious book written by an experienced author.

Interpreting understanding context

John Searles (1977) objections, based in speech act theory, to Jacques Derridas ‘grammatological’ or ‘deconstructive’ ideas about language, text and writing are well known — as are Derridas (1977, 1978a, 1988) replies and, perhaps, Searles responses (1983, 1994). More recently, however, Jeff Coulter (1994) in Journal of Pragmatics has launched a different criticism of Derrida, based in Wittgensteinian and ethnomethodological theory, and directed at what Coulter thinks of as Derridas unduly indeterminate and interpretable conception of context. In this paper, we want to respond to some features of Coulters criticism, to argue that it mistakes some of Derridas arguments and, finally, to try to show that, if these (Derridas) arguments are put properly, the differences between Derridas and Coulters positions can be slightly reduced.

A Globe of One's Own: In Praise of the Flat Earth

Today’s questions of climate and climate ethics, with attendant concerns for the sustainability and viability of this life of ours on earth, present a new imaginary for political questions. It was only in the late twentieth century, with the advent of picturing the earth from space, with the possibility of nuclear annihilation of earthly life, and the speed of new media allowing for global audiences (such as the entire world viewing 9/11), that the problem of a global ethos would emerge. If there had always been a silent presupposed “we” 1 in any ethical theory, then this virtual universalism would always struggle alongside moral valorizations of specified communities. 2 How do we, from the particular world we inhabit, begin to think of life as such? It is the present sense of the planet as a whole—as a fragile bounded globe—that might present us, finally, with the opportunity and imperative to think a genuine ethos. Now that we have a notion of climate that seems to break with the etymology of this specific inclination or latitude of the earth, and does so by gesturing to something like a sense of the earth as a region or inclination in itself, this may open a new imaginary of the globe. We might think of ethos as no longer bound to a territory within the planet; instead there might be the ethos of this globe itself, which has no other region against which we might define ourselves or towards which we might direct our fantasies of another future. If there is something like climate change, perhaps it takes this form: not only a mutation of this climate (warming, depleting, becoming more volatile) but an alteration of what we take climate to be. One might want to suggest that as long as we think of climate in its traditional sense—as our specific milieu—we will perhaps lose sight of climate change, or the degree to which human life is now implicated in timelines and rhythms beyond that of its own borders. The figure of the globe appears to offer two ethical trajectories: on the one hand, an attention to global interconnections and networks would expand responsibility and awareness beyond the figure of the isolated moral subject. Ethics may have to be considered beyond discursive, human and political modes (especially if one defines politics as the practice of a polity). On the other hand, the figure of the globe—considered as a figure—is intertwined with a tropology of interconnectedness, renewal,

Sex and the (Anthropocene) City

In this essay I explore three concepts: sex, the city, and the Anthropocene. I argue that the condition for the possibility of the city is the assemblage of sexual drives for the sake of relative stability, but that those same drives also exceed the citys self-preservative function. Further, I argue that the very conditions that further the city and that enable philosophical and scientific concepts to be formed (and that allow for the Anthropocene to be discerned as an epoch) rely upon a geological politics that enables new ways of thinking about what counts as the political as such.

Introduction: Deleuze and law : forensic futures

This volume engages with the impact of a thinking of law with Gilles Deleuze. It is an attempt to engage in another mode of doing jurisprudence, which places the emphasis on the material bodies of citizens and their interests rather than the abstract formless subject of law. It is, as Claire Colebrook observes in her essay in this volume, a reconsideration of law and legal theory as a differential jurisprudence. In such a jurisprudence the emphasis would be placed on how the claims of some bodies might transform the relation between what counts as a speaking subject for law and what is silenced. This shift in the way we view the manner in which individual bodies are formed and subjugated by law provides an opening to another thinking of law, which emerges in the essays in this collection. In this regard the collection attempts to perform what one might term a vitalist jurisprudence or one in which the body obtains primacy over what Deleuze and Guattari termed the terror of the signifier.

Derrida, Deleuze and Haptic Aesthetics

In On Touching Derrida locates Jean-Luc Nancy (and, briefly, Gilles Deleuze) within a tradition of haptic ethics and aesthetics that runs from Aristotle to the present. In his early work on Husserl, Derrida had already claimed that phenomenologys commitment to the genesis of sense and the sensible is at one and the same time a commitment to pure and rigorous philosophy at the same time as it threatens to over-turn the primacy of conceptuality and cognition.Whereas Nancy (and those other figures whom Derrida cites, such as Merleau-Ponty) express a faith in a return to the sensibility of flesh, Derrida presents his own work as manifestly more cognisant of the necessary distance between flesh and sense. Another ‘approach’ to the haptic is suggested by Gilles Deleuze, whose work Derrida locates within phenomenological presence, despite Deleuze and Guattaris trenchant rejection of ‘the lived’ and the human organism that inevitably subtends any discussion of the relation between sensibility and sense. Rather ...

Who Comes after the Post-human?

To anticipate the answer to the question of who comes after the posthuman, I will give a one-word answer: the pre-human. I also want to begin by recalling the question that I have varied for the title of this essay. In 1991, in a profoundly deconstructive manner, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy posed the question, ‘who comes after the subject?’ Implicit in the phrasing is that the very possibility of the question entails a subject, or a ‘who’. To think about what might be other than the thinking subject is both the most Cartesian of gestures (allowing for a subject or question beyond the given), and already post-Cartesian in striving to think beyond the subject. As both Derrida (1969) and Deleuze and Guattari have argued: the supposed ultra-humanism of Descartes was also a hyperbolic surpassing of the human, either by way of a doubt that destroys the concrete existence of ‘man’ or by the creation of a ‘persona’ that has little to do with the living human being: ‘Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch’s flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 41). Part of the force of deconstruction lay in this strangely inhuman border of the inescapably human: if there is such a thing as the human that exists beyond the level of species being, or defines humans as a species, it is a certain capacity to negate or question whatever is given as their humanity.