Contrasting the conflicting positions of Fink and Žižek, this article opens and closes with the question: is feminine jouissance ineffable? It solves the mystery of why Lacan associates the Other jouissance with women and presents an account of phallic and the Other jouissance informed by the work of Breuer and Freud. It argues that the satisfactions of Lacan’s feminine subject bear striking affinity to those of the hysteric, while phallic jouissance affords the same sort of enjoyment as that of Freud’s obsessional neurotic. And, while “real” experiences make one lose one-self and may not be represented by one who was absent, this is not to say that we cannot shed light on characteristically feminine pleasure/pains.

After an extended period in which Marxism received relatively little attention, many of its tenets are now playing a more important role within the left. This essay argues for the relevance today of a number of Marx’s major themes. The Marx I offer here is a conservative Marx. I base this view on his insistence that socialism is needed not to makes us perfect but to save society, in a general sense, from the threats of destruction that it encounters under capitalism. His criticism of utopianism requires that change be anchored in steps humanity has prepared itself to take, rather than in steps that it has no reason to believe will be effective. The importance of class has survived attacks on it as a relic of industrialism and the dominance of the male proletariat. But the working class is more extensive than it ever was. It now encompasses diverse races, genders, and cultures in what can become a front against capitalism. Finally, Marx’s politics posits an inversion of the power relation in capitalist society with capitalism’s subordination of citizens to the state. The global ferment against the failures of capitalism opens new possibilities for the growth of anti-capitalist currents.

Disaster has a triple violence: the literal event; inequality in rescue efforts; deprivation and coercion prior to physical disaster. Globally, the poor are the most vulnerable in disaster, but there are different degrees of poverty. Although Chile suffered a far more severe earthquake than Haiti, in 2010, the developed infrastructure of Chile allowed for greater resilience. The extreme poverty of Haiti impeded the implementation of humanitarian assistance pledged in the billions. In New Orleans, the exiled poor left behind usable real estate that represented an opportunity for disaster capitalists. The exploitation of the poor in this case is less classic exploitation than depredation. The prevention of depredation will require study, laws prohibiting disaster capitalism, and further emphasis on disaster preparation.

This paper argues that borders and violence against migrants no longer takes place exclusively at the geographical space between two sovereign territories. Instead border violence today has become much more normalized and diffused into society itself. An entire privatized industry now capitalizes on the cycle of transporting, incarcerating, hiring, and releasing non-status migrants. Similarly, however, resistance to this violence is also shifting from the older confrontation with sovereignty and the demands for rights to the larger aim of making the non-status migrant or nomad the new figure of political belonging and solidarity: demanding equality for all, regardless of status.

This text offers a discussion of the concept and experience of alienation, as it has been theorized in two very different traditions. Accordingly, I juxtapose a recent discussion by Italian Autonomist Marxist Franko “Bifo” Berardi to that of Argentine philosopher and scholar of indigenous cosmologies Rodolfo Kusch. Unlike Berardi’s anti-capitalist critique, Kusch identifies Western Modernity (and not just capitalism) as the source of alienation, and proposes a “de-linking” from its categories and epistemic practices. I caution that even a progressive meta-theory such as Marxism can engage in conceptual violence, when it claims universal validity.

Nonviolence today is usually advocated either on the basis of a moral condemnation of violence or a strategic confidence in nonviolent tactics. This paper offers an ethical conception that rejects an instrumentalist notion of nonviolence, on the one hand, and yet seeks to connect its normative appeal to effective politics, on the other. The argument proceeds by developing a relational and performative account of violence and by applying this to contexts of direct and structural violence to bring out the respects in which violence is a matter of harmed social existence. Proceeding then to nonviolence, the paper argues for an understanding of its transformational function by drawing on themes from recognition theory. It identifies relevant features of nonviolence by pointing to the experience of social movements as well as by referring to the nature of conflicts with violent opponents.

