Where Do the Hijab and the Kippah Belong? On Being Publicly Jewish or Muslim in Post-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Hebdo</Emphasis> France

To date, scholars have rarely talked about contemporary antisemitism and Islamophobia in France as part of a single story. When they have, it has typically been as part of a framework for analyzing racism that is essentially competitive: some depict Islamophobia as less a real problem than a frequent excuse to ignore antisemitism; others minimize antisemitism as an unfortunate but marginal phenomenon by comparison with the pervasive nature of anti-Muslim racism in French society. This article argues that the two are inseparable, and it focuses on a hitherto overlooked set of connections: in the era since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher in January 2015, at key flash points that question Muslim belonging in France, the position of Jews has repeatedly been invoked in ambiguous, contradictory ways. Participants in these public debates have sometimes forcefully maintained that Jews are unlike Muslims, since they have long been fully integrated French citizens. At other moments, these discussions have raised the specter of Jewish ethnic and religious difference. By emphasizing Jewish particularity, such debates evoke, perforce, the past twenty-five years of controversies about the allegedly problematic attire, food, and beliefs of France’s Muslims. The article focuses on several key moments, from the speech of Prime Minister Manuel Valls before the French parliament in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, to the kippah and burkini affairs of 2016, to the provocative comments of candidates in the 2017 presidential elections concerning Muslim and Jewish religious and ethnic markers of difference.     

The Carnival’s Edge: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Theories of Comedy

This article reexamines the satire of Charlie Hebdo through the lens of comedy theory and cultural studies. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “the carnivalesque” and Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “irony’s edge,” it considers the wide variety of potential meanings that are encoded within Hebdo’s highly controversial comedy and religious representations. Introducing the notion of the “ambigramic carnival,” I argue that competing notions of hegemony in French culture encourage radically different understandings of the ethical and political implications of Hebdo’s content. Ultimately, I contend that while Hebdo’s approach to satire is in no way responsible for the terroristic violence visited upon the magazine, the publication nonetheless crafted a style intended to evoke a range of responses, including profound anger. As an empirical companion to this theoretical approach, the article then turns to coverage of the Hebdo massacre in the Jewish press, arguing that in the United States the Forward used the Hebdo story to represent Jewish empowerment and disempowerment simultaneously.     

Introduction: Judeophobia and Islamophobia in France Before and After <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Hyper Cacher

This article opens with an assessment of the narratives that emerged in the immediate wake of the Charlie Hebdo / Hyper Cacher events in January 2015. It does so by examining the differing hashtags of the moment—#jesuisCharlie, #jesuisjuif, #LassBat—and how each offered a distilled account of what the moment meant; these competing interpretations were echoed in the news coverage and the commentary that followed. The article proceeds to set out how this special issue reframes and reevaluates the recent history of relations between Jews and Muslims in France. Each author suggests that Judeophobia and Islamophobia are inextricably entangled in ways more complicated than simple formulas or hashtags can encapsulate. Taking on the suggestion that “Muslims are the new Jews” in France (or in Europe), the special issue instead urges an appreciation of the interlocked vulnerabilities and insecurities of both Jews and Muslims. Such an approach requires a recognition of the structural and institutional forces and ideologies that have shaped their interconnected destinies in the last generation.     

The Head,the Heart,and Hysteria in Jeanne Flore's <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tales and Trials of Love</Emphasis> (c. 1542)

This essay examines a challenge to common literary representations of female mental illness in the Early Modern period—the hysterical woman—in a collection of French short stories contemporary to Vesalius's De Fabrica: Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love (1542). Jeanne Flore's tales depict several mentally disturbed female protagonists, young women prone to paroxysms of madness and self-mutilation. This study maintains that while Tales and Trials of Love superficially participates in the literary tradition that grew out of those accepted social and medical beliefs, it also questions the long-accepted paradigm of female hysteria and points to a shift in the socio-medical climate. Jeanne Flore's fictional narratives suggest that mental illness no longer consists in the realignment of a uterine imbalance, but rather in the telling of personal stories, a precursor to psychoanalysis and narrative medicine.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">What is ?Curriculum Theorizing</Emphasis>: for a People Yet to Come

