Édouard Glissant called for a “right to opacity” throughout his work. Speaking about small countries in the Caribbean in his 1981 Caribbean Discourse, he says, “We demand the right to opacity.” He would re-iterate this claim in his 1990 Poetics of Relation, writing...
Rei Terada’s concept metaracial emerges from her 2023 book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, the result of a sustained engagement with Hegel’s enduring influence on how we think about race — or rather, how race structures our thinking. In this...
A sociodicy is a structured attempt to justify the social order in spite of its manifold injustices. Its conceptual lineage can be traced back to the notion of theodicy, or the justification of God despite the existence of evil and suffering, a...
René Girard (1923-2015) was a synthetic theorist with a singular idée fixe, a grand pattern that he could not help but see inscribed and repeated everywhere in human culture. The key elements of Girard’s philosophical anthropology are mimetic desire, mimetic...
Benedict Anderson’s seminal work Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism from 1983 is one of the most important accounts of the historical rise and development of nationalism. Its basic insight and argument is that...
Iris Marion Young is one of the most important feminist philosophers of last decade of the 20th century and of the early 21st century. Her contributions within feminist political philosophy are wide ranging, although she is best known for her work on feminist...
