درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Black and Latina female educators have for centuries prepared children of color to resist dehumanization, claim full citizenship, and transform oppression through culturally specific Critical Feminist Ethics of Care. In 2018, I detailed a Revolucionista Ethic of Care specific to the needs and strengths of Mexican/Mexican American (Mexicanx/a/o) youth which offers a subterraneous social justice ethic of care through the curriculum and pedagogy of four female Spanish-speaking New Mexican (Nuevomexicana) and Mexican American (Mexicana) educators. Through this land-based Chicana Feminist Testimonio Methodology, I unearth a resistant, healing Critical Feminist Ethic of Care framework for (Nuevo)Mexicana/o children and communities which enriches the field of Care scholarship through its embodied, land-based epistemologies. I explore the ways in which four (Nuevo)Mexicana educators operationalize play and humor within their Ethic of Care to 1) open access to a mythic time/space continuum wherein they may access the historical and ongoing wounds of injustice fueling them, 2) gleefully travel to students’ multiple worlds, and 3) forge liminal spaces of joy for Mexicanx/a/o youth to shape futures of thriving. This work offers ancient, practiced tools of resistance and healing in this new and yet historicized moment of racialized hostility and hate against Communities of Color in the United States.

This article juxtaposes different and conflicting temporalities as configured in the context of care and caring. Weaving together (1) an autobiographical narrative in which I share parts of my own breast cancer journey with (2) research with men employed as care workers in Australia, I attempt to get at how differentially experienced temporal densities, trajectories, and orientations can be found when receiving and giving care. The slow and deep time of experiencing sickness, and the protective, forgetful time induced by medical trauma – both often perceived as nonlinear time –, clash with the neoliberal, sped-up, linear temporality of the late-capitalist medical industrial complex; leaving care workers and cared-for squeezed between temporalities that can be, and are, at odds with each other. The theoretical framing holding my consideration of these different ‘kinds’ of time, is a composite of feminist care ethics scholarship, critical time studies and the literary work by the Aboriginal author and scholar Mykaela Saunders. Specifically, I draw on Saunders’s short story ‘Buried time’, in which she connects with Aboriginal deep time and writes the abolition of colonial clock time into being. Taking a cue from Saunders narrative, I maintain that the temporalities of colonial/racial capitalism evince segmentation, fragmentation, and, ultimately, destruction. This is a mechanistic time not suitable for human and more-than-human life’s flourishing (that includes living and dying as well as possible); as such, it is a temporality that stands against the relational paradigms of care theory.

The article treats some underlying motifs of Slavoj Žižek’s reading of Hegel, according to which Hegelian dialectic and the Lacanian “logic of the signifier” are homologous. After a brief conceptual-historical contextualisation of Žižek’s Hegel against the backdrop of early twentieth century Hegelianism (Lukács, Kojéve), the article attends to some programmatic remarks in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), Žižek’s first English-language book. There, he for the first time presents a Hegel of constitutive antagonism, contrary to prevalent readings of Hegel as a thinker of final resolution. Žižek nevertheless provides his most systematic account of Hegel, including the 2012 tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, in the Sublime Object’s sequel, for they know not what they do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1991). The majority of the article therefore deals with the initial chapter of for they know not, where we encounter the foundations of Žižek’s specifically Lacanian Hegel. The latter holds accountable theoretical currents such as negative dialectic and deconstruction for insufficiently rigorous readings of key Hegelian categories, not least that of identity. Instead of entailing a conceptual imperialism that swallows difference within itself, Hegelian identity is by Žižek read against the background of Lacan’s account of structuralist differentiality. What comes to the fore here is the question of the self-identical One, whose qualitative manifestation in The Science of Logic’s “Doctrine of Being” Žižek casts in terms of the Lacanian trait unaire (unary trait), that is, the nascent form of the signifier.

The profundity of an idea, philosophy, or doctrine is often revealed by how it is accepted or rejected by others. Buddhist philosophy demonstrates this dynamic in its reception in the West. There are several illuminating perspectives on how Nietzsche interpreted Buddha, and on how these interpretations were received in both the West and the East. The claim that Nietzsche misinterpreted Buddha—similar to the way Schopenhauer and others interpreted Indian philosophical traditions—often overshadows Nietzsche’s more sympathetic engagement with Buddhism. However, the questions that concerned both thinkers cannot be fully addressed or resolved within a single generation, nor can we easily simplify their shared concerns. This paper focuses on critics’ portrayals of Nietzsche as having misinterpreted Buddha. Amidst various philosophical and existential issues, the paper seeks to foster a degree of sympathy for Nietzsche, and thus for Buddha as well, by exploring their concepts of ‘impermanence’ in relation to suffering and the relief from suffering. The shared element is the imperative ‘to overcome’: for Nietzsche, this concerns humanity; for Buddha, it concerns the self. The underlying hypothesis is that Gautama Buddha may be seen as Nietzsche’s Overman (Übermensch).