Dubravka Ugrešić
Born	(1949-03-03)3 March 1949 Kutina, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia
Occupation	writer
Nationality	Croatian
Notable award(s)	Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1999)

Dubravka Ugrešić pronounced [dǔbraːʋka ǔɡreʃitɕ] (born 27 March 1949) is a Croatian writer who lives in the Netherlands.

Background and education[link]

Ugrešić was born in 1949 in Kutina, SR Croatia, SFR Yugoslavia.^[1] Her mother is a Bulgarian from Burgas who emigrated to Yugoslavia at age 19, in the wake of World War II.^[2] Ugrešić studied Comparative Literature and Russian Language and Literature at the University of Zagreb, pursuing parallel careers as a scholar of the humanities and as a writer,^[3] and continued to work there in the Institute for Theory of Research on Literature for twenty years.^[4] She later moved to Amsterdam to write. She has spent time teaching at some European and American universities, including UNC Chapel Hill, UCLA, and Harvard. Currently, she lives in Amsterdam where she is a freelance writer and contributor to some European newspapers and literary journals.^[5][3]

Writing[link]

Ugrešić has written on a variety of topics from nature to the question of identity and exile. At first she wrote children's books including «Mali Plamen» (1971) and «Filip I screca» (1976). Another of her early works, «Stefica Cvek u raljama zivota» (1981) is included in her postmodern poetic category of writings. «U raljama zivota» was immediately popular and soon adapted into a film for which Ugrešić wrote the screenplay.^[6] Her best-known novel in former Yugoslavia was Štefica Cvek u raljama života (Steffie in the Jaws of Life), an ironic postmodernist novel freely playing with clichés and stereotypes of trivial literature and culture. It follows a young typist named Steffie Speck, whose name was taken from a Dear Abby column, as she searches for love, both parodying and being compelled by the kitschy elements of romance.^[7] Ugrešić called the novel her "biggest literary achievement... because of the way in which the hero of the novel defeats its author."^[7] The novel was an immediate success^{[citation needed]} and made into a 1984 movie U raljama života directed by Rajko Grlić.

Ugrešić's writing has been described as accessible, intelligent, innovative and politically and emotionally charged.^{[citation needed]} She calls her highly referential style "patchwork."^[7] In her view,

...great literary pieces are great because, among other things, they are in permanent polemics with their readers, some of whom are writers, and who are able to themselves express creatively their sense of this literary affair. Great literary pieces have that specific magical quality of provoking readers to rewrite them, to make a new literary project out of them. That could be the Borgesian idea that each book should have its counterpart, but also a Modernist idea of literature which is in constant dialogue with its literary, historical past.^[7]

In her writing, Ugrešić attempts to «de-tone» herself or remove tone from her writing, as she believes writing in first person leads the audience to think she is both omniscient and critical. Ugrešić does not regret her past writings because they too align with her previous and current beliefs and what she does.^[8]Ugrešić admits that her literary territory is not limited by national boundaries or language, though she continues to write in Croatian.^[9] In works such as The Confiscation of Memory, another book comprising several essays, Ugrešić expands upon the ease with which she communicates with Easteners as opposed to Westerners and the connections she makes with others. She writes about the past and how Easterners fear the past and would rather «sink into the compliant and indifferent present.» She comments on the destruction of the former Yugolsavia and how its change in history has effected a change in identity.^[10] Through this work, she expresses her belief that ruling elites and intelligentsia in post-Yugoslavia manipulate history and memory to suit their purposes.^[11]Ugrešić has also created various artisitc exhibitions based on her writings including an exhibit called «A primer for the illiterate» a series of essays she wrote in the early 1990s, demonstrating the dissolution of the country through metaphors.^[12] In her 1996 work, The Culture of Lies, Ugrešić searches for an explanation for what happened in Yugoslavia and who is to blame. She explores the role and status of the intellectual, whether such a person can join the nationalists or forever be apart from society. Ugrešić eliminates the various options for intellectuals until she is left with the idea that one must abandon ethnic and national identity altogether. Ugrešić finally concludes that every intellectual should be blamed because they did not do enough or nothing to stop the war in Yugoslavia.^[13] Ugrešić's latest work, Attack on the Minibar, is a collection of essays written on a number of topics, including personal and universal battles with fear and frustration,politics, migration, and art.^[14] Through her essays such as, “A Little Story about Remembering and Forgetting,” “In the Country all Lies are Truth,” Toys for Boys,” and Patriotism,” Ugrešić expresses her fear for the future of children and that they are only taught important moments in history rather than history as a true chronology, such education, Ugrešić laments, can easily sway children toward nationalism.^[15]

