Emily Parker, Ph.D.—Associate Professor of Philosophy. A graduate of Emory University, Professor Parker specializes in Contemporary French Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy and Theory, Environmental Philosophy, and Social and Political Philosophy. She has authored numerous research articles and one monograph, and she has edited one book. She is the author of Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body, Oxford University Press (2021), and editor of Differences: Rereading Beauvoir and Irigaray (2017), also published by Oxford University Press. She is currently working on editing and introducing a translation of Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir, forthcoming with University of Illinois Press. Professor Parker is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Towson University, where she also teaches courses in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. Address: https://www.towson.edu/cla/departments/philosophy/facultystaff/eparker.html
In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were understood to be matters of sci... more In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were understood to be matters of scientific classification. At the height of scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or sex or diagnosis or indigence were invention. Today, however, differences among human bodies are understood as matters of social construction. The philosophy of social construction understands differences among humans to be matters of human imposition. Social constructionism's way of understanding the origin of differences among humans is so well-established as to have no currently viable alternatives, even among new materialists, social constructionism's most ardent critics.
This book argues that new materialists and social constructionists share a distinction between the political and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that "empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.
_Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body_ ultimately bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.
To understand the political, you need the ecological. To understand the ecological, you need the ... more To understand the political, you need the ecological. To understand the ecological, you need the political. To understand one you need the other. The realms to which they refer are not distinct. Nevertheless, the concepts themselves resist each other, and much of their respective literatures are distinct. Anglo-European ecologists often neglect the race, class, sex, gender, disability, national, and linguistic dimensions of their work, and many political philosophers have little to say about ecology or the climate crisis. “The body” is the sine qua non of politics, while “bodies” in the plural seems to suggest something other than politics is going on. After all, there are planetary bodies, cat bodies, bodies of all sorts. Multiplicity prevails in ecology. But when one admits that humans are, like the rest of the planet, multiple, this threatens to upset the coherence of the polis, the political realm insofar as these terms connote a realm of uniform need. This is the problem of “the body” or the body problem: A certain body is taken for granted as ideal in the political realm, and the abstract way in which that body is invoked demonstrates just how alienated the polis is from its ecology. The body as a concept defines the political in contrast to the ecological.
View the blog post with links here: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/.
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies
The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the g... more The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously a...
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 2021
The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the g... more The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously an effort to install a supposedly nonracialized, non-disabled man, a universal body, and unilateral agency. A Fanonian response to the global pandemic and climate crisis would thus appreciate the myriad crises that arise precisely when humanity is thought to be the opposite of Earth. Available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0058?refreqid=excelsior%3Aeb2167e2431b72264e2c93d5fb179cf1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Our hope in the present essay is to provide a figure for thought in response to what Paul Crutzen... more Our hope in the present essay is to provide a figure for thought in response to what Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first named "the Anthropocene." Our interest is not in providing a substitute for this concept, but in offering an alternative way of approaching the vast political-ecological work currently being attributed to it. We want to question the images of impending global cat ast ro phe, 1 the glorifications of human abilities to overcome such quasi-apocalyptic conditions, and the ironic celebrations of our 'natural' resilience and technological prowess that are woven through the calls to responsibility and action which characterize Anthropocene discourse.
It is widely accepted that Judith Butler's work represents a fundamental departure from that of L... more It is widely accepted that Judith Butler's work represents a fundamental departure from that of Luce Irigaray. However, in a 2001 essay, Butler suggests that Irigaray's work plays a formative role in her own, and that the problematization of the biological and cultural distinction that Irigaray's notion of sexual difference accomplishes must be rethought and multiplied rather than simply rejected. In this essay, I place the notion of precarity in the work of Butler alongside that of sexual difference in Luce Irigaray, to show how together they seek to address violence to certain bodies through an approach that is at once ecological and political. I show that Butler's concept of precarity has deep, largely unappreciated, roots in the work of Luce Irigaray. Butler explores precarity as bodily multiplicity in ways that pluralize Irigaray's own ethics and politics of difference. Butler is, in other words, rewriting sexual difference as precarity.
My comments for a book panel on Jane Bennett's _Influx and Efflux_. The event can be viewed here:... more My comments for a book panel on Jane Bennett's _Influx and Efflux_. The event can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCDSKdZHOA0&feature=youtu.be.
In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were understood to be matters of sci... more In nineteenth-century Europe, differences among human bodies were understood to be matters of scientific classification. At the height of scientific acceptance, it was unthinkable that race or sex or diagnosis or indigence were invention. Today, however, differences among human bodies are understood as matters of social construction. The philosophy of social construction understands differences among humans to be matters of human imposition. Social constructionism's way of understanding the origin of differences among humans is so well-established as to have no currently viable alternatives, even among new materialists, social constructionism's most ardent critics.
This book argues that new materialists and social constructionists share a distinction between the political and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that "empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.
_Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body_ ultimately bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.
To understand the political, you need the ecological. To understand the ecological, you need the ... more To understand the political, you need the ecological. To understand the ecological, you need the political. To understand one you need the other. The realms to which they refer are not distinct. Nevertheless, the concepts themselves resist each other, and much of their respective literatures are distinct. Anglo-European ecologists often neglect the race, class, sex, gender, disability, national, and linguistic dimensions of their work, and many political philosophers have little to say about ecology or the climate crisis. “The body” is the sine qua non of politics, while “bodies” in the plural seems to suggest something other than politics is going on. After all, there are planetary bodies, cat bodies, bodies of all sorts. Multiplicity prevails in ecology. But when one admits that humans are, like the rest of the planet, multiple, this threatens to upset the coherence of the polis, the political realm insofar as these terms connote a realm of uniform need. This is the problem of “the body” or the body problem: A certain body is taken for granted as ideal in the political realm, and the abstract way in which that body is invoked demonstrates just how alienated the polis is from its ecology. The body as a concept defines the political in contrast to the ecological.
