Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), formerly also known as apotemnophilia, is characterized by a desire for amputation of a healthy limb and is claimed to straddle or to even blur the boundary between psychiatry and neurology. The neurological line of approach, however, is a recent one, and is accompanied or preceded by psychodynamical, behavioural, philosophical, and psychiatric approaches and hypotheses. Next to its confusing history in which the disorder itself has no fixed identity and could not be classified under a (...) specific discipline, its sexual component has been an issue of unclarity and controversy, and its assessment a criterion for distinguishing BIID from apotemnophilia, a paraphilia. Scholars referring to the lived body—a phenomenon primarily discussed in the phenomenological tradition in philosophy—seem willing to exclude the sexual component as inessential, whereas other authors notice important similarities with gender identity disorder or transsexualism, and thus precisely focus attention on the sexual component. This contribution outlines the history of BIID highlighting the vicissitudes of its sexual component, and questions the justification for distinguishing BIID from apotemnophilia and thus for omitting the sexual component as essential. Second, we explain a hardly discussed concept from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945a), the sexual schema, and investigate how the sexual schema could function in interaction with the body image in an interpretation of BIID which starts from the lived body while giving the sexual component its due. (shrink)

This article argues that political injustices can arise from the distribution and character of our sexual desires and that we can be held responsible for correcting these injustices. It draws on a conception of structural injustice to diagnose unjust patterns of sexual attraction, which are taken to arise when socio-structural processes shaping the formation of sexual desire compound systemic domination and capacity-deprivation for the occupants of a social position. Individualistic and structural solutions to the problem of unjust (...) patterns of sexual attraction are assessed in the context of racialised sexual aversion, racial fetishism, and the desexualisation of people with disabilities. While both forms of intervention can help in principle, some of the advantages of structural approaches are laid out. A schema for assigning political responsibilities for addressing this injustice is proposed, with some limits identified to the kinds of state and social responses that are justified. Finally, the status of the merely aesthetically unappealing is considered, with a relational egalitarian approach concluding that they are subject to structurally unjust patterns of sexual desire only when exposed to oppression or second-class citizenship as a result. (shrink)

The following leverages a queer(ed) somaesthetic lens to analyze the protagonist of "Poor Things" (2023), Bella Baxter, as a figure of deviance. Bella's body, as a queer(ed) space, serves as a vehicle for learning through the sensual erotic, a source of social discourse on personhood, morality, and autonomy, and a space where others project hegemonic norms of beauty, gender, and sexuality. The article further examines queerness through her identity, actions, gender, and sexuality and challenges conventional norms, making her body a (...) site for exploration and expression of deviation. Finally, the article examines the role of power, policing, and violence as a by-product of deviance, drawing parallels between Bella's experiences and those of queer people and other marginalized groups. By exploring Bella's character, the paper illuminates "Poor Things" (2023) as a compelling commentary on queer(ed) and embodied discussions of identity, autonomy, and personhood. (shrink)

This article illuminates a tension internal to Elizabeth Grosz's provocative theory of the irreducibility of sexual difference: while it establishes sexual difference as an ontological force of differentiation, it simultaneously delimits the forms sexual difference can take as fixed and uncrossable. This model thus privileges cissexual difference while invalidating trans modes of embodiment and identification, a move that perpetuates antitrans logic and practices while impoverishing feminist conceptions of the generativity of sexual difference. This article examines the (...) uses of transsexuality throughout Grosz's work on sexual difference, evaluating her claim that sexual difference is irreducible alongside her insistence that transsexuality is an impossible attempt to assume a bodily sex other than that assigned at birth. Illustrating how Grosz's account narrows the generativity of sexual difference down to unchangeable dimorphic sex, this article argues that fixed dimorphic sex is not simply irreducibly given but is the effect of normative schemas. If the power of sexual difference lies in its capacity to generate difference, it need not be constrained to an immobile binary of sexually specific bodies whose morphological possibilities are fixed. This article thus argues for the capacity of sexual difference itself to become otherwise than solely cisgender. (shrink)

Explores the conceptual schema underlying our understanding of reproductive technologies.

In recent decades, historians of religions have turned to, and developed, entirely new methodologies for the study of religion and human consciousness. Foremost among these are a collection of approaches often termed the “cognitive science of religion” (CSR), typically drawing on cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, and contemporary metaphor theory. Although we are still “early” in this enterprise, I hope to show how a meaningful dialogue between religious studies and contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science can help us to better understand some (...) intriguing mystical texts and practices from a tradition of medieval South Asian Hinduism. Known collectively as the Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyās, these followers of transgressive and antinomian Tantric Yoga provide excellent examples for exploring the nature of religion, ritual, consciousness, embodiment, identity, gender, emotions and sexuality. This paper will show how the study of these rich materials from seventeenth through eighteenth century Bengal in northeastern South Asia can be enhanced using insights from the philosopher Shaun Gallagher and the neurologist Patrick McNamara. (shrink)

When we think of desire in the Middle Ages we immediately recall the religious exhortation to love God and despise the flesh. My present subject is not the desire for God but the less sublime theme of sexual desire, however the two may have been linked. Sexual desire was a central intellectual concern for medieval thinkers despite their reputed aversion to the subject. It was not, for example, the trifunctional schema of modern celebrity — oratores, bellatores, laboratores (...) — that was the earliest and most pervasive of medieval social classifications, but the trisexual division among coniugati, continentes, and virgines. In other words, the human race was fundamentally grouped according to sexual activity. As advocates of virginity, the monks were the first to pronounce on sexuality, and they formulated the terms of discourse lasting into the early Middle Ages. By 1200, however, I can find no new monastic treatise De laude virginitatis in northern France deemed worthy of transcribing because of the author's fame or the weight of its argument. Contemporary theologians were equally indifferent. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate the linguistic practices by which participants in online dating chats become authentic gendered and sexual beings in the virtual world. This process of authentication validates them as members of a specific gender or sexual group, which is a key prerequisite for engaging in the intricacies of online desire and eroticism. Authentication in this context is necessarily a discursive act because of the absence of visual or aural cues, and it takes place through linguistic (...) strategies such as the age/sex/location schema, descriptions of the self, and screen names. The resulting gender and sexual identities are sketches or stereotypes whose value derives from the acceptance of social and cultural discourses on gender and sexuality that are negotiated in the interactions. Authentication, therefore, is not an external process imposed upon people, but the result of specific social practices. (shrink)

