Humanism, the dominant underpinning theory of modem philosophy, has gone through significant challenges from the antihumanist critiques coming from thinkers such as Heidegger, Lacan, and Foucault. While humanism is certainly not dead, the pre-critical humanisms of thinkers such as Locke and Rawls are no longer sufficient ways to theorize the human after the anti-humanist critique. The anti-humanist critique has been sufficiently successful that we now stand in a philosophical landscape that is best understood as “posthumanist.” This does not mean that the desire to theorize the human from the human perspective, a la Husserl, is altogether dead. Rather, it is to suggest that any successful attempts at theorizing the human must take the anti-humanist critique into account. Theories that do so are best labeled “post-humanisms.” If, as Foucault suggested, Sartre and Lacan once stood as “alternate contemporaries” in the humanist/antihumanist landscape of the 1950s, then now, in this post-humanist landscape of contemporary philosophy, it is Lacan and Levinas, antihumanist and post-humanist, who stand as alternate contemporaries. Lacan’s anti-humanism is a powerful and attractive critique of the excesses of earlier humanisms that relied too heavily on transparent self-knowledge and freedom, instead placing the unconscious as the forefront of the human experience and encouraging us to dissolve “the subject who is supposed to know.“ Levinas’s post-humanism is a powerful and attractive way of attempting to rescue humanity from the totalizing forces of earlier humanisms while taking seriously the antihumanist critique, placing an an-archic responsibility to the other person at the forefront of the human experience. New possibilities await the philosopher in this new landscape, new ways of theorzing the human without falling into the pre-critical naivete of earlier humanisms. As we move philosophy deliberately into this post-humanist landscape, exciting new work has begun emerging, and will continue to emerge.

Engaging, among others, with Benedict Anderson’s seminal study of “imagined communities,” this paper argues that nationalism comes into being with the rise of a Capitalist market and the ensuing competition, immediate or in due course, between the internal lregional and the extemal/interregional capitalists. The logic of nationalism is defined as being numerical, racial and linguistic, but the focus is removed from language as an emblem of nationhood and put on the dialectical workings of Capitalism. In the process, the paper attempts to explain why nations needed to be communally imagined only in a particular phase of history. The paper also traces the connections between the nationalisation of labour and the globalisation of capital under Capitalism. Finaly, the paper questions whether it is accurate to see Asian and African nationalisms as “modularly imagined” on the basis of American andlor European nationalisms.

The author argues that Fanon’s analysis of struggles after decolonization in The Wretched of the Earth is highly relevant to the contemporary South African situation.

A kind of political complacency has become a common complaint of Habermasian philosophy. At odds with some earlier stances, according to which he had claimed to represent the best critical hopes of a Marxist tradition that he regarded as exhausted, Habermas has come to defend the legitimacy of liberal democratic institutions and forms ofpolitical expression. No longer the last Marxist, but a hesitant post-Marxist, Habermas is today arguably the foremost intellectual spokesperson for a presently existing democracy which bears as much relation to its stated principles as did the so-called socialisms suffered during the Cold War. The author seeks in this article merely to identify the philosophical bases for the seemingly increasing conservatism of Habermas’s thought. I argue that tensions between the normative dimensions of communicative rationality emerge more clearly as Habermas moves from a general account of discourse, to ethics, and then to democratic politics. Habermas increasingly embraces an abstract normativity and abandons the practical-critical dimensions which were embedded in the counterfactual moment of communicative action. The normative ground for politics itself has narrowed to accommodate the abstract normativity of discourse.

The author examines almost three decades of sociolinguistic and anthropological research to present the most up-to-date definition of African American English or “Ebonics” and offers a defense of its value in contemporary American culture.

The author argues for a conjunction of Albert Camus’s “idealism” with Jean-Paul Sartre’s “dialectical realism” as a corrective to the limitation of each for the sake of a viable transformative politics.

Popular images of rights almost always emphasize their protective qualities. But who is really protected? In this paper it is argued that contemporary rights talk, because of faulty underlying assumptions, systematically favors prejudice and big property interests. Further, once the mistaken assumptions are surrendered, and it is realized that all rights are affirmative, a less systematically misleading debate can be created within the realm of rights discourse.

The author argues that a Fanonian analysis offers a rich understanding of the complexity ofthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Picking up where Peggy McKintosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” left off, this essay looks further into the ways that racial privilege manifests itself in the lives of white Americans. It explores some of the reasons that white privilege is hard for whites to see and it explores the question of how white people can act responsibly given the unavoidable realities of racial privilege

The author examines belief-centered and act-centered conceptions ofracism through a discussion and critique ofconceptions ofrace and racism offered by K. Anthony Appiah, J.L.A. Garcia, and Michael Phillips.