Partially borrowing a title from Freuds Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, this thesis will take up a similar project in the sense that it will examine the different destinies or variations that memory fulfills as a dynamic apparatus, and one important aspect of human embodied experience. By eliciting Spinoza and Freud as the foundational theories on mind and its relation to body, I contour a discussion of individual trauma, historical trauma, and testimony that situates the human individual as both a producer and produced by historical and political conditions. Ultimately I advocate for a dialectical approach that values stories as the last mode of communicating reflective human experience, and sees the past as history living in the present.

This project examines the role that emotions can and should play in morality and moral theory. A philosophical study of emotion inevitably leads to an discussion of the evaluation of emotion, which is a topic covered both by moral theory and by the notion of emotional intelligence. The theory of emotional intelligence shows us that the value of emotional intelligence is morally based, if we understand morality in its properly expansive sense. Although Kantian moral theory is thought to be not so expansive, limited to a rights-based rather than virtue-based approach, I show that Kants theory of virtue illuminates the connections between morality and emotional intelligence. Most people are beginning to accept that the standard interpretation of Kantian moral theory is mistaken, and I give more evidence to tip the scales, showing that Kant goes some distance toward giving us a fruitful theory of emotional intelligence. In doing this I criticize the interpretation that takes Kantian moral theory to be formal, and I argue that Kantian autonomy must be understood in terms of universality and the categorical imperative, not broadly practical reason. My interpretation of Kantian moral theory shows that it helps us to understand the relationship between morality and emotion.

In my dissertation, I critically examine the relationship between health, development, and the unconscious conditions of our symbolic use of objects of value. If we look at the average biomedical and cognitive-behavioral models of health, for instance, we find a guiding assumption about therapeutic causality, namely, that health and illness are produced through knowable, mechanically efficient causes, through what a Kantian might call empirical causes. Critiquing this assumption, my thesis is that while we are right to understand health and illness as empirically produced, our knowledge would be greater, more scientific, and capable of producing wiser and more social forms of health if we expanded our notion of causality to include the influence of primitively wishful, or what I call placeboic, mechanisms. Human health and illness are not just cultural phenomena steeped in various lines of history but, much more deeply, they are rooted in, and so conditioned by, our relatively unexplored prehistories. Philosophy should therefore become more archaeological, I suggest, in our task of understanding and bettering society. One of the basic lessons I draw from these insights is that, despite appearances, social and individual health and illness are largely indexes of the development of culture. They are marks of regression and progression in tension. To defend these points, I develop three interrelated tactics. First, I look to psychoanalysis, especially to Freuds examination of the fort/da game in children and to D.W. Winnicotts theory of the transitional object, to show how human development pivots on what might be called the preverbal differentiation of subject and object in and as symbolized objects of value (e.g., a pacifier, then a teddy bear, etc). Objects of value defend against illness to the degree that value sustains the bi-directional (im)permeability of self and world. Second, I trace the psychoanalytic account of the relation between health and development to its scientific heritage in Kants critical aesthetics of valuation and in Marxs theory of fetishized values. Third, I ask larger questions about the relation between individual and socio-historical development. Does individual development recapitulate socio-historical development, and vice versa? I suggest that they do and that they do so through the necessary disavowal of archaic but persistent wishes and forces.

ABSTRACT: REPRESENTING MATERNITY IN PHILOSOPHY Few living philosophers would conjecture that women cannot be philosophers; however, the classical notion that those who generate life cannot create ideas continues to inform philosophical notions of maternity. It is unfair to require exclusion on the basis of sex; however, the inconvenient possibility is that Aristotles notion of maternity promotes skepticism, not about the political status of women, but about the merits of political equality as an over-arching, regulative ideal which applies to all relationships. As Arendt notes, while the opposition of two worlds so long associated with the feminine and the masculine risks consolidating sexist ideologies, the possibly greater risk occurs when philosophers personalize metaphysics. Arendt sidesteps some of these thornier issues propagated by Aristotles notion of maternity by replacing maternity with natality. Natality gestures towards the infants promise to be unpredictable; in doing so, the concept highlights how infants complicate our attempts to extrapolate identity from biological circumstance. Like Arendt, Klein uses the context of reproductive biology to highlight the manner in which ambiguity permeates memory and identity but, unlike Arendt, encourages her readers to analogize from maternity rather than natality. By widening the scope of her lens of analysis to include maternity, Klein destabilizes the philosophical habit of regarding birth from the point of view of he who is born but does not bear. Kristevas subject in process is this same trajectory fully realized. Destabilizing the boundary between the creation of ideas and the generation of life permits philosophy to return to its conceptual progenitors, the physical and the metaphysical, with the legitimate hope of reproducing a most fertile offspring: s/he who generates life and creates ideas.