This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception. I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or erase the feminine body, but is informed by Merleau-Ponty particular version of the phenomenological reduction whereby factic determinations are “bracketed” to permit the object under study to reveal itself as (...) it is rather than as we wish it to be or have been conditioned to think it. I subsequently defend Merleau-Ponty against the long-standing claim that entwining sexuality with existence prevents an analytic and by extension positive conception of sexuality by arguing that he rejects the monadic logic that this charge is premised on to instead challenge us to think of sexuality in terms of its integration with an individual’s entire embodied, embedded existence. The result is an analysis that emphasizes the ambiguity, afoundationalism, individuality, and open-ended immanent expressivity of sexuality. (shrink)

Modern urban life is increasingly characterized by specialized erotic worlds designed for sexual partnership and sexual sociality. In this article, I build on sociological theory developed in areas other than the sociology of sexuality to formulate a framework uniquely suited to the analysis of such modern erotic worlds--the sexual fields framework. Coupling Goffman's social psychological focus on situational negotiation with a Bourdieusian model of routine practice, the sexual fields framework highlights the relationship of interactional work to (...) fields of objective relations wherein historically specific erotic schemas acquire a structural manifestation that erotic players must navigate. In so doing, the sexual fields approach advances a set of sensitizing concepts for identifying the structures of collective sexual life, and raises a set of new lines of sociological inquiry, including the relationship of sexual fields to both psychoanalytic and macro-level structures and processes. (shrink)

Fortune published ‘The Winged Bull: A Study in Esoteric Psychology’ in The Inner Light Magazine in 1938. In it, she states that The Winged Bull has a threefold thesis: ‘Firstly, the radical unsoundness of the Christian attitude towards sex; secondly, the remedial possibilities of a combination of psychology and occultism; thirdly, the dangers of the dark side of sexual magic.’ The ‘key-concept’ of the book however, ‘in which the three basic motifs are subsumed,’ is ‘the relationship between a man (...) and a woman in the light of the forgotten knowledge of the ancients,’ and concerns ‘the knowledge of certain aspects of the sex relationship which are the carefully guarded secrets of the initiates.’ The initiation offered in the novel is into this secret knowledge of love and sex. In this chapter I will explore the vision of magical sexuality Fortune presents in The Winged Bull in more detail. I will consider the way Fortune presented her form of sexual magic, self-consciously contrasting it with the forms practised by her contemporaries, particularly Aleister Crowley. Discussing the relationship between sexuality and initiation, I will consider polarity and gender in Fortune’s work as well as the importance of sacrifice within her cosmological schema. (shrink)

This article provides a critical analysis of the manner in which prostitution and trafficking for the purposes of sexual exploitation was ‘framed’ by official discourses in order to support the reforms in England and Wales contained within the Policing and Crime Act 2009. Drawing upon the recent work of Judith Butler, emphasis will be placed on how the schema of the vulnerable prostitute was fundamental to invoking emotional affects, which justified certain political effects, especially the move towards criminalising (...) the purchase of sexual services. However, on closer analysis the article will uncover an agenda influenced by law and order/morality, immigration and a ‘fear of the enemy’. Furthermore, it will be argued that New Labour’s framing of the problematic enabled the State to avoid dealing with the more difficult, but more urgent, issues of the differential distribution of wealth, precarity and the engendering of an ethical and global responsibility for the other. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s seminal book, Phenomenology of Perception, stands as a positive resource for articulating both trans experiences and trans identities within both a wrong-body model and a multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. I begin my paper by highlighting the complex relation between Talia Bettcher’s proposed multiple worlds of sense model and the wrong-body model. As the dismissal of either model appears undesirable, I suggest that we attempt to combine the two models. To (...) do this, I turn to Georgia Warnke’s contextual understanding of identity as I ultimately juxtapose her work with Merleau-Ponty in order to give a positive account of trans identities that will function as a bridge between Merleau-Ponty and Bettcher. I then turn to discuss the basic ideas within Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception that are used to ground Rubin’s wrong-body model. As I contend that Merleau-Ponty has more to offer what Rubin attributes to him, I then turn to key passages concerning Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the sexual schema and the intrinsic ambiguity of the body. By incorporating both concepts into a discussion of trans philosophy, I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers a non-essentialist account of sexuality that both phenomenologically legitimates and grounds the wide spectrum of trans experiences and trans identities as well as Warnke’s contextual identity through, what I call, our ambiguous-being-in-the-world. Such an account, I conclude, makes possible a combined wrong-body model and multiple worlds of sense model of trans philosophy. (shrink)

This paper brings Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach to Sasha Waltz’s dance film S, which focuses on the relation between sexuality and language. Maintaining that movement in cinema takes place in the viewers and not the film, the paper considers how the visual can be deepened to include the ways we move and are moved. Saussure’s insights into language are brought to the sensible, which is here understood in terms of divergences from norms. Though film would seem to privilege vision, viewing this (...) film helps to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s claim that a film succeeds when it engages the viewer’s embodied understanding, and shifts the norms of the corporeal schema. (shrink)

Today, the ‘pluriverse’ is considered to be a radical new concept capable of decolonising political thought. However, it is not only decolonial scholarship that has taken up the concept of the pluriverse; far-right intellectuals, too, have been cultivating a decolonial imaginary based on the idea of the pluriverse. This article compares the way the concept of the pluriverse appears in certain strands of Latin American decolonial theory exemplified by Walter Mignolo, on the one hand, and the ethnopluralism of the European (...) New Right represented by Alain de Benoist and Alexander Dugin, on the other. Despite Mignolo’s pluriverse being an ‘open pluriverse’ of entanglement between peoples, while the European New Right’s is a ‘closed pluriverse’ of ethnic separation, I argue that these uses of the pluriverse are nevertheless underpinned by a shared analytical and normative framework. This framework is defined by a simple refrain: that what oppresses the world is ontological and epistemological sameness, and what will liberate it is ontological and epistemological difference. I argue that this schema, which misapprehends imperialism as a form of epistemic domination geared purely towards homogenisation, rather than as a set of material relationships that also produce (e.g. racial, sexual, and class) difference, does not provide a solid foundation for contesting colonial relations. (shrink)

