Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary

Ann V. Murphy

Description

Images of violence enjoy a particular privilege in contemporary continental philosophy, one manifest in the ubiquity of violent metaphors and the prominence of a kind of rhetorical investment in violence as a motif. Such images have also informed, constrained, and motivated recent continental feminist theory. In Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann V. Murphy takes note of wide-ranging references to the themes of violence and vulnerability in contemporary theory. She considers the ethical and political implications of this language of violence with the aim of revealing other ways in which identity and the social bond might be imagined, and encourages some critical distance from the images of violence that pervade philosophical critique.
Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE: Violence, Reflexivity, Critique

1. Thinking in Images

Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary
Feminism and the Motif of Violence
Genealogy and Violence

2. Philosophy’s Shame

Shame and the Philosophical Imaginary
Philosophy and Its Others
Shame and the Discourse on Difference

3. Violence, Visibility, and Identity Politics

Philosophy, Identity, and Violence
The Defense of Identity Politics
The Visible and the Real
Sexuality and Spectacle

PART TWO: Vulnerability, Ambiguity, Responsibility

4. The Provocations of Vulnerability

Feminist Philosophy and the Vulnerable Body
Ethical Ambiguity and Corporeal Vulnerability
A Phenomenology of Touch
Framing Violence and Vulnerability

5. What’s in a Name? Imagining Vulnerability Otherwise

Uniqueness and the Human
Ontological Virtue
Ontological Vice
An Ethics of the Singular

6. Assuming Ambiguity: The Body and Ethical Life

Ambiguity in Beauvoir’s Early Work
Vulnerability Revisited
Assuming Ambiguity
Freedom and Violence

Conclusion: Witnessing the Imaginary

References
Index

Sujets

• Philosophy
• Discourse analysis
• Stylistics
• Semantics

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 11 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438440323
• Langue: English

Extrait

SUNY series in Gender Theory

Tina Chanter, editor

VIOLENCE AND THE
PHILOSOPHICAL IMAGINARY
ANN V. MURPHY
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Cover photograph by K. M. Moore. EsterKey Farm, South Valley, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2012 State University of New York
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie D. Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murphy, Ann V.
Violence and the philosophical imaginary / Ann V. Murphy.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in gender theory)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4031-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Violence—Philosophy. 2. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title.
B844.M87 2012
303.601—dc22
2011015175
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Hillary
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book came to life in several landscapes, with the help of many friends and colleagues.
I began writing during my time as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. I thank the University of New South Wales for supporting my research, and for the chance to live in an extraordinarily beautiful place. Enormous thanks go to the philosophers in Sydney for extending such welcome and hospitality, and for the provocation of their own work: Rosalyn Diprose, Catherine Mills, Moira Gatens, Paul Patton, Simon Lumsden and Sarah Sorial. I also thank Lisa Guenther and Rohan Quinby, then of New Zealand, lately of Tennessee, always of Canada, for their insight and friendship.
Before Sydney, my philosophical home was the University of Memphis. My thanks go to four generous mentors from my time there: I am very grateful to Len Lawlor for his intellectual and professional guidance and encouragement. Thank you to Robert Bernasconi for crucial lessons in making philosophy more responsible. It was such good luck to share the last couple of years in Memphis with Mary Beth Mader, whose creative intellect is an inspiration. Tina Chanter has been teacher, friend, and mentor extraordinaire in ways too numerous to count.
I am grateful to have shared the time in Memphis with S. K. Keltner, Valentine Moulard-Leonard, Donna-Dale Marcano and Joshua Glasgow.
For their raucous southern charm and steadfast friendship, thanks galore go to Michelle Stuart, Sarah Kron, Meredith Looney, Lisa Bacon, Hannah Mentgen, Karen Cardwell, Melody Vollman, Lisa Torrence, Martha Hample, Tootsie Bell, Jamie Russell, Marina Pakis, Hailey Thomas and Mayla Reginelli.
I count myself lucky to have landed in New York, and I thank my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at Fordham University. Thanks to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for a Faculty Fellowship during the 2009-2010 academic year that allowed for the completion of this manuscript.
Also in New York, heartfelt thanks go to Sam Coleman, Susannah Flicker, Brian Mundy and Jenny Navasky.
At SUNY Press, thanks go to Andrew Kenyon and to Laurie Searl for her editorial guidance. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers whose comments and criticisms were so helpful. I owe special thanks to William Brandon who proofread and indexed the manuscript.
Imagining a life in philosophy would have been impossible were it not for the support of Alan Schrift and Johanna Meehan in the early days; I will always be deeply grateful to both of them. For various forms of philosophical inspiration, support, and camaraderie, I thank Debra Bergoffen, Kyoo Lee, Kym Maclaren, Shannon Mussett, and Kelly Oliver. Particular thanks go to Gail Weiss for her continuing support as I have been learning the ropes.
Tina Chanter, Lisa Guenther, Samir Haddad, S. K. Keltner, Valentine Moulard-Leonard, and Gayle Salamon read portions of the manuscript and provided criticism that called me to greater clarity regarding this book's purpose. I am truly grateful to each of them. It is a real gift to have dear friends with whom to philosophize; special thanks go to Sam and Gayle for the great conversations in New York.
Thanks to my parents, Douglas and Christine Murphy, and my brother Blake, for their unwavering love and support. I am grateful beyond measure.
I lost my grandmother, Dorothy Lou Brown Murphy, shortly before the manuscript went to press. She was a relentlessly curious, feisty, and free spirited woman, an inspiration to me, and I miss her.
This book was finished under an impossibly blue sky in the high desert of northern New Mexico. Thanks to Molly Moran, Sarah Stinnett, Kelly Jones, Russell Adams, Bronson Elliott, Tonya Troske, Thomas Bergan, Gloria Vigil, Philip Tatoris, Julie Shigekuni, and Jonathan Wilks for the happiness and perspective that come with having a second home. A special thank you goes to Aaron Johnson, who is teaching me extraordinary things about hope, courage, and resilience. My deepest gratitude belongs to Kathleen Moore for the inspiration and shelter of the life we share there.
Parts of Chapter 4 were first published as “Reality Check: Rethinking the Ethics of Vulnerability” in Theorizing Sexual Violence , eds. Victoria Grace and Renee Hemberle (Routledge Press 2009). Ideas that inform Chapter 5 were first worked through in the context of a discussion of humanism in “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism” in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26, no. 3 (2011). Special Issue on the Ethics of Embodiment, ed. Debra Bergoffen and Gail Weiss. Chapter 6 was first published as “ ‘Violence Is Not an Evil:’ Ambiguity and Violence in Simone de Beauvoir's Early Philosophical Writings” in philoSOPHIA: A journal of continental feminism 1, no. 1 (2010).
INTRODUCTION

