How can we conceive of freedom and responsibility when our power is limited and we are subject to the forces of society? Melissa A. Odie asks what it means to live responsibly amid historical harm and wrongdoing, in the wake of slavery and genocide, or in the face of severe resource asymmetries. By connecting resistance to evil with reflections on the nature of power and political action, Odie reveals the daily ways people commonly exercise power, inflict harm, and show themselves capable of actions that transform both selves and the world. Viewed in this context, truly ethical political action may appear miraculous but could happen at any time. Odie asks what it means to live freely when advantages are distributed disproportionately according to race, gender, class, culture, and religion. What do freedom and responsibility entail when, for example, creating a home for oneself implies social and economic commitments that render others homeless? To address these questions, Orlie links diverse intellectual concerns and constituencies in the social sciences and humanities, offering original interpretations of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Thomas Hobbes. She compares their thinking to that of the seventeenth-century Quakers who found political possibilities in the powers they called "spirit" in the world and in themselves.

"When social power is conceived in Foucauldian terms, it is notoriously difficult to grapple with what it means to think affirmatively about ethical-political action. Drawing upon the unlikely combination of Hannah Arendt and the early 17th-century Quaker movement, Orlie articulates a fascinating approach to this problem. Without forgetting for a moment our enmeshment in power, she nevertheless shows how better appreciating our spiritual capacity for 'natality' can engender a distinctive sense of responsibility and freedom." Stephen K. White, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University"A thoughtful and erudite meditation on our ethical and political possibilities in the time after Truth." Wendy Brown, University of California, Santa Cruz"Living Ethically, Acting Politically confronts our ordinary complicities in the operations of social power with the possibility of doing otherwise. Refusing the legislative imaginary of sovereignty, Melissa A. Orlie draws innovatively on Arendt, Foucault, and early modern Quakers to rescue the 'can' from the jaws of the 'ought' not to escape obligations but to recollect their generation in the contingencies and equivocalities of social practices. At once evocative and provoking, this work opens new terrain at the borderlines of politics and ethics." Kirstie M. McClure, author of Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent"

Ethical loneliness is the experience of being abandoned by humanity, compounded by the cruelty of wrongs not being acknowledged. It is the result of multiple lapses on the part of human beings and political institutions that, in failing to listen well to survivors, deny them redress by negating their testimony and thwarting their claims for justice. Jill Stauffer examines the root causes of ethical loneliness and how those in power revise history to serve their own ends rather than the needs of the abandoned. Out of this discussion, difficult truths about the desire and potential for political forgiveness, transitional justice, and political reconciliation emerge. Moving beyond a singular focus on truth commissions and legal trials, she considers more closely what is lost in the wake of oppression and violence, how selves and worlds are built and demolished, and who is responsible for re-creating lives after they are destroyed. Stauffer boldly argues that rebuilding worlds and just institutions after violence is a broad obligation and that those who care about justice must first confront their own assumptions about autonomy, liberty, and responsibility before an effective response to violence can take place. In building her claims, Stauffer draws on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean Améry, Eve Sedgwick, and Friedrich Nietzsche, as well as concrete cases of justice and injustice across the world.

It is well known that Hegel conceives of history as the gradual process of rational thought and of forms of political life. But he is usually thought to place himself at the end of this process. This book argues that an essential part of Hegel's historical-political thinking has escaped the notice of its interpreters.

Bringing together many of the leading human geographers from around the English-speaking world, Envisioning Human Geographies offers a series of personal visions for the future of human geography. The result is a vigorous and far-sighted debate about what human geography could and should be concerned with in the twenty-first century. The individual contributors develop their arguments to address the shape and direction of human geographies, with each chapter looking forward and envisioning an intellectual future for the subject. The result is a set of powerful statements written around the themes of: ·space ·nature ·enclosure ·political-economy ·non-representation ·post-colonialism ·feminism ·post-structuralism ·computation ·morality ·spirituality ·activism. The statements are tied via an introduction that discusses the ideological, academic and aesthetic prompts that fire the human geographical imagination. Envisioning Human Geographies maps out important new territories of enquiry for human geography, and is essential reading for all students studying the nature and philosophy of the subject.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

Both personal and theoretical, autoethnographic and analytical, this book offers a performative, arts-based narrative about the aftermath of abusive marriages, using the stories, drawings, songs of other women to compare with Tamas's own lived experience.