Absolute Idealism Research Articles

Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel II: Art and the Absolute

AbstractKant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’, which began in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), had, by the early 1790s, fundamentally altered the terrain of German philosophy – but not entirely in the way that Kant had foreseen. Skeptical challenges to Kant’s discursive account of cognition, in which experience arises from the separate faculties of sensibility and understanding, had led thinkers such as K.L. Reinhold and J.G. Fichte to attempt to provide a first, foundational principle for the critical philosophy. These efforts were enormously influential, but by the middle of the 1790s, they too were facing a great deal of critical scrutiny. The central challenge to the Fichtean project came from an unlikely quarter: a group of young thinkers and poets who are collectively known as the early Romantics. For the Romantics, Fichte’s project remains too ‘subjectivist’, for it tries to provide an account of the world by beginning with the conditions that govern subjectivity alone. Rather, the Romantics argue that the world must be understood in terms of a monistic Absolute, akin to Spinoza’s substance, in which all dualisms are overcome. It is with this step that Absolute Idealism comes on the scene, and sets the stage for the development of Hegel’s system in the early 1800s. This essay, which continues the story of ‘Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel I’, examines the ways in which early Romanticism reacted to the Fichtean project, looks at a variety of anti‐foundationalist idealisms that the Romantics – in particular Hölderlin, Novalis, Schlegel, and Schleiermacher – developed, and traces the role that Friedrich Schelling plays in offering the first systematic account of Absolute Idealism.

Who’s Who from Kant to Hegel I: In the Kantian Wake

AbstractWhile almost all of Kant’s contemporaries agreed that the Critique of Pure Reason effected a philosophically epochal change, there was far less consensus about what precisely Kant’s new critical philosophy had brought about. In large part, this uncertainty was a result of a methodological crisis that Kant’s work had sparked: the Critique had shown that traditional dogmatic metaphysics was suspect at best, but what new methods needed to be adopted in the wake of Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’? The Critique stood as the lighting rod at the center of a complicated and especially lively set of debates and disputes that erupted in Germany in the late 1780s and early 1790s: empiricists and rationalists, threatened by the ‘all‐destroying Kant’, leapt to challenge the new critical system; skeptics attacked Kant’s claims to have secured a sure footing for empirical knowledge; a few ambitious thinkers sought to complete the critical system by revealing a foundational first principle on which Kant’s system could rest. All of these elements conspired to make the early stages in post‐Kantian thought one of the richest, most vibrant – and most fascinating – periods in the history of philosophy. The present essay looks at the various figures of the move from Kant to Fichte, and presents some of the excellent new research on the era that has appeared in the last decade or so. The sequel takes up the period from Fichte to Hegel, with an eye toward understanding how Kantian critical philosophy gave way to Hegelian Absolute Idealism.

Choosing Thou or You to Reveal Ideal Relationships in “The Knight’s Tale”

