Philosophy & Social Criticism

In this paper, I offer an immanent critique of John Rawls’s theory of justice which seeks to show that Rawls’s understanding of his theory of justice as criteriological and contractarian is ultimately incompatible with his claim that the theory is grounded on the primacy of the practical. I agree with Michael Sandel’s observation that the Rawlsian theory of justice rests on substantive metaphysical and epistemological claims, in spite of Rawls’s assurances to the contrary. But while Sandel argues for even more substantive metaphysical and epistemological commitments, I argue in the opposite direction. Following J. G. Fichte, I argue for a normative theory of society, not based on some particular notion of the good or on some contentious account of what all reasonable persons would agree to, but based only on the radical primacy of the practical, that is, based only on the seemingly empty premise that free beings - precisely because they are free - cannot be imagined in advance as all agreeing to any particular thing at all.

Frederick Douglass’s socio-political narrative is explored through an existential lens, arguing that Douglass is contesting the proposition that essence precedes existence. Douglass, through his fight with Covey, a white ‘slave breaker’, and his escape to freedom, affirms his existence (etymologically, ‘standing out’) as being for it-self (pour-soi) over and against the reduction of his existence to that of being in-itself (an-soi). Drawing from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who was greatly influenced by the phenomenological and politico-praxic work of Black novelist Richard Wright, it is argued that Douglass disrupts the power/knowledge regime of white American slavery, exercising his existential capacity for transcendence. Examining whiteness as a species of what Beauvoir calls ‘the serious man’, it is argued that whites within Douglass’s text are in a state of flight, performing their whiteness as ‘the serious man’, that is, where whiteness is accepted as an unconditioned state of being. Douglass’s narrative depicts whiteness as a flight from freedom (bad faith); for his very act of protestation against whiteness demonstrates that whiteness is not an objective, hypostatized thing, but a performative choice that sustains white hegemony.

An attempt is made to try to delineate the common ground of feminist concerns and the work of Wittgenstein by alluding to several areas of theory - among them are the orality-literacy distinction, the notion of the universal, and the realm of particulars. I cite portions of both the Tractatus and the Investigations, and utilize the work of commentators such as Anscombe, Fogelin and Genova. The broader argument is that Wittgenstein’s turn away from a kind of logical atomism is a move that can readily be used for feminist purposes, but that it requires precise articulation and a clear setting-out of conditions.

Since the fall of the former Soviet Union, and following geographical and technological changes in the global economy, theorists in Europe as well as the United States have lamented the confusion and emotional disengagement of many groups formerly identified with the left. This paper addresses the Kantian origins of the idea that ‘revolution’, however defined (or deferred), is the only plausible image for effective historical engagement capable of motivating spectators to action. Drawing on Foucault’s inquiries into conditions for the possibility of ‘heroizing’ the present, I examine two frameworks for understanding the ontological impact of historical models for ‘eventfulness’, those offered by Heidegger and Bergson. I then explore their implication for debates between Foucauldian theorists over the technological and bodily bases required to recognize the optimistic moral significance Kant attributed to revolution in practices characterizing the ‘new capitalism’.