The motif of violence pervades recent French thought. When Derrida claims that there is “violence embedded at the root of meaning” ( Derrida 1978, 125 ) or Jean-Luc Nancy declares that “violence … is or makes truth” ( Nancy 2005, 17 ) these statements hardly register as shocking. Today they may seem banal and even anodyne. Of interest here are not the hermeneutic questions that arise when one considers how to best interpret these claims, but rather the muted force that such extraordinary claims exercise in the landscape of contemporary theory. What follows is a discussion of the images of violence that animate recent French thought and those political philosophies that inherit resources from that canon. My aim is not to argue for their censure or diminution, but instead to examine the nature of contemporary philosophy's investment in images of violence and to think through what is at stake in the proliferation of these images, even and especially when they appear within philosophies of nonviolence.
The omnipresence of images of violence in contemporary theory provides the starting point for this work. Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary is a reflexive inquiry into the way in which images, allegories, and metaphors of violence function in recent Continental thought. It is similarly an investigation into how images of violence have informed, constrained, and motivated recent Continental feminist theory. Since both violence and the imaginary are sprawling motifs in contemporary theory, it is necessary to first delineate the scope of this project and then to clarify those questions it seeks to address and those it does not. The work that follows does not offer a positive philosophy of violence per se; nor does it argue for or against any particular conception of the imaginary. Following feminist thinkers of the imaginary such as Michèle Le Dœuff, Moira Gatens, and Genevieve Lloyd, the conception of the imaginary at work here is intended to be broad and to reference the constellation of images, symbols, metaphors, and allegories that traffic with some frequency in philosophy, albeit in ways that may be veiled. The imaginary concerns the various modes of representation and rhetoric that are deployed in theory, often in ways that are largely unconscious.
The philosophers engaged here all work in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Continental philosophy, especially recent French thought. While the motif of violence is particularly prevalent in this corner of Continental philosophy, it is surely not the only place where this could be said to be true. Nonetheless, this book limits its scope to include French existential phenomenology and postphenomenological thinkers, so it does not attempt a thesis in regards to recent Continental thought or philosophy broadly construed. However, it is not only recent French thought per se that is the issue here, but more so the Anglophone inheritance of that body of work, and particularly its legacy in Anglophone feminist theory. Given the dominance of phenomenological approaches to questions of embodiment and identity, and subsequently to those philosophical considerations of the limits of a phenomenological approach, the question of experience has been one of the more foundational in contemporary Continental philosophy. Yet while a wealth of philosophical attention has been granted to a consideration of the merits and failures of phenomenology, and, therefore, to the critical querying of experience, little to no attention has been granted to the problem of the contemporary