Benjamin P. Davis
Texas A&M University, Global Languages & Cultures, Faculty Member
- Human Rights, Ethics, Decolonial Thought, Continental Philosophy, Social and Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, and 18 moreSocial Theory, Latin American Philosophy, Latin American Studies, Liberation Philosophy/Post-Continental Philosophy, American Philosophy, American Studies, Pragmatism, Decolonization, Indigenous Studies, Liberation Theology, Marxism, Decolonial Feminism, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Theory, Latin American and Caribbean History, Caribbean Studies, Edouard Glissant, and Human Rights Lawedit
- I am the author of _Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics_ (Edinburgh UP, 2023, ... moreI am the author of _Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics_ (Edinburgh UP, 2023, in the series Contemporary Continental Ethics) as well as _Simone Weil's Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). With Kris F. Sealey, I co-edited the volume _Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy_ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024, in the series Creolizing the Canon).
Glissant book: https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-choose-your-bearing.html
Weil book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171943/Simone-Weil%E2%80%99s-Political-Philosophy-Field-Notes-from-the-Margins
Critical Theory book: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538188019/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophyedit
Choose Your Bearing commits to inclusive universal rights and protections for natural environments. Interweaving philosophy and history, Benjamin Davis presents an elegant account of the contributions, contradictions, and betrayals of... more
Choose Your Bearing commits to inclusive universal rights and protections for natural environments. Interweaving philosophy and history, Benjamin Davis presents an elegant account of the contributions, contradictions, and betrayals of human rights advocacy within anti-colonial struggles. Referencing Glissant, Said, Marx, Du Bois and other intellectuals, this book engages ethics, diverse ethnic identities, and the structural antagonisms between colonizers and the colonized. Choose Your Bearing offers a succinct study of intellectuals and care-givers who improvised a common language for political advocacy; thus, it clarifies how to stabilize current resistance to imperialism and predatory powers.
—Joy James, Williams College
Davis’ book rigorously argues for a sense of political commitment based on the responsibilities that come with the inescapable and future entanglements of subjects and communities who are always implicated and global. Choose Your Bearing provides us with a compelling guide for thinking and acting ethically in the contemporary world.
—Gerard Laurence Aching, Cornell University
In this ethically bracing and philosophically wide-ranging intervention, Benjamin Davis calls on Édouard Glissant to help reimagine human rights for a politics that requires more awareness of and responsibility for global hierarchy and oppression. Human rights are not beyond reproach but they are also not unsalvageable, if they are reforged as credible tools for emancipation, as Glissant and others have foreseen.
—Samuel Moyn, Yale University
This careful study sheds light on a neglected figure, Glissant, even as it argues persuasively for the ongoing, complicated relevance of human rights discourse in contemporary politics. An important addition to political theory, at once invigorating and enlightening, especially as it confronts racial and cultural difference.
—Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto
Intro: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/choose-your-bearing-edouard-glissant-human-rights-and-decolonial-ethics/
Order: https://www.bookculture.com/book/9781399522441
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/08/11/recently-published-book-spotlight-choose-your-bearing/
—Joy James, Williams College
Davis’ book rigorously argues for a sense of political commitment based on the responsibilities that come with the inescapable and future entanglements of subjects and communities who are always implicated and global. Choose Your Bearing provides us with a compelling guide for thinking and acting ethically in the contemporary world.
—Gerard Laurence Aching, Cornell University
In this ethically bracing and philosophically wide-ranging intervention, Benjamin Davis calls on Édouard Glissant to help reimagine human rights for a politics that requires more awareness of and responsibility for global hierarchy and oppression. Human rights are not beyond reproach but they are also not unsalvageable, if they are reforged as credible tools for emancipation, as Glissant and others have foreseen.
—Samuel Moyn, Yale University
This careful study sheds light on a neglected figure, Glissant, even as it argues persuasively for the ongoing, complicated relevance of human rights discourse in contemporary politics. An important addition to political theory, at once invigorating and enlightening, especially as it confronts racial and cultural difference.
—Mark Kingwell, University of Toronto
Intro: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/choose-your-bearing-edouard-glissant-human-rights-and-decolonial-ethics/
Order: https://www.bookculture.com/book/9781399522441
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/08/11/recently-published-book-spotlight-choose-your-bearing/
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Latin American Studies, International Relations, Philosophy, Ethics, and 10 moreLatin American and Caribbean History, Political Theory, International Studies, International Law, Human Rights, Caribbean Literature, Philosophy Of Law, Decolonial Thought, Edouard Glissant, and Decolonialidad
In this moving account of Simone Weil’s political thought, Benjamin Davis merges world history and personal testimony, theory and living, brain and heart. He shows that one’s scholarship and one’s life cannot be separated easily.... more
In this moving account of Simone Weil’s political thought, Benjamin Davis merges world history and personal testimony, theory and living, brain and heart. He shows that one’s scholarship and one’s life cannot be separated easily.