Politics and exile[link]

In 1989, Ugrešić joined the Association for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative. After the outbreak of the war in 1991 in former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-war and anti-nationalistic stand. She wrote critically about nationalism and the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of state controlled media. She was accused of anti-state activities^[16] and proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”.^[17] She left Croatia in 1993 after a series of public media attacks^[3] and has attributed her exile from the Croatian literary community to the current political mood of the majority.^[18]She feels that Eastern Europeans fear the past and would rather "sink into the compliant and indifferent present." She emphasizes that there has been no effort to conserve the past but rather to destroy anything related to Yugoslavian culture, including literature. She recognizes that this rapid change in history has caused individuals ("being born in one country, living in a second, and dying in a third") to quickly change identities and in many cases to embrace nationalism. She believes that citizens of the former Yugoslavia have become deprived of their common past. She desires to look forward but believes that the importance of those years as a period of solidarity in the Balkans should not be overlooked.^[19]

In her most recent book, “The Attack on the Minibar,” she details her victimization by the media, among other topics. She has recently started to travel to Croatia more and to speak to the media, admitting that she has begun to reconcile with certain people, but not with the state.^[20] Furthermore, though she has not ruled out the possibility of returning to live in Zagreb, she believes that residing abroad gives her a different perspective on the places she has lived, explaining it in terms of a “mental game” that helps her to discover more about herself and others. Another reason that she prefers to live outside of Croatia is that she believes most people think that literature serves to promote national identity, but she would prefer to be expelled from the national community than conform to this idea.^[21]

Awards[link]

Ugresic at the National Book Critics Circle Awards in March 2012, where her book Karaoke Culture was a criticism finalist

Ugresic has received several literary awards and international recognition for her writing.

In the former Yugoslavia she was awarded the NIN Prize in 1988 for Forsiranje romana reke,^[3] being the first female writer (out of four in total, as of 2010^[update]) to win this prize since it was established in 1954.

Other regional awards are the Meša Selimović award, the K.Š. Gjalski award, etc.^{[citation needed]}

International Literary Awards[link]

• 2010 Tiptree Award for Baba Yaga Laid an Egg^[22]
• 2006 Short listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. UK.
• 2004 Premio Feronia – Citta di Fiano. Italy.
• 2000 Heinrich Mann Preis (Heinrich Mann Prize). Akademie Der Kunste Berlin. Germany.^[3]
• 1999 Osterreichischen Staatspreis fur Europaische Literatur 1998 (Austrian State Prize for European Literature). Vienna, Austria.
• 1998 SWF-Bestenliste Literaturpreis (Sud-West-Funk Bestlist Literary Award). Germany.
• 1997 Versetsprijs 1997, Stichting Kunstenaarsverzet 1942–1945 (Artists in Resistance Prize). Netherlands.
• 1996 Prix Europeen de l’ Essai Charles Veillon (Annual prize for the best European book of essays). Switzerland.

Bibliography[link]

• Napad na minibar (2010)
• Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2007; translated into English 2009)
• Nobody’s Home (2007)
• The Ministry of Pain (2005)
• Lend Me Your Character (2004)
• Thank You For Not Reading (2003)
• The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1998)
• The Culture of Lies (1998)
• Have A Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994)
• In the Jaws of Life (1992)
• Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1991)

References[link]

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (April 2010)

External links[link]

• Official Homepage
• Dubravka Ugrešić at the complete review
• Dubravka Ugrešić interview by Svetlana Boym in BOMB Magazine, 2002
• Ugrešić at Open Letter Books

Lisa Appignanesi (born 4 January 1946) is a British writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. She is president of the writers’ organization English PEN. Her latest book is All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion. Her previous book, Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors won the 2009 British Medical Association Award for the Public Understanding of Science, amongst other prizes.

