Ewa Ziarek

University at Buffalo, State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of Comparative Literature

This essay diagnoses systemic interconnections between COVID-19 pandemics, anti-Black racism, and the intensification of digital capitalism. By drawing on Charles Mills’ rectificatory justice and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on understanding and action, it argues that the role of philosophy lies in safeguarding racial justice and understanding again...

The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st-Century Feminist Theory is the most comprehensive available survey of the state of the art of contemporary feminist thought. With chapters written by world-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, the book explores the latest thinking on key topics in current feminist discourse, including: Feminist subjectivity...

By refiguring Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of natality in terms of biopolitical and feminist theory, the book provides the means of diagnosing interconnections between three dangers that biopolitics poses to democratic plurality, the intensification of biopolitical normalisation, the rise of elements of what Arendt calls “totalitarianism,” and restri...

There are two interrelated questions that I would like to explore in the context of Pleshette DeArmitt’s work. The first one pertains to the intellectual stakes in the eloquent style of her writing, its elegance and playfulness, which accompanies the philosophical order of argumentation. And the second one refers to the issue of female friendship....

This essay develops further the main implications of a feminist theory of aesthetics and modernism first articulated in Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism. By engaging critically with Theodor Adorno and Giorgio Agamben in the context of feminist theories of gender and race, the author examines complex relations between political and...

Despite The Growing Interest in Hannah Arendt’s idea of natality and its relationship to politics, natality is rarely discussed in the context of biopolitics. This is all the more puzzling since Arendt is not only a thinker of natality but also, as Agamben acknowledges in Homo Sacer, the first thinker of biopolitics (Agamben 1998, 3–4). While we wi...

The constellation of feminism, the sublime, and modernism is fraught with ambivalence, contradictions, and domination, if not sheer irrelevance. The fact that the sublime has disappeared as a key concept from the lexicon of modernism and the avant-garde is itself a symptom of the transformation of the literary field. This chapter begins with the cl...

At least since the 1970s, vulnerability has emerged as a significant area of research in international social sciences. Combining sociology, studies of climate change, politics, and cultural geography, these interdisciplinary studies of vulnerability are concerned with the exposure of populations to natural, economic, and political disasters. In th...

This book articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and on the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. It examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and situa...

Written in two voices, this article shows that Luce Irigaray’s thought offers an alternative to the subject/object structure dominant in philosophy. The article engages with dialectical thought and especially Hegel, exploring Irigaray’s focus on sexual difference. The authors elucidate negativity and felicity in politics, history, and personal life...

The title of this essay deliberately evokes Joan Wallach Scott’s influential 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” which was crucial in the formation of gender history.1 Perhaps twenty-five years later it is time for making a similar claim about the importance of aesthetics for feminist philosophy. Since the early ninetie...

Melancholia is a hybrid concept, deployed in feminist and philosophical theories politics and aesthetics, but "properly" belonging to neither. This heterogeneity of melancholia as both an aesthetic and a political category allows us to interrogate the interrelationship between gender politics and aesthetics without, however, abolishing their differ...

Andrew Benjamin's book Of Jews and Animals is a welcome addition not only to the burgeoning field of animal studies but also to contemporary preoccupations with justice, universality, and particularity and the demands they make on philosophical, ethical, and political thinking. By implicitly questioning the turn toward the "materialist" Christian u...

This chapter addresses the limitations of contemporary debates on ethics and democracy. It discusses the notion of heteronomous freedom and its relation to ethical obligation, political antagonism and sexual difference. It proposes a feminist democratic praxis and an ethics of dissensus, which opposes the conservative political work performed by pr...

At the end of Homo Sacer, Agamben suggests that the question of potentiality is intertwined with a (non-dialectical) mediation of bare life and political forms of living outside the parameters of the sovereign decision. In this essay I attempt to develop a new type of interaction between bare life and forms of life by examining Agamben's philosophy...

Lisa Guenther’s The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction is a book I have been waiting for a long time. It is one of the first studies to undertake the ambitious project of articulating the philosophical and the ethical significations of maternity in the context of feminist politics of reproduction and abortion rights. The Gi...

It is not an overstatement to say that Rodolphe Gasché has taught an entire generation of literary and philosophical scholars how to read Derrida’s texts responsibly, by taking fully into account both the philosophical tradition into which they intervene and the singularity of this intervention. Given this exemplary mode of philosophical engagement...

Building on studies that recover suffrage as an important political, historical, and cultural phenomenon, this article considers the political implications of the British suffragettes' redefinition of the right to vote as the right to revolt. Such a definition means that the suffragettes' contribution to political modernity is not limited to the en...

This introductory chapter reflects on the future of the humanities with the help of an interdisciplinary group of renowned theorists and scholars including Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, and Irigaray. It addresses questions such as: What notions of futurity, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities...

In this essay, I argue that Giorgio Agamben's revision of biopolitics poses the pressing political question of whether bare life itself can be mobilized by emancipatory movements. Yet, in order to develop the possibilities of resistance, we need to reconsider first of all the way bare life is implicated in the gendered, class, colonial, and racist...

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties ab...

ewa plonowska ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she teaches feminist theory, modernism, continental philosophy, ethics, and critical theory. She is the author most recently ofAn Ethics of Dissensus: Feminism, Postmodernity, and the...

Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 347-349 Seshadri-Crooks's Desiring Whiteness makes an important contribution into three areas of inquiry: psychoanalysis, critical race studies, and modern aesthetics. The book first of all develops a highly original psychoanalytic theory of the specificity of the symbolic structure o...

Hypatia 18.2 (2003) 197-204 Two different books share the same concern about the relation between ethics and postmodernism. As its title suggests, the collection of essays, Evil after Postmodernism (2001), edited by Jennifer L. Geddes, approaches this question by focusing on the problem of evil, while Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (1999)...

Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 247-250 Charles Shepherdson's lucid and erudite book, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture,Psychoanalysis, makes four crucial contributions to contemporary debates in feminism and psychoanalysis. First, it underscores the originality of the psycho-analytical concepts of embodiment and sexuality irreducible either to biological essential...

Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. Charles Shepherdson. London, New York: Routledge, 2000. - Volume 17 Issue 4 - Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers—including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray—the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of em...

Diacritics 28.1 (1998) 60-75 An important intervention of Irigaray's work on sexual difference into the postmodern debates on ethics is the mediation between two different lines of ethical inquiry: one represented by the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze, Foucault, and, to a certain degree, Castoriadis, and the other by the work of Levinas, Derrida, and L...

Copyright (c) 1995 by Ewa Ziarek, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on ot...

Kelly Oliver. Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double Bind. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. - Volume 10 Issue 4 - Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1989. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [246]-255). Photocopy of typescript.