My dissertation explores the significance of biopower to forms of life and language in the contemporary West. Generally defined, biopower is a type of regulatory power that directs and fosters the biological life of populations. Focusing on its differential operation, this project investigates how populations are afforded or denied the attentions of biopower. I argue that the question How does life have language? is an important mechanism of exclusion in biopolitical contexts. By deciding what counts as language and, accordingly, which living-beings are speaking-beings, biopower gives voice to and fosters the lives of some while silencing and abandoning the lives of others. This project develops fresh interpretations of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and an under-recognized theorist of biopower, Julia Kristeva. In their varied and resourceful writings on contemporary power, these thinkers challenge the distinction between zoe (the life of biology) and bios (the life of language and politics). To map the languages of biopower, this project brings Foucault, Agamben and Kristeva into uncommon conversation. In the spirit of Foucaults history of the present, I examine the mechanisms that separate animal voice from human speech and that divide, in Kristevas words, those who give life (women) and those who give meaning (men). Ultimately, I argue for a connected transformation a biopower beyond the logic of exclusion and a language beyond the logic of sacrificethat opens ways of living and speaking otherwise.

This dissertation clarifies a tension within the modern ideals of sovereignty that inform the contemporary state system. On one hand, sovereignty is idealized as a kind of authority that constitutes the collective subject over which it is exercised. On the other hand, sovereignty is idealized as a kind of political authority that emanates from the very collective subject that it would constitute. This subject, ‘the people’, is construed as both the precondition for, and artifact of, sovereign authority. This paradoxical circularity has historically been hidden by appeals to territoriality as a fixed criterion of political community and democratic inclusion. The constitution of ‘the people’, in other words, is construed as objectively given by the apparently natural or pre-political boundaries of geographic territory. This appeal to purportedly pre-political boundaries can undermine genuinely democratic self-determination, as well as inquiry into the justice or legitimacy of political constitution itself. In order to criticize this type of purportedly pre-political closure, I draw upon recent work in democratic theory to clarify the fundamental contestability of sovereign acts of constitution and boundary setting.

The core commitment of liberalism is that individual liberty is in some sense primary. There is, however, much disagreement over the concept of liberty itself. In this dissertation, I attempt to determine which conception of liberty is the properly liberal one. Ultimately, I argue in favor of what I call the anti-domination conception of liberty. I begin by examining other conceptions of liberty that are prominent in the contemporary literature, specifically Isaiah Berlins distinction between negative and positive liberty as well as variants of these views and Philip Pettits non-domination conception. Of these, I argue that none are consistent with basic liberal commitments and intuitions. As an alternative, I develop the anti-domination conception of liberty in which liberty is understood as reciprocity of power. One is free, on the anti-domination account, to the extent that one stands in an equal relation of power with others. This account, I argue, is conceptually unique from alternative views in that it is a status-based, as opposed to an option based, conception of liberty. As such, I contend that it is the conception that best coheres with core liberal commitments and values.