Early life and education[link]

Appignanesi was born in Łódź, Poland. She grew up in Paris and Montreal,^[1] where she studied at McGill University and worked as a Features Editor for The McGill Daily.^[2] Following her BA in English and MA (with a thesis on Edgar Allan Poe), she moved to Britain, to do a PhD in Comparative Literature University of Sussex.^[2] During this period she spent some time in Paris and Vienna and wrote a thesis on Henry James, Marcel Proust and Robert Musil which was published in 1974 as Proust, Musil and Henry James: Femininity and the Creative Imagination.^[2]

Academic work[link]

After a year working as a writer in a Manhattan social research firm Appignanesi returned to Britain to work as a European Studies lecturer at the University of Essex.^[2] Appignanesi also lectured at New England College, and in 1976 helped found the Writers and Readers writers collective,^[1] which launched the important graphic Beginners series with titles on Marx and Freud. In 1975 she published The Cabaret, a history of cabaret,^[1] a new edition of which came out in 2005 (Yale University Press).

ICA and full-time writing[link]

In 1980 she left academia to become Director of Talks and Seminars at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where she stayed for ten years and helped the ICA talks programme gain a reputation as "an intellectual hothouse".^[1] While at the ICA she edited the Documents series, which included the books Postmodernism and Ideas from France.^[1] She became Deputy Director of the ICA in 1986 and created the ICA-Television branch, which produced England's Henry Moore in 1988 and Seductions for Channel Four^[3] She left the ICA in 1990 to write full-time, and received publishing deals for Memory and Desire and Freud's Women (co-written with John Forrester) published in 1991 and 1992 respectively.^[2] As well as these she has written nine other fiction and two non-fiction books, including the highly acclaimed Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors in 2008.^[4][5][6]

As well as her writing Appignanesi has also co-written a film on Salman Rushdie for French television,^[7] presented two series of radio programmes on Sigmund Freud for BBC Radio 4,^[8] presented the arts and ideas Nightwaves programme for BBC 3, contributed to a variety of programmes, including Start the Week and Women’s Hour, and written for the New Writing Partnership.^[9] Appignanesi has appeared as a cultural commentator on many television programmes, including the BBC's Newsnight and Late Review. She is the General Editor of The Big Ideas series, published by Profile, which includes Violence by Slavoj Zizek and Bodies, by Susie Orbach. She worked as a fellow of the Brain and Behavior Laboratory at the Open University,^[2] was a council-member of the ICA (2000–06) and is Chair of the Freud Museum, London.^[10] She has also written for The Guardian,^[10] The Observer, The Independent, and The Daily Telegraph.^[2][7] In 2004 she became the Deputy President of English PEN and in 2008 the President. As part of her work with English PEN she edited Free Expression is No Offence, a collection of writings that formed part of English PEN's protest against what became the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and helped induce the British Government to amend the Bill by inserting a robust clause protecting freedom of expression.^[10] Under her Presidency, English PEN launched its report on Libel Reform, "Free Speech is Not for Sale," helped to rid Britain of obsolete Blasphemy and Criminal Libel laws, as well as setting up the PEN PINTER PRIZE. Appignanesi was also voted one of Britain's Top 101 Female Public Intellectuals.^[11]

Appignanesi has been nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize,^[12] and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for her critically acclaimed family memoir Losing the Dead, while her novel The Memory Man was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and won the Canadian Holocaust Fiction Award.^[12] Mad, Bad and Sad was short-listed for the Warwick Prize and long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize,^[13] amongst others, and won several awards. With John Berger, she translated the work of Nella Bielski. The Year is 42 won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for Literary Translation.

In 1987 she was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.^[12] Her popular fictions are reminiscent of those of Lesley Glaister and Sally Beauman, while her psychological thrillers have been compared to those of Nicci French.

Personal life[link]

Lisa Appignanesi first married Richard Appignanesi, another writer, with whom she had one son, the film director Josh Appignanesi. The couple later divorced. Her later partner is John Forrester. Their child, Lisa Appignanesi's second, is Katrina Forrester, a PhD student in political thought at Cambridge.