Choosing Thou or You to Reveal Ideal Relationships in “The Knight’s Tale” Raychel Haugrud Reiff If a noble person living in fourteenth century England attended a party and thanked the host by saying, “I thank you for inviting me to your wonderful party,” the host would willingly accept the guest’s gratitude. But if the guest said, “I thank thee for inviting me to thy wonderful party,” the host would be offended, thinking either that the guest was mocking him or that the visitor had no manners. On the other hand, if a fourteenth-century noble person’s son or daughter gave the party and the parent said, “I thank you for inviting me to your wonderful party,” the child would hurt, questioning why the parent was acting in such a cold manner. But if the parent said, “I thank thee for inviting me to thy wonderful party,” the son or daughter would be happy. Thou and you pronouns could not be used interchangeably by the English noble men and women of Chaucer’s time. Addressing a person with the correct pronoun was extremely important; in fact, proper pronoun usage was part of the chivalric ideal that showed “both the social awareness of the speaker and the relationship between the speaker and the person addressed.”1 In the fourteenth century, the second-person singular pronoun had two forms: thou/thee/thy and ye/you/your, with thou and ye being used as subjects of clauses, thee and you as objects of clauses, and thy and your as possessives. This is not the way in which the English language was originally spoken. In the era of Old English and early Middle English times, these same pronouns were used, but the pronoun you was always plural while thou was singular. But starting in the late thirteenth century, English-speaking people began using the plural you when speaking to a single person to signify a polite but distant relationship between members of the upper class, or to address a person of a higher rank, or to display emotional coldness. Thou pronouns continued to be spoken, but they now demonstrated either a close intimacy or social distancing. English linguistics professor David Crystal explains these distinctions: [End Page 69] The you forms would normally be used: *by people of lower social status to those above them (e.g., ordinary people to nobles, children to parents, servants to masters); *by the upper classes when talking to each other, even if they were closely related; *as a sign of a change (contrasting with thou) in the emotional temperature of an interaction. The thou forms would normally be used: *by people of higher social status to those below them (e.g., nobles to ordinary people, parents to children, masters to servants); *by the lower classes when talking to each other; *in addressing God; *in talking to ghosts, witches, and other supernatural beings; *in an imaginary address to someone who was absent; *as a sign of a change (contrasting with you) in the emotional temperature of an interaction.2 Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” demonstrates this usage; it is a medieval romance that shows ideal relationships since the tale is, as critic W. A. Davenport writes, “the epitome of the fourteenth-century court poem, expressing in wide-ranging poetic language the interest in chivalry of the court of Edward III, combining military techniques and courtly practices with elaborate rituals of love.”3 In this romance, which critic Laurel Amtower claims “may well represent the most penetrating critique of identities and their idealized form in the entire Canterbury Tales,”4 the knights and ladies, who are all honorable, display model relationships with people, including other members of the gentility, sworn brothers, and courtly lovers; with the natural world; and with the gods. Part of their ideal code of behavior includes the way they speak to one another, something the fourteenth-century knight Geoffroi de Charney, author of Livre de Chevalerie or Book of Chivalry, claimed was a requirement of chivalry because knights, he writes, must always seek honor “while maintaining in word and deed and in all places their honor and status.”5 One way Chaucer shows...

Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity; Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950

Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity; Modernism on File: Writers, Artists, and the FBI, 1920–1950

William James , A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading (review)

Reviewed by: William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading Richard A. S. Hall William James, A Pluralistic Universe. A New Philosophical Reading . Ed. H. G. Callaway. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. In 1907 William James was invited to give the Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College, Oxford. Initially he was reluctant to do so since he feared undertaking them would divert him from developing rigorously and systematically some metaphysical ideas of his own that had preoccupied him for some time. [End Page 130]In the end, however, he relented and in the spring of 1908 gave the lectures which were subsequently published as A Pluralistic Universe.As it happened, though, in the course of these lectures James presented some of those metaphysical ideas, though in a popular and informal style appropriate to lecturing. Later on he did get down to working out a systematic metaphysics in proper academic style, but the project was cut short by his untimely death in 1910. The incomplete Some Problems of Philosophy,posthumously published in 1911, recapitulates some major themes of A Pluralistic Universe. When James addressed his Oxford audience, the time was ripe for the advancement of his own brand of metaphysical pluralism and radical empiricism in opposition to the still-regnant forms of monistic idealism as represented by Bradley, Green, and Royce. The hegemony in the philosophical world long enjoyed by idealism was beginning to break up—something noted by James in his first lecture—due in no small part to the very ideas aired in his lectures and the then newly emerging schools of pragmatism and realism. The period between 1914 and 1918 not only rings the death knell of European imperialism but also, significantly, marks the watershed between nineteenth-and twentieth-century philosophy. The argument of A Pluralistic Universerevolves around the Parmenidean conundrum of the one-and-the-many. It is the solution to this problem that was the main bone of contention between James and absolute idealists like F. H. Bradley, T. H. Green, and Josiah Royce. For them, the world in reality is but one thing, though appearing illusorily as many, with a pervasive unity throughout—it is a "block-universe," to use James's expression for it; for James, by contrast, the world is irreducibly many things whose unities are partial and shifting. The gravamen of James's objections to absolute idealism was its monism, though he objected no less strenuously to other ideas associated with it: its doctrine of internal relations; its determinism; and, in particular, its deprecation of experience in favor of concepts (what James condemns as "vicious intellectualism"). James proposed, against this monolithic idealism, the alternative hypothesis of metaphysical pluralism. Here he affirmed the reality of external relations (particularly conjunctions) among things and the continuities within experience, thereby making his empiricism "radical." He approached experience phenomenologically, finding it, not concepts, to be constitutive of reality, the value of concepts being more practical than theoretical. He conceived of the universe as being open-ended, where human agency can make a difference for the better. A subtext of A Pluralistic Universeis James's advocacy of something like [End Page 131]traditional theism in contradistinction to the pantheism of absolute idealism. He rightly notes that the Absolute is not the God of Christianity. He believes that his pluralistic ontology allows for, and the religious experiences of people abundantly attest to, the existence of a personal God, albeit a finite one, with whom communion and commerce is possible. At a deeper, psychological level, though, A Pluralistic Universeis an expression of James's own desire to feel "at home" in the universe, a desire, I should add, that he shares with many protagonists of classic American fiction, and which is perhaps intensified by the experience of inhabiting and accommodating one's self to the relatively unfamiliar New World. He complains about the "foreignness" of the Absolute in objective idealism and of that sovereign God, in traditional theisms, subsisting beyond all human influence or effects. Howard Callaway's recent edition of James's Hibbert Lectures joins the Harvard edition of them, with a foreword by Richard J. Bernstein, as an indispensable volume of James's...

