Emilio Caja
1. Introduction
A critical attitude is wholly distrustful of the rules of conduct with which society as presently constituted provides each of its members. Thus, from Horkheimer and Adorno to Fanon and the feminists, it is not surprising that critical theorists talk about liberation, emancipation from incalculable social mechanisms; and it is not surprising either that they do so by trying to enlighten on the moral that guides methods of – theoretical and practical – action. This means working towards an engaged vision, the understanding of the oppressed, exposing the real relations among human beings as inhuman, pointing beyond the present so as to carry a historically liberatory role. Nevertheless, they have not been the first ones involved in this activity. A similar approach can be found in Marx, who argues that “we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not”[1].
The tool for the analysis of society that both Marx and critical theorists have adopted is immanent critique, whose definition I take from Titus Stahl: “immanent critique is a form of social critique that evaluates both the empirical behaviour constituting social practices and the explicit self-understanding of their members according to standards that are, in some sense, internal to those practices themselves. By doing so, immanent critique aims at a transformation of such practices that encompasses both actions and self-understandings”[2]. The common thread that connects Marx and – explicitly or implicitly – critical theorists is therefore a deep reflection on the relations of social domination. At the same time, however, there are points of departure which eventually lead critical theory in the broad sense to talk about a liberation that goes beyond just class domination and encompasses, among other categories, gender and race. In particular, the next section deals with the departure of the Frankfurt School from orthodox Marxism and the emergence, in Foucault’s project of a genealogy of history, of a new object of domination – the body. Here, it must be said that while Adorno and Horkheimer directly refer to Marx, Foucault never explicitly deals with him, but by putting the body at the centre of his analysis of disciplinary power necessarily challenges the Marxist category of labour.
On the other hand, it would be misleading to think about critical theory as a coherent and unified body of literature. First, the objects of analysis vary depending on the authors, and even if class, gender and race most of the time intersect, they remain three different “categories”. Second, and more important, there is a divergent result in the immanent critique of Horkheimer and Adorno (and Foucault) and that of feminist and anti-racist thinkers. In the former the critique becomes pervasive as it targets the universal system of injustice; as a result, Adorno and Horkheimer argues for a withdrawal from society. They suggest that the individual should live his own phenomenology, rejecting rationality and concreteness in favour of pleasures and passions. Similarly, Foucault’s focus on individual responses to disciplinary powers has been criticized for not providing collective solutions to the problems identified. Instead, feminist and anti-racist thinkers try to rewrite the contradiction – going beyond a capital-labour conflict –, try to think through it in order to find a strategic way out of the immanent critique. This is the dealt in section 3.
Finally, in section 4, the diverse contributions that critical theorists bring to the concept of politics are analysed through the lenses of Rancière’s thought. Indeed, extending liberation beyond class liberation means putting at the centre of the analysis a broader range of subjects than the Marxist proletariat; and it means also studying exploitation beyond the category of work. Rancière has a normative conception of politics that opens up the space for an ideological construction of political activity – with all its strength and weaknesses. And in this process, the aesthetics of politics becomes important. Overall, the work of critical theorists thus lead to what I call pessimism of reason – to be understood as a scepticism towards common sense that involves also traditional forms of political representation -, but leaves some space for an optimism of the will – to be understood as political activism and a fascination towards spontaneity.
