Bøger af Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek show us that biopolitics along with sexism, racism and political theology seeks to control to women's reproductive agency. They reconfigure Arendt's philosophy of natality (birth rate)in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices and democratic pluralism.

"Opens a battlefront and conversation that is likely to preoccupy the next generation."-Tom Cohen, University at Albany

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.

Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Michel Foucault and Luce Irigaray, this book proposes a conception of ethics - an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in the context of embodiment and antagonism.