—Christy Wampole, Princeton University
This book made me understand Simone Weil in a thrilling new way. With clear exposition and forceful argumentation, engaging with Weil texts that are familiar and those that are often overlooked, Benjamin Davis succeeds in inserting Weil into the canon of outstanding twentieth-century political philosophers.
—Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University
In his beautifully written and assiduously detailed book, Davis considers Simone Weil's politics of community, of self, and of thought. Approaching Weil as a sophisticated political philosopher, Davis illuminates an entirely new dimension of Simone Weil's engagement with the turbulence of her time. He does so with all the grace and attention one could desire, and provides an irrefutable argument as to why we should all be reading Simone Weil with Davis as our guide.
—Helen M. Kinsella, University of Minnesota
Too many of Simone Weil’s readers have accepted some version of Charles de Gaulle’s condescending verdict: ‘she’s crazy’. In this powerful and thoughtful study, Benjamin Davis treats Weil as a philosopher who tested her ideas in the factories, high schools, and battlefields of world capitalism and the French Empire. In doing so, he offers a strikingly original portrait of a thinker whose commitment to unifying thought and action offers much to anyone who hopes to understand capitalism and empire today.
—Jessica Whyte, University of New South Wales
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171943/Simone-Weil%E2%80%99s-Political-Philosophy-Field-Notes-from-the-Margins
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/10/27/recently-published-book-spotlight-simone-weils-political-philosophy/
—Christy Wampole, Princeton University
This book made me understand Simone Weil in a thrilling new way. With clear exposition and forceful argumentation, engaging with Weil texts that are familiar and those that are often overlooked, Benjamin Davis succeeds in inserting Weil into the canon of outstanding twentieth-century political philosophers.
—Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University
In his beautifully written and assiduously detailed book, Davis considers Simone Weil's politics of community, of self, and of thought. Approaching Weil as a sophisticated political philosopher, Davis illuminates an entirely new dimension of Simone Weil's engagement with the turbulence of her time. He does so with all the grace and attention one could desire, and provides an irrefutable argument as to why we should all be reading Simone Weil with Davis as our guide.
—Helen M. Kinsella, University of Minnesota
Too many of Simone Weil’s readers have accepted some version of Charles de Gaulle’s condescending verdict: ‘she’s crazy’. In this powerful and thoughtful study, Benjamin Davis treats Weil as a philosopher who tested her ideas in the factories, high schools, and battlefields of world capitalism and the French Empire. In doing so, he offers a strikingly original portrait of a thinker whose commitment to unifying thought and action offers much to anyone who hopes to understand capitalism and empire today.
—Jessica Whyte, University of New South Wales
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538171943/Simone-Weil%E2%80%99s-Political-Philosophy-Field-Notes-from-the-Margins
American Philosophical Association Interview: https://blog.apaonline.org/2023/10/27/recently-published-book-spotlight-simone-weils-political-philosophy/
Research Interests:
Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant intervention that takes the concept to a new and unwonted place. Brilliantly edited by Kris Sealey and Benjamin Davis, this germinal... more
Creolizing Critical Theory inscribes at once the next iteration of the concept and a significant intervention that takes the concept to a new and unwonted place. Brilliantly edited by Kris Sealey and Benjamin Davis, this germinal collection of essays—with the Frankfurt School firmly in its sights, as well as the formidable canon of Continental philosophical texts that subtend it—opens the way to an astonishing idea: by methodologically focusing on Caribbean intellectual resources and its fertile thinkers, a creolized critical theory aims ‘to demonstrate the critical interventions from modes of thinking for which Black and Native death is not a side issue, but rather what is most urgent for critically re-imagining the category of the human.’ This powerful turn toward demarks another shift in the geography of reason, but it also lays claim to the rejected insight of a critical European blindness.
—Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future.
—Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
—Hortense J. Spillers, Vanderbilt University
Critical theory is in constant need of self-transformation in light of the crises and struggles of its age, an age that is defined by the historical entwinement of capitalism and colonialism and its afterlives. Against this background, Creolizing Critical Theory offers a highly topical invitation to think with the Caribbean, with Caribbean thought as critical theory. Its chapters weave a rich and complex tapestry, containing a multitude of greatly relevant insights for all those who share critical theory’s ambition to address the deep crises of our present and to open up new ways of imagining the future.
—Robin Celikates, University of Amsterdam
Order: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Philosophy, Ethics, Latin American and Caribbean History, and 11 moreGlobalization, Human Rights, Theodor Adorno, Critical Race Theory, Caribbean Studies, Walter Benjamin, African American Studies, Black Studies, Critical Legal Studies, Caribbean Philosophy, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot
This is the first chapter to Kris Sealey and my co-edited volume, Creolizing Critical Theory.