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• The Language of Trust (1973)
• Proust, Musil and Henry James: Femininity and the Creative Imagination (1974)
• The Cabaret (1975)
• Not to be Trusted (1981)
• One Man Woman (1982)
• Hard to Handle (1983)
• New Discovery (1984)
• The Rushdie File (1984)
• Memory and Desire (1991)
• Freud's Women (1992) (co-author: John Forrester)
• Dreams of Innocence (1994)
• A Good Woman (1996)
• The Things We Do for Love (1997)
• Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir (1999)
• The Dead of Winter (1999)
• Sanctuary (2000)
• The Cabaret (2004)
• Paris Requiem (2004)
• The Memory Man (2004)
• Free Expression is No Offence (2005)
• Unholy Loves (2005)
• Simone De Beauvoir (Life & Times S.) (2005)
• Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors (2008)

External links[link]

• Lisa Appignanesi Official Website

Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum in 2008
Born	Martha Craven (1947-05-06) 6 May 1947 (age 65) New York City
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Political philosophy, Ethics
Notable ideas	Capability approach Feminism
Influenced by Aristotle · Stanley Cavell · Catharine MacKinnon · John Stuart Mill · Adam Smith · G. E. L. Owen · John Rawls · Amartya Sen · Bernard Williams

Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven; May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics.

Nussbaum, though not a lawyer, is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.

Life and career[link]

Nussbaum in 2010

Nussbaum was born in New York City, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker; during her teenage years, Nussbaum attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. She described her upbringing as "East Coast WASP elite...very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status".^[1] She would later credit her impatience with "mandarin philosophers" as the "repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida".^[2]

She studied theatre and classics at New York University, getting a B.A. in 1969, and gradually moved to philosophy while at Harvard University, where she received an M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1975, studying under G. E. L. Owen. This period also saw her marriage to Alan Nussbaum (divorced in 1987), her conversion to Judaism, and the birth of her daughter Rachel, who is currently a history professor at Evergreen State College.^[3] Her interest in Judaism has continued and deepened: on August 16, 2008 she became a bat mitzvah in a service at Temple K. A. M. Isaiah Israel in Chicago's Hyde Park, chanting from the Parasha Va-etchanan and the Haftarah Nahamu, and delivering a D'var Torah about the connection between genuine, non-narcissistic consolation and the pursuit of global justice.^[4]

During her studies at Harvard, Nussbaum claims she encountered a tremendous amount of discrimination, including sexual harassment, and problems getting childcare for her daughter.^[5] When she became the first woman to hold the Junior Fellowship at Harvard, Nussbaum received a congratulatory note from a "prestigious classicist" who suggested that since "female fellowess" was an awkward name, she should be called hetaira, for in Greece these educated courtesans were the only women who participated in philosophical symposia.^[6]

She taught philosophy and classics at Harvard in the 1970s and early 1980s, where she was denied tenure by the Classics Department in 1982.^[2] Nussbaum then moved to Brown University, where she taught until the mid-1990s. Her 1986 book The Fragility of Goodness, on ancient Greek ethics, made her a well-known figure throughout the humanities. More recent work (Frontiers of Justice) establishes Nussbaum as a theorist of global justice.

Nussbaum's work on capabilities has often focused on the unequal freedoms and opportunities of women, and she has developed a distinctive type of feminism, drawing inspiration from the liberal tradition, but emphasizing that liberalism, at its best, entails radical rethinking of gender relations and relations within the family.^[7]

Nussbaum's other major area of philosophical work is the emotions. She has defended a neo-Stoic account of emotions that holds that they are appraisals that ascribe to things and persons, outside the agent's own control, great significance for the person's own flourishing. On this basis she has proposed analyses of grief, compassion, and love,^[8] and, in a later book, of disgust and shame.^[9]

Nussbaum has engaged in many spirited debates with other intellectuals, in her academic writings as well as in the pages of semi-popular magazines and book reviews and, in one instance, when testifying as an expert witness in court. She testified in the Colorado bench trial for Romer v. Evans, arguing against the claim that the history of philosophy provides the state with a "compelling interest" in favor of a law denying gays and lesbians the right to seek passage of local non-discrimination laws. A portion of this testimony, dealing with the potential meanings of the term tolmêma in Plato's work, was the subject of controversy, and was called misleading and even perjurious by critics.^[10][11] She responded to these charges in a lengthy article, "Platonic Love and Colorado Law".^[12] Nussbaum used multiple references from Plato's "Symposium" and his interactions with Socrates as evidence for her argument. The debate continued with a reply by one of her sternest critics, Robert P. George.^[13] Nussbaum has criticized Noam Chomsky as being among the "leftist intellectuals" who hold the belief that "one should not criticize one’s friends, that solidarity is more important than ethical correctness". She suggests that one can "trace this line to an old Marxist contempt for bourgeois ethics, but it is loathsome whatever its provenance".^[14] Among the people whose books she has reviewed critically are Allan Bloom,^[15] Harvey Mansfield,^[16] and Judith Butler.^[17] Her more serious and academic debates have been with figures such as John Rawls, Richard Posner, and Susan Moller Okin.^{[18][19][20][21][22]}

