Book-A-Lena
An interesting book, recommended by Lena -- Martha Nussbaum's Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Here's the Publisher's Weekly Review:
Often, contentious social issues like gay marriage, pornography and stem cell research are framed in terms of religion, morality and the public good. This erudite and engaging treatise contends that these debates are frequently really about the primal emotions of disgust and shame. Philosophy professor Nussbaum, author of Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, challenges a number of fashionable intellectual currents, including Leon Kassís notion of a bioethics based on "the wisdom of repugnance" and communitarian Amitai Etzioniís championing of public humiliation of drunk drivers and other criminals. In response to advocates of populist reflexes of disgust and shame as a cure for social degeneracy, she mounts a critical defense of the classical liberal philosophy of John Stuart Mill, one refounded on a psychoanalytic theory of the emotions. She argues that while disgust and shame are inescapable psychological reactions against human animality, weakness and decay, injecting them into law and politics ends up projecting these troubling aspects of ourselves onto stigmatized groups like homosexuals, women, Jews and the disabled, and is therefore incompatible with a liberal and humane society. Writing in an academically sophisticated but accessible style, Nussbaum is equally at home discussing Aristotle and Freud, Whitmanís poetry and Supreme Court case law. The result is an exceptionally smart, stimulating and intellectually rigorous analysis that adds an illuminating psychological dimension to our understanding of law and public policy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Paglia, who's opinion can be trusted, refers to her as "that PC chameleon and ruthless academic operator, Martha Nussbaum."
Meeeeeeeeeeee-yow.
Crid at May 13, 2004 9:23 AM
Alright, 'whose.' I'm not an academic, I'm USEFUL, OK????
Crid at May 13, 2004 9:24 AM
Paglia. Whatever.
Lena at May 13, 2004 10:35 AM
Lena, let's shoot some fish in a barrel! This is Martha writing the journal "Diacritics":
"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the questions of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural tonalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
Passages like that are why conservatives snicker at liberals who demand or cite academic sources. Breathing, fluid-filled, taxpaying human beings often believe that Martha should take her "refounded psychoanalytic theories of the emotions" and shove them up her tenured asshole.
Crid at May 13, 2004 11:39 AM
Nope, I was wrong, that was Judith Butler. Yes, I'm embarrassed.
LENA, I CAN'T TELL THEM APART!
Crid at May 13, 2004 11:45 AM
That's okay Crid. Here's something that Martha Nussbaum put together with the economist Amartya Sen, in their human rights work. I think you'll find a lot of differences between their writing and Judith Butler's:
Central Human Functional Capabilities
1. Life. Being able to live to the end of a human life of normal length; not dying prematurely or before oneís life is so reduced as to be not worth living
2. Bodily health and integrity. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; being adequately nourished; being able to have adequate shelter
3. Bodily integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; being able to be secure against violent assault, including sexual assault, marital rape, and domestic violence; having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and for choice in matters of reproduction
4. Senses, imagination, thought. Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to reason ñ and to do these things in a ìtruly humanî way, a way informed and cultivated by adequate education, including, but by no means limited to, literacy and basic mathematical and scientific training; being able to use imagination and thought in connection with experiencing and producing expressive works and events of oneís own choice (religious, literary, musical, etc); being able to use oneís mind in ways protected by guarantees of freedom of expression with respect to both political and artistic speech and freedom of religious exercise; being able to have pleasurable experiences and to avoid nonbeneficial pain
5. Emotions. Being able to have attachments to things and persons outside ourselves; being able to love those who love and care for us; being able to grieve at their absence; in general, being able to love, to grieve, to experience longing, gratitude, and justified anger; not having oneís emotional developing blighted by fear or anxiety. (Supporting this capability means supporting forms of human association that can be shown to be crucial in their development.)
6. Practical reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of oneís own life. (This entails protection for the liberty of conscience.)
7. Affiliation. (a) Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognize and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship. (Protecting this capability means, once again, protecting institutions that constitute such forms of affiliation, and also protecting the freedoms of assembly and political speech.) (b) Having the social bases of self-respect and nonhumiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others. (This entails provisions of nondiscrimination.)
8. Other species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to animals, plants, and the world of nature
9. Play. Being able to laugh, to play, to enjoy recreational activities
10. Control over oneís environment. (a) Political: being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern oneís life; having the rights of political participation, free speech, and freedom of association (b) Material: being able to hold property (both land and movable goods); having the right to seek employment on an equal basis with others; having the freedom from unwarranted search and seizure. In work, being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.
(from ìSex and Social Justice.î Martha C. Nussbaum. 1999. pp 41-42.)
Lena at May 13, 2004 3:14 PM
That's better than what's described in the review, which sounds intolerably smarmy and condescending in that academic/psychotherapeutic sort of way, ie it's all about feelings (which were discovered at Princeton in April 1967)! I think lefties, and women especially, are obsessed with feelings. And sharing feelings, which they confuse with talking about them and....
OK, enough for today.
It must be cool to have Sen as a co-author.
See this here ...
http://www.idsa.org/webmodules/articles/articlefiles/Postrel.pdf
...Which covers a mix of #4 & #9 in your list. Her books are great too. Besides, I think she's a FOA (Friend of Alkon).
Crid at May 13, 2004 11:16 PM
I agree with you that feelings make for pretty boring conversation. Just last week I was complaining to Amy about people who -- in response to "Hey, how's it going?" -- launch into some kind of whiny bullshit about their icky boyfriends or spiritual quests. I always want to interrupt them and say, "No, the correct answer to that question is 'Fine, and you?'"
Amateur psychotherapy -- don't try it at home!
Lena at May 14, 2004 3:20 AM
What are you idiots talking about?
You can't tell the difference between Butler and Nussbaum??!!!
Anybody who makes such a statement obviously has never read either of these authors.
You did not only make the unfathomable mistake of presenting a Butler quote as a Nussbaum quote, but seem to have completely missed that Nussbaum USES just this quote in an article criticising Butler!
The comments on feeling are equally astounding in demonstrating that you guys are having a discussion about a whole body of literature that you have never read. Why, why, why would you do such a thing? It will be obvious to any informed person who reads your comments that you havenít made ANY effort to even identify what people might be talking about when they say that the topic of feelings is relevant for political philosophy?
Yours Sincerely,
A person who has read a book
What are you idiots talking about? at July 15, 2004 3:37 AM
Lena is my best friend, and reads more books in a day than you do in a month -- and the highest caliber of stuff. Clearly, there's reason for you to be so defensive -- ie, lacking intellect and literacy -- or you might politely offer a correction. Here's a book you might check out: "Control Your Anger Before It Controls You" by Albert Ellis.
Amy "Supercilious Asshole Hater" Alkon at July 15, 2004 8:00 AM
I think the "Idiots" blogger is pissed off at Crid, because Crid mistook Butler for Nussbaum. But I don't understand the indignant tone, because Crid never really claimed to know either author's work, and he caught his own mistake. Life goes on.
Full Disclosure on My Familiarity with Butler and Nussbaum's Work:
I don't know Butler's early work, but I recently read her new book ("Precarious Life") and thought it was amazing. As for Nussbaum, I've read "Sex and Social Justice" (which I quoted above) and "For Love of Country?" Okay?
Lena at July 15, 2004 8:30 AM