2. Questioning the contradiction: from production to the body
The first generation of the Frankfurt School – in particular I refer to the Dialectic of the Enlightenment – operates a revision of Marxist historical materialism. Indeed, the object of the critique, that is, society, has modified. Using Marxist tools, Adorno and, even more, Horkheimer try to understand the movement from liberal capitalism to mass democracy capitalism, from competition to the monopolistic phase, and from the forms of the bourgeois state to totalitarianism. While the argumentation is not always clear, the intuitions of the authors are easy to follow and rhetorically powerful. Horkheimer that
in the system of liberal market economy, which led men to admirable inventions, to the saving of work and in the end to the mathematical formulation of the cosmos, its specific products, machines, have become instruments of destruction in the proper sense: instead of work, they made superfluous workers.[3]
In this context, Critical Theory wants to take the responsibility of the disappearance of class contradiction into a totality, which is contradictory in itself; of the problem of the non-existence of a privileged subjectivity:
the first signs of the capacity of capitalism to survive the market economy have been informed right after the destiny of proletariat organizations. The watchword of unity was profoundly eradicated in trade unions and parties which, however, rather than fulfill the duty of the united proletarians – the resistance against class society – adequated to the natural conditions of their evolutionary transformation in mass organizations, integrating in the process of transformation of the economy.[4]
Their analysis therefore aims at elaborating a free subjectivity in the moment in which the liberation of the proletariat appears to be compromised – trapped into totalitarian forms of mass democracy – but also to force reason and societal structures to a sort of psychoanalysis, in order to identify the traumatic contents that have been removed:
everywhere, humanity is educated and injured at the same time. As far as a state, suppose the whole Europe, can be big and powerful, the mechanisms of oppression against the internal enemy [productive forces] have to find their justification in the fight against the external one. If hunger and the danger of war were necessary consequences, uncontrolled products of the blind market mechanism, in the authoritarian state they become increasingly aware instruments of control.[5]
However, in the Dialectic, the critique becomes pervasive, as the objective is shifted away from exploitation and becomes the universal system of injustice. As Habermas has pointed out, Adorno and Horkheimer no longer want to overcome theoretically the performative contradiction inherent in an ideology critique that outstrips itself. Rather, they eschew theory and practice, standing firm against the fusion of reason and power in the name of spontaneity. In the dialectic, the strategic contradiction is moved backward and it is understood not in the conflict between capital and labour, but rather in power and violence as such. Reading the text it therefore appears as the solution is then moved forward, not in socialism but in a sort of utopia. In this way, perhaps, they have set the normative foundations of critical theory so deep that they have not disturbed the dominant powers. At the same time, however, they pose the accent on another important element, that is
in this world, things are complicated and are decided by many factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not from just one alone. [6]
Although much opposition between the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School and the Foucaultian genealogy exists[7], when analysing their contributions to the analysis of class, race and gender, important commonalities emerge. Both Foucault and Horkheimer and Adorno criticize modernity as it has given rise to an alienated objectification of subjective powers that compromise “man’s” autonomy and thus block his true self-realization[8]. This is what defines modern Western man’s domineering relation to otherness and difference in all forms. Confronting this reality, the critique of reason of the Frankfurt School used Marxist tools but departed from Marxism, questioning the relevance of the proletariat and industrial production as the actor and setting of revolutionary subjectivation. Foucault’s radical critique of reason has had a similar objective to that of the Frankfurt School: a conscious reappropriation of subjective powers so as to revive the humanist project. Foucault did not intensively dealt with Marx, but rather his genealogy of power/knowledge identified another actor, the body, and another setting, that of disciplining regimes.
Foucault targets social institutions that are clearly marked by hierarchies of power, that for him meant a
a strategy[…]dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, operations[…]a series of relations always aiming at, always in activity, rather than a privilege that one might hold[…]It has to be admitted that this power is exercised rather than owned, that it is not the acquired or preserved privilege of the dominant class, but the effect of its strategic positions.[9]
Thus, “power produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth”[10]. In Foucault the question is whether there is any space for truth. This is because
it has to be admitted that power produces knowledge; that power and knowledge directly involve each other; that there is neither a relation of power without a correlated constitution of a field of knowledge, nor at the same time a field of knowledge that does not imply and constitute relations of power. These relations power-knowledge should not be analysed from a subject of knowledge that is free or in no relation with the system of power, but rather it should be considered that the subject, the objects, and the modalities of knowledge are effects of the fundamental implications of power/knowledge and their historical transformations.[11]
The body is thus immersed into the political camp, above all for economic utilization. Indeed, in the Docile Bodies’chapter of Discipline and Punish, Foucault sets out the dimension of exploitation: the body becomes a useful force only when it is at the same time a productive body and a subjugated body. Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes the same forces (in political terms of obedience).
Putting bodies at the centre of a reflection on political economy might be interpreted – especially looking at the legacy of Foucault’s thought – as a response to the crisis of the concepts of proletariat and industrial capitalism. Indeed, the body encompasses a much greater number of domination procedures and dominated subjects: bodies are exploited in production and social reproduction activities, but also in colonization and segregation practices. The setting is not anymore just the Western factory, but also the house, peripheries, (ex-)colonized countries and all the places of economic exploitation.