The article proposes a re-examination of the role and position of the so-called “Disney villains” within the narrative framework of animated films and popular culture as a whole. In the first part, the historical evolution in the representation of these villains will be explored according to the practice of “queer coding,” which involves attributing stereotypically queer traits to them without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity. It will be observed how their non-conforming gender and sexuality, used to mark (...) their moral deviance, challenge and defy dominant gender and narrative norms. It is precisely through their queer performance and camp aesthetic that “evil stepmothers,” “sissy-villains,” and “drag-queen-like” sea witches can emancipate themselves from their traditional roles as antagonists (narrative level) and as social outcasts (discursive level) to seize the spotlight through the screen (manifest surface). This study combines tools of Greimasian text analysis, including the canonical narrative schema and the generative trajectory of meaning, with Lotman’s theory and notion of “semiosphere,” to investigate the centrality and criticality of these “quillains” within the heteronormative narrative framework and the broader cultural context. To capture (or being captured by) the queer aspect of these characters and their stories, the invitation is to look at their visage not as a coded symbol of an underlying identity and truth, but as an image that exceeds any defined meaning thanks to its iconic power. (shrink)

Notorious for advancing a strict dichotomy between the masculine “demiurgic father” and the feminine “nurse/receptacle of becoming” as the “natural” origin of the cosmos, Plato's Timaeus has become a site for feminist interrogation. Most critics easily deem the text a masculine fantasy that projects feminine impotence and obligatory heterosexuality, reinforcing patriarchal power structures that are blindly reproduced in their historical reception. Consequently, this article analyzes the Neoplatonic replication of this framework, but with special attention given to Proclus's challenges to this (...) gendered and sexual context. In this late, sometimes forgotten figure, we find, rather surprisingly, a Platonist who neither sequesters the feminine to the domain of the passive receptacle nor charges her simply with being a bastard image of the masculine. Rather, for Proclus, the feminine becomes the site of lived, erotic power that produces and sustains the value of authentic otherness. Furthermore, Proclus offers a challenge to the naturalness of the sex binary, suggesting a radical queerness as the basis of all identity. Overall, we shall see how classical patriarchal thinkers may, despite themselves, offer subversive models that might present readers with possibilities for troubling the sexual prejudices of ancient metaphysical schemas. (shrink)

In a 1967 article for Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Jacques Nassif shifts the focus of Freud’s “‘A Child is Being Beaten’” from the aetiology of perversions to the question of fantasy. Nassif concludes that there is a fundamental fantasy exhibited in these cases and conducts an “archaeology” of this fundamental fantasy, locating the origin of fantasy with the origin of sexual difference: castration and the Oedipus complex. In the final lines of the article, Nassif wonders if “another fantasy,” with a (...) different verbalization that corresponds to a “another body,” could be built on this structure, but admits his reading does not permit an answer to this question. I propose that a reading that shifts the focus in the text again provides both an affirmative answer to Nassif’s question as well as indications of an elaboration. On my reading, without abandoning Nassif, ambivalence is the conceptual focus. Ambivalence, as Freud formulates it, is not just the reversal of feelings into their opposite, like love transformed into hate. Rather, ambivalence is the co-presence of things “different in their nature,” and this co-presence modifies these things chained together. In the context of the fantasy in “‘A Child is Being Beaten,’” this shift in conceptual focus results in an alternative schema of the Oedipus complex, an analysis of drive as a linguistic representation of the ambivalent relation, and the Lacanian concept of the letter as the precipitate of this ambivalent relation circuited by the drive. The conclusion, here, is that the fantasies recorded in the text do not only express a fundamental fantasy about the origin of the sexes, as Nassif suggests, but express a fundamental fantasy about the conditions of signification tout court. The article ends on an open question—cued by Nassif’s closing question in his essay—regarding the possibility of further reconciliation between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of this analysis of ambivalence, drive, and the letter. (shrink)

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and (...) ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic. (shrink)

Criminal law practices in the US, including policing and incarceration, have drawn heavy criticism for their disproportionate impact on black people, particularly black men. At the same time, some feminist scholars and activists advocate for increases in criminal law responses to sexual assault, including expanding criminal statutes to cover more instances of sexual assault and increasing sentencing guidelines. These reforms are often justified by claims that criminal law should express more feminist values and reject sexist social schemas. This (...) paper makes the case that criminal legal interventions aimed at changing sexist social schemas, such as ‘rape culture,’ are unlikely to be successful because criminal law is effective at maintaining existing social norms, but bad at introducing novel ones. Similarly, in the US, criminality has been ideologically linked to blackness, so attempts to use the stigma of criminality to combat sexual violence are likely to reinforce anti-black racism. The very meaning of a criminal law depends on related social schemas, and the racist social schemas associated with criminality undermine the ability of criminal legal responses to present anti-sexist values. At best, criminal legal reforms aimed at expressing the equal dignity of women will be ambiguous because their meaning is negotiated by existing sexist and racist social schemas. Thus, penal expressivism cannot offer a justification for using criminal law to combat sexual assault. (shrink)

