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Abstract: Abstract Politics is frequently understood through the body. However, liberal political theory and, therefore, American law focus upon a question of rights, rather than of needs. Due to this, liberal political theory occludes vulnerability and the facticity of bodies from political thought. Embodiment, a given but also an uncomfortable facet of life, pushes us to consider how political and legal decisions impact people’s lives. It necessitates that political and legal decisions are made by considering the ways in which they can and will effect all people, not just the independent, autonomous, and rational actor. This legal embodiment theory allows us to make visible the ways in which marginalized people’s bodies frequently are the site of specific restrictions. The paper begins with a discussion of embodiment and care ethics. It then progresses to gender-affirming healthcare and abortion and how embodiment arises in those legal discourses. Then, it moves to a discussion of queer sexuality in education, engaging with ideas of disgust. Finally, it broaches the question of the State’s role when it comes to legal embodiment. If we consider embodiment through a lens of a shared good, then legal embodiment ought to prioritize decisions which will promote caring relationships between the individual’s body and the State. PubDate: 2024-07-29
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Abstract: Abstract This introduction to the “Fictional Subjectivities” collection lays out the significance of literature in the study of subjectivities and provides a framework for a literary analysis of subjectivities. It highlights the ability of fiction to present a diversity of subjectivities to readers, who are invited to engage with and experience subjectivities different from theirs while reading a book. It also insists on the importance of a sustained reflection on fiction, as our lives are intertwined with narratives and our subjectivities constructed and reworked by fiction. PubDate: 2024-07-22
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Abstract: Abstract Despite their often perceived linearity, the past, present, and future are intricately woven together. Previous experiences shape our perception, nourishing potential scenarios and enriching our evaluations. Sociocultural contexts reinforce this interplay, directing our attention toward various aspects based on our social positions. This scenario forms the context for the present study, which investigates perspectives of young Chilean men from two considerably distinct life conditions: business students and incarcerated individuals. Using semistructured interviews and a phenomenologically inspired analysis, we found that participants (amidst COVID-19) referred to similar pessimistic evaluations for their country but, on the contrary, remarkably converged on optimistic future expectations for their personal lives. Despite their markedly different personal life stories. The conclusions point to the stark experience of individuals "freed" from social structure, nurtured by recent neoliberal Chilean history. PubDate: 2024-07-02
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Abstract: Abstract The paper mobilises a personal experience of participation in a population-based health screen to explore wider aspects of subjectivity, choice and freedom. The screen is a familiar feature of contemporary society and represents a broader ‘health imperative’. It intrinsically enforces a binary choice and thus, within its own remit, produces two reductive modes of being its subject characterised, respectively, by assent and refusal. Merleau-Ponty’s account of a ‘conditioned freedom’ operating within a primordial, embodied subjectivity, however, allows a recuperation of aspects of my enactment of choice that tend otherwise to be eclipsed within the screen’s binary logic. The thinking of two more recent writers deepens my understanding of how this freedom might play out within experience. David Abram helps me grasp the extent to which I encounter the screen as an ageing animal. Meanwhile a contrast with a very different historical and inter-cultural confrontation explored by Eduardo De Castro raises far-reaching questions around the bindingness of decision and the self/other relation. PubDate: 2024-05-07 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00185-y
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Abstract: Abstract Intersubjectivity has long fascinated thinkers who have challenged the notion of the unitary subject. Its alternative, the intersubjective self, is permeable and reciprocal, open to and shaped by the others. Questions of intersubjectivity have become increasingly urgent as a result of the rise of social media which metaphorically brings users together as a shared mind. This article probes questions of relationality and the narratable nature of human self (cf Cavarero in Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood. Routledge , London, 2000; Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself Fordham. University Press, New York, 2005) in a work of fiction that compares the relationalities created by social media and the subjective experience: Patricia Lockwood’s novel, No One Is Talking About This (2021). The very opacity of the novel probes the question of what (inter)subjectivity might mean in the age of social media. More broadly, the article seeks to test the relevance of feminist theories of relational and narrative self within the context of the novel. PubDate: 2024-05-07 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00186-x
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Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Please help us test our new pre-print finding feature by giving the pre-print link a rating. A 5 star rating indicates the linked pre-print has the exact same content as the published article.
