Thursday, February 16, 2012

Amy Allen, POS, Ch. 7

1. With respect to the account of gender vis-à-vis Benhabib here, the interpretation was that Benhabib’s view takes there to be an unengendered core self that precedes the self, whereas Allen’s view is that the self is always already constituted as gendered (at least in modernity, &c., &c.). There was a worry that gender here is monolithic, rather than hegemonic. Do you (could you?) accept that gender is inherently multiple? Is it multiple as personal identity (identification)? Is it multiple as social identity (ascription)?

2. There were questions about the status of normativity in the book, and the concerns driving the questions about normativity that are emphasized. We cobbled together a rough and working typology of questions about normativity (noting that not everyone agreed on this):
1. Meta-theoretical account of normativity. An account of the structure and status of normativity. This is going to be a philosophical or meta-theoretical or methodological account. Within the frame of an account or conception of ‘what normativity is’ (in a largely formal sense) we can then ask questions about the norms (in a largely contentful or substantive sense) themselves…
2. Normative Big Questions.
i. Questions about, say, Freedom and Equality. These questions about which it’s not useful to engage in rational debate. These are (per definition) always intertheoretic or intervocabulary or inter-episteme.
3. Normative little questions.
i. Questions of this or that harm, or this or that oppression. Questions about norms that are zones of conflict in our contemporary cultural configuration.
ii. Genealogy is useful here, Pragmatism is useful here, Critical Theory is useful here, Analytic Naturalism is useful here, Anthropology is useful here, and so are other styles of inquiry.

Thursday, February 9, 2012

Amy Allen, POS, Chs. 5 &6, Questions

1. Why does Allen need Foucault to be offering a determinate negation of the subject? Is this requisite for the project of integrating Foucaultian genealogy and Habermasian critical theory? If Foucault is not offering a determinate (rather than abstract) negation of the philosophy of the subject, then is there sufficient shared philosophical space between Foucault and Habermas to effect the sort of philosophical integration that Allen is working for? (Thus, we wondered, is there an implicit reliance in the text on the idea that the motor of critical theory is the determinate negation of philosophical conceptions.)

Is this account of Foucault as determinate negator sufficiently in touch with the Foucaultian-Deleuzian attempt to get out from under the logic of contradiction. See, for instance, Foucault’s review of Deleuze’s 1968 and 1969 books, or Foucault’s “What Is Critique?” where he does not negate phenomenology and analytic philosophy so much as just claim that he’s doing something else.

2. There were questions about how to navigate between Maeve Cooke’s work (on Amy Allen’s account) on radical contextualism (position #2) versus context-transcending theory (position #3) (138ff.). How does Cooke’s position in defense of #3 not collapse that view back into #3?

One view is that #3 inevitably collapses back into #2, and that this would be problematic except for the ability to orient #2 in terms of the temporal projection of norms. Norms are produced in context and, as norms, are inherently projectible (promisable) to other contexts which are relevant in the right respects. Metaphor not of posit and apply, but of production and reproduction.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Chapter 4

1. The Psyche. Butler worries that Foucault “does not address the issue of ‘the psychic form that power takes’” (73). What is the philosophical status of the concept of the psychic? Is this a thoroughly historicizable concept, such that ‘the psychic’ is a feature of some group of people like ‘We Victorians’ or ‘we moderns’ or some such? Or is this a philosophically heavy concept, perhaps a structuralist concept, such that ‘the psychic’ is a category or container that takes historically variable forms?

2. Normative distinctions. It is suggested that “what is required is a distinction between subordination as a normatively problematic relationship and dependency as a normatively neutral one” (84; cf. 78 top). There was a question about the political (and, more broadly, normative?) implications and ramifications of the appeal to the psychic in Butler? If we want to move toward a psychoanalytic conception of psychic capacities (e.g., capacity of vulnerability), then how do we cash that conception out in terms of a project engaging normative critique?