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Ethics And Affects: A Critique Of Social Intelligibility With Adorno, Butler And Spivak, Jana Mcauliffe

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

In Ethics and affects: a critique of social intelligibility with Adorno, Butler and Spivak I offer a critical analysis that can help to disentangle the reliance of social legitimacy on social intelligibility. I maintain that legitimacy and intelligibility are woven into a kind of double-bind, wherein the illegitimacy of some social identities contributes to a continued unintelligibility of some experiences, while that unintelligibility in turn works to preclude legitimacy. There is thus an injustice, or at least something rather like an injustice, to the ways social intelligibility and social legitimacy are entangled. The central argument here is that critique that …