Making a Case for a Cultural Exchange of Aesthetics between Europe and Japan: The Three Stages of Cultural Globalization

What characterizes cultural globalization? In my paper I approach this question from an aesthetic point of view and with an especial focus on the exchange of cultures between Germany and Japan. The aim of this paper is to show that the process of cultural globalization occurs in three distinct stages discussed below: Stage One: Eastern and Western worldviews unified during the Age of Discovery. Up until this time, European- or Christian-oriented images of the world had prevailed in Europe, while specifically Asian worldviews abounded within Asia. In 1602, Matteo Ricci (Pinyin: Li Madou, 1552-1610), an Italian missionary, drew up his World Map, thus enabling Asians and Europeans for the first time to develop common worldviews. However, this exchange between the East and the West remained a partial one, as can be seen in the case of the chinoiserie or japonaiserie in Europe and the reception of European paintings in Japan. Stage Two: During the 19th century, the imperialism that led to the hegemony of European culture in Asia became established as an absolute standard. The Eurocentric assertion that Eastern culture was an earlier stage of Western culture spread not only throughout Europe, but also within some Asian nations that had been compelled into modernization, namely westernization. For example, a Neo-Hegelian view of world history developed among many peoples in Asia. Stage Three: The period commencing during the latter half of the 19th century and continuing through the start of the 20th century saw a rise of Asian nations. In Asia, cultures were constrained by modernization and European culture was accepted as the absolute standard. However, simultaneously, these same Asian countries began to recompose and reinterpret their own traditional cultures. Such movements in Asia came to react to, transform, and relativize the cultural standard that had originated in Europe. That is, those Asians involved in a globalizing process became active participants in that process, an action that characterizes cultural exchange in the globalized age in the true sense of the word. In my paper, I examine this cultural exchange with an especial focus on how modern Japanese aesthetics address modernization or westernization, and I draw on Kakuzo (Tenshin) Okakura (1862-1913), Curt Glaser (1879-1943), and Tetsuro Watsuji (1889-1960) as examples. It is concluded that cultural globalization is not a univocal process that can be dictated exclusively by one particular culture; cultural globalization is instead a manifold process; it grows as a collective project among various cultural systems that are often in collision. The task of intercultural philosophy is to pay attention to these interactions between cultures and to understand each cultural phenomenon as a collaboration between various cultures.

