Beyond Blood Identities Posthumanity in the Twenty First Century

by Hill, Jason D.

• ISBN13: 9780739138434
• ISBN10: 073913843X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-10-28
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

In this highly original work, Jason D. Hill argues that strong racial, ethnic, and national identities function according to a separatist logic that does irreparable damage to our moral lives. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, the author boldly develops a new version of cosmopolitanism he coins posthuman cosmopolitanism, according to which only individual persons-not cultures, races, or ethnic groups-are the bearers of rights and the possessors of an inviolable status worthy of respect. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Jason D. Hill is associate professor of philosophy at De Paul University in Chicago. He is the author of Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What it Means to Be Human in the New Millennium (2000).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Moral Reasoning from a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture	p. 19
Culturalism and Moral Reasoning	p. 19
Toward a Moral Conceptual Base of Culture	p. 35
Cosmopolitanism: A Definition and the Question of Tolerance	p. 45
Who Owns Culture? A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry	p. 57
Culture-Faith: The Mystification of Cultute	p. 57
Culture-Faith Applied: Cultural Privacy and the Ownership of Native Culture	p. 65
Counterarguments against Applied Culture Faith: The Right to Cultural Privacy	p. 72
Representation without Authorization	p. 75
Who Has the Right to Speak for Whom?	p. 78
Ethnocide or Culture Killings: Is It So Bad?	p. 81
Dismantling the Tribes from Within: Modernization and the Capabilities Approach	p. 90
Moral Culture Is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare	p. 107
Sylvia Plath: "Daddy" and the Creation of Moral Culture	p. 108
Moral Incommensurability and the Clash of Cultures	p. 115
The Anatomy of Antiassimilationism and the Logic of Contagion	p. 120
The Cult of Death and the Worship of Ancestry: The Genesis of Group Narcissism	p. 126
The Psychopathology of Tribalism	p. 137
The Tribalist as Moral Appropriator	p. 137
Symbolic Ethnicity	p. 140
Ethnic versus Ethnic: The Problem of Definition	p. 144
Tribalism, Untouchability, and Human Slime	p. 150
The Art of Symbolic Necrophilia	p. 155
Imagistic and Emblematic Representations: Tribal Epistemology and the Impossibility of Knowing the Other	p. 160
Moral Masochism and Black Identity: A Tragic Tale	p. 166
Jim in Africa	p. 171
Theorizing Posthumanity: Radical Inclusion, Jews as the Chosen People, and the Identity Politics of St. Paul	p. 177
Laissez-Faire Existential Engagement
Posthuman in the Flesh: Jews and the Fragility of Chosenness	p. 188
How God Became a Cosmopolitan	p. 193
The Identity Politics of St. Paul	p. 205
Appendix:Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response	p. 215
Bibliography	p. 237
Index	p. 243
About the Author	p. 251
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