Anarcha-feminism emerged as a ‘school of thought’ in late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Informed by the experience of female subjugation, anarchist women undertook a radical critique of sexual double standards and the gendered division of labour in ways that anarchist men were less inclined to recognise. In addition to describing the sociopolitical conditions from which anarcha-feminism arose, this chapter highlights the following key thinkers: Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman. As (...) a dynamic, loosely formed network of activists who came from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, these women held differing ideas on how to create a free society. Yet, several intersecting principles were reflected in their activism, if not explicitly through their public advocacy, then implicitly through their unconventional lifestyles: the liberating potential of individual autonomy, the necessity of sexual freedom in order to achieve autonomy, and the inseparability of women’s liberation from the larger schema of human liberation. Beyond supporting the broader efforts of the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminism offered a model of womanhood that articulated women’s sexual agency as an economic and personal imperative, which in turn provided a radical alternative to the suffrage movement and a critical framework for modern feminism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY: A REVIEW DISCUSSION [I]t seems to me that Schema 18 [preparatory draft for the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] needs to rest on a deeper realization of the urgent problems posed by technology.... (The Constitution on Mass Media seems to have been totally innocent of any such awareness.) For one thing, the whole massive complex of technology, which (...) reaches into every aspect of social life today, implies a huge organization of which no one is really in control, and which dictates its own solutions irrespective of human needs or even reason.... I am not of course saying that technology is "bad," and that progress is something to be feared. But I am saying that behind the cloak of specious myths about technology and progress, there seems to be at work a vast uncontrolled power which is leading man where he does not want to go... and in which the Church... ought to be somewhat more aware of the intervention of the "principalities and powers" of which St. Paul speaks. -Thomas Merton, Letter to Bernard Haring (December ~6, 1964) l WHEN A DRAFT of the United States Roman Catholic bishops' proposed pastoral letter on human values was circulated to philos·ophy teachers at Catholic colleges in 1975, one respondent took the occasion to suggest that what was needed was not another geneml restatement of " human values " or a piecemeal analysis of specific issues (unemployment, artificial contraception, abortion, nuclear weapons, etc.) but something intermediate-work toward the development of an ethics of technology.2 Unbeknown i The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, selected and edited by William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), pp. 383-384. 2 The pastoral subsequently appeared as To Live in Christ Jesus: A Pastoral Reflection on the Moral Life (Washington, DC: U.S. Catholic Conference, November 1976). 146 TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY 147 to himself, he had voiced a concern similar to that expressed by Thomas Merton a decade earlier. With the publication another decade later of Technological Powers and the Person: Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technology,3 the proceedings of a workshop for Catholic bishops by the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center (then in St. Louis, now in Boston) there is evidence that this need is being increasingly recognized. Working from cmss-disciplinary analyses of two commonly un-associaited issues-nuclear energy and reproductive technologies (i.e., the ostensibly positive correlates 0£ nuclear weapons and artificial contraception)-Technological Powers and the Person seeks to formulaite general guidelines for the engagement with modern technology. Two specific technologies are rightly seen as related aspects of a global phenomenon, and philosophical anthropology is properly proposed as the foundation for ethical principles. Although aspects of this assessment may well be criticized, the general approach-a.s well as this particular workshop and the form of its final proceedingsdeserve commendation. 'Vhat follows, then, are some comments on format and substantive content aimed at furthering such a project. 1. The workshop itself (which was held in Dallas, Texas) was opened on the evening of January 31, 1983, with a keynote address by Christopher Derrick, a Catholic layman from England who has written on moral and religious issues of cuLture s Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P., Donald G. McCarthy, Edward J. Bayer, S.T.D., Michael P. McDonough, S.T.D., and Larry D. Lossing, eds., Technological Powers and the Person: Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technologies (St. Louis, MO: Pope John Center, 1983). Pp. xiii, 500. This is the third in a series. Previous proceedings are New Technologies of Birth and Death (196 pages, from a 1980 workshop) and Human Sexuality and Personhood (254 pages, from a 1981 workshop), both published by the Pope John Center; as the titles and pages alone indicate, neither has the scope of the present volume. 148 CARL MITCHAl\1 and eoology.4 Together with a general overview of the workshop by the senior editor, Derrick's address constitutes part ooo of the proceedings. His fundamental question concerns whether there might not be an "inordinate attachment to temporal good... (shrink)