Nussbaum is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (elected 1988) and the American Philosophical Society. In 2008 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She is a Founding President and Past President of the Human Development and Capability Association and a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, Central Division.

Major works[link]

[edit] The Fragility of Goodness

The Fragility of Goodness^[23] confronts the ethical dilemma that individuals strongly committed to justice are nevertheless vulnerable to external factors that may deeply compromise or even negate their human flourishing. Discussing literary as well as philosophical texts, Nussbaum seeks to determine the extent to which reason may enable self-sufficiency. She eventually rejects the Platonic notion that human goodness can fully protect against peril, siding with the tragic playwrights and Aristotle in treating the acknowledgment of vulnerability as a key to realizing the human good.

Her interpretation of Plato's Symposium in particular drew considerable attention. Under Nussbaum's consciousness of vulnerability, the re-entrance of Alcibiades at the end of the dialogue undermines Diotima's account of the ladder of love in its ascent to the non-physical realm of the forms. Alcibiades's presence deflects attention back to physical beauty, sexual passions, and bodily limitations, hence highlighting human fragility.

Fragility made Nussbaum famous throughout the humanities. It garnered wide praise in academic reviews,^[24][25] and even drew acclaim in the popular media.^[26] Camille Paglia credited Fragility with matching "the highest academic standards" of the twentieth century,^[27] and The Times Higher Education called it "a supremely scholarly work".^[28] Nussbaum's fame extended her influence beyond print and into television programs like PBS's Bill Moyers.^[29]

[edit] Cultivating Humanity

Cultivating Humanity^[30] appeals to classical Greek texts as a basis for defense and reform of the liberal education. Noting the Greek cynic philosopher Diogenes' aspiration to transcend "local origins and group memberships" in favor of becoming "a citizen of the world", Nussbaum traces the development of this idea through the Stoics, Cicero, and eventually modern liberalism of Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant. Nussbaum champions multiculturalism in the context of ethical universalism (utilitarianism), defends scholarly inquiry into race, gender, and human sexuality, and further develops the role of literature as narrative imagination into ethical questions.

At the same time, Nussbaum also censured certain scholarly trends. She excoriated deconstructionist Jacques Derrida as "simply not worth studying" and labels his analysis of Chinese culture "pernicious" and without "evidence of serious study". More broadly, Nussbaum criticized Michel Foucault for his "historical incompleteness and lack of conceptual clarity", but nevertheless singled him out for providing "the only truly important work to have entered philosophy under the banner of "postmodernism"."^[31] Nussbaum is even more critical of figures like Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and George Will for what she considers their "shaky" knowledge of non-Western cultures and inaccurate caricatures of today's humanities departments.

The New York Times praised Cultivating Humanity as "a passionate, closely argued defense of multiculturalism" and hailed it as "a formidable, perhaps definitive defense of diversity on American campuses"^[32] Nussbaum was the 2002 recipient of the University of Louisville Grawmeyer Award in Education.

In 2010, Nussbaum published Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, which extends the analysis of Cultivating Humanity to schools and universities in many different countries, arguing that liberal arts education, currently under threat all over the world, supplies skills without which democracies are unlikely to remain stable.

