Suchergebnisse

There is free thought, free choice, the free world - and then there is free stuff. By tracking the transformations of just one idea, "free," this book describes an arc of thought through a "revaluation of values" and offers its critique in the same gesture.

Intro -- Copula -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- 1. The Maternalin Its Natural Habitat -- 2. Brave New World -- 3. Reproducing Technology -- 4. Conceiving of Feminism -- 5. Feminism Is a Kind of Time -- 6. The Lore of the Father -- 7. The Figure of the Copula -- 8. The Body as Material Event -- 9. The Technology of Genre -- Bibliography -- Index of Names -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.

Higher education on the corporate model imagines students as consumers, choosing between knowledge products and brands. It imagines itself liberating the university from the dictates of the State/tradition/aristocratic self-replication, and putting it in the hands of its democratic stakeholders. It therefore naturally subscribes to the general management principles and practices of global corporate culture. These principles – transparency, accountability, efficiency – are hard to argue with in principle. But an abstract argument in political economy comes down to earth in the challenges facing the arts and humanities, after the 'Education Revolution', to justify their modes of life.

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist—but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic—and a poetics—in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

The paper argues that psychoanalysis and deconstruction offer more to feminist theory than contestation. The common feminist criticisms of the work of Lacan and Derrida are not as compelling as may be thought. Among the possibilities for feminist theory using psychoanalysis and deconstruction is the scrutiny of theory as theory—and this will inevitably include scrutinizing feminist theory itself.