A TRIAL OF PHILOSOPHY JOEL C. BEAUPRÉ Dissertation under the direction of Professor David C. Wood This trial of philosophy is of whether suffering, through a reading of Job, can arraign philosophy. I examine the form or law of thinking a specific loss of experience: that useless suffering cannot appear. Job is un-mournable his suffering can only attain meaningfulness in terms supplied by the purportedly divine mechanism of retributive justice. Jobs lawsuit attempts to meaningfully bind his innocence, affliction, and the divinitys violence together. Like Jobs lawsuit, I carry an exploration of sufferings recalcitrance to formation into a destructive reading of both a repression of the text and philosophys attempt at responsiveness to the articulateness of material. Although acknowledged as constitutive of philosophical reflection, Erfahrung is subject to an aspiration to a perfect system, requiring careful parsing of differences between philosophies that attempt to defer reconciliation and resolution. Job is not experienced by way of an illusion of an immediacy of Jobs meaning consistent with types of eschatological horizon. Like Jobs challenge to law (a violent administration of the world and axiomatic presuppositions as to the meaning of suffering), I attempt to challenge lawful resolutions of indeterminacy in interpretation. In an attempt to allow the sensuousness of Job to signify in its own right, I read against synthetic efforts to heal fissures in the text. In dialectical tension with the desire for univocality, I read Job as irredeemably torn, for preserving elements in their differences is generative of plural readings. Like the allusions in the text to a weave coming undone, Job mimes the modernist artworks resistance to form. By allowing the non-systematic to suffuse the practice of criticism, criticism becomes utterly useless for the perpetuation of the fear and hope of endoxa (an attempt to foreclose significances). I employ textual juxtapositions (e.g., Job and Kafka, for both K and Job are subject to the absence of written law) to mime the contemporary spirit of montage as the gathering of things ejected by the insistence that everything be properly placed. Jobs cry wanders homelessly through nested displacements, requiring a wandering reminiscent of Benjamin.

This dissertation is a philosophical feminist account of the relationship between subjectivity and oppressive discourse. Feminists have rightly pointed out that philosophical accounts of the universal or neutral subject are untenable, and often hold that sexist, racist, heterosexist and classist speech and practices have negative consequences at the level of subjectivity for women and the other populations who are their objects. Yet, efforts to account for these consequences have been philosophically inadequate in virtue of their problematic ontologies of selfhood, agency and language, as well as their frequently question-begging approaches to proposing political change. Drawing on the philosophical work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and John Dewey, I argue that a better feminist account of situated subjectivity would conceive oppressive discourse as particularly entrenched patterns of interaction, which give rise to relationally-constituted meanings whose effects may be variously described as subjective, discursive, material or political. Using examples of contemporary popular political discourse about women political figures in the United States, I argue that the interactional and relational character of the patterns of meaning that are typically understood as simply oppressive of a particular group are in fact constitutive of a constellation of more and less privileged and oppressed subjects, and moreover, that these meanings and subjects are concomitantly shaped by their particular geo-political situations. Given this pragmatic and post-structuralist account of subjectivity and political discourse, I argue that feminist efforts to resist oppression by changing everyday interactions and meanings are legitimate and have the potential to effect widespread political change, though this is by no means guaranteed. However, because efforts to change meanings (sometimes called resignifications) may also be counterproductive, feminists must be able to adjudicate between such efforts, and may do so most effectively by using a pragmatic method.

For over thirty years now, reclamations of historical womens philosophical writing have provided us with more access to the work of women who have largely not been represented in philosophical history. Yet, within the field of reclamation, the mechanisms of womens exclusion from philosophy have not been sufficiently theorized. Without that theorization, I argue, reclamation risks contributing to the exclusion of women from philosophy. Reclamation must begin its work with the question of exclusion. In this dissertation, I show how that can be done with the work of three thinkers of womens exclusion, Luce Irigaray, Genevieve Lloyd, and Michèle Le Doeuff. I use their theories to generate models of engaging womens writing that transform philosophical practice to overcome its constitution through the exclusion of women. Then, I use the perspective gained on exclusion to engage the Seneca Falls Declaration and Sojourner Truths speech at the 1851 Ohio Womens Rights Convention. For Irigaray, the logic of discourse makes it impossible for feminine subjectivity to speak. Yet, the logic of discourse can be changed, and Irigaray shows how attention to womens writing can be a crucial strategy for transforming it. With Lloyds approach, womens writing cannot enter philosophical history without significant revision of the concept of reason. Lloyd offers a means of reconceptualizing reason through historical critique. For Le Doeuff, womens writing did make transformative demands, and offer alternatives in light of them, but we are unlikely to know that history. We must now imagine our way into that lost history, and Le Doeuff offers a means for doing so. By comparing the advantages, limitations, and potential collaboration of these approaches, both in abstract analysis and through concrete engagement with the Seneca Falls Declaration and Truths speech, my intent is not to declare one method the winner, but to help elucidate how the reclamation of womens writing can proceed. Through this comparative work, however, I also hope to show the stakes of how reclamation is approached. Although I do not aim to provide a single answer, I hope to show the urgency of the question: how should we reclaim womens writing?