Link: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
Link: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781538187999/Creolizing-Critical-Theory-New-Voices-in-Caribbean-Philosophy
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Ethics, Feminist Theory, and 10 moreLatin American and Caribbean History, Political Theory, Caribbean Literature, Literary Theory, Caribbean Studies, Social and Political Philosophy, Stuart Hall, Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Philosophy, and Sylvia Wynter
In this essay, I read Stuart Hall's idea of "politics without guarantees" as meaning that all concepts are saturated with history and that no use of a concept can prevent it from being co-opted. The contribution of this reading is that it... more
In this essay, I read Stuart Hall's idea of "politics without guarantees" as meaning that all concepts are saturated with history and that no use of a concept can prevent it from being co-opted. The contribution of this reading is that it shifts the task of critical theory: if all concepts carry limitations and can be used to advance domination, then critical theorists need not search for pure concepts or worry about how to prevent our concepts from being captured. Instead, our task is to strategically leverage always already imperfect concepts with a view toward shared political goals. For an example of this kind of critical theory, I look to W. E. B. Du Bois's uses of "human," "humanity," and "human rights" in Black Reconstruction, which I suggest were informed by how he came to understand "humanity" in John Brown.
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/pga_2023_0999_6_15_42
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/pga/content/pga_2023_0999_6_15_42
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Philosophy, Ethics, Philosophy Of Religion, Political Theory, and 14 moreHuman Rights, Philosophy Of Law, Feminism, Humanism, Frankfurt School, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Stuart Hall, Decolonial Turn, Decolonial Thought, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Decolonialidad, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
This article examines how Hannah Arendt's idea of a "right to have rights" could travel in the Americas. It offers a reading of the right to have rights that foregrounds the right to land as a basic right. This reading emerges through an... more
This article examines how Hannah Arendt's idea of a "right to have rights" could travel in the Americas. It offers a reading of the right to have rights that foregrounds the right to land as a basic right. This reading emerges through an attention to contemporary Indigenous social movements and political philosophy. Taken together, this examination and reading ask justice-oriented actors to support land back movements as part of a broader practice of defending human rights and situating those rights within a responsibility to land.
The aim of the article is to dwell with to what extent rights discourse could be a transitional language around changing practices of sovereignty, title, treaties, and law in the Americas.
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/arendtstudies/content/arendtstudies_2022_0999_8_24_48
The aim of the article is to dwell with to what extent rights discourse could be a transitional language around changing practices of sovereignty, title, treaties, and law in the Americas.
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/arendtstudies/content/arendtstudies_2022_0999_8_24_48
Research Interests:
Any appeal to a right raises the question of a corresponding duty. If one bears a right, then who bears the duty to respect, protect, and enforce that right? In this essay, I contend that human rights claims need not be oriented to or... more
Any appeal to a right raises the question of a corresponding duty. If one bears a right, then who bears the duty to respect, protect, and enforce that right? In this essay, I contend that human rights claims need not be oriented to or reliant on the state. I start from and conclude with lessons from the 2016 protests at Standing Rock. Standing Rock, I argue, exemplifies critical theory that organizes communities through the language of human rights.
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802487
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/802487
Research Interests: Social Movements, Native American Studies, American Studies, Ethics, Indigenous Studies, and 9 moreIndigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Political Theory, Human Rights, History of Human Rights, Indigenous Communication Theory, Decolonial Thought, New social movements, Decolonialidad, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
This note on human rights practice observes that some pedagogical methods in human rights education can have the effect of making human rights violations both seem to be performed by abnormal, bad actors and seem to occur in places far... more
This note on human rights practice observes that some pedagogical methods in human rights education can have the effect of making human rights violations both seem to be performed by abnormal, bad actors and seem to occur in places far away from US classrooms. This effect is not intended by instructors; a methodological corrective would be helpful to human rights education. This note provides a corrective by suggesting two practices: (1) a pedagogical emphasis on what the Martinican philosopher É douard Glissant calls 'entanglements', or the way in which normal, local actions are tied to global consequences in our contemporary world; and (2) a pedagogical exercise of performing a phenomenology of, or first-person reflection on, daily life as it relates to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The emphasis and exercise work together to implicate the actor in larger patterns of human rights violations and protections. Overall, the emphasis and exercise prevent an insidious insinuation of some human rights education: that human rights violations are to be theorized in the global North but suffered in the global South.
