Ep. 72 – Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire

Back from a hiatus in western Massachusetts, B joins John and special guest co-host Alyssa Ruth Mazer to discuss Miguel de Beistegui’s book The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject. What is a liberal subject and how does desire open up its discourses and genealogy and governmentalities? Did Beistegui try to out-Foucault…Foucault, the book’s stated intellectual inspiration? The team attempts a reparative reading of the Introduction, Conclusion and Beistegui’s chapters on recognition. But these three self-professed genealogists hit a snag. Critiquing the murky depths of desire and recognition requires more than what the Western canon provides! What happened to queer theory? Is there feminism at all? Could Black and Indigenous theories of personhood have made a more prominent appearance? Is there a “true” kind of resistance? With so much to discuss, you can’t not desire tuning in!

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes or Spotify. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music, “Post Digital,” from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.

Links:

• De Beistegui’s homepage at University of Warwick
• De Beistegui, “The Political Honour of Psychoanalysis” talk at Warwick (2015)
• Relevant Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries: desire; recognition; Foucault
• Combahee River Collective Statement at Black Past
• Remembering Lauren Berlant (UChicago; Duke)
• Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
• Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes” (2000) in Constellations

Ep. 44 – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on theory, paranoid reading, and reparative reading

Join Emily, John, and B as they celebrate a reunion: John’s brief return to New York in this exciting episode on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s critiques of paranoid reading, her theories of affect, and the move toward the reparative. More specifically, upon a listener request from Sug, we read her “Paranoid and Reparative Reading” and “Melanie Klein the the Difference Affect Makes.” In response, we ask many questions: Is social and critical theory always already situated as a form of paranoid reading? Is our favorite of favorite methods, of genealogy, necessarily paranoid in its form and origins? And how do we get from theorizing to the ground, to the reparative forms of relationality that may function to heal in the midst of crisis? All these, as well as B’s mysterious return to Heideggerianism, will be eagerly, and for the latter shockingly, explored. Everyone’s favorite Tumblr Friend from Canada has some great questions about graduate school applications. And our dreams segment will have you on the fence, or will it cook your goose? Find out.

Remember to support us on Patreon to help offset/reimburse the cost of our fancy new microphone, which we have named Lacan. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music. Get the mp3 here.

 

Links!

• Get the book
• Link to the chapter itself, University of Sydney
• Read more about Sedgwick
• Review of Touching Feeling and Sedgwick’s work
• SEP’s entry on emotion and theory
• More on Melanie Klein’s Theories of Affect and Psychoanalysis

 

Interview: Amy Allen on Decolonizing Critical Theory – Epistemic Unruliness 10

Thanks to our friends over at the New Books Network, we bring you John’s interview for New Books in Global Ethics and Politics with Amy Allen on her 2016 book, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Enjoy!

How can we de-colonize critical theory from within, and reimagine the way it grounds its normative claims as well as the way it relates to post- and de-colonial theory? Amy Allen (Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Penn State University) takes up this project in her book The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia Univ. Press, 2016). The work challenges the way that the Frankfurt School of critical theory constructs and deploys concepts of normativity, history, and progress, in the process offering rich interpretations of Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst. Allen then turns to the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault in order to articulate a different perspective on these issues, one that enables a radical self-critique and de-colonization of critical theory. She concludes by exploring alternative means for critical theory to justify its normative claims as a way for it to more deeply engage with post- and de-colonial theory.

Get the mp3 here