Abstract: Abstract The anti-violence movement has embraced a strategy for confronting interpersonal violence through criminal justice legislation. This has led anti-violence activists to advocate for police enforcement and prison punishment. Turning against its roots in feminist activism, the conclusion to the movement demonstrates an over-coding of state violence on anti-violence interventions. As a critique, this article engages Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of four regimes of violence to analyse how criminal justice reforms for survivors of violence result in an enactment of greater violence. With special attention to hate crimes and domestic violence, carceral and juridical assemblages provide the mechanics of the regime of state violence manifesting carceral feminism and homonationalism. As an alternative formation, reenvisioning the anti-violence movement as a war machine provides an abolitionist anti-violence praxis. Two concrete strategies emerge for this abolitionist anti-violence project: first, to support and protest for the release of imprisoned survivors of violence, and second, to develop alternative strategies for confronting violence within communities. PubDate: 2024-04-22 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00180-3
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Abstract: Abstract Nothing has done more to cement William James’s reputation than his unrepentant individualism. In a present marked by the challenge of imagining modes of transformative action worthy of our planetary travails, James’s individualism appears dated, unworthy of the present. Yet such judgement neglects its pragmatic dimension, as well as its political connections to James’s anarchistic pluralism. Situating anarchism at the centre of James’s vision, this article argues that his defence of individuals constitutes no ontological postulate but forms part of a speculative theory of change. Rather than apologia for individual heroism, James’s individualism is better understood in the impersonal voice of the “fourth person singular:” individual lives matter not as originary sources of heroic action but as zones of divergence through which terrestrial forces of mutation and metamorphosis pass. Revisiting connections between James’s individualism, pragmatism, and anarchism, the article offers a radical reappraisal of James’s thought as a vital method for intensifying unruly forces of transformation on an earth unstable and unsafe. PubDate: 2024-04-15 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00178-x
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Abstract: Abstract Anti-capitalist subjectivities are produced through politically generative refusals of the divisive, profit-oriented, and manageable subject positions made available by capitalism’s socio-symbolic order. Pushing back against liberal political theories which presume subjectivity to be a priori or coherent, this article employs psychoanalytic theory to grapple with the flowing, changing, patterned, and disjointed nature of anti-capitalist subject formations. Although mainstream psychoanalysis has, historically, aligned with the dictates of capital, I argue that psychoanalytic theory nonetheless offers a useful resource for understanding how anti-capitalist refusal can foster emancipatory desires and situated political commitments within and among subjects. In fleshing out these arguments, I engage with the role that fantasy plays in forming anti-capitalist subjectivities. I also consider what solidarity building and political action mean with respect to anti-capitalist subjectivity. By way of conclusion, I argue why we should make the case for anti-capitalist subjectivity, offering some directions that future work may take. PubDate: 2024-04-15 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00182-1
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Abstract: Abstract This article problematizes subjectification through the practice of norm critique. The study builds on interviews with some of the key initiators and participants in a project working norm critically with men and masculinity in relation to gender equality and climate change in Sweden. Through the psychoanalytical framework of enjoyment and fantasy, I develop a perspective on how and why a certain understanding of the norm-critical subject emerges. The analysis makes visible how the practice of norm critique, while challenging hegemonic masculine norms such as emotional stoicism, reinforces neoliberal ideals of individualized self-emancipation and the quest for authenticity and wholeness, which risks de-politicizing the issue of climate change. PubDate: 2024-04-05 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00181-2
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Abstract: Abstract Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should instead be understood in continuity with and as illuminating the nature of human personhood and subjectivity. Under a phenomenology specific to the author’s experience, addiction appears as a mode of experience that has an unmanageable overflow of narratives created as discourses concerning people, events, thoughts, and feelings; narratives embodied in assemblages of objects; and narratives appearing as mental images. These considerations suggest that pre-reflective connection to the world can be profoundly illuminative but also can isolate is from the world and, further, that our ethical values form from within our lives and not as an artificial addition. Our historical, narrative self-understanding has existential and moral import. Thus, addiction by its extremity exemplifies the ceaseless ethical activity of personhood. PubDate: 2024-03-06 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00179-w