Link: https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jhuman/huab008/6280176?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Link: https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/jhuman/huab008/6280176?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Research Interests:
Contemporary feminist theory by and large agrees on criticizing the traditional, autonomous subject and instead maintains a relational, dependent self, but the vocabulary used to describe the latter remains contested. These contestations... more
Contemporary feminist theory by and large agrees on criticizing the traditional, autonomous subject and instead maintains a relational, dependent self, but the vocabulary used to describe the latter remains contested. These contestations are seen in comparing the approach of some feminist legal theory, as demonstrated by Martha Fineman, to the approach of some feminist theory that draws on continental philosophy, as demonstrated by Judith Butler. Fineman's concept of vulnerability emphasizes the universality of vulnerability in the human condition, arguing that a "responsive state" is most conducive to producing subjects who are "resilient" in the face of neoliberal pressures. We argue that vulnerability, as an existential as opposed to a political description, is a limited rubric under which to organize against neoliberal forces. Further, we contend that Fineman's rhetoric of resilience risks reiterating a neoliberal logic of individualized self-management. In response, we look to Butler's concept of precarity, which underscores particular social conditions, as opposed to universal ontological vulnerabilities, that debilitate certain subjects. At stake is how we respond to neoliberal forces today: a vocabulary of precarity poses a more effective challenge than one of vulnerability, for it opens onto not merely individual or institutional resilience but grounded, communal resistance.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2021.25
Link: https://doi.org/10.1017/hyp.2021.25
Research Interests:
I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the way that she reads Marx – as forming “not a doctrine but a method of understanding and action.” My claim is that Weil’s method is likewise twofold: she attempts to understand... more
I read a selection of Simone Weil’s political philosophy in the way that she reads Marx – as forming “not a doctrine but a method of understanding and action.” My claim is that Weil’s method is likewise twofold: she attempts to understand the world through inquiry, then she tests her understanding through action. First, I read “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934). In that essay, inquiry, exemplified by Weil’s calling into question the term “revolution,” is her way of understanding reality around her, including forces of oppression and possibilities for liberation. Second, I read her “Factory Journal” (1934–1935), which records how she tested her theories from “Reflections” by placing herself in French factories. My conclusion states the fruits of Weil’s method for philosophy today: an interrogation of present political keywords (resistance, resilience) and a practice of philosophy as a way of life.
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17570638.2021.2002644?src=
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17570638.2021.2002644?src=
Research Interests:
This essay responds to John McDermott's diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: "[B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language." I... more
This essay responds to John McDermott's diagnosis of politics and religious life in the U.S.: "[B]oth traditional political and religious institutions are no longer an adequate let alone rich resource for a celebratory language." I present a new celebratory language by reading William James's description of saintliness in Varieties of Religious Experience. James gives me the resources to naturalize and democratize saintliness. Distinguished not by her transcendent miracles but by her this-worldly energies and experiments, the pragmatic saint remakes the experience of her community through celebration, a form of appreciation and criticism exemplified in engaged art. My ethical and aesthetic description of the saint thus builds on E. Paul Colella's recent political description of the saint as the "strenuous citizen."
Link: https://brill.com/view/journals/copr/18/1/article-p72_72.xml
Link: https://brill.com/view/journals/copr/18/1/article-p72_72.xml
Research Interests:
This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding and one relatively more recent. First, it takes place against the background of the overwhelming influence that the category of ‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary... more
This essay works at the intersection of two trends, one longstanding and one relatively more recent. First, it takes place against the background of the overwhelming influence that the category of ‘identity’ exercises on both contemporary knowledge production and political practice. Second, it responds to what has been called the ‘decolonial turn’ in theory. We compare the work of Gayatri Spivak, Aijaz Ahmad, and Walter Mignolo in terms of the following question: What kind of reflexive method do they deploy in response to their recognition of the politics of knowledge production, that is, the existence of a relationship between social position and epistemic position? We then develop a novel distinction between post-colonial, anti-colonial, and de-colonial perspectives, one based not on backward-looking intellectual genealogies but on forward-looking political practices.
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801
Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14735784.2020.1808801
Research Interests:
It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that... more
It is one thing to consider what human rights have been and another to inquire into what they could be. In this essay, I present a history of human rights vis-à-vis decolonization. I follow the scholarship of Samuel Moyn to suggest that human rights presented a “moral alternative” to political utopias. The question remains how to politicize the moral energy around human rights today. I argue that defending what Édouard Glissant calls a “right to opacity” could politicize the ethical energy around human rights today. Glissant’s right to opacity outlines a blueprint for the praxis of human rights to shift from a “functional model” to a “critical model,” to use Enrique Dussel’s distinction. My ultimate aim is to show how social movements around human rights and decolonization could converge today.
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dj1b25s
Research Interests: Anthropology, Ethics, Latin American and Caribbean History, Political Theory, Human Rights, and 15 moreLegal Theory, Social Justice, Philosophy Of Law, Caribbean Politics, Social and Political Philosophy, Decolonial Turn, Decolonial Thought, Edouard Glissant, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International law, international relations, human rights law, international humanitarian law, international organisations, law and politics, Philosophy of liberation, Enrique Dussell, Decolonialidad, Amnesty International, and Pensamiento decolonial
In this essay, I link Pragmatism and the philosophy of liberation by making a comparison between John Dewey's concept of the public and Enrique Dussel's concept of the pueblo. I am specifically interested in how these concepts set up the... more
In this essay, I link Pragmatism and the philosophy of liberation by making a comparison between John Dewey's concept of the public and Enrique Dussel's concept of the pueblo. I am specifically interested in how these concepts set up the relationship between intellectuals and their constituency--the community from which their thought emerges and to which they take themselves to be responsible. Reading the public and the pueblo together, I emphasize the need for intellectuals to consider further how their scholarship affects those they claim to serve. I conclude via what AnaLouise Keating calls "risking the personal"--offering some autobiographical remarks on the questions I raise below.
