Abstract
In The Fall and The Happy Death, Albert Camus describes, with kaleidoscopic perspicuity, the fragmentary quality of modern experience and poetically articulates the experience of modernity as a fallen condition. Aamir Mufti draws our attention to the ways in which the perception of modernity as a fallen condition encourages the cultural critic to begin the work of recovery—the recovery of the self and of tradition through tradition itself. Identifying a trend that, referencing Benjamin, he calls “auratic criticism,” Mufti traces the ways in which the concept of religious tradition operates to fulfil this role of recovery. The task, he believes, is to distinguish the commitment to critique, which requires a scrupulous elaboration of the homelessness of modern experience, from the impulse to resolve the crisis of modern culture, through a gesture of recuperation of a lost world.1 Such recuperation might be witnessed in the effort to recall and reproduce an “auratic consciousness” of a precolonial past or, in Camus’ case, a lost connection with a very earthy natural life. Similarly, a romantic recovery of a lost condition is also noticeable in Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where the “native” seems to stand for a more complete, yet to be attained, humanity. More recently the account of reification as the forgetfulness of a more original recognition can be found in Axel Honneth’s Tanner lecture on reification.
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Notes
Aamir Mufti, “The Aura of Authenticity,” Social Text 64, 18, 3 (2000): 91.
A.J. Munby documented his secret but brief relationship and marriage to a domestic servant Hannah Cullwick. His papers contained over 600 photographs of working women. Carol Wolkowitz, “The Working Body as Sign: Historical Snapshots,” in Constructing Gendered Bodies, ed. K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 88.
Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters (London: Routledge, 2000), 40.
Toril Moi, What is a Woman: And Other Essays? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6.
Karen Green, “Reason and Feeling: Resisting the Dichotomy,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71, 4 (1993): 392.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindication of the Rights of Women, ed, Barbara Taylor (London: Everyman, 1992).
For an innovative reading of Wollstonecraft, Ashley Tauchert, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
For a helpful discussion offlaws in the sociobiological argument, Alison Assiter, Enlightened Women: Modernist Feminism in a Postmodern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 112–116.
All in Arthur Caplan ed. The Sociobiology Debate: Readings on Ethical and Scientific Issues (New York and London: Harper and Row, 1978).
Joan Scott Gender, “A Useful Category of Historical Analysis in Gender and the Politics of History,” American Historical Review 19, 5 (1986): 1053–1075.
Jane Flax, “Postmodernism and Gender Relations,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 45.
Qtd. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, “Putting the Body’s Feet on the Ground: Towards a Sociological Reconceptualization of Gendered and Sexual Embodiment,” in Constructing Gendered Bodies, ed. K. Backett-Milburn and L. McKie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 17.
Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), 133–156.
Iris Marion Young, On Female Experience: ‘Throwing like a Girl’ and other Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7.
Bodies that Matter (Butler, 1993).
The Bodies of Women (Diprose, 1994).
Volatile Bodies (Grosz, 1994).
Sexy Bodies (Grosz and Probyn 1995).
Flexible Bodies (Martin, 1995).
Imaginary Bodies (Gatens, 1996).
I would add Shildrick’s Leaky Bodies (1997).
Joseph Catalano, Thinking Matter: Consciousness from Aristotle to Putnam and Sartre (London: Routledge, 2000), 109.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Philosophical Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 330.
Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, Introduction to Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 8.
Christine Battersby, Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 36.
Richard Shusterman, “Somaesthetics and The Second Sex: Pragmatist Reading of a Feminst Classic,” Hypatia 18, 4 (2003): 118.
For an account of Beauvoir’s dialogue with those who became identified as French poststructuralist feminists, Elaine Stavro, “The Use and Abuse of Simone de Beauvoir: Re-Evaluating the French Poststructuralist Critique,” The European Journal of Women’s Studies 6 (1999): 263–280.
Of relevance to this, Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 73.
Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1989).
For ways to think situation in terms of habitus, see Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), ix.
Anthony King, “Structure and Agency,” in An Introduction to Social Theory, ed. Austin Harrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 223.
Lois McNay, “Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity,” Theory, Culture and Society 16, 1 (1999): 95–117.
David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 231.
Martin Jay, “Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,” in Cambridge Collections, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 131.
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© 2010 Gillian Howie
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Howie, G. (2010). Sex and Gender. In: Between Feminism and Materialism. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113435_8
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