What is ?Curriculum Theory articulates the problematic of difference, diversity, and multiplicity in contemporary curriculum thought. More specifically, this essay argues that the conceptualization of difference that dominates the contemporary curriculum landscape is inadequate to either the task of ontological experimentation or the creation of non-representational ways for thinking a life. Despite the ostensible radicality ascribed to the curricular ideas of difference and multiplicity, What is ?Curriculum Theory argues that these ideas remain wed to an structural or identitarian logic that derives difference from the a priori conditions of the possible. Further, this essay argues that the orthodox conceptualization of difference in contemporary curriculum studies is complicit with the capitalist commitment to quantitative multiplicity, or rather, the proliferation of ‘multiple consumer choices’. Following this problematic, the task of this paper is oriented to the conceptualization of difference adequate to the creation of a people yet-to-come, or rather, a people for which no prior image exists. To accomplish this, What is ?Curriculum Theory draws upon Deleuze’s Bergsonism in order to advance a conceptualization of difference that breaks from modes of dialectical negation and contradiction particular to the tyranny of representational thinking. Articulating an image of difference that no longer accords to the possible, this essay composes a thought experiment conceptualizing a pedagogical life in a manner that explicates the transversal relationship between the actual (what is) and the virtual (what is not-yet).     

Talking about Antisemitism in France Before and After <Emphasis Type="Italic">Charlie Hebdo</Emphasis> and Hyper Cacher

This article explores tensions in French Jewish discourses about antisemitism in the post-2000 period. Drawing on commentary from French Jewish intellectuals, national Jewish organizations, and the French Jewish press from the mid-2000s until after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, I note a complex relationship between change and continuity in discursive characterizations of French antisemitism. While empirical manifestations of antisemitism were notably transformed by the Toulouse attacks of 2012, much French Jewish discourse insisted on continuity from the early 2000s onward. At the same time, Jewish narrative practices shifted rather dramatically. In a political context where Israel was often depicted as part of a history of violent settler colonialism, early 2000s Jewish discourse divorced French antisemitism from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (post)colonial racism in France. After 2012, some Jewish commentators linked Israel to French antisemitism by likening terrorism in Israel with Islamic antisemitism in France. These disjunctures between narratives and empirical violence suggest that the “structures of feeling” behind Jewish reactions to contemporary antisemitism cannot be reduced to empirical questions about safety and security. Social scientists thus need to move beyond an empirical analysis of antisemitism itself and attend to the cultural and affective work Jewish discourses about antisemitism do in any particular moment.     

Changes Over Time in the Comprehension of <Emphasis Type="Italic">He</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">They</Emphasis> as Epicene Pronouns

An epicene pronoun is a gender-neutral singular pronoun used in sentences when the gender of the subject is unknown or unspecified. In English, he and they are commonly-used epicene pronouns. Until recently, he has been widely accepted as being grammatically correct. However, many have argued that he is sexist because it may bias people to think about males. Two experiments were performed using a lexical decision task in which participants reacted to gendered words (e.g., aunt and uncle) after reading sentences using he, they, or unrelated epicene pronouns. We conducted the experiments 15 years apart in order to explore whether change in pronoun usage and the social significance of pronouns would be associated with different priming effects. Both experiments demonstrated that pronouns influence the processing of gendered nouns. However, in Experiment 1 they facilitated the processing of feminine nouns whereas in Experiment 2, he slowed the processing of feminine nouns. We discuss these results with respect to language change and conclude that they is a more effective epicene.     

H<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">uang</Emphasis> Zongxi as a Republican: A Theory of Governance for Confucian Democracy

Confucianism has been historically intertwined with authoritarianism in general and monarchy in specific. Various contemporary attempts to reconcile Confucianism with democracy have yielded controversial results mostly due to the theoretical tension between the authoritarian character of the former and the liberal one of the latter. This article seeks to develop an alternative route to Confucian democracy by drawing from Huang Zongxi’s 黃宗羲 Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince (Mingyi Daifang Lu 明夷待訪錄). In this well-known work, Huang argues for a form of limited government that is built upon laws, political protection of academic freedom, good institutional designs, and separation of governmental powers. While these features seem to qualify Huang only as a defective liberal, this article argues that they are in much coherence with the insights of republicanism concerning good governance. This article will argue that the republican themes embodied in Waiting for the Dawn can justify and support a particular form of Confucian republican democracy.     

The Fallaciousness of Threats: Character and <Emphasis Type="Italic">Ad Baculum</Emphasis>

Robert Kimball, in “What’s Wrong with Argumentum Ad Baculum?” (Argumentation, 2006) argues that dialogue-based models of rational argumentation do not satisfactorily account for what is objectionable about more malicious uses of threats encountered in some ad baculum arguments. We review the dialogue-based approach to argumentum ad baculum, and show how it can offer more than Kimball thinks for analyzing such threat arguments and ad baculum fallacies.     