Similarly to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Foucault’s conceptualization is pervasive, leaving no space for neither action nor thinking, and as consequence “the potential for a broad range of normative nuances is surrendered, and the result is a certain normative one-dimensionality”[12]. From this, it is not surprising that he believes that liberation will come through spontaneous, unmediated actions, such as
a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating pleasure within reality, and a new economy in the mechanism of power[13].
Nevertheless, Foucault’s account remains extremely tied to the individuality of the body’s responses, meaning that individual responses to conformism are different depending on the person. He overlooks that the cost of resistance is extremely high for some people, while definitely lower for other, and for this reason racial and feminist thinkers have not saved him from harsh criticism. At the same time, racial and feminist thinkers have used the relationship between power, knowledge, violence and the body have been used to expand the contradiction.
3. Rewriting the contradiction: the subjectivity of race and gender
Critical theory has increasingly looked for ways to include the otherness. In talking about Foucault and Deleuze, Spivak reports what the two philosophers believe to be the most important contributions of French structuralism,
The networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive – a persistent critique is needed; and second, intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society’s other.[14]
Although laudable, Spivak believes that there is a contradiction in a position that valorises the concrete experience of the oppressed, but “ignore the question of ideology[…]of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the macrologies”[15]. The problem is that they operate an unquestioned valorisation of the oppressed as subject, believing that “the masses know perfectly well, clearly […] they know far better than [the intellectual] and they certainly say it very well”[16]. Ideology is considered a “false consciousness”, being deceived; on the other hand, desire – characterizing the masses – is opposed to being deceived, as “we never desire against our interests, because interest always follow and finds itself where desire has placed it”[17]. Two things emerge: first, by implying that beyond false representation is where the oppressed subjects speak, act and know for themselves lead to a utopian politics; second, their approach is uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual in consolidating the international and gendered division of labour.
Against this background, the aim of feminist and anti-racist thinkers is above all to put at the centre of research the subjectivity of the subaltern groups. In this process, two fundamental steps are the identification of relations of power dominating these groups and the studying of subject formation within groups. Understanding consciousness and its transformation requires working with and through a Marxist understanding of consciousness. It involves the knowledge of social relations, but
this is not to belittle the importance of understanding peasants’ consciousness or workers’ consciousness in its pure form. This enriches our knowledge of the peasant and of the worker and throws light on how a particular mode takes on different forms in different regions, which is considered a problem of second-order importance in classical Marxism.[18]
Indeed, when the question of the consciousness of the subaltern comes, the notion of what the category of work cannot say becomes important. And in this sense, feminist and anti-racist thinkers are linked to Horkheimer, Adorno and Foucault.
The first point of intersection between feminists and anti-racists is on what type of political system emerges under the domination of Western male. Both Nancy Hartsock and Achille Mbembe refer to Georges Bataille to talk about “the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations”[19] that leads to only one possible result: a system of death. Bataille connects death with the definition of boundaries, of limits. The (male) self, surrounded by rigid ego-boundaries and walled cities, is discontinuous with others – primarily the mother that poses a threat for his identity. As a consequence of this experience of discontinuity, fusion with another is experienced as violent. Thus, desire for fusion with another can only take the form of domination of the other. The fusion with a threatening other happens only when the other ceases to exist as a separate. Sexual fusion with the other and, more broadly, interaction with the other is therefore connected with violence and death. How to systemically analyse this system of death and discrimination and provide emancipatory insights?