The Social Constructionist Challenge to Primacy Identity and the Emancipation of Oppressed Groups: Human Primacy Identity Politics and the Human/‘Animal’ Dualism

In a recent issue of this journal Mike Homfray asserted that social constructionism challenges emancipatory politics based in essential conceptualisations of identity. Thus for Homfray the concept of identity as associated with the pre-deconstructed subject is central for the emancipatory goal of oppressed groups like the lesbian and gay movements. In this paper I offer a distinction between radical identity politics that seeks to liberate oppressed groups, and what I have called primacy identity politics in which primacy identity is used to preserve the subjugation of those who are oppressed. In so doing I put forward a challenge to Homfray's somewhat wholesale rejection of the capacity for a critique of identity to work for emancipatory politics by focussing on primacy identity politics rather than on radical identity politics. In making an argument for the deconstruction of identities for emancipatory purposes I refer to my work on the human oppression of nonhuman animals. In this work I turn my attention away from those who are oppressed to the oppressors because this transfer of attention shows how useful the deconstruction of identity could be for the emancipation of oppressed groups. My examination of discourses used by the pro nonhuman animal experimentation lobby group Pro-Test shows how primacy identity politics can effectively be challenged by a social constructionist critique of essential identities and thus, contra Homfrey, I conclude that the deconstruction of identities can strengthen emancipatory causes.

<em>Idealist Political Philosophy: Pluralism and Conflict in the Absolute Idealist Tradition</em>, by Colin Tyler

<em>Idealist Political Philosophy: Pluralism and Conflict in the Absolute Idealist Tradition</em>, by Colin Tyler

Introducing Reflexive Critique in the Business Curriculum Reflections on the Lessons Learned

This paper advances the idea of reflexive critique and explores its contribution to management learning. Drawing on diverse literatures propounding a critical perspective, this article integrates the various propositions of 'what it is to be critical' in advancing the notion of reflexive critique and proposes two additional forms of critique. It is argued that reflexive critique is supported by the critique of simplification and the critique of identity. These forms of critique have not been previously articulated in the relevant literature and they are presented here as a contribution to extending our understanding of what it means to be critical. These forms of critique derive from the experience of introducing an innovative course entitled 'Critical Thinking' offered to MBA students over a five-year period. The paper discusses the importance of critique in the business curriculum and explains the rationale for introducing the course and its objectives, as well as the learning and teaching techniques employed. The analysis considers how different forms of critique can instil a more reflexive approach to the analysis of management in relation to participants' experiences of managing. The paper concludes with a review of the main lessons learned from teaching this course and considers the implications that these lessons raise about management education programs seeking to address management and the process of managing.

