| dc.contributor.author | Webber, Robert James. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:35:49Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1999 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1999 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINQ49298 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55681 | |
| dc.description | Foucault argues that there is no outside to power. Lacan argues that the Real constitutes a permanent site of resistance. Exploring how the philosophy of Jacques Derrida negotiates a way through the tension between these two positions in order to provide an account of critical agency which avoids returning to more metaphysical accounts of subjectivity provides a point of intervention for a thesis whose case study is ultimately more empirical in that focuses on the politics of multiracial identity in America. The justification for combining an empirical case study with such fundamentally philosophical questions comes from Derrida as well, and especially from his suggestion---the one with which I open the thesis---that there is always a danger in intellectual work of either simply "thinking the present" in which we merely focus on what is present-at-hand, or of exploring the question of "presencing" simply as a philosophical mediation. In both cases, he argues, we fail to pose the truly critical question, which is how the present comes into presence. As I argue in part one of this thesis, it is because the present can only be presenced through the kind of "non-decisive repudiations" which Derrida explores in his reading of the word 'differance' that we can in fact negotiate the positions set out by Foucault and Lacan and identify the possibility of a permanent site of resistance within the exercise of power itself. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thus, my case study is able to explore the demand made by many multiracial Americans for their own racial category on the 2000 US census not simply as something which is happening in "the present" but as a site where this present in fact comes into presence. In this respect, the "politics" of multiracial identity in America refers to the tension between resistance and repudiation which accompanies the moment of critical agency which multiracial Americans exercise in making this demand. As we shall see, while they resist the existing terms of racial inclusion in America, through a reading of how multiracial Americans and interracial families were represented during this campaign in the mainstream American press I also explore how this resistance simultaneously works to reproduce other dominant images of American identity. In particular, I show how the recognition of multiracial identity in America has depended on the repudiation of their sexuality by multiracial Americans who are either gay or lesbian. | en_US |
| dc.description | As I argue in the conclusion, it is because repudiation is internal to the possibility of critical agency that the kind of political resistance performed by new political identities such as multiracial Americans shows that although it is possible to transcend any given context of power relations it is never possible to transcend the exercise of power itself. In between I attempt to relate the question of presencing to the question of the present by exploring two areas which foreground the case study. These are the relationship between the law and representation and the question of group identity and group rights as they are articulated in liberal political theory. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1999. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | | en_US |
| dc.subject | Political Science, General. | en_US |
| dc.title | "Thinking the presence of the present": Critical reflections on subjectivity, the law, and the politics of group rights (illustrated through a case study of the campaign to recognise multiracial identity in America). | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