In The Feminist Standpoint, Nancy Hartsock traces the societal effects of a sexual division of labour, “the differential male and female life activity in class society leads on the one hand towards a feminist standpoint and on the other toward an abstract masculinity”[20]. Abstract masculinity, which has been described above, sets a hostile and combative dualism at the heart of the (Western) community and its social relations. In this, there is “a great deal in common with that imposed by commodity exchange […] The separation and opposition of social and natural world […] the effort to define only the former of each pair as important”[21]. A patriarchal capitalism is thus the one in which
the oedipal roots of these hierarchical dualisms are memorialized in the overlay of female and male connotations: it is not accidental that women are associated with quasi-human and nonhuman nature, that the lives of women are systematically used as examples to characterize the lives of those ruled by their bodies rather than their minds.[22]
A similar experience of the societal relations that emerge from rigid ego-boundaries’ definition emerges from the works anti-racist thinkers. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes the settler-native spatial division in colonization,
the zone were the natives live is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the settlers […] obedient to the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, they both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity. No conciliation is possible, for of the two terms, one is superfluous […] the town belonging to the colonized people, or at least the native town, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil rupture.[23]
And the native “is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values; […] a corrosive element; […] he is a deforming element; […] the depository of maleficent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable elements of blind forces”[24].
For Fanon, “I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality”[25]. Therefore, the colonial domination leads to an inferiority complex that has direct – economic exploitation – and indirect, psychological – the internalization of this inferiority – effects. The colonial framework is inescapable, affects the mind and the body, as discrimination leads to the negation of the black body, to a third-person consciousness. And here, as Spivak argues, if “the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow”[26].
From this shared critique, the way in which these thinkers rewrite the capital-labour contradiction takes forms that depend on the characteristics of the potential revolutionary subject.
Feminist materialism expands the Marxist account beyond his critique of capitalism in order to interpret reproduction. In capitalism, “women contribute to both production for wages and production of goods in the home, that is, they like men sell their labour power and produce both commodities and surplus value, and produce use-values in the home. Unlike men, however, women’s lives are institutionally defined by their production of use-value”[27]. Now, within the capitalist system, “the male worker in the process of production is involved in contact with necessity, and interchange with nature as well as with other human beings, but the process of production or work does not consume his whole life”[28]; in producing use-values in the home, women contribute to subsistence – meals, clothing, etc. – but, more importantly, produce/reproduce men and other women on both a daily and a long-term basis. And, “in terms of the physical, emotional, legal, custodial and sentimental situation of the women’s product, the child, the [Marxist] picture of the human relationship to production, labour and property is incomplete”[29]. Indeed, the activity involved is far more complex than the instrumental working with others to transform objects. The female experience in reproduction represents a unity with nature that goes beyond the proletarian experience of interchange with nature, and “the possession of a tangible place of production in the womb situates the women as an agent in any theory of production”[30]. The womb and the house as tangible places of production are avoided in Marx. Indeed, as Spivak argues, “Marx’s own writings on women and children seek to alleviate their condition in terms of a desexualized labour force”[31]. By taking into consideration the feminist perspective, the nature and history of alienation, labour and the production of property becomes different from what Marx taught us.
Anti-colonial writings highlight the existence of an international system of division of labour that went beyond nineteenth-century territorial imperialism and is a major source of the economic exploitation of contemporary capitalism. From Césaire onwards, race theorists have given great importance to a re-reading of Western capitalism through the eyes of colonial and post-colonial experiences,
colonization is an objectification […] relationships of domination and submission that transform the colonizer into a sergeant and the indigenous man in means of production.[32]
Colonization thus hampers development of both the oppressed individual and, as a consequence, of colonized countries. However, if in Hartsock the aim is to generalize, through political activism, the potentiality made available by the activity of women – the one based on the experience of continuity and relation rather than discontinuity –, for Fanon decolonization is the replacement of one population by another.
And this can happen as the sovereign right to kill is not subject to any rule in the colonies. It is taught by the settlers, through the use of brutal force, and reproduced by the natives. However, the first subjectivating agent is not, as in Marx, the native worker, but rather the peasant, “for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain”[33]. At the same time, Fanon warns that in the process of de-colonization, native intellectuals, that have been implanted “the essential qualities of the West”[34], and nationalist leaders, in favour of non-violent actions always aiming at a compromise, may drive movements towards an apparent – but not substantial – independence. De-colonization is thus often a continuation of economic exploitation by first-world countries and their private companies of the fields for investment of third-world countries.