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Abstract: Abstract Using the work of Louise Rosenblatt and her transactional theory of reading, this article examines the experiential nature of literature. Challenging notions of literature that rely solely on fixed categories, the writings of Louise Rosenblatt emphasize the dynamic nature of the literary work. A poem, a novel, or a play, Rosenblatt argues, is not an object but a lived event requiring the reader’s active participation. By exploring the concept of literary transaction, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of the evolving role of the reader in producing and shaping the literary work. An analysis of the reader’s engagement with the potentialities of the text reveals the literary work as an interactive process of assembling and sharing meanings. PubDate: 2024-03-04 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00176-z
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Abstract: Abstract This article examines Christine Montalbetti’s novel Plus rien que les vagues et le vent (2014) (Nothing but Waves and Wind, 2017) to propose the ocean as a model to think about contemporary masculinities. This French road novel depicts homosociality in the post-2008 American landscape through the perspective of an outsider homodiegetic narrator. The ocean serves as a narrative model for the novel: its bodily connection with the characters embodies “hybrid masculinities” that emerge from a hybridity of patterns in an ongoing process of negotiation, appropriation and reformulation. In their travels, the characters eventually meet the ocean and testify to a fluid ontology that overturns the Modern detachment from the environment together with its humanist conception of “Man.” The ocean’s waves suggest a nonlinear timeline and an ongoing posthumanist reformation of subjectivities, like the ever-reshaping shorelines. In Montalbetti’s novel, the ocean as a model for hybrid masculinities accounts for novel forms of power relationships, where radical openness pairs with violence. PubDate: 2024-02-19 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-024-00177-y
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Abstract: Abstract This article examines how Facebook’s Feed, its dynamic user interface, incorporates and refashions the capacity to temporalize cultural material and experience that has classically been attributed to subjectivity. I problematize the ambiguous historicity of digital culture across the experience of the ordinary that it produces by arranging the subjective time and ‘ruined’ bits of cultural material into algorithmic timelines. Drawing on recent media theory, I underscore the irreducible alienness of algorithmic temporalizations, which undermine habitual normalization. I show subjectivity moves beyond identity and narrative closure through an unconscious affective investment in extremely popular algorithmic timelines. PubDate: 2023-11-20 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00173-8
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Abstract: Abstract In this article, we engage feminist theorisations of figurations as “performative images that can be inhabited” (Haraway 1997/2018) to trace some of the figures which are animating stories about climate change and reproduction in Global North contexts. We focus our reading on a handful of texts which circulate around the question of ‘Is it okay to have a child, given our climate conditions and futures'’ Throughout, we consider the relationship between figurations and our subjective becomings in response to environmental devastations. We critique and resist the hegemonic figuring of ‘the human subject’ as rational and unitary (Braidotti 2014), as this figure naturalises the Western social power relations of advanced capitalism, population control and human exceptionalism. Seeking multiplicity, we look for figures and subjective openings which enable us to become response-able to the pain of ecological worlds dying around us (Haraway 2016), including from our disciplinary location of psychology. PubDate: 2023-10-27 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00168-5
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Abstract: Abstract What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic' This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically, and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive, computational and corporate processes and (infra)structures that characterise algorithmic life. Bringing affect theory and speculative philosophies to bear on computational histories and cultures, I tease out the continuing implications of post-war efforts to make intuition a measurable and indexable mode of anticipatory knowledge. If digital computing pioneers tended to elide the more ambivalent implications of quantifying intuition, this article asks what computational myths are at play in current accounts of machine learning-enabled sensing, thinking, and speculating and what complexities or chaos are disavowed. I argue that an understanding of more-than-human intuition which grapples meaningfully with the indeterminacy central to digitally mediated social life must recognise that visceral response is recursively trained in multiple ways with diverse, and often contradictory, effects. PubDate: 2023-10-27 DOI: 10.1057/s41286-023-00170-x