Link: http://ijp.tamu.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Responsibilities-of-the-Intellectual-Dewey-Dussel-and-Democracy.pdf
Link: http://ijp.tamu.edu/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Responsibilities-of-the-Intellectual-Dewey-Dussel-and-Democracy.pdf
Research Interests:
The central claim of this essay is that Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity" is most fruitfully understood not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political... more
The central claim of this essay is that Édouard Glissant's concept of "opacity" is most fruitfully understood not as a built-in protection of a population or as a summary term for cultural difference, but rather as a political accomplishment. That is, opacity is not a given but an achievement. Taken up in this way, opacity is relevant for ongoing decolonial work today.
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/clrjames/content/clrjames_2019_0999_12_17_63
Link: https://www.pdcnet.org/clrjames/content/clrjames_2019_0999_12_17_63
Research Interests:
This essay envisions a habit of revising habits, that is, a habit of openness and transformation. By examining William James’s descriptions of habits and his attention to the environments in which those habits are lived, I present this... more
This essay envisions a habit of revising habits, that is, a habit of openness and transformation. By examining William James’s descriptions of habits and his attention to the environments in which those habits are lived, I present this habit as a particular aesthetic engagement with the “thickness” of the entangled, textured environments in which we find ourselves. Our environments feature different positions and perspectives; they are shared with others and constantly changing. Consequently, one’s actions are called into question or break down in practice—they are interrupted. This active and mundane approach to “pragmatic thickness” and “pragmatic interruption” is different from both more receptive approaches to thickness and transcendental forms of interruption presented in recent Continental philosophy. To flesh out these differences, in the fashion of James and by way of conclusion, I offer two maxims that address the ethical implications of a habit of interruption, and I describe a concrete environment in which this habit could be socially fruitful today.
Link: https://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/V15N02-A02-Davis-PragmaticInterrupt.pdf
Link: https://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/V15N02-A02-Davis-PragmaticInterrupt.pdf
Research Interests:
In this essay, I contend that globalization is less an international process and more a colonial project. I argue that definitions of “globalization” articulated primarily through economic metrics insufficiently account for the violences... more
In this essay, I contend that globalization is less an international process and more a colonial project. I argue that definitions of “globalization” articulated primarily through economic metrics insufficiently account for the violences concomitant with such a project. In response to this insufficiency, I draw on three concepts by three decolonial authors—transmodernity (Enrique Dussel), global coloniality (Aníbal Quijano), and dialogical cosmopolitanism (Eduardo Mendieta)—in order to develop my own definition of globalization. I then offer a preliminary sketch of what I call “affective alternatives,” which could convey ways of life different from the hegemonic social forms that globalization promotes and imposes. At the very least, affective alternatives present a parallax: seen and felt from the perspective of the alternative, globalization is not taken as neutral, normal, irreversible, or desired; rather, it is “distorted” into globalization/coloniality, a project to be resisted. I conclude with reflections on connecting and deepening coalitions of resistance.
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt7p9n6
Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3xt7p9n6
Research Interests: Latin American Studies, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Indigenous Studies, Latin American and Caribbean History, and 10 moreGlobalization, Border Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Political Science, Liberation Theology, Continental Philosophy, Decolonial Thought, Decolonization, Enrique Dussell, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
Simone Weil (1909–1943) philosophized on thresholds and across borders. Her persistent desire for truth and justice led her to both elite academies and factory floors, political praxis and spiritual solitude. At different times she was an... more
Simone Weil (1909–1943) philosophized on thresholds and across borders. Her persistent desire for truth and justice led her to both elite academies and factory floors, political praxis and spiritual solitude. At different times she was an activist, a pacifist, a militant, a mystic, and an exile; but throughout, in her inquiry into reality and orientation to the good, she remained a philosopher. Her oeuvre features deliberate contradiction yet demonstrates remarkable clarity. It is value centered and integrated but not systematic. It contains scattered notes of her translations of and commentaries on several ancient Greek texts, Pythagorean geometry formulae, and detailed accounts of her daily tasks within a factory; but her oeuvre is also composed of addresses to political, industrial, and religious leaders as well as pieces intended for university students, radical militants, industrial workers, and farm laborers. In both her life and her thought—itself an unstable distinction with respect to Weil—she is a philosopher of margins and paradoxes. In part because Weil’s thought defies categorization, the ways in which her ideas are taken up often say as much about her commentator as they do about her. She was taken as a prototype for Albert Camus’s révoltés and praised by André Gide as “the patron saint of all outsiders”. Giorgio Agamben described her conscience as “the most lucid of our times”, and Hannah Arendt claimed that perhaps only Weil treated the subject of labor “without prejudice and sentimentality”. Maurice Blanchot described Weil as an “exceptional figure” who offers “an example of certitude” in the modern world, and Iris Murdoch wrote of “a profoundly disciplined life behind her writings” that gave “an authority which cannot be imitated”. But Weil was also criticized by Leon Trotsky as a “melancholy revolutionary” and disparaged as “crazy” by Charles de Gaulle. These remarks, however, betray an irony of which Weil was well aware and about which she was deeply concerned near the end of her life, namely, that her person would be considered more than her thought. By categorically focusing on the philosophical concepts Weil articulated and developed, this entry attempts to present her philosophy while speaking to her concern.
