What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and inequality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? What are the implications of postmodern ethics for the agonistic politics of radical democracy?
We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers--including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray--the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism.
As the unavoidable yet productive dissonance among antagonism, freedom, and obligation suggests, the ethics of dissensus seeks not to transcend politics but to articulate the difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. Opposing the conservative political work of privatized moral discourse that reduces social antagonism to the apolitical experience of good and evil, the ethics of dissensus calls into question not only the depoliticized subject of ethics but also the disembodied notions of citizenship, rights, and democratic community.

What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and inequality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? What are the implications of postmodern ethics for the agonistic politics of radical democracy?
We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers--including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray--the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism.
As the unavoidable yet productive dissonance among antagonism, freedom, and obligation suggests, the ethics of dissensus seeks not to transcend politics but to articulate the difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. Opposing the conservative political work of privatized moral discourse that reduces social antagonism to the apolitical experience of good and evil, the ethics of dissensus calls into question not only the depoliticized subject of ethics but also the disembodied notions of citizenship, rights, and democratic community.

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek provide a reconfiguration of Hannah Arendt's philosophy of natality from the perspective of biopolitical and feminist theory. They show us that Arendt provides new ways of contesting biopolitical threats to human plurality and the threat of biopolitics - along with sexism, racism and political theology - to women's reproductive agency. They extend Arendt's account of collective political action to include political hospitality, responsibility and story-telling as ways of countering the harms of biopower. Diprose and Ziarek give us an insightful account of the political ontology of Hannah Arendt and form new dialogues between her and major 20th- and 21st-century thinkers including Foucault, Agamben, Nancy, Kristeva, Esposito, Derrida, Levinas and Cavarero.

A Future for the Humanities: Praxis, Heteronomy, Invention brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the pressing question of the future of the humanities. Whereas many recent works have addressed this question in primarily pragmatic terms, this book seeks to examine its conceptual foundations. What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities' future in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? Although hailing from disparate disciplines and taking different angles on these questions, the essays we have assembled argue collectively that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and the very matrix for invention. Such a broadly conceived notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming; kinship and the foreign; "disposable populations" within a global political economy; queerness and the death drive; the parapoetic; electronic textuality; invention and accountability; political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy; art and art history; visuality; politicaltheory; criticism and critique; psychoanalysis; gender analysis; architecture; literature; art). This volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future. It will prove indispensable to a wide range of scholars, practitioners, and disciplines: philosophy, history, literature, political science, visual studies, art history, gender studies, film studies, psychoanalysis, poetics, architecture, technology studies, and art.

A Future for the Humanities: Praxis, Heteronomy, Invention brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the pressing question of the future of the humanities. Whereas many recent works have addressed this question in primarily pragmatic terms, this book seeks to examine its conceptual foundations. What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities' future in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? Although hailing from disparate disciplines and taking different angles on these questions, the essays we have assembled argue collectively that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and the very matrix for invention. Such a broadly conceived notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays in this volume discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming; kinship and the foreign; "disposable populations" within a global political economy; queerness and the death drive; the parapoetic; electronic textuality; invention and accountability; political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy; art and art history; visuality; politicaltheory; criticism and critique; psychoanalysis; gender analysis; architecture; literature; art). This volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future. It will prove indispensable to a wide range of scholars, practitioners, and disciplines: philosophy, history, literature, political science, visual studies, art history, gender studies, film studies, psychoanalysis, poetics, architecture, technology studies, and art.

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called "intermedialities." The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory. The "intermedial" approach to social relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter (being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not only engagements between already constituted positions but even more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and ethical analysis of the "in-between" enables a conception of community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with others rather than on an identification with a shared identity. Investigations of "in-betweenness," both as medium specific and between heterogeneous "sites" of inquiry, range here from philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the political circulation of money and power to the operation of new technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these com

Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics is a comprehensive collection devoted to the new field of research called 'intermedialities.' The concept of intermedialities stresses the necessity of situating philosophical and political debates on social relations in the divergent contexts of media theories, avant-garde artistic practices, continental philosophy, feminism, and political theory. The 'intermedial' approach to social relations does not focus on the shared identity but instead on the epistemological, ethical, and political status of inter (being-in-between). At stake here are the political analyses of new modes of being in common that transcend national boundaries, the critique of the new forms of domination that accompany them, and the search for new emancipatory possibilities. Opening a new approach to social relations, intermedialities investigates not only engagements between already constituted positions but even more the interval, antagonism, and differences that form and decenter these positions. Consequently, in opposition to the resurgence of cultural and ethnic particularisms and to the leveling of difference produced by globalization, the political and ethical analysis of the 'in-between' enables a conception of community based on difference, exposure, and interaction with others rather than on an identification with a shared identity. Investigations of 'in-betweenness,' both as medium specific and between heterogeneous 'sites' of inquiry, range here from philosophical conceptuality to artistic practices, from the political circulation of money and power to the operation of new technologies. They inevitably invoke the crucial role of embodiment in creative thought and collective acting. As a mediating instance between the psyche and society, matter and spirit, nature and culture, and biology and technology, the body is another interval forming and informed by socio-linguistic relations. As these complex intersections between media, materiality, art, and the philosophy and politics of the in-between suggest, the project of intermedialities provides new ways of rethinking relations among arts, politics, and science.

A variety of recent theoretical frameworks from poststructuralism to queer theory and postcolonialism are used to examine Gombrowicz's texts in the context of the current reappraisals of the mixed legacies of modernism. Essays discuss Gombrowicz's aesthetics and his philosophical interests; his exil

These original essays explore how the concept of revolution permeates and unifies Julia Kristeva's body of work by tracing its trajectory from her early engagement with the Tel Quel group, through her preoccupation in the 1980s with abjection, melancholia, and love, to her latest work. Some of the leading voices in Kristeva scholarship examine her reevaluation of the concept of revolt in the context of the changing cultural and political conditions in the West; the questions of the stranger, race, and nation; her reflections on narrative, public spaces, and collectivity in the context of her engagement with Hannah Arendt's work; her development and refinement of the notions of abjection, melancholia, and narcissism in her ongoing interrogation of aesthetics; as well as her contribution to film theory. Focused primarily on Kristeva's newest work--much of it only recently translated into English--this book breaks new ground in Kristeva scholarship.