The point of this collection of essays on James Baldwin is, as it were, to not take the word on James Baldwin at its word. This collection does not seek to iterate, once again, the divisions—separating Baldwin's work into distinct, discrete articulations such as those that have so marked critiques on Baldwin. James Baldwin, culminating in The Fire Next Time (this is always where the dividing line is drawn, The Fire Next Time), darling of the white liberal establishment with his (...) essays in Partisan Review and Commentary—this Baldwin is the author who struggled with that metaphoric father, Richard Wright, the Marxist “naturalist” (and confrère of Sartre, de Beauvoir) and creator of the tragic Bigger Thomas, who had to be “slain” in order that “art” (for “arts sake,” of course) might triumph over the “protest novel.” The Baldwin, who, try as he might, could never quite bridge the gap with “Alas, Poor Richard,” the essay he penned after Wright's death. That Baldwin is undone by the violent homophobia of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, in which Baldwin is attacked relentlessly, for his homosexuality, for being, among other things, the “black boy, with a white mind”; the effect of Cleaver's attacks, the logic goes, is that it “reduced” Baldwin to giving up his liberalist tendencies, his commitment to “art” for its own sake. As a consequence, Baldwin “apologized” to Cleaver, in part by revising, radically, his position on the Black Panthers by underwriting Cleaver's and Huey Newton's project. In this schema, everything that Baldwin writes after The Fire Next Time is either “bad literature” or outright pamphleteering—black nationalist “propaganda.”There is a place in Baldwin scholarship for critiques and assessments of this kind, but that is not the thinking on Baldwin that this collection undertakes. The ambition here is, rather, to see where Baldwin's Logos, his word, his word on race and racism, his word on film, his word on violence against African-Americans across the decades (indeed, the centuries), his word on love and religion, takes us. This collection engages Baldwin as a philosopher, as a thinker who raises fundamental questions, questions that go to the core of what it means to be in the world.In a certain sense, this should not be a surprising turn in scholarship, considering his moment as a writer. Born in 1924, Baldwin belongs to a generation of black Atlantic thinkers who infused nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and theater with philosophical language and massive theoretical aspiration. Baldwin's birth-moment puts him alongside that great anticolonial cluster of West Indian writers, including Frantz Fanon, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, inheritors, all of them, of that just-prior wave of anticolonial writing and struggle in the works of Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and C. L. R. James. These are legendary, world-historical thinkers, renowned for the challenge they put to European imperial power and the logic of colonialism as much as they anticipated the problems and, indeed, the disappointments that sovereignty would bring to fledgling Third World nations—and the sovereign nations to come. This is a cadre of thinkers to which Baldwin, in his own complicated way, belonged.The birth-moment is also an intellectual event, an occasion in which an honest reckoning with the past seemed possible, one that might reject and surpass the abjection of the Africana past in the name of something simultaneously more syncretic, creolized, and more messianic. This is, as C. L. R. James might have insisted, a world-historical moment. For all of these thinkers, this moment was: revolutionary. Transformative. It was full of potentiality but already haunted by the specter of a failed to-come. Another future becomes possible in Baldwin's work, just as it had become possible in the essays, poems, novels, and theoretical works of his black Atlantic contemporaries, drawing, always, on the complex richness of the painful, yet something more than just pain, history, and the memory of black people. Such a moment and its work entrenches Baldwin deeply in his generation and its philosophical moment. In such an entrenchment, set in that context and thought in its moment, the nuance and complexity of Baldwin's work becomes visible. It becomes material for treatment, not simply restatement or historical framing—to not take the word on Baldwin at its word, but to treat the word and draw out its theoretical sense and sensibilities. To not take Baldwin at his word demands thinking the philosophical difficulties that Baldwin's work grapples with in so many registers, that he raises insistently.It is this insistence on a philosophical treatment of Baldwin's work that marks the importance of this collection. This collection, in its own somewhat oblique way, situates the work of Baldwin in the context of an emerging specialty in philosophy and one to which this journal is dedicated: philosophy of race. What that specialty, still so new, will come to mean is of course not yet set (and we are immensely grateful for this indeterminacy), and is perhaps held open as a matter of principle, but for that very reason Baldwin's work warrants serious attention from philosophers theorizing about race. If by philosophy of race we mean a scientific interrogation into the meaning of the term race, whether historical or contemporary, then Baldwin's contribution is thin, if even of any real significance. He does not examine the history of the idea, nor does he try to give a clear definition of it; for Baldwin, the pathologies of American life so deeply disturb our thinking and speaking about race that clarity about the concept seems a dream that is its own kind of pathology. (That may be one of the projects Baldwin charges us to undertake, in part that we may better situate his work philosophically.)Nonetheless, the concept of race is absolutely the center of Baldwin's thinking, the question that will not let go of him, the question that is always determinedly present. Always, of course, cast in discourses such as language, embodiment, politics, memory, identity—these are all Baldwin's questions, the impossibly freighted and difficult questions of his moment and generation. He does not begin with the history of a concept, nor does he begin with the project of re- or de-definition of race. Rather, Baldwin begins with what the early Fanon called l'expérience vécue du Noir—the existential sense of blackness, the lived-experience of a racialized body and all of those meanings, contingent and otherwise, that attend to it, that pressed so sharply on his thinking, that so animated and troubled his thinking.In all, then, at work in the essays that follow is a thinking Baldwin: Baldwin as thinker, thinking through Baldwin's work. Love, language, cinema, ethnicity, race, and violence—these are the critical issues for any thinking, and Baldwin's exploration of them across three decades of writing, all of which are represented here, is both adventurous and rigorous. To draw out both of these senses of his work requires a new horizon of Baldwin scholarship, one that steps out of the literary historical approach to him and his moment and toward the conceptual stakes in that moment, his response to it, and the difficult matter of formulating a way of thinking through Baldwin's own questions. In this way, to take Baldwin at his word by working from his word—as if it were the first word for our thinking of race, love, language …We are taking Baldwin seriously, and so are taking seriously what he calls in “Many Thousands Gone” the myriad forces “which reduce the person to anonymity and which make themselves manifest daily all over the darkening world.”1 Against this, Baldwin demands, we must struggle in every possible way—politically and, of course, philosophically, we must think again/st those forces that would reduce anyone to “anonymity.” The determination not be anonymous is, of course, the philosophical (existential) force that motivates the writing of Nobody Knows My Name—few works could be so overburdened, simply the act of their naming, as an existential consequence of how and what they are named. Baldwin asks us to be philosophical readers: read the text, his text, the text of anti-black racism, attend to the manifestations, register their violence and pain, take seriously the history and memory borne by and in that world, and theorize another possible future. That is, think philosophically about the black experience. To think philosophically about Baldwin's work, the primary task of the essays that follow, is to deploy philosophy, not simply or solely as the internal character of a text (though that is certainly part of Baldwin's nonfiction), but also as the interpretative frame through which that text is read. Take Baldwin seriously, read the text of racism, read his work as such. The essays that follow do not indulge such frames in order to enhance the texts themselves, but instead draw out what otherwise might lay hidden, and thereby draw out the philosophical register in Baldwin's essayist and literary voice.Not, then, we could say, Baldwin as philosophy or Baldwin in the terms of philosophy, but rather Baldwin and philosophy, that peculiar, textured conjunction that marks the specificity of each, yet mixes, contaminates, and reformulates. Baldwin here emerges from that conjunction in a philosophical register we do not yet find, in any systematic sense, in commentary on his work. Therein lies this contribution to a scholarly field. In this admixture there are also consequences for philosophy and how we think philosophically about racialized experience. Baldwin's experimentation with the time of love and the (temporal) force of language draws us into the unthinkability of the future and the sublimity of the suffering and suffered past. We can only, as Walter Benjamin's work reminds us, apprehend the relationship of the extant present to the future through our grappling with the always historic past. In that philosophy of race, that racialization of philosophical thinking, the Logos of Baldwin's work says its piece in no small measure because Baldwin's oeuvre will not admit of any peace on the critical philosophical issues of our conjuncture. Baldwin's work makes us take up all the resonant questions, from race to love, from culture to sexual identity, from literature to the law. Wherever we turn, there is Baldwin, confronting us, asking us how we are taking up these questions, “baby.”. (shrink)