Link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/
Link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/
Research Interests:
This essay is organized into four parts: (1) definition and examples of impossibility as transcendent; (2) discussion of a radical, immanent alternative to the possible; (3) elaboration on the implications of that material alternative;... more
This essay is organized into four parts: (1) definition and examples of impossibility as transcendent; (2) discussion of a radical, immanent alternative to the possible; (3) elaboration on the implications of that material alternative; and (4) a challenge to those enmeshed in academic assemblages today. To begin, I turn to two exemplars who move beyond the logic of the possible, Antigone and Simone Weil. I focus on Antigone because of her audacious transgressions of authority and the law, of her gendered position in society, and of life itself. I then look to Weil because of her emphasis on renouncing the self, her rejection of the idolatry inherent in capitalism, and her critique of human rights discourse and humanitarianism—two (related) approaches to global crises. For both Antigone and Weil transcendence of the possible is rooted in and motivated by the supernatural; however, those of us skeptical of implicit metaphysics therein are left wondering: How would a material turn to the impossible manifest itself? I suggest that Alain Badiou’s notion of fidelity to “the event” is an immanent “impossible,” and thus, pace Antigone and Weil, a viable alternative to supernatural “impossibles.” Indeed, Badiou’s ethics of the event enables us to envision material interruptions to the narrative of the possible. I then discuss the implications of these interruptions, arguing that such breaks in self, thought, and action could inspire impassioned, subject-ivating, and self-critical responses to crises today.
Link: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/16.3/Davis.pdf
Link: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/16.3/Davis.pdf
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This is my review of Wolfram Eilenberger's The Visionaries.
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-024-00679-z
Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41296-024-00679-z
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This is my review of Nancy Mithlo's Knowing Native Arts. The review is really a conversation.
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857968
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857968
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This review essay examines prominent definitions of Critical Theory today. Many of these definitions frame Critical Theory as a broad project that distinguishes itself from other theories by working across disciplines in order to... more
This review essay examines prominent definitions of Critical Theory today. Many of these definitions frame Critical Theory as a broad project that distinguishes itself from other theories by working across disciplines in order to contribute to emancipatory movements. Defined thus, Critical Theory serves as an umbrella term under which would sit, for instance, feminist, decolonial and intersectional theories. But when elaborating on their definitions of Critical Theory in public statements, several prominent institutional sites and recent books chart a lineage from Immanuel Kant to the Frankfurt School and beyond, highlighting recent debates with French poststructuralism. When the story of Critical Theory is told in this way, Critical Theory runs into the problems Bernard Harcourt effectively outlines in Critique & Praxis, such as retreating from political practice into epistemological questions, withdrawing from activism into academic enclaves and being co-opted by liberal politics. My argument is that certain figures advancing Black radical thought and cultural critiques—I focus on Joy James and Stuart Hall—give Critical Theory the theoretical and practical resources to side-step the problems of retreating into epistemology, the academy or liberalism. Re- oriented in this way, Critical Theory could more effectively diagnose and respond to the struggles of our time.
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1919908
Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2021.1919908
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I wrote this essay thinking about Coöperism 11/13: Rescue at Sea.
Link: https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2024/03/26/benjamin-p-davis-critique-at-sea-level-paul-gilroys-renewed-critical-theory/
Link: https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2024/03/26/benjamin-p-davis-critique-at-sea-level-paul-gilroys-renewed-critical-theory/
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I wrote this reflection essay following my seminar with Frieda Ekotto and Bernard Harcourt at Columbia's Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Seminar: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/7-13/ Essay:... more
I wrote this reflection essay following my seminar with Frieda Ekotto and Bernard Harcourt at Columbia's Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
Seminar: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/7-13/
Essay: https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2023/12/18/benjamin-p-davis-a-scarf-and-a-song-reflections-on-simone-weil-jean-genet-and-edward-said/
Seminar: https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/7-13/
Essay: https://the1313.law.columbia.edu/2023/12/18/benjamin-p-davis-a-scarf-and-a-song-reflections-on-simone-weil-jean-genet-and-edward-said/
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This is my entry on Édouard Glissant's "right to opacity" for Critical Legal Thinking's "Key Concepts."
Link: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2023/11/21/edouard-glissant-the-right-to-opacity/
Link: https://criticallegalthinking.com/2023/11/21/edouard-glissant-the-right-to-opacity/
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A reflection on solidarity in our time of wildfires--written from summer 2023.
Link: https://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-embrace-a-wildfire-a-path-out-of-the-smoke/
Link: https://www.publicbooks.org/how-to-embrace-a-wildfire-a-path-out-of-the-smoke/
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The West ultimately needs to be more reflective about how we live our lives in a very ordinary, everyday sense.
