Heideggerian existential phenomenology remains largely ignored by Latin American feminists due to their preference for more Marxist and Sartrean philosophies. But its influence on Latin American feminism can be felt through the work of thinkers such as Beauvoir and Irigaray, who have had a great impact on Latin American feminists’ involvement in political movements and developmentof theories. The aim of this essay is to discuss ways in which Latin American and U.S. Latina feminists have been influenced by phenomenology’s commitment to lived experience, but have yet to embrace existential phenomenology in an explicit manner.

What does race add to class, as both are secular social categories? The difficulties of invidious nationalism and the conservation of races that would not foment holy wars of terror persist for both secular or postsecular theorists. Postsecular thinkers are in a stronger position than a secular theorist to challenge religiously inflected social integrations, invidious nationalism, and fundamentalism.Unmasking them as social formation proffers an external criticism, to speak of them as sacralizations of identity exposes them at the root. Secular theorists ignore postsecular sensibility at the peril of failing to challenge the invidious claim to roots that secular nationalism and religious fundamentalism profess.

In this translation of Chapter 5 of Memoria de Auschwitz (2003), Reyes Mate argues that only memory can appropriately respond to the singular event of Auschwitz, as demanded by the new categorical imperative of Adorno. Traditional philosophical rationality, by contrast, overlooks or even justifies the suffering of individuals. Mate acknowledges significant contributions to knowledge about Auschwitz, both in anticipation of its occurence and in retrospect, without losing sight of how this event nevertheless escapes comprehension. He proposes that a memory adequate to Auschwitz cannot simply be aimed at avoiding similar barbarism in the future, but must be dedicated to the failed aspirations of the victims themselves.

In the United States today, much interpersonal racism is driven by corrupt forms of self-preservation. Drawing from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, I refer to this as self-love racism. The byproduct of socially-induced racial anxieties and perceived threats to one’s physical or social wellbeing, self-love racism is the protective attachment to the racialized dimensions of one’s social status, wealth, privilege, and/or identity. Examples include police officer related shootings of unarmed Black Americans, anti-immigrant sentiment, and the resurgence of unabashed white supremacy. This form of racism is defined less by the introduction of racism into the world and more on the perpetuation of racially unjust socioeconomic and political structures. My theory, therefore, works at the intersection of the interpersonal and structural by offering an account of moral complacency in racist social structures. My goal is to reorient the directionality of philosophical work on racism by questioning the sense of innocence at the core of white ways-of-being.

The Correctional Service of Canada is currently re-instituting animal-based agribusiness programs in two federal penitentiaries. To situate the contemporary function of such programs, I provide a historical overview of prison agriculture in relation to Canadian nation-making. I argue that penitentiary farms have functioned as a means of prison expansion and settler territorialisation. While support for agricultural programming is rooted in its perceived facilitation of rehabilitation and vocational training, I show that these justifications are untenable. Rather the prison farm ought to be viewed as an institution made possible by and that reproduces, settler colonial power relations to animals, labour, and territory. Prison agribusiness is then an expression of colonial, agricultural, and carceral powers.

This article examines Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s advocacy for fidelity to revolutionary truths in light of complex system theory’s understanding of resiliency. It begins with a discussion of how Badiou and Žižek describe truth. Next, it looks at the features that make a complex system resilient. The article argues that if we understand neoliberalism as a resilient system, then the fidelity to revolutionary truths that Badiou and Žižek advocate is not enough, for it doesn’t realize how truths come from the system as a whole. The article concludes by describing how this viewpoint alters discussions of political change.

I begin by briefly reconstructing Honneth’s concept of reification. His paradigm gives the reification of the non-human environment a marginal position in comparison to the reification of human beings, thereby detracting from its explanatory and critical potential. In order to avoid this outcome, I subsequently present a paradigm of subject identity formation in which not only affectively-based intersubjective interactions but also affectively-based interactions with the non-human environment are, in both a “genetic” and a “conceptual” sense, essential to establish an objective and meaningful relationship with external reality. On the basis of this paradigm a closer connection can be identified between the reification of human beings and the reification of the non-human environment—a connection in which the reification of the latter may reinforce human reification (and vice versa).

In this article, I argue that justice is necessarily inapplicable to the global scale, since there is no such thing as a global society in the proper sense. I examine why this is so, and criticize two types of arguments for global justice—maximalist conceptions (such as those of Charles Beitz and Allen Buchanan) that argue for a robust notion of redistribution on the global scale, and minimalist conceptions (such as those of Thomas Pogge and Iris Young) that argue for a notion of redress or solidarity across borders.

This paper considers the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau with reference to the recent rise of Right-wing populism. I argue that even as Mouffe and Laclau develop a critical political ontology that regards democracy as an end in itself, they simultaneously exclude certain elements of the demos. In other words, they appeal to formal categories but decide the political content in advance, disqualifying Right-wing movements and discourses without justification. This ambivalence between form and content reveals the limits of Mouffe and Laclau’s brand of radical democracy for understanding and critiquing the present political conjuncture.

While the decolonial turn calls into question the broad structure of Western knowledge projects, it also suggests an investigation of the central objects and categories of these projects. This study undertakes this latter investigation in relation to Marxist theory. Starting from the work of Frantz Fanon and contemporary theorists of coloniality, I consider three central figures in the Marxian critique of capital: enclosure, valorization, and real subsumption. Interrogating familiar and heterodox accounts of these figures, my analysis exposes an architecture of injury that comprehends the structure of value and that articulates a process of extended violation working beyond the dialectic.

In recent decades, the literature of global ethics has promoted greater and more rigorous attention to transnational moral responsibilities. This essay argues, however, that prominent global-ethics anthologies remain burdened by Eurocentric/colonialist elements that contradict efforts to build more ethical transnational communities. Drawing on scholars of coloniality, including Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the essay traces colonialist elements in deep structures of prominent global ethics texts. It examines how, even when texts argue for aid to the poor, these elements foster tendencies in the affluent world to detach from and dehumanize people on the other side of global hierarchies. They also deprive academic readers of the insights of grassroots global-justice struggles. The essay concludes by sketching some directions that those of us who study and teach global ethics might pursue in order to unsettle colonialist baggage and cultivate skills and relationships more conducive to ethical global communities.

Marcuse argues that society must be evaluated in terms of its unrealized potentialities. Potentialities are formulated by the imagination, which has an essential cognitive function in revealing what things might be. Utopian thinking, thinking that transcends the given facts toward their potentialities, is thus rational in Marcuse’s view. His explanation for this claim draws on Hegel, Marx, and phenomenology. With Freud, Marcuse elaborates the historical limits and possibilities of the imagination as an expression of Eros. Utopia is the historical realization in a refashioned world of the rational contents of the imagination.

This paper critically examines violence, and our shared responsibility for it. Drawing on insights from Jean-Paul Sartre, I develop the correlation between scarcity and violence, emphasizing scarcity as agential lack that results from conditions of oppression and domination. In order to develop this correlation between scarcity and violence, I examine the racial dimension of violence in the U.S. Following this analysis, I claim that we all share responsibility for the social structural processes in which we participate that produce scarcity. On these grounds, I argue for the imperative of democratic equality, i.e., conditions for the self-development and self-determination of all.