Search Results

This chapter argues that, even at their most radical, feminist critics of liberalism rarely leave the spaces of paradox produced by contradictions and inconsistencies inherent to liberal capitalist societies: between the promise of universalism and the particularity of actual citizenship and the administration of justice. It reviews feminist criticisms of liberalism and individual rights and arguments about the ways that space sustains and naturalises illiberal practices in liberal societies. Drawing on Laclau, Butler, Zizek and Young, it considers how two geographies operate within recent efforts to rethink universality, and democratic feminist politics and solidarity, namely, the metaphors of ‘empty space’ and ‘webbed connections’.

What is it to see something in a picture? Most accounts of pictorial experience—or, to use Richard Wollheim's term, ‘seeing-in’—seek, in various ways, to explain it in terms of how pictures somehow display the looks of things. However, some ‘things’ that we apparently see in pictures do not display any ‘look’. In particular, most pictures depict empty space, but empty space does not seem to display any ‘look’—at least not in the way material objects do. How do we see it in pictures, if we do? This chapter offers an account of pictorial perception of empty space by elaborating on Wollheim's claim that ‘seeing-in’ is permeable to thought. It ends by pointing to the aesthetic relevance of seeing—or not seeing—empty space in pictures.

This chapter tackles the question of whether afterness can be thought to have a space, a Zeitraum, in which its movements can be thought. The German word Zeitraum, idiomatically translated, indicates a period of time but literally means “time-space”; it suggests that time not merely is related to space but also can be thought, somewhat curiously, as having a space. This chapter asks if the after is situated not only temporally but also spatially. More specifically, it considers whether afterness can have a space, and if so, how its space could be thought. Focusing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of “empty space,” a historical and experiential no-man’s-land in which what lies between the after and the before cannot be reduced to the presence of a “now,” the chapter explains how we may interpret afterness as both an openness and a form of traumatic survival.

This chapter illustrates the intimate relationship between colonialism and world population growth. For a time, the colonizing of global empty spaces—“waste lands”—was rationalized as a means to accommodate the colonizing nation's increasing modernization and overpopulation, and that the more recent development of all unoccupied lands being assimilated into modern political systems curtails the colonizers' attempts to make use of a spatial resource. Occupation of waste lands now had to undergo negotiation as per the law of nations, complicating the simpler colonial process of sovereignty over a given territory. Of course, the rights of a state to occupy waste lands would frequently be called into question; it is argued that the right of land occupation might simply be a matter of need, thus translating the spatial politics of earth to the politics of life.

This chapter introduces a perceptual phenomenon so far overlooked in the philosophical literature: ‘visual evanescence’. ‘Evanescent’ objects are those that due to their structured visible appearances have a tendency to vanish or evanesce from sight at certain places and for certain ‘biologically apt’ perceivers. Paradigmatically evanescent objects are those associated with certain forms of animal camouflage. This chapter shows that reflection on visual evanescence helps create conceptual room for a treatment of looks statements not explicit in the contemporary literature, one which takes its cue from the relatively neglected philosophy of perception of G.E.M. Anscombe. In sensory contexts in which evanescence is known to have occurred, the use of ‘looks invisible’ seems to be intelligible, a fact that sensationalist and objectivist treatments of the nature of looks cannot obviously accommodate — at least, when coupled with what Cora Diamond (1981) describes as a ‘natural’ understanding of nonsense. By focusing on a number of imaginative scenarios in which the statement ‘looks invisible’ is permissible, the author opposes these ontological treatments with the grammatical approach drawn from Anscombe and, in doing so, uncovers a degree of unity across the cases considered: something can intelligibly be said to ‘look invisible’ if one can see or appears to see the entirety of the region that the ‘invisible’ thing occupies. The region ‘looks empty’ but is full.

This Coda closes the book by reflecting on the initial reception of Newton's Principia in France as it relates to the eruption after 1715 of the "Newton Wars," and the very different understanding of the Principia that sustained them. Stressing the contingent nature of this history, the chapter explores how French science was shaped overall by the peculiar dynamics of Newton's influence. Noting how eighteenth-century mathematicians in the United Kingdom tended to follow the Old Style mathematicians in France in their rejection of mathematical analysis, the irony of the French origin of what we now call "Newtonian mechanics" through a failure to follow Newton as literally as his English and Scottish colleagues is noted. The emergence of Newton's new identity as a mathematical natural philosopher and defender of the theory of universal gravitation after 1715 is also explored, along with the changing French understanding of the Principia and its place in French science. Pointing to The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, which picks up the story from here, the book concludes by pointing to some of the ways that Enlightenment French Newtonianism as practiced after 1730 reveal the historical traces of this earlier history.

Tocqueville asserted that the principle of democratic equality is a “providential fact.” In its actual unfolding, however, the “providential” aspect was replaced by a strictly empirical, humanly engineered process or development, and the spirit of “equality” gave way to the unleashing of unlimited self-interest, which produced growing inequality. This chapter traces the transformation from a qualitative conception into a purely quantitative, empirical, and “minimalist” definition of democracy. Apart from violating equality, the transformation also ignores the “paradigm shift” of democracy (vis-à-vis monarchy): that popular sovereignty cannot be occupied, but remains (in the terms of Claude Lefort) an “empty space.” The chapter also discusses the steady globalization of this definition, meaning the transfer of liberal minimalism from the Western “center” to the non-Western “periphery,” often through policies of “regime change.” In this manner, the domestic rise of inequality is paralleled by the rise of global elitism and hegemonic domination.

This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s poems and other short pieces. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: atomism; empty space; active regions of the world that we do not notice; the ideas that occur to us and why; animal knowledge; insect knowledge; peace and conflict; gender; imaginary worlds; poetry; animal cruelty; and the treatment of nature. The poems on atomism reflect a view that Cavendish entertained early on and then abandoned in favor of her animist view that bodies are not only divisible, but also active, perceptive, and knowledgeable. A common theme across other poems is the sophistication of nonhuman creatures, for example in “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him downe,” “A Morall Discourse betwixt Man, and Beast,” “Of the Ant,” and “Of Fishes.”

This chapter features a selection of excerpts from Cavendish’s book, Philosophical and Physical Opinions. The passages treat a number of topics and issues: whether or not there are inherent capability differences between men and women; gender; atomism; whether or not goodness and badness are objective qualities in the natural world; empty space and the impossibility of vacuum; the struggle for creatures to maintain their structural integrity; striving; individuation; creation; annihilation; chance; causation; teleology; knowledge; motion; perception; mental illness and the brain; and physicians and disease. The chapter begins with a note that Cavendish writes “To the Two Universities” in which she says that the main reason for differences in the skills and capacities of women and men is that men have put into place structures that make it impossible for women to develop and flourish. She also looks ahead to a future time when different structures will be in place and the self-same work that she has produced in the seventeenth century will have an opportunity to secure a foothold.