Link: https://www.openglobalrights.org/indigenous-human-rights-claims-outline-promising-new-ways-life/
Link: https://www.openglobalrights.org/indigenous-human-rights-claims-outline-promising-new-ways-life/
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This essay is my response to the political theorist John Keane's essay "How Democracies Die, Fast and Slow."
Link: https://publicseminar.org/essays/are-universities-bad-for-democracy/
Link: https://publicseminar.org/essays/are-universities-bad-for-democracy/
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This essay is a reflection on the 2020 series Jon Catlin and I ran called "Sentencing the Present." I invite readers to think with me about the ethics and politics of refusal in the context of the so-called Great Resignation. Link:... more
This essay is a reflection on the 2020 series Jon Catlin and I ran called "Sentencing the Present." I invite readers to think with me about the ethics and politics of refusal in the context of the so-called Great Resignation.
Link: https://publicseminar.org/2022/11/an-ethics-of-refusal/
Link: https://publicseminar.org/2022/11/an-ethics-of-refusal/
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The most consistent feedback we have received is that “Sentencing the Present” has taken on a life of its own. We have asked each other: Just what kind of life is that? “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” Theodor Adorno wrote.... more
The most consistent feedback we have received is that “Sentencing the Present” has taken on a life of its own. We have asked each other: Just what kind of life is that? “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” Theodor Adorno wrote. Translated literally: “There is no right life in the wrong one.” This is perhaps the best-known line from his own reflection on crisis in the 1940s, written, like many of our paragraphs, from a situation of displacement: Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. In which he also stated: “There is nothing innocuous left.”
A version of that claim has become commonplace with regard to the virus: No door handle, no friend, no lover, is innocuous. Part of the point of “Sentencing the Present,” and our “Theses” before it, has been to make the medical diagnosis social, as Adorno did in his time. To state as clearly as we could that U.S. life before “the crisis” was “wrong life” — and hence to raise our voices against any return to “normal.”
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/field-notes-on-sentencing-the-present/
A version of that claim has become commonplace with regard to the virus: No door handle, no friend, no lover, is innocuous. Part of the point of “Sentencing the Present,” and our “Theses” before it, has been to make the medical diagnosis social, as Adorno did in his time. To state as clearly as we could that U.S. life before “the crisis” was “wrong life” — and hence to raise our voices against any return to “normal.”
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/field-notes-on-sentencing-the-present/
Research Interests:
This is the final compilation of contributions to the “Sentencing the Present” series, co-curated by Benjamin Davis and Jonathon Catlin, and published with Public Seminar in five parts from May-June, 2020. A sentence is protean: It can... more
This is the final compilation of contributions to the “Sentencing the Present” series, co-curated by Benjamin Davis and Jonathon Catlin, and published with Public Seminar in five parts from May-June, 2020.
A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political advocacy, and inspired by the response of readers to our own “Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis,” the past several weeks we have convened an ongoing conversation of critical voices reflecting on the history of the present and the possibilities of the future. To start, we asked some of today’s most pressing thinkers to offer a “thesis,” raise a question or reconsider a word. Our open invitation brought in new voices.
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/sentencing-the-present-an-archive-of-a-crisis/
A sentence is protean: It can describe, question, or cry out. A sentence is critical: In passing judgment, it names wrongs, makes decisions, and declares publicly. In a spirit of both open inquiry and political advocacy, and inspired by the response of readers to our own “Theses for Theory in a Time of Crisis,” the past several weeks we have convened an ongoing conversation of critical voices reflecting on the history of the present and the possibilities of the future. To start, we asked some of today’s most pressing thinkers to offer a “thesis,” raise a question or reconsider a word. Our open invitation brought in new voices.
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/essays/sentencing-the-present-an-archive-of-a-crisis/
Research Interests: Critical Theory, History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Humanities, and 14 moreFeminist Theory, Political Theory, Marxism, Human Rights Law, Human Rights, Political Science, Race and Ethnicity, Medical Humanities, Public Humanities, Decolonial Thought, Crisis, Covid-19, Coronavirus COVID-19, and COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Twelve theses of political philosophy concerning crisis and catastrophe, written in response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/2020/03/theses-for-theory-in-a-time-of-crisis/
Read online at: https://publicseminar.org/2020/03/theses-for-theory-in-a-time-of-crisis/
Research Interests: Critical Theory, History, Intellectual History, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, and 13 moreEthics, History of Ideas, Political Theory, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Social and Political Philosophy, Modern European History, Edouard Glissant, Economic Crisis, Lauren Berlant, History of Epidemics, and COVID-19 PANDEMIC
I wrote this "tip sheet" for philosophical writing a la other tip sheets passed around in creative writing workshops. I invite feedback on what has worked for your students and how you might modify my suggestions.
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Please submit anonymous abstracts of 250-500 words and a separate short bio by January 26th, 2024 to AWScolloquy@gmail.com
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A workshop on religion, politics, and Simone Weil held at The John C. Danforth Center, Washington University in St. Louis, co-sponsored with the Political Theology Network. Link:... more
A workshop on religion, politics, and Simone Weil held at The John C. Danforth Center, Washington University in St. Louis, co-sponsored with the Political Theology Network.