Stupid Pleasures

Stupid Pleasures Graham Hammill (bio) Review of: Michael D. Snediker, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2008. We all know that happiness is a form of stupidity. Once The Declaration of Independence promises the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right, it's difficult not to think of happiness as a form of indoctrination. Shiny happy people are, first and foremost, unthinking rubes who watch reality TV, shop at outlets, vacation at Disneyworld (or, worse, Las Vegas), and generally enjoy vapid forms of cultural entertainment. Happily engaging in these activities simply proves the lack of capacity for critical reflection. Perhaps this is why academics who have dedicated their lives to criticism have such a difficult time presenting themselves as generally optimistic. Consider how often academics in the humanities convey genuinely good news as a complaint. News about receiving tenure (which rewards scholarly accomplishment with a job for life) is followed by something like, "Now I'm stuck here forever." News about receiving a major fellowship (finally the time to do the work one really wants to do) is followed by, "Now I'm obliged to finish this book." It's as if we have to cast good news within a broader, pessimistic view of the world lest we appear to be happy and, therefore, stupid. Once optimism is unmasked as naïveté, it seems to produce a backlash in which, among the smart set at least, in order to prove oneself as sophisticated and subversive, one has to be generally unhappy and perhaps a little depressed. It's this dynamic that Michael Snediker seeks to displace for queer studies. How, Snediker asks, can queer theory conceive of optimism as a useful and interesting site for critical investigation? How can one develop a queer understanding of optimism that doesn't simply reinforce its opposite, pessimism? One way into these questions might be to explore the centrality of camp in queer culture, but Snediker doesn't go that route. More ambitiously, his study uses optimism as a conceptual wedge to overturn queer theory as we currently know it. Snediker begins Queer Optimism with the astute observation that optimism is a centrally unthought term among the writing of the most well-known queer theorists of the past twenty or so years. Since its invention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, queer theory (and here, Snediker means theoretical work by Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick, and Lee Edelman) has inadvertently produced a situation in which queer sexuality is equated with melancholia, self-shattering, shame, or the death drive-all negative, destructive, and, for Snediker, essential pessimistic concepts that foreclose analytic engagement with positive affect. Engaging with optimism reverses that situation by putting the question of queer identity back on the table. The generative movement in early queer studies was the critique of identity as the site of psychological and political normalization. Important as that critique was in the early 1990s for reimagining political agency, it also tended to idealize the destabilization of identity and the affirmation of incoherency in oneself. As Snediker puts it, Dissatisfaction with a given regime of coherence [e.g. heteronormativity] might sponsor a critical commitment to dismantling coherence tout court. Such a dissatisfaction, however, might likewise productively sponsor a reconfiguration of coherence-the cultivation of a vocabulary of coherence that more precisely does justice to the ways in which coherence isn't expansively, unilaterally destructive, reductive, or ideological. (25-6) Snediker uses queer optimism in order to mobilize the second possibility against the first. At his most ambitious, Snediker asks how a critical investigation of optimism might lead to a new understanding of some fundamental categories: queer desire, queer ontology, and queer representation. So what exactly is queer optimism? This isn't an easy question to answer, and not just because queering concepts tends to make them difficult to pin down. In his discussions of what queer optimism might be, Snediker is much clearer about what it's not rather than about what it is. Snediker is very careful not to equate queer optimism with the kind of hopefulness that Lee Edelman aggressively dismantles in No Future: Queer Theory...

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

THE BODY OF SUBLIME KNOWLEDGE: THE AESTHETIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Creation stricto sensu

AbstractInformed study of Aquinas suggests that absolute idealism and realism do not differ about the relation of created and uncreated freedom (praemotio physica) but rather, if at all, about created vis à vis uncreated being generally. Both cannot be in the same sense. Nor, therefore, have we grounds for distinguishing divine or infinite thinking from real production, if nothing else really is. The Thomist doctrine that God has no real relation to anything outside God is thus, implicitly, absolute idealism. Positing “ontological discontinuity” denies the absolutely infinite transcendence in affirming it. We have no being as God, uniquely, has. This is the meaning of “image”, while “face to face” is ultimately one face (intimior me mihi). Seeing and being are one. Thus Hegel should be seen as rather explicating than reducing creation, thus deepening the doctrine and not offering an alternative. R. Gildas merely assumes the latter. Infinity requires union with “alterity”within God and intra-Trinitarian and ad extra processes are thus analogous. So self-renouncement as explaining either creation (originating an origin) or incarnation (kenosis) is anthropomorphic paradox. God has to be “all in all”.

Wrestling with the Angel and the Law, or the Critique of Identity: The Demjanjuk Trial, Operation Shylock: A Confession , and "Angel Levine"

Wrestling with the Angel and the Law, or the Critique of Identity: The Demjanjuk Trial, Operation Shylock: A Confession , and "Angel Levine"

Geist als Kultur?

Hegel’s central concept of „spirit“ has been repeatedly misinterpreted, as if it stood for spiritualist metaphysics or even a subjective idealism. Hegel’s use of this term apparently needs translating, whereby in the context of his early writings up to The Phenomenology of Mind, the term „culture“ seems like a good equivalent, although it was not available to Hegel in its present-day broad sense. This possibility is admittedly limited by Hegel’s later determination of mind and nature, which we are not able to follow without transforming his absolute idealism into a speculative idealism, but this does not come into question as a possibility for a philosophy of culture.