View the blog post with links here: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/.
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies
The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the g... more The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously a...
International Journal of Critical Diversity Studies, 2021
The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the g... more The critiques of modernity by Bruno Latour and Amitav Ghosh are important for understanding the global pandemic of COVID-19 as well as modern responses to it. In spite of this importance, each maintains a commitment to the polis and “the body” – a falsely universal body that opposes itself to others. I seek to extend their critique while also addressing the polis. In this essay, I argue that a helpful response is anticipated by French philosopher and decolonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. In The wretched of the Earth, Fanon's critique of the Manichaean distinctions between human and earthly agency, human and body, human and animal is the framework for his understanding of the significance of colonial wartime “cortico-visceral disorders.” The colony is (1) a manifestation on the part of the European polis of disgust for blackness, for animality, the agency of soil, the powers of the sun, for disability that the colony itself often causes and always denies, and (2) simultaneously an effort to install a supposedly nonracialized, non-disabled man, a universal body, and unilateral agency. A Fanonian response to the global pandemic and climate crisis would thus appreciate the myriad crises that arise precisely when humanity is thought to be the opposite of Earth. Available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0058?refreqid=excelsior%3Aeb2167e2431b72264e2c93d5fb179cf1#metadata_info_tab_contents
Our hope in the present essay is to provide a figure for thought in response to what Paul Crutzen... more Our hope in the present essay is to provide a figure for thought in response to what Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer first named "the Anthropocene." Our interest is not in providing a substitute for this concept, but in offering an alternative way of approaching the vast political-ecological work currently being attributed to it. We want to question the images of impending global cat ast ro phe, 1 the glorifications of human abilities to overcome such quasi-apocalyptic conditions, and the ironic celebrations of our 'natural' resilience and technological prowess that are woven through the calls to responsibility and action which characterize Anthropocene discourse.
It is widely accepted that Judith Butler's work represents a fundamental departure from that of L... more It is widely accepted that Judith Butler's work represents a fundamental departure from that of Luce Irigaray. However, in a 2001 essay, Butler suggests that Irigaray's work plays a formative role in her own, and that the problematization of the biological and cultural distinction that Irigaray's notion of sexual difference accomplishes must be rethought and multiplied rather than simply rejected. In this essay, I place the notion of precarity in the work of Butler alongside that of sexual difference in Luce Irigaray, to show how together they seek to address violence to certain bodies through an approach that is at once ecological and political. I show that Butler's concept of precarity has deep, largely unappreciated, roots in the work of Luce Irigaray. Butler explores precarity as bodily multiplicity in ways that pluralize Irigaray's own ethics and politics of difference. Butler is, in other words, rewriting sexual difference as precarity.
My comments for a book panel on Jane Bennett's _Influx and Efflux_. The event can be viewed here:... more My comments for a book panel on Jane Bennett's _Influx and Efflux_. The event can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCDSKdZHOA0&feature=youtu.be.
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This book argues that new materialists and social constructionists share a distinction between the political and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that "empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.
_Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body_ ultimately bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.
A version of the book in blog form can be found in the Blog of the APA: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/
Further details can be viewed here:
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/elemental-difference-and-the-climate-of-the-body-9780197575086?lang=en&cc=us#>
View the blog post with links here: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/.
Available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0058?refreqid=excelsior%3Aeb2167e2431b72264e2c93d5fb179cf1#metadata_info_tab_contents
This book argues that new materialists and social constructionists share a distinction between the political and the ecological. Emily Anne Parker centers her argument on the philosophical concept of the polis, according to which there is one complete human form. It is this form that is to blame for our current political and ecological crisis. Political hierarchies and ecological crises are often considered to be two different problems: for example, many speak of parallel problems, climate change and racial injustice. Parker argues that these are not parallel crises so much as one problem: the polis. The philosophy of the polis asserts that there is one complete human body, and that body is meant to govern all other things. In that sense there are not two crises, but instead one concern: to perceive the ways in which this tradition of the polis constrains the present. Elemental difference in the polis is appreciated in the fact that "empirical bodily non-identity," an Aristotelian concept, can be called upon to elevate one group of bodies among the rest. Parker builds from Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the very idea of empirical bodily non-identity begins with the modern science of racial anatomy, or what Wynter calls biocentrism. Parker argues that biocentrism is a feature of the polis, according to which the one complete body was defined by its capacity for disembodied thought. The sciences of racial anatomy are a more explicit commitment to biocentrism, but the ranking of matter with respect to one complete human, a body that is the site of supra-natural thinking, is a practice that has always characterized the polis. In this way, the polis is responsible for both political and ecological hierarchy. It is as responsible for what is euphemistically called climate change as it is for the political hierarchy that constitutes it.
_Elemental Difference and the Climate of the Body_ ultimately bridges the insights of social constructionism and new materialisms to create a philosophy of elemental difference. Difference, rather than needing to be either dismissed based on its social construction or reified in keeping with the hierarchies of the polis, is crucial for addressing contemporary crises of the polis.
A version of the book in blog form can be found in the Blog of the APA: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/
Further details can be viewed here:
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/elemental-difference-and-the-climate-of-the-body-9780197575086?lang=en&cc=us#>
View the blog post with links here: https://blog.apaonline.org/2022/10/05/the-body-problem/.
Available here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/intecritdivestud.4.1.0058?refreqid=excelsior%3Aeb2167e2431b72264e2c93d5fb179cf1#metadata_info_tab_contents