Link: https://politicaltheology.com/call-for-papers-the-worldly-weil-simone-weil-and-political-theology/
Link: https://politicaltheology.com/call-for-papers-the-worldly-weil-simone-weil-and-political-theology/
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For the video of this workshop, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGqeLsq-c70 Hannah Arendt’s useful phrase ‘the right to have rights’ asks us to consider foundational rights—to consider on what ‘right’ other ‘rights’ are based. In... more
For the video of this workshop, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGqeLsq-c70
Hannah Arendt’s useful phrase ‘the right to have rights’ asks us to consider foundational rights—to consider on what ‘right’ other ‘rights’ are based. In _The Rights of Others_, Seyla Benhabib argues that the first right in Arendt’s phrase is addressed to humanity as a call to recognize political membership, where such a ‘right’ to membership entails legal entitlements (the plural ‘rights’). Working with a different literature, and calling into question the still-predominant North American priority of political rights over economic rights, in _Basic Rights_ Henry Shue argues that security and subsistence rights are foundational for other rights. In still different fields and sites, theorists in Native Studies and centuries of Indigenous activism have called for land (back) as foundational to other meaningful economic or political rights, and others in Native Studies and Black Studies have asked theorists, advocates, and organizers to re-think both a strategic reliance on rights claims and a too-easy sense that the nation-state protects rights (e.g. Glen Coulthard, _Red Skin, White Masks_; Dionne Brand, _A Map to the Door of No Return_; and Rinaldo Walcott, _The Long Emancipation_). Finally, Paul Gilroy has recently asked us to re-imagine the history of human rights such that its genealogy begins not with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence or Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration, but with David Walker and Frederick Douglass (c.f. _Postcolonial Melancholia_ and _Darker than Blue_).
In other words, claims to human rights—what they have been, are, and could be—remain unstable into our present, part of a larger contradictory history that includes the South African white supremacist Jan Smuts calling for human rights in the preamble of the United Nations Charter while W. E. B. Du Bois took up the term in his contemporaneous Color and Democracy; or, more recently, when human rights have been invoked to argue both for and against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
What are we to make of this conceptual instability? What histories, traditions, and cosmologies help us to understand rights claims in new ways? What sites of practice (well beyond political theory) leverage rights in the most useful ways, and what can we learn from these sites, struggles, and celebrations? At the very least, such a contested history of human rights requires what Arendt called thinking, and we look forward to thinking in community in June.
Hannah Arendt’s useful phrase ‘the right to have rights’ asks us to consider foundational rights—to consider on what ‘right’ other ‘rights’ are based. In _The Rights of Others_, Seyla Benhabib argues that the first right in Arendt’s phrase is addressed to humanity as a call to recognize political membership, where such a ‘right’ to membership entails legal entitlements (the plural ‘rights’). Working with a different literature, and calling into question the still-predominant North American priority of political rights over economic rights, in _Basic Rights_ Henry Shue argues that security and subsistence rights are foundational for other rights. In still different fields and sites, theorists in Native Studies and centuries of Indigenous activism have called for land (back) as foundational to other meaningful economic or political rights, and others in Native Studies and Black Studies have asked theorists, advocates, and organizers to re-think both a strategic reliance on rights claims and a too-easy sense that the nation-state protects rights (e.g. Glen Coulthard, _Red Skin, White Masks_; Dionne Brand, _A Map to the Door of No Return_; and Rinaldo Walcott, _The Long Emancipation_). Finally, Paul Gilroy has recently asked us to re-imagine the history of human rights such that its genealogy begins not with Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence or Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration, but with David Walker and Frederick Douglass (c.f. _Postcolonial Melancholia_ and _Darker than Blue_).
In other words, claims to human rights—what they have been, are, and could be—remain unstable into our present, part of a larger contradictory history that includes the South African white supremacist Jan Smuts calling for human rights in the preamble of the United Nations Charter while W. E. B. Du Bois took up the term in his contemporaneous Color and Democracy; or, more recently, when human rights have been invoked to argue both for and against the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
What are we to make of this conceptual instability? What histories, traditions, and cosmologies help us to understand rights claims in new ways? What sites of practice (well beyond political theory) leverage rights in the most useful ways, and what can we learn from these sites, struggles, and celebrations? At the very least, such a contested history of human rights requires what Arendt called thinking, and we look forward to thinking in community in June.
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For the video of this workshop, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdzmMz9OMzc
Research Interests:
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This international and interdisciplinary conference tackles several key questions concerning human rights today: What is the most claims to human rights can achieve? How can human rights be a starting point for making claims on the... more
This international and interdisciplinary conference tackles several key questions concerning human rights today: What is the most claims to human rights can achieve? How can human rights be a starting point for making claims on the nation-state? Are human rights claims necessarily addressed to nation-states? And what alternative political visions do human rights exclude? Panels of leading anthropologists, legal theorists, political scientists, and philosophers will discuss and debate these questions.