Overall, keeping the experiences of a gendered subjectivity and of the subjectivity of people of colour separate is useful to understand how they expand the classical notions of class and proletariat. Rewriting the history of capitalist exploitation through the eyes of the oppressed expands the meaning of what labour, value and surplus-value mean: on the one hand, accumulation comes through unpaid housework and reproduction; on the other, David Harvey has defined accumulation by dispossession[35] the phenomenon by which people of the Global South have been deprived of their lands by private Western multinationals. The proletariat has been transformed into a multitude that includes women, colonized people – both in their countries and in the West –, as well as the workers; exploitation happens in the production process as well as in social reproduction activities; finally, the category of work identifies only a partial space of a broader picture of accumulation and exploitation, which depends also on a gendered and international division of labour. At a political level, as it has been shown, the responses can be extremely diverse: the nihilism that the genealogy of power of Foucault tends to inspire, political activism predicated by Hartsock or violence as it can be read in the text of Fanon and Mbembe. Is it then possible to reformulate a unified theory of political struggle? The final section deals with this question.
4. Spontaneity, delegation and politics
“Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part”[36]. The words of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière are again influenced by the thought of Bataille, who interpret politics “as a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo”[37].
In Rancière, politics is primarily the conflict over the existence of a common stage that recognizes status of those present in it. Politics is a wrong that defines the community as divided between the rich and the poor; politics is the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich, it is fought at the boundaries of a community with those excluded pretending to be included. Defining politics as happening at the boundaries of a community is a departure from Adorno and Horkheimer, for whom politics meant living your own individual phenomenology within the system in an unclear acceptance-rejection relationship with it. More interestingly, this definition of politics differs from that of Foucault; or better, in Rancière there is a definition of politics that in Foucault tends to lack. This is clear in the contraposition between Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power,
Foucault has shown that, as a mode of government, the police described by writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries covered everything relating to “man” and his “happiness” [and] the evolution of Western societies reveals that the policeman is one element in a social mechanism linking medicine, welfare and culture.
and Rancière’s police, that is not the state apparatus, but
is essentially the law, generally implicit, that defines the allocation of ways of doing, of ways of being, and ways of saying and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible and the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and another is not, that this speech is understood as a discourse and another as noise.[…]Policing is not so much the disciplining of bodies as a rule of governing their appearing, a configuration of occupations and the properties of the spaces where those occupations are distributed.[38]
Police is about the counted; politics is about the uncounted and want to show the break – between those who have part and those who have no part – in a series of actions that reconfigure the space where parties have been identified. And this happens when the exclusive policing is confronted with the equality principle: “the set of practices driven by the assumption of equality between any and every speaking being”[39].
Counted and uncounted, equal beings; but also conflict and demonstrations. Rancière’s method of equality reinstates the Marxism with which Foucault was struggling, but it doesn’t talk about the proletariat. It talks about equally speaking being that are purposely divided and that can use their bodies and their language to change the configuration of a community.
Using the concept of subjectification and leaving the possibility for ideological construction of the political activity, Rancière, together with anti-racist and feminist thinkers, tries to find a way out of the immanent critique. And, in his thought, the aesthetics and performative acts of politics become important. In this aesthetics is involved the main political subject that he identifies – the demos. The demos is the political subject with the appearance of which the order of police is split into a contentious community. I believe that the demos and performative politics are two identifying elements of modernity that represent, at the same time, the emergence of a wide set of heterogeneous demands that act spontaneously and the tension towards a coherent synthesis of these demands into forms of intersectional representation.
First, Judith Butler, in the conclusion of Gender Trouble, offers parody as a way to destabilize and make apparent the invisible assumptions about gender identity and the inability of “ontological locales”[40] as gender. This is not far from Rancière’s idea of being seen. And, more important, this is similar to many practices that animates contemporary struggles, attacking, but also mocking, power: being seen requires wearing yellow vests, as the movement of the Gilets Jaunes did to protest against the increasing economic and social deprivations in France; or it requires a pink fist, as introduced by the feminist movement Ni Una Menos demanding for the recognition of women rights all around the world; or the image of Mohamed Bouazizi, the street vendor who set himself on fire and became a catalyst for the Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring thereafter. These are just three examples of many cases from South America to Hong Kong. And all of these are movements that put their bodies directly into the contention and that use demonstrations, rallies and protests to let their voice be heard. A lot of importance is assigned to the repetition of the performance: “insist until you are heard” could be a motto. On the other hand, these movements symbolize another feature of modern politics: the spontaneity of their actions often is in contrast with traditional intermediary subjects that historically supported the working class – namely trade unions. As a consequence, the forms of actions vary a lot, going from political activism to violence, towards others or the self.
