The Moral Theory of Poststructuralism PDF Download

Author: Todd May
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039744
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Author: Mark Olssen
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526156598
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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In popularizing the term ‘speaking truth to power’, now widely used throughout the world, Michel Foucault established the basis upon which a new ethics can be constructed. This is the thesis that Mark Olssen advances in Constructing Foucault’s ethics. Olssen not only ‘speaks truth’ to existing moral and ethical theories that have dominated western philosophy since Plato, but also shows how, by using Foucault’s insights, an alternative ethical and moral theory can be established that both avoids the pitfalls of postmodern relativism and simultaneously grounds ethical, moral, and political discourse for the present age. Taking the late ‘ethical turn’ in the philosopher’s thought as its starting point, this ambitious study seeks to construct an ethics beyond anything Foucault ever attempted while remaining consistent with his core postulates. In doing so it advances the concept of ‘life continuance’, which expresses a normative orientation to the future in terms of the quest for survival and well-being, giving rise to irreducible normative values as part of the discursive order of events. This approach is explored in contrast with a range of other, established systems, from the Kantian to the Marxist to contract ethics and utilitarianism.

Author: Todd May
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271039078
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism. What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an (essentially benign) essence and that power is always repressive, never productive. After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments—namely, a poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, contra Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments.

Author: Claire Colebrook
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Ethics and Representationprovides a critique and overview of contemporary post-structuralist theory. Exploring the Kantian and phenomenological background of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Irigaray, this book raises some key questions and issues in critical theory. These questions are looked at from a number of angles including the notion of point of view and perspective, the critique of anthropologism from Kant to Deleuze, and the relation between representation and modernity. This is an original contribution to ethical and critical theory which situates poststructuralism in its philosophical background, and in the sustained problematic of the enlightenment.

Author: Alan D. Schrift
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317546830
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 558

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"Poststructuralism and Critical Theory's Second Generation" analyses the major themes and developments in a period that brought continental philosophy to the forefront of scholarship in a variety of humanities and social science disciplines and that set the agenda for philosophical thought on the continent and elsewhere from the 1960s to the present. Focusing on the years 1960-1984, the volume examines the major figures associated with poststructuralism and the second generation of critical theory, the two dominant movements that emerged in the 1960s: Althusser, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Habermas. Influential thinkers such as Serres, Bourdieu, and Rorty, who are not easily placed in "standard" histories of the period, are also covered. Beyond this, thematic essays engage with issues as diverse as the Nietzschean legacy, the linguistic turn in continental thinking, the phenomenological inheritance of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the influence of psychoanalysis, the emergence of feminist thought and a philosophy of sexual difference, the renewal of the critical theory tradition, and the importation of continental philosophy into literary theory.

Author: Mark Poster
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501746189
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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In Critical Theory and Poststructuralism Mark Poster enacts a dialogue between the French poststructuralists, especially Michel Foucault, and the tradition of critical social theory as developed by the Frankfurt School and by other Continental theorists such as Jean-Paul Sartre. These confrontations between poststructuralists who represent "postmodern" thought and theorists committed the "modern" project of the Enlightenment is, according to Poster, of urgent importance because of the failure of critical theory to sustain a convincing critique of today's radically changed social formation.

Author: David Couzens Hoy
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262582635
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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This book serves as both an introduction to the concept of resistance in poststructuralist thought and an original contribution to the continuing philosophical discussion of this topic. How can a body of thought that mistrusts universal principles explain the possibility of critical resistance? Without appeals to abstract norms, how can emancipatory resistance be distinguished from domination? Can there be a poststructuralist ethics? David Hoy explores these crucial questions through lucid readings of Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and others. He traces the genealogy of resistance from Nietzsche's break with the Cartesian concept of consciousness to Foucault's and Bourdieu's theories of how subjects are formed through embodied social practices. He also considers Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida on the sources of ethical resistance. Finally, in light of current social theory from Judith Butler to Slavoj Zizek, he challenges "poststructuralism" as a category and suggests the term "post-critique" as a more accurate description of contemporary Continental philosophy. Hoy is a leading American scholar of poststructuralism. Critical Resistance is the only book in English that deals substantively with the topical concept of resistance in relation to poststructuralist thought, discussions of which have dominated Continental social thought for many years.

Author: Todd May
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271023740
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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A book for everyone interested in learning how philosophy is done and what it can tell us about who we are.

Author: Anthony Uhlmann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521640763
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasizing how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.

Author: Annika Thiem
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823293476
Category : PHILOSOPHY
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Moral philosophy and poststructuralism have long been considered two antithetical enterprises. Moral philosophy is invested in securing norms, whereas poststructuralism attempts to unclench the grip of norms on our lives. Moreover, poststructuralism is often suspected of undoing the possibility of ethical knowledge by emphasizing the unstable, socially constructed nature of our practices and knowledge. In Unbecoming Subjects, Annika Thiem argues that Judith Butler's work makes possible a productive encounter between moral philosophy and poststructuralism, rethinking responsibility and critique as key concepts at the juncture of ethics and politics. Putting into conversation Butler's earlier and most recent work, Unbecoming Subjects begins by examining how Butler's critique of the subject as nontransparent to itself, formed thoroughly through relations of power and in subjection to norms and social practices, poses a challenge to ethics and ethical agency. The book argues, in conversation with Butler, Levinas, and Laplanche, that responsibility becomes possible only when we do not know what to do or how to respond, yet find ourselves under a demand to respond, and even more, to respond well to others. Drawing on the work of Butler, Adorno, and Foucault, Unbecoming Subjects examines critique as a central practice for moral philosophy. It interrogates the limits of moral and political knowledge and probes methods of social criticism to uncover and oppose injustices.