Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach class... more Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America. This interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies, classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theatre history. Moira Fradinger tracks the ways in which, since the early nineteenth century, fragments of Antigone's myth and tragedy have been persistently cannibalized and ruminated throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, quilted to local dramatic forms, revealing an archive of political thought about Latin America's heterogeneous neo-colonial histories. Antígona is consistently characterized as a national mother and, as the twentieth century advances, multiplied on stage, forming female collectives, foregrounding the urgency of systemic change or staging gender politics. Through meticulous examination of classical culture in necolonial contexts, Fradinger explores ways of reading Creole texts from the geopolitical South that disrupt the colonial reading protocols that deracinate texts or lock them into locality. By historicizing Antígona plays and interpreting them with a purpose to address specific colonial legacies, the book reveals how Antígona has ceased being Greek and instead tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Antígonas rethinks the paradigms through which we understand the presence of ancient cultural materials in former colonial territories, while illuminating an understudied continent in Anglophone reception studies.
More Info: Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politic... more More Info: Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2014
Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastroph... more Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous las...
bears no trace in Sofía’s thinking. No decision may take refuge in the illusion of its apolitical... more bears no trace in Sofía’s thinking. No decision may take refuge in the illusion of its apolitical, purely ethical nature. By surrendering and allowing her grandson to live Sofía would abide by the power of the day, which imposes a dilemma on her and conditions the value of life (the life of her grandson) to particular material conditions, namely, Sofía’s renunciation. Is Sofía’s sacrifice, the sacrifice of her private interests (saving her grandson's life), based on the hope of articulating these interests into a universal ethical imperative? Is she attempting to save everyone at the expense of one? Sofía clearly knows that this is another illusion—the ethical illusion. She sacrifices her individual interests to maintain her political claim: the universal impossible of demanding that all the disappeared come back. Nonetheless, she also knows that this universal is a historical articulation; it is not autonomous from the political sphere, which imposes material conditions for the...
Ce numéro, consacré aux femmes dans le cinéma latino-américain, propose des panoramas sur toute l... more Ce numéro, consacré aux femmes dans le cinéma latino-américain, propose des panoramas sur toute l’Amérique latine (la place des femmes dans la production, dans la réalisation), des articles sur les pionnières du cinéma, sur des réalisatrices contemporaines, des études plus détaillées sur des aspects cinématographiques de réalisatrices latino-américaines (comme par exemple Lucrecia Martel). Afin de rendre hommage aux réalisatrices latino-américaines, la revue a souhaité leur donner la parole en leur posant 3 questions à propos de leur conception de la création cinématographique. Leurs réponses ouvriront ce numéro. Enfin, une rubrique « reseñas » propose des comptes-rendus de livres récemment publiés à propos du cinéma latino-américain
A radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. Sh... more A radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. She ceaselessly alerts us to the conditions of production of our privileges; the exclusions on which our social, political, sexual, racial identities are constructed; the blood of those others who “have crafted our eyes,” to recall Donna Haraway’s famous manifesto (Haraway 1988, 585);1 the suffering that allows for our happiness; the “danger” that defines our “purity,” to pay homage to Mary Douglas’s early anthropological exploration of boundary-formations (Douglas 1966). Chanter’s questioning of all the exclusions that give meaning to our identities and social orders is not oriented to “include” that which is excluded, as if she aimed at an “adding approach.” Rather, Chanter aims at thinking about how inclusions can change what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Rancière 2009, 72). At stake is how to make inclusion speak of ...
This short paper explores why a notion of recognition ‘grouped into spheres’ (Honneth) is so prob... more This short paper explores why a notion of recognition ‘grouped into spheres’ (Honneth) is so problematic. Social ‘spheres’, we argue, need to be treated historically and critically rather than taken as social facts. From a brief dip into the Phenomenology’s section on ‘the Ethical World’ it is clear that the early Hegel treated spheres in just such a historical and critical manner. The Phenomenology offers no succour to Honnethian thinking. Hegel’s discussion of Antigone highlights the alienations involved when social spheres – in the case of the polis, the institutions of state or family – make divergent demands upon us. For the Hegel of the Phenomenology a social world of spheres such as Honneth describes is one of diremption and alienation. It is not one in which mutual recognition can come to fruition.
Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach class... more Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America. This interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies, classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theatre history. Moira Fradinger tracks the ways in which, since the early nineteenth century, fragments of Antigone's myth and tragedy have been persistently cannibalized and ruminated throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, quilted to local dramatic forms, revealing an archive of political thought about Latin America's heterogeneous neo-colonial histories. Antígona is consistently characterized as a national mother and, as the twentieth century advances, multiplied on stage, forming female collectives, foregrounding the urgency of systemic change or staging gender politics. Through meticulous examination of classical culture in necolonial contexts, Fradinger explores ways of reading Creole texts from the geopolitical South that disrupt the colonial reading protocols that deracinate texts or lock them into locality. By historicizing Antígona plays and interpreting them with a purpose to address specific colonial legacies, the book reveals how Antígona has ceased being Greek and instead tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Antígonas rethinks the paradigms through which we understand the presence of ancient cultural materials in former colonial territories, while illuminating an understudied continent in Anglophone reception studies.
More Info: Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politic... more More Info: Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles' Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa's The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake. The book shares the philosophical interest in rethinking politics that has recently surfaced at the crossroads of literary criticism, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. Fradinger takes seriously the responsibility to think through and give names to the political uses of violence and to provoke useful reflection on the problem of violence as it relates to politics and on literature as it relates to its times
PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 2014
Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastroph... more Debates about how to stage, film, narrate (or record in any available media) real-life catastrophe, such as mass human-rights violations or war, tend to center on the simultaneous necessity and inadequacy of any representational form to capture the real event: evidence is needed for political, legal, cultural, and historical purposes, but its framing is always conditioned by whatever a given regime of visibility leaves in or leaves out. All too familiar ethical, political, and representational challenges lurk behind the deployment of media to make visible the experience of real-life survivors—in the case I treat here, women survivors of imprisonment and torture during Uruguay's 1973-85 dictatorship. Consider the risks of revictimizing the protagonists, overwhelming or numbing spectators with images of extreme vulnerability, or, even worse, of inciting voyeuristic or sadistic pleasures in an audience passively “regarding the pain of others”—to recall Susan Sontag's famous las...
bears no trace in Sofía’s thinking. No decision may take refuge in the illusion of its apolitical... more bears no trace in Sofía’s thinking. No decision may take refuge in the illusion of its apolitical, purely ethical nature. By surrendering and allowing her grandson to live Sofía would abide by the power of the day, which imposes a dilemma on her and conditions the value of life (the life of her grandson) to particular material conditions, namely, Sofía’s renunciation. Is Sofía’s sacrifice, the sacrifice of her private interests (saving her grandson's life), based on the hope of articulating these interests into a universal ethical imperative? Is she attempting to save everyone at the expense of one? Sofía clearly knows that this is another illusion—the ethical illusion. She sacrifices her individual interests to maintain her political claim: the universal impossible of demanding that all the disappeared come back. Nonetheless, she also knows that this universal is a historical articulation; it is not autonomous from the political sphere, which imposes material conditions for the...