The literature on hybrid masculinity suggests that some men manage subordinate or contradictory forms of masculinity while still maintaining and benefiting from gender inequality. Drawing from 35 in-depth qualitative interviews with religious participants in pornography addiction recovery programs, we expand this literature by illustrating how hybrid masculinity operates through shared cultural knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality. We find that participants use distinct cultural schemas related to religion and science to explain how men are created by God to be biologically (...) “hard-wired” for pornography addiction. We use the phrase redemptive masculinity to describe a type of hybrid masculinity that upholds the cultural association between hegemonic masculinity and pornography consumption, but allows religious men to describe their avoidance of pornography as a masculine feat. Redemptive masculinity depends upon particular beliefs about gender that give advantage to the religious men who work to overcome pornography addiction. We show how their stories reinforce essentialist differences between male and female bodies that protect the interests and sexual expressions of religious men. In turn, we show how hybrid masculinities may involve gender-flexible practices for men but also how these may ultimately reinforce strict and inflexible beliefs about so-called “opposite” sexes. (shrink)

This is a systematic case study of the assessment and treatment of Anna, a woman presenting with posttraumatic stress disorder following a drug-facilitated sexual assault that occurred over twenty years earlier. She was also diagnosed with avoidant personality disorder. Treatment with cognitive therapy for PTSD and social phobia was supplemented by imagery rescripting of memories of childhood trauma within a schema therapy approach. The study documents how her intrusive memories of the rape were potentiated by early maladaptive schemas (...) that developed in response to abusive and neglectful parenting. Within a broader narrative, three examples of IR are described which show how, as an emotion-focused intervention, this approach discloses deeper memories and emotional states that are distressing and traumatic and allows them to be transformed through a healing process that is organic and displays what Bohart and Tallman call “self-organizing wisdom.”. (shrink)

The “discipline” of feminist film theory has made and continues to make a significant contribution to the analysis of societal power relations and to the formulation of critical subject and gender theories in numerous other disciplines, and can thus be described as a mirror of theoretical debates on gender and sexuality at an interdisciplinary level. Key paradigms of feminist film theory are notably the “spectatorship” approach, feminist image criticism (“image of the woman”), critical extensions, and objections particularly through cultural studies (...) and postcolonial critique as well as approaches from queer theory and cognitively influenced media studies (film schema approach). Resisting the temptation of a teleological representation of feminist film theories, the contribution aims to provide an insight into coexisting approaches. (shrink)

Anarcha-feminism emerged as a ‘school of thought’ in late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Informed by the experience of female subjugation, anarchist women undertook a radical critique of sexual double standards and the gendered division of labour in ways that anarchist men were less inclined to recognise. In addition to describing the sociopolitical conditions from which anarcha-feminism arose, this chapter highlights the following key thinkers: Louise Michel, Charlotte Wilson, Lucía Sánchez Saornil, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, and Emma Goldman. As (...) a dynamic, loosely formed network of activists who came from diverse socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds, these women held differing ideas on how to create a free society. Yet, several intersecting principles were reflected in their activism, if not explicitly through their public advocacy, then implicitly through their unconventional lifestyles: the liberating potential of individual autonomy, the necessity of sexual freedom in order to achieve autonomy, and the inseparability of women’s liberation from the larger schema of human liberation. Beyond supporting the broader efforts of the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminism offered a model of womanhood that articulated women’s sexual agency as an economic and personal imperative, which in turn provided a radical alternative to the suffrage movement and a critical framework for modern feminism. (shrink)

This chapter explains the origins of the progressive law reform era in new multi-disciplinary knowledges about rape generated from the 1960s, and provides an overview of the feminist scholarship which has attempted to account for why statutory law reforms have not yielded significant improvements in trial practice. It discusses accounts focused on law’s patriarchal and phallocentric nature; the translation to practice problem, including the resistance of lawyers and judges and inter-trial inconsistency; and the endurance of the ‘rape schema’ as (...) a dominant framework for identifying ‘genuine’ allegations of sexual violence. The chapter also explains the concept of ‘rape myths’ and overviews the empirical research literature that show the continued influence of myths and stereotypes on jury deliberation. (shrink)

The sex/gender distinction is a staple of feminist philosophy. In slogan form: sex is “natural,” while gender is the “social meaning” of sex. Considering the importance of the sex/gender distinction—which, here, I neither endorse nor reject—it’s interesting to ask if philosophers working on the metaphysics of sexuality might make use of an analogous distinction. In this paper, I argue that we ought to endorse the sexual orientation/identity distinction. In particular, I argue that the orientation/identity distinction is indispensable to normative (...) explanations regarding LGBTQIA+ oppression and resistance. As a case study, I consider the oppression involved in the gentrification of historic queer neighborhoods. (shrink)

'A dazzling treatise, as erudite and eloquent as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and considerably more sound in its conclusion' - TLS When John desires Mary or Mary desires John, what does either of them want? What is meant by innocence, passion, love and arousal, desire, perversion and shame? These are just a few of the questions Roger Scruton addresses in this thought-provoking intellectual adventure. Beginning from purely philosophical premises, and ranging over human life, art and institutions, he surveys (...) the entire field of sexuality; equally dissatisfied with puritanism and permissiveness, he argues for a radical break with recent theories. Upholding traditional morality - though in terms that may shock many of its practitioners - his argument gravitates to that which is candid, serene and consoling in the experience of sexual love. (shrink)