Science,Politics and the Production of Biological Knowledge: New Trends and Old Challenges

In the history of biology, knowledge about human differences often has been produced through an interaction with politics and values assumed to be external to science. Two recent books—Jonathan Marks’ Is Science Racist? and Maurizio Meloni’s Political Biology—shed new light on this interplay. While Marks looks into the field of anthropology, Meloni offers a historiographical view on the soft-hard heredity debate. Based on these new contributions, this essay addresses a number of current ways in which society and science conceptualize human differences through categories like race, gender, and class. Especially, this refers to the separation of what is taken as natural and purportedly fixed, from what is cultural and changeable.     

Animal groups and social ontology: an argument from the phenomenology of behavior

Through a critical engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the concepts of nature, life, and behavior, and with contemporary accounts of animal groups, this article argues that animal groups exhibit sociality and that sociality is a fundamental ontological condition. I situate my account in relation to the superorganism and selfish individual accounts of animal groups in recent biology and zoology. I argue that both accounts are inadequate. I propose an alternative account of animal groups and animal sociality through a Merleau-Pontian inspired definition of behavior. I criticize Merleau-Ponty’s individualistic prejudice, but show that his philosophy contains the resources necessary to overcome this bias. I define behavior as a holistic, ongoing, meaningful and Umwelt-oriented intrinsically configured expression of living forms of existence. By looking at cases of animal groups drawn from contemporary studies in zoology and behavioral ecology, I show that animal groups, in the fact that they behave, manifest themselves to be a fundamental form of existence, namely, the social form of existence.     

The Nature of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Stimmungen</Emphasis>

This essay comprises two chapters from the first part of Bollnow’s book on moods (Das Wesen der Stimmungen), namely the second chapter on the concept of Stimmung and the third chapter on Stimmungen as the sustaining foundation of the soul. It argues that moods constitute the simplest and most original form in which human life comes to know itself. Moods are understood as a specific harmony between, first, the inner and outer world; second, the states of the body and the soul; and, third, the individual faculties of the soul. Moods differ from emotions in the narrow sense, which are always intentionally directed towards a specific object, whereas moods do not have any specific object; they are states of being, structuring and coloring human existence as a whole. Hence, no system of moods is provided, but their extensive diversity is indicated. Furthermore, transient, unsteady, or “moody” moods (Launen) are distinguished from persistent or basic moods (beständige Lebensstimmungen).     

Marx and Paci on the Question of Appearances (Or,Reading <Emphasis Type="Italic">Capital</Emphasis> as a Phenomenology)

The following essay argues that Marx’s method of critique, conception of science, and mode of presentation in Capital are all phenomenological in the sense first articulated by Enzo Paci in The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. In Capital, Marx places the phenomenological problem of appearances at the centre of his criticism of political economy. His analysis begins with the way in which things typically present themselves in a capitalist society, but this is merely the starting point for a systematic critique which tries to reveal the innerconnections and exploitative social relations hidden beneath those estranged outward appearances. Marx presumed that this phenomenological approach was the most appropriate method for demystifying the ‘naturalized’ semblance of the capitalist economy. According to Paci’s reading of Capital, the task of Marxian critique is to show these superficial appearances for what they really are: i.e., reflections of the reified reality of modern life.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Tian</Emphasis> as Cosmos in Z<Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">hu</Emphasis> Xi’s Neo-Confucianism

Tian 天 is central to the metaphysics, cosmology, and ethics of the 800-year-long Chinese philosophical tradition we call “Neo-Confucianism,” but there is considerable confusion over what tian means—confusion which is exacerbated by its standard translation into English as “Heaven.” This essay analyzes the meaning of tian in the works of the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), presents a coherent interpretation that unifies the disparate aspects of the term’s meaning, and argues that “cosmos” does an excellent job of capturing this meaning and therefore should be adopted as our translation of tian.     

Articles of Faith: Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression within contemporary multicultural liberal democracies. These two fundamental human rights have increasingly been seen, in public and political discourse, in terms of tension if not outright opposition, a view reinforced by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015. And yet in every human rights charter they are proximate to one another. This essay argues that this adjacency is not coincidental, that it has a history and that, in illuminating this history, it is possible to explore how the contemporary framing of these two rights as being in opposition has come about. Looking back to the framing of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the essay offers an historical perspective that, in turn, facilitates a reappraisal and re-evaluation of these two liberties that is the necessary, albeit insufficient, predicate to the task of addressing the problematic of multicultural ‘crisis' in the contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, in which the presence of certain religious communities (Muslims, in particular) and the role of religion in public and political life more generally (and, conversely, of secularism) has assumed a central importance.     