Ce numéro, consacré aux femmes dans le cinéma latino-américain, propose des panoramas sur toute l... more Ce numéro, consacré aux femmes dans le cinéma latino-américain, propose des panoramas sur toute l’Amérique latine (la place des femmes dans la production, dans la réalisation), des articles sur les pionnières du cinéma, sur des réalisatrices contemporaines, des études plus détaillées sur des aspects cinématographiques de réalisatrices latino-américaines (comme par exemple Lucrecia Martel). Afin de rendre hommage aux réalisatrices latino-américaines, la revue a souhaité leur donner la parole en leur posant 3 questions à propos de leur conception de la création cinématographique. Leurs réponses ouvriront ce numéro. Enfin, une rubrique « reseñas » propose des comptes-rendus de livres récemment publiés à propos du cinéma latino-américain
A radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. Sh... more A radical democrat: This is how I have come to see Tina Chanter in our intellectual exchanges. She ceaselessly alerts us to the conditions of production of our privileges; the exclusions on which our social, political, sexual, racial identities are constructed; the blood of those others who “have crafted our eyes,” to recall Donna Haraway’s famous manifesto (Haraway 1988, 585);1 the suffering that allows for our happiness; the “danger” that defines our “purity,” to pay homage to Mary Douglas’s early anthropological exploration of boundary-formations (Douglas 1966). Chanter’s questioning of all the exclusions that give meaning to our identities and social orders is not oriented to “include” that which is excluded, as if she aimed at an “adding approach.” Rather, Chanter aims at thinking about how inclusions can change what Jacques Rancière refers to as the “cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible” (Rancière 2009, 72). At stake is how to make inclusion speak of ...
This short paper explores why a notion of recognition ‘grouped into spheres’ (Honneth) is so prob... more This short paper explores why a notion of recognition ‘grouped into spheres’ (Honneth) is so problematic. Social ‘spheres’, we argue, need to be treated historically and critically rather than taken as social facts. From a brief dip into the Phenomenology’s section on ‘the Ethical World’ it is clear that the early Hegel treated spheres in just such a historical and critical manner. The Phenomenology offers no succour to Honnethian thinking. Hegel’s discussion of Antigone highlights the alienations involved when social spheres – in the case of the polis, the institutions of state or family – make divergent demands upon us. For the Hegel of the Phenomenology a social world of spheres such as Honneth describes is one of diremption and alienation. It is not one in which mutual recognition can come to fruition.
Analizo la película XXY de Lucía Puenzo (Argentina, 2007) desde el punto de vista de la relación ... more Analizo la película XXY de Lucía Puenzo (Argentina, 2007) desde el punto de vista de la relación entre la materia viviente de la zona costera uruguaya y la propuesta del film con respecto a la diversidad sexual. Sugiero la expresión “anfientidad sexual” para distinguir la manera en que el film representa la relación entre cuerpo, sexo y género al ficcionalizar un caso intersex a través de asociaciones entre los animales humanos y los anfibios y reptiles del ambiente costero, en especial las tortugas marinas que migran cruzando el Atlántico y que se encuentran en peligro de extinción. En tanto las tortugas determinan su sexo dependiendo de la temperatura del ambiente, representan un dinamismo relacional singular de la materia viviente, que corre peligro de extinguirse en nuestra era y que el film asocia con la variación sexual.
Entrevista a la investigadora argentina Florencia Montagnini sobre la conservación de los bosques... more Entrevista a la investigadora argentina Florencia Montagnini sobre la conservación de los bosques tropicales, la deforestación y el medio ambiente.
Artículo de opinión para la revista en línea Letra Urbana
comentario sobre los recientes y masi... more Artículo de opinión para la revista en línea Letra Urbana
comentario sobre los recientes y masivos movimientos internacionales contra el acoso y la violencia sexual
Opinion article for the online magazine Letra Urbana; coments on the recent and massive international movements against gendered violence and sexual harrasment in the work place
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http://letraurbana.com/articulos/equilibrios-intimos-los-bosques-tropicales-y-sus-servicios-ambientales/
http://letraurbana.com/articulos/lo-posthumano-entrevista-a-francesca-ferrando/
comentario sobre los recientes y masivos movimientos internacionales contra el acoso y la violencia sexual
Opinion article for the online magazine Letra Urbana; coments on the recent and massive international movements against gendered violence and sexual harrasment in the work place