影响与互动：解构、理论与女性主义

解构理论与女性主义之间存在影响与互动的关系。罗兰·巴特的社会语言观启发了女性话语的建构,德里达反对逻各斯中心主义的主张深化了女性主义对菲勒斯中心主义的批判;反本质主义的解构立场亦启发女性主义学者颠覆固定、僵化的女性形象与模式化的女性特征,打破女性地位、命运与生理之间的本质主义联系,同时关注"女性"这一范畴内部的异质因素。而女性主义的人文关怀与现实精神又决定了其对解构理论必须采取为我所用的实践策略,将之纳入自己的政治框架。     

BritCrits: Subversion and submission,past, present and future

This article explores some of the intellectual influences which have shaped the development of Critical Legal Studies in Britain and the contexts in which these influences made themselves felt. It then considers which influences might or should steer Critical Legal Studies in the future. In terms of the past, specific attention is given to the influence of Marxism, Freud and Lacan, feminism, Foucault and Derrida, and recent genres of history-writing. As to the future, the question is asked whether Critical Legal Studies will engage constructively with recent developments in the life sciences and the philosophy of science, and, more generally, whether it will be able to surpass its established mooring in the philosophy of history. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Responding to my interlocutors: a subject in the making...

In this response to Ronnie Lippens’ and Erik Claes’ critiques of a paper entitled ‘The Lore of Criminal accusation,’ Pavlich notes the ways in which his work might be compared to, yet differentiated from, abolitionist approaches to crime. Working through Lippens’ comments, he notes a possible way to understand the analysis and politics of crime (through accusation). Pavlich challenges Claes’ optimistic hypostatization of ‘criminal law’, idiosyncratic understandings of deconstruction and refocuses attention on the centrality of accusation to creating criminal subjects.     

Here be monsters: a choreomaniac's companion to the danse macabre

Consider this a vade mecum: an invitation to “walk with me” through more or less uncanny terrains of worlds in the making in search, of(f) course, of monsters. The search will be delving into the areas of “creepypasta:” pieces of cursed prose and pictures that circulate online, waiting to contaminate and possess the next reader. Using a theoretical framework of posthuman and feminist theory, not least the work done by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this vade mecum asks what it might mean to engage ethically with that which is not supposed to exist, but which haunts us nonetheless. In other words: what does it mean to move, live and engage with spectres in digital times?     

Beautiful Day: Awakening to Responsibility

Recently published works, such Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, have suggested the natural confederacy of the sensory appreciation of beauty and the achievement of social justice. Scarry (amongst others) has proposed that the opiated moment in which one is arrested by beauty's spell results in a ‘radical decentrification’, where under they who behold beauty are awakened to alterity and, consequentially, encouraged to realize an ethical agenda based upon just (sic) relations between people. The present article refutes the adequacy of the beauty - ethics - justice triptych and, instead, proposes that the entire variegated aesthetic quantum operates as the medium through which recognition of (in)justice reminds us of our responsibility to the other. As essentially inarticulate concepts, justice and responsibility are capable of ‘speaking’ to us through the channel of the aesthetic. The aesthetic is the plane of dialogue on which our felt appreciation of (in)justice prompts us to responsibility. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

“本性应得”与“不可侵犯”——评马里旦的权利学说

马里旦的权利学说回归到阿奎那的自然法学说,以上帝规定人的本性、本质——人的功能正常运行——为基点,引申出人的自然义务和自然权利。其理解、使用的"权利"概念既有与古典自然法学权利观——正当自由——相近的"不可侵犯"之义,又有源自潘恩的"应得"之义,有时又有具体利益事项之义。对马里旦权利学说的辨析有助于深化对权利概念的认识。     

重思他者：动物问题与德里达对列维纳斯伦理学的解构

德里达批判性地将列维纳斯的伦理学运用到了动物伦理领域,他认为动物可以成为列维纳斯伦理学中的他者,而且它们比他人更加他异,是他者的他者。动物可以让我们更激进地重思主体性。哪怕是列维纳斯的“我在此”这样强调受拣选性和被动性的主体性,在德里达看来也还不够激进,并且太过人类中心主义。他通过列维纳斯“您先请”的伦理原则,进一步把这一主体性推进到了更为被动的“我跟随”。“我跟随,故我是”,而我所跟随的不只可能是人,也可能是动物。通过将列维纳斯的好客理论批判性运用到对于动物问题的解读中,德里达进一步拓展了其“质疑主权”的主体性思考。     

Derrida on Identity and Difference: A Radical Democratic Reading of The Other Heading

Abstract

Both modernist and post-modern social criticism of power pre suppose that agents frequently consent to power relations, which a political theorist may wish to critique. This raises the question: from what normative position can one critique power which is, as a sociological fact, legitimate in the eyes of those who reproduce it? This paper argues that "symbolic violence" is a useful metaphor for providing such a normative grounding. In order to provide an epistemological basis of critique, it is further argued that social actors have multiple interpretative horizons avail able to them as part of their everyday social practices. Thus, they are not caught in a preconstituted web of meaning from which there is no escape, as is sometimes implicit in the over-socialized perceptions of agency associated with post-modernism.     

"More than All the Others": Meditation on Responsibility

Abstract

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical back ground of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Pato?ka's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis?     

Spectres of Kosovo: 20 Years of Liminality and Aporia

ABSTRACT

Using the concepts of spectres, liminality and aporia as conceptualised by Jacques Derrida, this article offers a critical read to Kosovo’s conundrums with its sovereignty. The main argument of this article is that in the system of sovereign states, Kosovo is permanently entangled in an aporetic situation in that it has to coexist between being a recognised and a contested state; between a legitimate and illegitimate polity; between unequivocally European and permanently detached from the EU. The article relies on longitudinal data gathered from digital and traditional ethnographic research in Kosovo conducted over the past seven years, including a dozen interviews with NGO actors, university professors, and journalists in Kosovo. In its conclusion, the article opens up the debate whether the only way to imagine Kosovo is in it being permanently unfinished, oscillating between meanings, concepts, and statuses.