Symbolic Forms for a New Humanity: Cultural and Racial Reconfigurations of Critical Theory

Drucilla Cornell · Kenneth Michael Panfilio

Jan 2010 · Fordham Univ Press

About this ebook

It has become commonplace to write about the vociferous appetite of colonialism and its insatiable devouring of modern life. In this book the authors expand on those ideas, showing how there has been a colonization of critical theory itself, fitted with prejudices that would limit knowledge to analytic reductions commensurate with so-called Western metaphysics. Against such a monolithic force, the authors posit the work of the oft-neglected German Idealist Ernst Cassirer in careful textual precision to unearth his contribution to critical theory via an in-depth understanding of symbolic forms in all of their richness and complexity. Such a maneuver allows an ethical humanism to emerge that grants equal importance and standing both to the intellectual heritage of Afro-Caribbean historicism and poeticism and to the long-ignored significance of black philosophies of existence. Each of these traditions provide searing indictments against imperialist domination of the so-called Third World and return such questions of domination to the realm of critical theory against some who would deny that we are still in an age of imperialism. The focus of this book is an exposition on the human condition that is then expanded upon to raise, and at times answer, some of the most important questions of what is to be doneabout the global racism, sexism, and poverty that have asymmetrically infected the livelihoods and ways of life for so many people who have been rendered beneath the register of humanity.

About the author

Drucilla Cornell was Professor Emerita of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University; Professor Extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, South Africa; and a visiting professor at Birkbeck College, University of London. With a background in philosophy, law, and grassroots mobilization, she played a central role in the organization of the memorable conferences on deconstruction and justice at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 1989, 1990, and 1993. She was the author of The Philosophy of the Limit (1992), Feminism and Pornography (2000), and Law and Revolution in South Africa: uBuntu, Dignity, and the Struggle for Constitutional Transformation (2014). She has also coedited several books: Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender (1987), with Seyla Benhabib; and Hegel and Legal Theory (1991) and Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), with David Gray Carlson and Michel Rosenfeld. She was part of a philosophical exchange with Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Nancy Fraser entitled Feminist Contentions (1995). In addition to her academic work, she wrote four produced plays. Kenneth Michael Panfilio is Assistant Professor at Illinois State University in the Department of Politics and Government. Both authors are co-editors of the book series Just Ideas: Transformative Ideals of Justice in Ethical and Political Thought.