“Color Him Black”: Erotic Representations and the Politics of Race in West German Homosexual Magazines, 1949–1974

This piece analyzes the tensions between racial liberalism and erotic representations in West German homosexual-oriented magazines between 1949 and 1974. Relying primarily on publications such as Der Kreis, Die Insel/Der Weg, Amigo, and Du & Ich, this paper argues that as white West German homosexual men made a case for the end of legal discrimination and for social acceptance, they often constructed their arguments and identity as a persecuted minority in relation to the struggles and imagined experiences of colonized men and racial minorities. At the same time, however, many homosexual men still maintained a set of assumptions about racial difference that exoticized and essentialized men of color, assumptions that are particularly apparent in the erotic representations (both visual and literary) of men of color that appeared in these magazines. I further argue that, although historians of homosexuality in West Germany have traditionally viewed 1969 as a break, due to the radical changes in gay life that followed the 1969 reform of the anti-sodomy statute, the tensions between racial liberalism and exoticization continued well into the 1970s and in a remarkably similar published format. The contradictions within these magazines add to the growing literature on both homosexuality and race in postwar West Germany. Through the close examination of a medium that was crucial to the formation of homosexual communities and the development reformist politics, we can more fully understand the complexities and tensions on which minority politics were built in the wake of fascism.     

The Laruellean Clinamen: François Laruelle and French Atomism

According to François Laruelle, French thought has been unduly influenced by corpuscular or atomist thinking, yet Laruelle has himself employed key atomist terms—in particular, that of the clinamen or swerve—in framing his own style of thought. This essay looks at this tension between atomism and anti-atomism in Laruelle’s thought, taking the measure of his contribution to a larger stream of postwar French thinking about the relevance and stakes of ancient atomism. Its contention is that Laruelle subtly but really outlines a quantum theoretical resumption of ancient atomist philosophy—one that deserves closer attention and comparative study in the larger context of French philosophical interest in the atomists. A first section of the paper briefly describes Laruelle’s general project, along with his claim that he differs from his contemporaries because he uniquely escapes the dangers of what he calls corpuscular thought. A second section addresses the apparent tension between Laruelle’s claim to produce a non-corpuscular thinking and his consistent recent use of the atomist image of the clinamen, ultimately arguing that Laruelle sides with the clinamen against two forms of corpuscularity supposedly avoided by the clinamen itself but nonetheless usefully embodied in atomist thought. The final section of the paper draws up in preliminary terms a comparison between Laruelle’s understanding of his relationship to atomism and that of his contemporaries, focusing in particular on Alain Badiou.     

Nietzsche and drawing near to the personalities of the pre-Platonic Greeks

This essay focuses on and attempts to uncover the truly radical character of Nietzsche’s early “philological” work, specifically asking after the benefit he claims the study of classical culture should have for our present, late-modern historical moment. Taking up his study of the Pre-Platonic thinkers in 1873’s Philosophie im tragischen Zeitalter der Griechen, the first section analyzes Nietzsche’s statement that history’s principle task is the uncovering of Persönlichkeiten. I argue that it is not at all the subjective character of a psychologized individual that Nietzsche has in mind, but rather the moment of persönliche Stimmung or ‘being attuned’ to the world, which grounds and gives rise to thinking. In the second section, I show that the phusis or ‘nature’ to which the thinker is exposed in this attunement is comparable to the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian natural forces in tragic poetry, as Nietzsche understands it. This dynamic conception of phusis does not provide a metaphysical substrate or an objectively real ground to which we might return via that Greeks, but is rather essentially phenomenal, i.e. it is nothing other than the movement into and out of appearance, which always entails and requires its reception by the human being to whom it appears. In the final section of the essay, this origin proves for Nietzsche not to be located in a distant past moment. Rather, it is the abyssal origin of the tradition that is always already effective in our present moment, informing our contemporary conceptions of our world and ourselves.     

The Self in Movement: Being Identified and Identifying Oneself in the Process of Migration and Asylum Seeking

How migration influences the processes of identity development has been under longstanding scrutiny in the social sciences. Usually, stage models have been suggested, and different strategies for acculturation (e.g., integration, assimilation, separation, and marginalization) have been considered as ways to make sense of the psychological transformations of migrants as a group. On an individual level, however, identity development is a more complex endeavor: Identity does not just develop by itself, but is constructed as an ongoing process. To capture these processes, we will look at different aspects of migration and asylum seeking; for example, the cultural-specific values and expectations of the hosting (European) countries (e.g., as identifier), but also of the arriving individuals/groups (e.g., identified as refugees). Since the two may contradict each other, negotiations between identities claims and identity assignments become necessary. Ways to solve these contradictions are discussed, with a special focus on the experienced (and often missing) agency in different settings upon arrival in a new country. In addition, it will be shown how sudden events (e.g., 9/11, the Charlie Hebdo attack) may challenge identity processes in different ways.