In 1979, Audre Lorde delivered a paper at a conference celebrating feminism that proceeded to undermine the self-congratulatory tone of the participants by alerting them to the ways that they too were in need of radical critique. In this paper I explore the nature and importance of what it means to be radical by analyzing Lorde’s place within the broader trend of philosophical self-criticism as it specifically relates to the feminist movement. My goal is to argue that while radical theory must always stretch out toward the world, it must always turn back on itself in order to avoid the very injustices it seeks to correct.

In this paper I argue that a merit of Iris Young’s social connection model of responsibility for structural injustices is that it directs the American people’s responsibility for unjust wars, such as the recent war against Iraq, toward their responsibility to abolish the “war machine,” including the “empire of bases,” that is a contributing factor of unjust U.S. wars. I also raise two objections to her model. First, her model leads us to downplay the culpability of the American people as a political collective in voting to continue the Iraq war with the re-election of George W. Bush. Second, Young misinterprets her model of responsibility as a new type of responsibility that is conceptually completely distinct from liability responsibility rather than as offering a new ground for holding people responsible.

This essay urges us to complement work on the philosophy and social science of race that has focused on the “visual” and “epistemic” dimension of racism with work on affect or what is here called the somatological dimensions of racism. The racist self hears race before he sees it. The racist self is convulsed by race before she experiences it as an epistemic affair. It is argued here that we dwell in the sound house of race. Before racism is chromocratic, it is phonocratic. The technologies of the racist self are the technologies of racializing aurality and phonology. Racism brands us sonically. Race, it will be argued, is a sonic stigmata. More specifically, the focus will be on voice, accent, what here is called the prosody of race. The aim is make those racialized and racializing accents in philosophy resound, echo, and reverberate so that we can hear the prosody of race. The racist does not dwell in the silent chamber of the mind’s “I.” The viscera of racism dwells in the body our racist habits have domesticated.

Max Stirner pioneered a radically existentialist thinking in which the ego or the Unique One is able to appropriate its “predicates” or determinations as objects of consumption. In this sense the singular event is privileged over the intellectual “spooks” that express the predicate’s independence from and mastery over its subject. Karl Marx’s thinking was decisively altered by his encounter with Stirner, to whom he replied at length (with Engels) in The German Ideology. I propose that Marx and Engels’s critique and appropriation of Stirner provides the basis for what I call “communist existentialism,” and that this is the proper standpoint for radical philosophy today. After giving an account of this position, I briefly adopt it to critique two of the communist standpoints associated with “communization,” those of Tiqqun and Theorie Communiste.

Are traditional models of ethics sufficiently action-guiding? It is customary for moral philosophers to formulate substantive normative theories that advance principles of right conduct. The purpose of these principles is to act as a guide to judgment and action. I propose that normative models of ethics fail to be sufficiently action-guiding. In so doing, I advocate a reform of traditional ethics and propose a radical reformulation of ethics—an ethic that makes education a moral imperative.

Over the course of the twentieth century, nationalistic approaches to the obstacles of racism in the United States have increasingly come to be seen as the more revolutionary of the various forms of anti-racist struggle. This paper explores several historical instances of Black Nationalism and seeks to demonstrate that, despite the many points on which they might diverge, they share in common a tendency to naturalize and embrace the category of race as a basis for political struggle, and that they therefore constitute an ideologically accommodating and hence essentially regressive approach to the questions of race and racism. It is suggested that a critique of the modern category of race and a political practice aimed at its denaturalization will be a necessary aspect of any attempt to overcome racial oppression and inequality.

This paper draws on the (explicit and implicit) dialogs of Gayatri Spivak, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler to reconsider Marx’s contribution to an understanding of political agency and subjectivity. It suggests that through engaging with certain voices of Marx, there emerges a complex and dynamic understanding that allows for a thinking of subjectivity as produced through structural conditions in a way that both enables and limits agency. These insights allow us to imagine the transformative political agency of those subjects marginalized within the current global order to engage in an emancipatory struggle marked by its openness and indeterminacy.