> >
> > The Nietzsche-Foucault-Marxist area of thought is an
> > area I'm extremely excited & interested in. Does
> > anyone know of a list (a "left-Nietzschean" list) that
> > explores this specific area? Not a list run by
> > Fou-Cult gurus, but one a bit more liberal and lax?
> > I'm interested in other writers that have plumbed
> > these depths. Like I mentioned, _The Philosophy of
> > Friedrich Nietzsche_ by HL Mencken, with the
> > explanatory intro by anarchist Charles Bufe, is
> > excellent, esp. where the Bufe into lays out where
> > Nietzsche converges and diverges with left-libertarian
> > thought. ANd again there is the book _I Am Not a Man,
> > I Am Dynamite: Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition_
> > which reveals his influence on anarchism, even though
> > Nietzsche explicitly condemned anarcists as suffering
> > from ressentiment.
>
> I would recommend Wendy Brown's work, States of Injury, which is a
>critique of a certain feminist politic that call to the state for
>protection, although I think that its analysis of the concept of
>wounded identity can be used in other contexts. To be honest, this
>has been my largest engagement in Nietzsche (my interests are more
>Spinozist.) I have also heard good things about Deleuze's analysis.
>I think that the largest Nietzsche influence on historical
>materialism is rather indirect, from Sorel to his critical uptake in
>Gramsci. To turn to your earlier comment about N's rather dubious
>politics, the unfortunate thing is that if one were to reject
>philosophers for racism and misogyny we would be erasing a great deal
>of continental philosophy if not all of it.
>
> robert wood
I'm going to be reading her work and doing seminars on it at the blog. I read her piece critiquing Catherine MacKinnon's rhetoric in Drucilla Cornell's anthology, Feminism and Pornography. There, she drew on Baudrillard's reading of Marx's rhetoric as emulating the symptoms of capitalst production. Brown, likewise, reads Catherine MacKinnon's rhetoric, most notably what has come to be called "the copula" -- where CatMacK's rhetoric, Brown says, is a symptomatic reading of women's oppression. Her rhetoric emulates pornography in its incessant circling around the 'truth' of sex, the need to expose it all, the constant repetition, etc.
The other author who has done some great stuff on this, following Brown's work in States of Injury, is Janet Halley (Split Decisions, a polemic against the limitations of feminism), who provides a pretty excellent reading of the way ressentiment plays out in a court case in Texas where she reads what was otherwise considered a feminist "win" in the legal system from the perspective of a "queer man". As such, she forces us tosee how feminist legal scholarship can't "see past its corner". Blah blah.
the cached version of an article that ends up in revised version in her book, Split Decisions. The byline is Ian Halley, but that is a bit of performativity expressing Halley's desire to "take a break" from feminism by taking on the her "Inner Queer Dewd". (Hence, the name of my blog at the moment. :)
Also, I just wrote up a babbling intro to an article by Jo Doezema, which draws on Brown's work. Doezema examines the uses and abuses of the image of the third world prostitute by western feminists. She basically argues, drawing on postcolonial critiques of orientalism, that western feminists (esp of the radical variety) use brown prostitutes largely to advance their own interests in feminist politics in the West -- which means they end up ignoring the actual voices of third world prostitutes who tend to be wholly uninterested in the radfem politics that seeks complete eradication of prostitution (and pornography, hence their neologism, pornstitution) -- since they view prostitution as the motor of sexist history.
"Ouch! Western feminists' 'wounded attachment' to the 'third world prostitute'" by Jo Doezema May 2000. (A later version of this paper appears in Feminist Review, No. 67, Spring 2001 pp. 16-38) http://www.walnet.org/csis/papers/doezema-ouch.html
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