Ashes taken for fire: aesthetic modernism and the critique of identity

Ashes taken for fire: aesthetic modernism and the critique of identity

Hegel y el neo-hegelianismo francés: una nueva identidad

RESUMENLejos de romper con el idealismo absoluto de Hegel, la filosofía francesa contemporánea parece asegurar su continuación. En efecto, el nuevo concepto de identidad mediante el cual la especulación hegeliana superó la rigidez inmóvil de la sustancia y la lógica bipolar del pensamiento representativo, ha sentado las bases especulativas de lo que el pensamiento francés reinscribe hoy bajo las categorías de diferencia, repetición, diseminación, imposibilidad, exceso, paradoja, instante, etc. El eterno retorno de lo mismo, el acontecimiento que sobreviene a la finitud y la aporía de una contradicción realizada son otros tantos nombres con los cuales la «escuela de la diferencia» reclama la racionalidad de una Aufhebung, que desborda y contiene toda discriminación abstracta.PALABRAS CLAVESIDENTIDAD, DIFERENCIA, OPOSICIÓN, MEDIACIÓNABSTRACT Far from breaking with Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, French Contemporary Philosophy seems to ensure its continuity. In fact, the new concept of identity through which the Hegelian speculation overcame the immovable rigidity of substance and the bipolar logic of representative thought, has settled the speculative base of what nowadays French Philosophy includes again under the categories of difference, repetition, dissemination, impossibility, excess, paradox, instant, etc. The eternal return of the same, the event that happens to finite and the aporia of an actual contradiction are different names through which the «school of difference» claims the rationality of Aufhebung, which overflows and contains all abstract discrimination.KEY WORDSIDENTITY, DIFFERENCE, OPPOSITION, MEDIATION

Beyond Identity Politics

SUMMARY Oral history has long been an important resource for lesbian and other underprivileged groups in advancing identity politics. While there is an increased awareness of social construction of identity and the impact of race and class on the experiences of sexual identities, oral historians have yet to rethink their task in view of poststructuralists' and queer theorists' critique of identity. This paper examines the “Oral History Project of Hong Kong Women Who Love Women” as an attempt to construct histories that respect difference and minimize normalization. It discusses the project's significance in terms of its subversion of the heterosexual/homosexual binary and its queering of the notions of identity, community and coming out. The critique unfolded is one of antiassimilation and anti-minoritization.

"I Can't Get Sexual Genders Straight": Kathy Acker's Writing of Bodies and Pleasures