Bilateral proof systems, which provide rules for both affirming and denying sentences, have been prominent in the development of proof-theoretic semantics for classical logic in recent years. However, such systems provide a substantial amount of freedom in the formulation of the rules, and, as a result, a number of different sets of rules have been put forward as definitive of the meanings of the classical connectives. In this paper, I argue that a single general schema for bilateral proof rules (...) has a reasonable claim to inferentially articulating the core meaning of all of the classical connectives. I propose this schema in the context of a bilateral sequent calculus in which each connective is given exactly two rules: a rule for affirmation and a rule for denial. Positive and negative rules for all of the classical connectives are given by a single rule schema, harmony between these positive and negative rules is established at the schematic level by a pair of elimination theorems, and the truth-conditions for all of the classical connectives are read off at once from the schema itself. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to understand if and how interactions with Sexual Robots will modify users’ relational abilities in human-human relations. We first underline that, in today’s scholar discussion on the ‘symbolic argument’, there is no theoretical framework explaining the process of symbolic shift between human-robot interactions (HRI) and human-human interactions (HHI). To clarify the symbolic shift mechanism, we propose the concept of objectual mediation. Moreover, under the lens of Winnicott’s object-relation theory, we argue that HRI can (...) structurally modify users relationality, degrading intersubjective abilities: Sexual Robots may blurry the limit between the ‘internal object’ and the external one. We conclude that, under certain conditions, interactions with Sexual Robots may bring the user back to an infantile object-relation setting, worsening the user ability to manage relational frustration. This will negatively impact on human-human interactions and social values in general. (shrink)

Philosophers have recently expressed interest in the question as to whether there is a right to sex, a right whose justification is motivated by the existence of sexually excluded people – people who suffer from involuntary long-term sexual deprivation (owing, say, to a chronic medical condition). This paper, after offering preliminary remarks about what a right to sex and its objects might be and who might have this right, surveys seven justifications for the right: linkage arguments, need, well-being, a (...) minimally decent life, being a basic good, justice, and relationships. The paper argues that a right to sex does not likely exist because none of the justifications are convincing. The paper then argues that despite the lack of justification, and because sexual exclusion is a problem worthy of attention, people's sexual needs can be addressed through the lens of goals instead of rights. This not only takes sexual exclusion seriously enough but also avoids the crucial problems associated with rights-talk, especially that of sexual coercion. (shrink)

Here, I examine the epistemic relation between beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation (e.g., beliefs concerning whether orientation is dispositional) and beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories (e.g., beliefs concerning whether polyamorous is an orientation category). Current philosophical research gives epistemic priority to the former class of beliefs, such that beliefs about the taxonomy of orientation categories tend to be jettisoned or revised in cases of conflict with beliefs about the nature of sexual orientation. Yet, considering (...) the influence of ideology on beliefs about socially significant phenomena, I argue for an epistemic reversal. (shrink)

Sexual orientation and how we might understand it is a topic that arouses significant controversy. Is sexual orientation a natural or social phenomenon? Are categories such as 'queer' and 'straight' essential to the human condition or dependent on contingent cultural practices? Whilst such questions have been considered from the perspectives of sociology and gender studies, they remain relatively underexplored from a philosophical standpoint. In this book, Matthew Andler breaks new ground examining the metaphysics of sexuality. Distinguishing sexual (...) orientation and sexual identity, he asks why only certain aspects of sexuality count as sexual orientations, arguing that sexual dispositions can only become sexual orientations in virtue of being related to heteropatriarchal kinship structures. He then turns to sexual identity, arguing that the categories 'queer' and 'straight' are grounded in the political function of sexuality cultures as resisting and/or entrenching heteropatriarchal kinship structures. Additionally, he critiques capitalist expropriations of queerness in pinkwashing. He also argues that trans-inclusive interpretations of sexuality categories serve everyone who seeks to build a life outside of the narrow provisions of heteropatriarchal kinship structures. Sexual Orientation and Identity: A Philosophical Analysis will be of interest to those studying the philosophy of gender, social metaphysics, and gender studies, as well as for anyone interested in the conceptual issues underlying debates concerning gender and social justice. (shrink)

The liberal view that valid consent is sufficient for a sex act to be morally legitimate is challenged by three major philosophies of sex: the Catholic view of sex as ordained for procreation and properly confined to marriage, the romantic view of sex as bound up with love, and the radical feminist analysis of sex in our society as part and parcel of the domination of women by men. I take a critical look at all three, focusing on Mary Geach''s (...) recent statement of the procreation view, Roger Scruton''s theory of sexual desire as naturally evolving into intimacy and love, and several radical feminist discussions of sex in sexist society which argue that the notion of consent is unhelpful and, indeed, irrelevant. I argue that none of these lines of argument is convincing, and that consent remains the touchstone of morally permissible sex – although, dmittedly, it may not be very helpful in discussing ideals of human sexuality. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent efforts in the conceptual engineering of sexual orientation are practically misguided. More precisely, I argue that philosophers cannot implement a revision to the concept of sexual orientation because we lack conceptual authority over the concept. Furthermore, in virtue of how philosophy is currently structured, we are unlikely to acquire the relevant kind of conceptual authority. Along the way, I critically discuss an argument from Herman Cappelen for a more global pessimism about (...) the implementation problem. I also discuss some alternative strategies to achieving the political goals that motivate these recent efforts to engineer the concept of sexual orientation. Ultimately, I argue that philosophers should instigate a sort of conceptual abandonment by exploiting their social role as a conceptual gadfly. (shrink)

I argue that the magnitude and nature of sex differences in aggression, their development, causation, and variability, can be better explained by sexual selection than by the alternative biosocial version of social role theory. Thus, sex differences in physical aggression increase with the degree of risk, occur early in life, peak in young adulthood, and are likely to be mediated by greater male impulsiveness, and greater female fear of physical danger. Male variability in physical aggression is consistent with an (...) alternative life history perspective, and context-dependent variability with responses to reproductive competition, although some variability follows the internal and external influences of social roles. Other sex differences, in variance in reproductive output, threat displays, size and strength, maturation rates, and mortality and conception rates, all indicate that male aggression is part of a sexually selected adaptive complex. Physical aggression between partners can be explained using different evolutionary principles, arising from the conflicts of interest between males and females entering a reproductive alliance, combined with variability following differences in societal gender roles. In this case, social roles are particularly important since they enable both the relatively equality in physical aggression between partners from Western nations, and the considerable cross-national variability, to be explained. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una descripción de los escritos inéditos de Jacques Derrida sobre Marx y Louis Althusser en la década de 1970, y un estudio de conceptos como ideología, diferencia sexual, reproducción, violencia, dominación o hegemonía en perspectiva deconstructiva. Se trata de pensar en una otra economía, más allá de la economía del cuerpo propio. El artículo fue publicado en el Volumen 7 de la Revista Demarcaciones, "a 25 años de Espectros de Marx.".