[edit] Sex & Social Justice

Sex and Social Justice sets out to demonstrate that sex and sexuality are morally irrelevant distinctions that have been artificially enforced as sources of social hierarchy; thus feminism and social justice have common concerns. Rebutting anti-universalist objections, Nussbaum proposes functional freedoms, or central human capabilities, as a rubric of social justice.^[33]

Nussbaum discusses at length the feminist critiques of liberalism itself, including the charge advanced by Alison Jaggar that liberalism demands "ethical egoism". Nussbaum notes that liberalism emphasizes respect for others as individuals, and further argues that Jaggar has elided the distinction between individualism and self-sufficiency. Nussbaum accepts Catharine MacKinnon's critique of abstract liberalism, assimilating the salience of history and context of group hierarchy and subordination, but concludes that this appeal is rooted in liberalism rather than a critique of it.^[34]

Nussbaum condemns the practice of female genital mutilation, citing deprivation of normative human functioning in its risks to health, impact on sexual functioning, violations of dignity, and conditions of non-autonomy. Emphasizing that female genital mutilation is carried out by brute force, its irreversibility, its non-consensual nature, and its links to customs of male domination, Nussbaum urges feminists to confront female genital mutilation as an issue of injustice.^[35]

Nussbaum also refines the concept of "objectification" as originally advanced by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Nussbaum defines the idea of treating as an object with seven qualities: instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity. Her characterization of pornography as a tool of objectification puts Nussbaum at odds with sex-positive feminism. At the same time, Nussbaum argues in support of the legalization of prostitution, a position she reiterated in a 2008 essay following the Spitzer scandal, writing "the idea that we ought to penalize women with few choices by removing one of the ones they do have is grotesque".^[36]

Sex and Social Justice was lauded by critics in the press. Salon declared, "She shows brilliantly how sex is used to deny some people – i.e., women and gay men – social justice".^[37] The New York Times praised the work as "elegantly written and closely argued".^[38] Kathryn Trevenen praised Nussbaum's effort to shift feminist concerns toward interconnected transnational efforts, and for explicating a set of universal guidelines to structure an agenda of social justice.^[39] Patrick Hopkins singled out for praise Nussbaum's "masterful" chapter on sexual objectification.^[40] Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin faulted Nussbaum for "consistent over-intellectualisation of emotion, which has the inevitable consequence of mistaking suffering for cruelty".^[41]

[edit] Hiding from Humanity

Hiding from Humanity^[42] extends Nussbaum's work in moral psychology to probe the arguments for including two emotions — shame and disgust — as legitimate bases for legal judgments. Nussbaum argues that individuals tend to repudiate their bodily imperfection or animality through the projection of fears about contamination. This cognitive response is in itself irrational, because we cannot transcend the animality of our bodies. Noting how projective disgust has wrongly justified group subordination (mainly of women, Jews, and homosexuals), Nussbaum ultimately discards disgust as a reliable basis of judgment.

Turning to shame, Nussbaum argues that shame takes too broad a target, attempting to inculcate humiliation on a scope that is too intrusive and limiting on human freedom. Nussbaum sides with John Stuart Mill in narrowing legal concern to acts that cause a distinct and assignable harm.

In an interview with Reason magazine, Nussbaum elaborated, "Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of non-harmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy".^[43]

Nussbaum's work was received with wide praise. The Boston Globe called her argument "characteristically lucid" and hailed her as "America's most prominent philosopher of public life".^[44] Her reviews in national newspapers and magazines garnered unanimous praise.^[45] In academic circles, Stefanie A. Lindquist of Vanderbilt University lauded Nussbaum's analysis as a "remarkably wide ranging and nuanced treatise on the interplay between emotions and law".^[46]

A prominent exception was Roger Kimball's review published in the New Criterion,^[47] in which he accused Nussbaum of "fabricating" the renewed prevalence of shame and disgust in public discussions and says she intends to "undermine the inherited moral wisdom of millennia". He rebukes her for "contempt for the opinions of ordinary people" and ultimately accuses Nussbaum herself of "hiding from humanity".

Nussbaum has recently drawn on and extended her work on disgust to produce a new analysis of the legal issues regarding sexual orientation and same-sex conduct. Her book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and the Constitution was published by Oxford University Press in 2009, as part of their "Inalienable Rights" series, edited by Geoffrey Stone.^[48]

[edit] From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law

In the 2010 book From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law Martha Nussbaum analyzes the role that disgust plays in law and public debate in the United States.^[49] The book primarily analyzes constitutional legal issues facing gay and lesbian Americans but also analyzes issues such as anti-miscegenation statutes, segregation, antisemitism and the caste system in India as part of its broader thesis regarding the "politics of disgust".