“I Can’t Get Sexual Genders Straight”: Kathy Acker’s Writing of Bodies and Pleasures Annette Schlichter (bio) Abstract The essay explores Kathy Acker’s reconfiguration of heterosexual practice and identity in her “novel” Don Quixote. The essay shows how the production of dissident heterosexualities forms a radical critique of sexuality by situating Don Quixote in the controversy over what Michel Foucault has called “bodies and pleasures,” the counterdiscursive concept he distinguishes from the reigning system of sex-desire. Through its claim to represent and legitimize excessive, perverse female heterosexual desires, Don Quixote reimagines socio-sexual relations through “bodies and pleasures” without giving up the critical force that the notion of sex-desire has offered feminist critics of the construction of the subject. Acker queers the conditions of representation by deploying the oppositional potential of “bodies and pleasures.” Kathy Acker entered the public stage in the 1980s as a countercultural author to emerge in the 1990s as an icon of dissident postmodern literature.1 Much of the critical literature on her complex works engages Acker’s deconstructions and re-representations of gender, the body, and female sexuality, but her critique of heteronormativity and her rethinking of heterosexuality have been addressed only rarely.2 This is surprising insofar as Acker’s public performances and her writings are so keenly interested in the specific queer fusion of poststructuralist critiques of identity with attacks on the social regulation of sexualities. Yet the artist seems at odds with the contemporaneous discourses that lay claims to a critique of sexuality. To begin with, her critique of normativity does not emerge from a history of gay and lesbian struggles; while Acker expresses her queer identification as a perverse straight woman, she also proactively states her difference from lesbians and gays: A gay friend said something interesting to me. I asked her if she differentiated between gay and straight women, and she said, “Yes, women who are gay are really outlaws, because we’re totally outside the society—always. And I said, “What about people like me?” and she said, “Oh, you’re just queer.” Like—we didn’t exist?! [laughs] It’s as if the gay women position themselves as outside society, but meanwhile they’re looking down on everybody who’s perverse. Which is very peculiar.” (“Interview Juno” 182) By mobilizing perverse identifications, Acker’s work demonstrates the possibility of a queer critique through the representation of dissident heterosexuality. While staking not only a queer but also a feminist critical position, Acker rejects radical feminist readings that interpret heterosexuality as a form of sexual alliance with the patriarchal enemy: “heterosexual women find themselves in a double-bind: If they want to fight sexism, they must deny their own sexualities. At the same time, feminism cannot be about the denial of any female sexuality” (“Introduction” 130).3 Acker explores, as Catrin Gersdorf explains insightfully, practices of resistance outside “the non-heterosexual paradigms of opposition against patriarchal structures.” This project considers “the literary expression of the will to resist traditional power structures while acknowledging the legitimacy of female heterosexual desires” (154, my translation). As I show in this essay, Acker articulates a resistance against heteronormativity through the reconfiguration of heterosexual practice and identity. Her re-thinking of heterosexuality de- and re-constructs discourses of sexuality and gender, thereby exposing and pushing the limits of queer and feminist critiques of normativity. In order to show how the textual production of dissident heterosexualities forms a radical critique of sexuality, I discuss Acker’s contribution as an intervention into the controversy over the meanings of what Michel Foucault has named “bodies and pleasures,” the counter-discursive concept he distinguishes from the reigning system of sex-desire. In that debate, scholars of sexuality tend to welcome Foucault’s claim for the counter-discursive function of “bodies and pleasures,” proposing that particular queer sexual acts should be read as oppositional practices. In contrast, gender theorists have been skeptical about the critical potential of Foucault’s suggestion, especially about his reliance on a supposedly “genderless” notion of “bodies and pleasures.” By situating Acker in this controversy about “bodies and pleasures,” I hope not only to illuminate the theoretical dimension of her fiction, but...

Not Hegel’s tales

The article expresses skepticism on the alleged affinity between Hegel’s theory of conceptuality and conceptual pragmatism. Despite the intriguing philosophical impetus underlying the latter, the author formulates doubts about its compatibility with logical and metaphysical principles of absolute idealism. The criticism is articulated in four theses: (1) pragmatism’s concerns with (ultimately empirical) concept-acquisition and concept-application are largely alien to Hegel’s logical-metaphysical theory of conceptuality; (2) the interchangeability of ‘word’ and ‘concept’ in the pragmatist discussion is incompatible with Hegel’s notion of thinking; (3) the distinction of Vertsandesbestimmung and Vernunftbegriff, while ignored in practice in the pragmatist approach, is pivotal to Hegel’s understanding of the nature of conceptuality; (4) finally, pragmatism’s use of the recognition-thesis from the Phenomenology of Spirit ignores the noncontractarian, non-negotiative function of the same in Hegel’s work.

Dewey's Critique of Kant

In this article I examine Dewey's critique of Kant in light of recent interpretations of Dewey's early works, as well as of his 1915 work, German Philosophy and Politics. My aim is to bring the earlier criticisms of Kant in line with the later ones. I make three claims in this paper: first, that Dewey's critique of Kant was indebted to Hegel as much as to the neo-Hegelians; second, that there is a continuous thread between the early criticisms and the later ones, as represented by German Philosophy and Politics; third, that Dewey's critique of Kant portrays Kant as more of a transitional philosopher, one wedded to experience over and against absolute idealism, than is commonly recognized.