For this reason, these movements most of the times interact with institutions in indirect ways. It is political pressure outside the institutions that may lead to institutional change rather than a political representation within institutions. This could explain the crisis of socialist-inspired parties in recent years, as it is hard to put into a cohesive program these demands, usually understood by party leaders more in terms of their cultural significance rather than in terms of political economy. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to think that there is not even a tension to do that. Indeed, out of this institutional crisis of political representation, what emerged was populism. As different definitions and examples of populism exist, here I would like to focus on the Spanish case. Just a few days ago, the radical left party Podemos formed a government with the socialist party. Podemos is a self-defined populist party that has constructed a narrative of the demos against the few rich monopolists. Coming out of the Indignados Movement, the party has a strong movement attitude and in his inauguration speech at the Parliament, the leader Pablo Iglesias thanked the feminist movement as well as all the social movements for their fundamental role in defense of democracy. Since its creation, the party has put into a coherent vision national demands for social inclusion and economic redistribution that don’t forget women and minorities – groups and regions – rights; moreover, it connected the excluded and the oppressed with the intellectuals, which played a positive and active role as a megaphone for people’s demands.
In conclusion, this review has shown how critical theorists have contributed to the description of contemporary changes in society in a way that requires a redefinition of the Marxist conflict between capital and labour. This review has also shown that, although certain theoretical approaches – as in the case of Rancière’s conception of politics – may help unifying this wide net of contributions into a coherent intersectional theory of social relation, there are still gaps between different contributions. Practically, this may signify that, at a global level, the reduction of these theories to a coherent narrative is counterproductive; at the same time, in Europe – which is the region I study and of which I can speech – a new definition of political communities is emerging along intersectional lines that emphasize the political role of the demos as the subject to be represented.
[1]Karl Marx, Early Writings, (Penguin: London, 1992), 208.
[2] Titus Stahl, “What is Immanent Critique?”, SSRN Working Paper, 2013.
[3] Max Horkheimer, “Autoritäter Staat”, in Gesellschaft im Überang, (Frankfurt a.M., 1972), 61.
[4] Horkeimer, “Autoritäter Staat”, 63.
[5] Horkeimer, “Autoritäter Staat”, 72.
[6] M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, (New York: Continuum, 1972), vii.
[7] Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and the Frankfurt School”, Political Theory, Vol.18-3, (1990), 441.
[8] McCarthy, “The Critique”, 447.
[9] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (Allen Lane: London, 1977), 30; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: an Introduction, (Allen Lane: London, 1979), 94-95.
[10] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 114.
[11] Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 31.
[12] Nancy Fraser, “Foucault on Modem Power: Empirical Insights and Normative Confusions”, in Untruly Practices, ed. Nancy Fraser, (Minneapolis, 1989), 32.
[13] Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 5.
[14] Gayatri C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1988), 66.
[15] Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 74.
[16] Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected essays and interviews, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 206-207.
[17] Foucalt, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 215.
[18] Ajit K. Chaudhury, “New wave social science”, Frontier, (1984):16-24, 10.
[19] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture, Duke University Press, (2003): 11-40, 14.
[20] Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the ground for a specifically feminist historical materialism”, in Discovering Realities: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka, (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983), 287.
[21] Harstock, “The Feminist Standpoint”, 285.
[22] Harstock, “The Feminist Standpoint”, 289.
[23] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (Penguin Books, 1967), 30.
[24] Fanon, The Wretched, 32.
[25] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (Penguin Books, 1967), 97.
[26] Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 82-83.
[27] Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint”, 283.
[28] Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint”, 284.
[29] Gayatri C. Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory”, Women’s Studies International Quarterly, (1978):241-246, 243.
[30] Spivak, “Feminism”.
[31] Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, 73.
[32] Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialism, (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1955), 23.
[33] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 47.
[34] Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36.
[35] David Harvey, “The “new” imperialism: accumulation by dispossession”, Socialist Register, (2004):63-87.
[36] Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, (University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 22.
[37] Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, 16.
[38] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 28-29.
[39] Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 30.
[40] Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 146.
il cigno nero 