Nussbaum posits that the fundamental motivations of those advocating legal restrictions against gay and lesbian Americans is a "politics of disgust". These legal restrictions include blocking sexual orientation being protected under anti-discrimination laws (See: Romer v. Evans), sodomy laws against consenting adults (See: Lawrence v. Texas) and constitutional bans against same-sex marriage (See: California Proposition 8 (2008)).

She identifies the "politics of disgust" closely with Lord Devlin and his famous opposition to the Wolfenden report that recommended decriminalizing private consensual homosexual acts on the basis that those things would "disgust the average man". To Devlin, the mere fact some people or act may produce popular emotional reactions of disgust provides an appropriate guide for legislating. She also identifies the 'wisdom of repugnance' as advocated by Leon Kass as another "politics of disgust" school of thought as it claims that disgust "in crucial cases...repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power fully to articulate it".

Martha Nussbaum goes on to explicitly oppose the concept of a disgust-based morality as an appropriate guide for legislating. Nussbaum notes that popular disgust has been used throughout history as a justification for persecution. Drawing upon her earlier work on the relationship between disgust & shame, Nussbaum notes that at various times racism, antisemitism, sexism, have all been driven by popular revulsion.^[50]

In place of this "politics of disgust", Nussbaum argues for the Harm principle from John Stuart Mill as the proper basis for limiting individual liberties. Nussbaum argues the harm principle, which supports the legal ideas of consent, the age of majority and privacy, protects citizens while the "politics of disgust" is merely an unreliable emotional reaction with no inherent wisdom. Furthermore Nussbaum argues this "politics of disgust" has denied and continues to deny citizens humanity and equality before the law on no rational grounds and causes palpable social harms to the groups affected.

From Disgust to Humanity earned acclaim in major U.S. publications,^{[51][52][53][54]} and prompted interviews in the New York Times and other magazines.^[55][56] One conservative magazine, The American Spectator, offered a dissenting view, writing, "[H]er account of the "politics of disgust" lacks coherence, and "the politics of humanity" betrays itself by not treating more sympathetically those opposed to the gay rights movement. The article also argues that book is marred by factual errors and inconsistencies.^[57]

The Capability approach[link]

During the 1980s Nussbaum collaborated with economist Amartya Sen on issues of development and ethics which culminated in The Quality of Life, published in 1993 by Oxford University Press. Together with Sen and a group of younger scholars, Nussbaum founded the Human Development and Capability Association in 2003. With Sen, she promoted the "capabilities approach" to development, which views capabilities ("substantial freedoms", such as the ability to live to old age, engage in economic transactions, or participate in political activities) as the constitutive parts of development, and poverty as capability-deprivation. This contrasts with traditional utilitarian views that see development purely in terms of economic growth, and poverty purely as income-deprivation. It is also universalist, and therefore contrasts with relativist approaches to development. Much of the work is presented from an Aristotelian perspective.

Nussbaum furthered the capabilities approach in Frontiers of Justice (2006), to expand upon social contractarian explanations of justice, as developed most extensively by John Rawls' in his Theory of Justice, Political Liberalism, The Law of Peoples, and related works. Nussbaum argues that standard social contractarianism, while far better than utilitarianism in providing a satisfactory framework for justice, relies on the belief and assumption that cooperation is pursued for the purpose of securing mutual advantage. Views deriving from the classical tradition of the social contract, she argues, have great difficulty dealing with issues of basic justice and substantial freedom in situations where there are great asymmetries of power between the parties. As such, Nussbaum argues that the procedural justice-based approach of contractarianism therefore fails to address areas in which symmetrical advantage does not exist, namely, in the context of justice for the disabled, transnational justice, and justice for non-human animals ("the three frontiers").

Noting that Rawls himself acknowledged the failure of his theory of justice to comprehensively address these three frontiers, Nussbaum claims that Rawls's attempt to expand his theory to address one of these areas — transnational justice — is "ultimately unsatisfying" because he fails to follow through with the essential elements developed in A Theory of Justice, namely, by relaxing some of the key assumptions about the parties to the original contract. Nussbaum argues that the contractarian approach cannot explain justice in the absence of free, equal and independent parties in an original position in which "all have something with which to bargain and none have too much" (with reference to Rousseau and Hume), concluding that the procedural perspective alone cannot provide an adequate theory of justice.