Fanon's conception of the body schema plays a central role in his philosophy. The body schema is the body's “grasp” or “sense” of itself. Fanon argues that in the encounter between the Black and white person the body schema “crumbles,” so that the Black person experiences herself as object‐like in various ways. Fanon's focus is the Black person's experience because his aim is to provide the Black person with tools for emancipation. Nevertheless, his account raises the question: (...) What happens to white self‐awareness within the colonial system? I argue that a proper understanding of Fanon's notion of the body schema provides an answer. The body schema underpins awareness of other people, not just one's bodily self. It is the self‐other experiential system that crumbles in the colonial system. Thus, we can supplement Fanon's account of Black self‐experience as object‐like with a description of white experience as tending toward solipsism, where this is the other side of the Black self‐awareness that Fanon describes. Both forms of awareness result from degraded reciprocity. Whilst they are not the same, they are nevertheless complementary parts of a defective relation between people. (shrink)

I expand on and defend a particular account of silencing that has been identified by Mary Kate McGowan. She suggests that one sort of silencing occurs when men do not think that women have the authority to refuse. I develop this proposal, arguing that it is usefully distinct from other forms of silencing, which attribute a radical misunderstanding to the perpetrator. Authority silencing, by contrast, allows that the perpetrator understands that the woman is trying to refuse. I examine the nature (...) of authority, and of refusal, and argue that a normatively binding refusal requires authority, the normative capacity to make a determination that has a ‘because I said so’ structure. Women’s authority in this sense is fragile. Authority to refuse sexual advances can be lost through women’s attire, how much they have had to drink, location, or their profession. This account makes sense of the way that perpetrators both do and do not understand sexual refusal, and explains how they are blameworthy despite their misunderstanding. (shrink)

My sexual rights puzzle according to which positive sexual rights are not compatible with negative sexual rights has been recently criticised in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Steven J Firth, who has put forward three objections to the puzzle. In this brief response, I analyse and reject each of these three objections.

What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial (...) class='Hi'>schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.” Quelles ressources l’analyse du schéma corporel faite par Merleau-Ponty fournit-elle au schéma historico-racial proposé par Fanon? En premier lieu, je vise à montrer que la théorie du schéma corporel de Merleau-Ponty est déjà une théorie de l’affect : une théorie qui n’oppose pas les affects à l’intentionnalité, qui ne les considère pas seulement comme un sens, mais comme une force, en cultivant des agentivités affectives plutôt qu’en constituant des contenus de sens statiques. Ensuite, j’affirmerai qu’en mettant en premier plan le rôle de l’affect chez ces deux penseurs, nous pouvons comprendre les innovations qu’apporte le schéma historico-racial, en anticipant et en influençant les théories féministes du tournant affectif – surtout la théorie de Sara Ahmed au sujet des économies affectives. Le schéma historico-racial établit la constitution d’agentivités affectives sur une échelle sociogénique, et ces économies affectives expliquent à leur tour la possibilité d’une dégradation du schéma corporel en schéma épidermique racial, une disjonction de l’intentionnalité affective que Fanon appelle « tétanisation affective ».Quali risorse può offrire la nozione merleau-pontiana di schema corporeo a quella di Fanon? In primo luogo, mi propongo di mostrare che la teoria dello schema corporeo elaborata da Merleau-Ponty è allo stesso tempo una teoria dell’affetto: una teoria che non oppone la dimensione degli affetti all’intenzionalità, poiché li considera non solo come senso ma come forze, in quanto implicano delle agentività affettive piuttosto che costituire meri contenuti statici di senso. Intendo quindi sostenere che mettendo in evidenza il ruolo dell’affetto in questi due autori sia possibile comprendere il portato innovativo dello schema storico-razziale, che anticipa e influenza le teorie femministe legate all’affective turn – e in particolare la teoria delle economie affettive elaborata da Sara Ahmed. Lo schema storico-razziale afferma la costituzione di agentività affettive a un livello sociogenetico, mentre le economie affettive rendono conto della possibilità del collasso dello schema corporeo in uno schema razziale epidermico, una disgiunzione dell’intenzionalità affettiva che Fanon definisce “tetanizzazione affettiva”. (shrink)

I attend to the temporal schema of open/closed by examining its elaboration in Bergson's philosophy and critically parsing the possibilities for its destabilization. Though Bergson wrote in a colonial context, this context barely receives acknowledgement in his work. This obscures the uncomfortable resonances between Bergson's late work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, and the temporal narratives that justify French colonialism. Given Bergson's uptake by philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, and by contemporary feminist and political theorists (especially “new (...) materialists”), a critical re-examination is called for. The Two Sources not only introduces a new dichotomy into Bergsonian philosophy—that of open/closed—it puts an end to the movement of duration by defining its possibilities as goals already given in advance. By turning the tools of Bergsonian critique onto The Two Sources, I propose an alternative to the open/closed—that of the “half-open”—creating in this way the conditions for decolonizing duration. (shrink)

Sexual objectification is a common theme in contemporary feminist theory. It has been associated with the work of the anti-pornography feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, and, more recently, with the work of Martha Nussbaum. Interestingly, these feminists' views on objectification have their foundations in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Fully comprehending contemporary discussions of sexuality and objectification, therefore, requires a close and careful analysis of Kant's own theory of objectification. In this paper, I provide such an analysis. I (...) explain what is involved, for Kant, in the process of objectification, what it really means for a person to be an object (what Kant calls an `object of appetite'), and finally deal with his reasons for thinking that marriage can provide the solution to the problem of sexual objectification. I then proceed to some contemporary feminist discussions on sexual objectification, showing how influential Kant's ideas have been for contemporary feminist thinkers MacKinnon, Dworkin, and Nussbaum. My analysis of these feminists' work focuses on the striking similarities, as well as the important differences, that exist between their views and Kant's views on what objectification is, how it is caused, and how it can be eliminated. (shrink)