To address this perceived problem, Nussbaum introduces the capabilities approach, an outcome-oriented view that seeks to determine what basic principles, and adequate measure thereof, would fulfill a life of human dignity. She frames these basic principles in terms of ten capabilities, i.e. real opportunities based on personal and social circumstance. Nussbaum posits that justice demands the pursuit, for all citizens, of a minimum threshold of these ten capabilities. She further developed the idea of the threshold, with reference to constitutional law, in her Foreword to the 2007 Supreme Court issue of the Harvard Law Review, "Constitutions and Capabilities: 'Perception' Against Lofty Formalism", which would ultimately appear in revised form as the book Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (2011). Creating Capabilities presents the approach in a brief and accessible form for a general audience. Her book, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (Basic Books 2008) explores the constitutional requirements of justice in the area of religious liberty. Nussbaum's major current work-in-progress, projected in the final chapter of Frontiers of Justice, is a book on the moral psychology of the capabilities approach, which will bring together her work on the emotions with the analysis of social justice. This book is under contract to Harvard University Press. The book entitled The Cosmopolitan Tradition is also under contract to Harvard University Press.

Bibliography[link]

• Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978)
• The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), ISBN 0-521-25768-9; Second edition (2001), ISBN 0-521-79126-X.
• Love's Knowledge (1990)
• Nussbaum, Martha, and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty. Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)
• Nussbaum, Martha, and Amartya Sen. The Quality of Life. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1993)
• The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994); Second edition with a new introduction by the author (2009), ISBN 978-0-691-14131-2.
• Poetic Justice (1996)
• For Love of Country (1996)
• Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (1997)
• Sex and Social Justice (1998)
• Plato's Republic: The Good Society and The Deformation of Desire (1998)
• Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (2000)
• Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001)
• Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (2004) (Trad. esp.: El ocultamiento de lo humano. Repugnancia, vergüenza y ley, Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2006, ISBN 978-84-609-8354-5).
• Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (edited with Cass Sunstein) (2004)
• Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006)
• The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future, (2007) ISBN 0-674-02482-6.
  • Reviewed in Pankaj Mishra, "Impasse in India" The New York Review of Books 54/11 (28 June 2007) : 48-51
• Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America's Tradition of Religious Equality (2008)
• From Disgust to Humanity: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law (2010).
• Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-691-14064-3 (Trad. esp.: Sin fines de lucro. Por qué la democracia necesita de las humanidades, Buenos Aires/Madrid, Katz editores S.A, 2010, ISBN 978-84-92946-17-4).
• Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Harvard University Press, 2011.
• "Philosophical Interventions: Book Reviews 1986-2011", Oxford University Press, 2012.
• "The New Religious Intolerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in an Anxious Age," Harvard University Press, 2012.

Awards and honors[link]

Honorary degrees[link]

She has 40 honorary degrees from colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia, including from:^[58]

• Mount Holyoke College,
• Wabash College,
• Emory University,
• Grinnell College,
• Williams College,
• Colgate University,
• The College of William and Mary,
• The University of St Andrews (Scotland),
• The University of Edinburgh (Scotland),
• The Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium),
• The University of Toronto (Canada),
• The Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France),
• The New School University (New York City),
• The University of Haifa (Israel),
• Ohio State University,
• The University of North Carolina at Asheville,
• Bielefeld University (Germany),
• and Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.).
• The Institute of Social Studies (ISS) awarded its honorary doctorate to her in 2006.

Awards[link]

• 1990: Brandeis Creative Arts Award in Non-Fiction
• 1991: PEN Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the best collection of essays
• 1998: Ness Book Award of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (Cultivating Humanity)
• 2000: Book award of the North American Society for Social Philosophy (Sex and Social Justice)
• 2002: Grawemeyer Award in Education (Cultivating Humanity)
• 2003: Barnard College Medal of Distinction
• 2004: Association of American University Publishers Professional and Scholarly Book Award for Law (Hiding From Humanity)
• 2005: listed among the world's Top 100 intellectuals by Foreign Policy (as well as in 2008 and 2010)^[59] and Prospect magazines.^[60]
• 2007: Radcliffe Alumnae Recognition Award
• 2009: American Philosophical Society's Henry M. Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence.^[61]
• 2012: Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences

See also[link]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• Nussbaum's University of Chicago faculty website

References[link]