The article engages with the relationship between feminist scholarship and the discipline of International Relations. Taking a step back from the recurrent concerns with marginality and those with the absent feminist revolution in IR, we recast the problem of the complicated ménage between feminism and the fi eld of IR as a case of a failure to love. Drawing on the sociology of thinking of Randall Collins and his theory of interaction ritual chains, we read the logic of practice in intellectual fi elds as one rooted in emotion. In this framework, we theorize citation practices as bearing the trace of intellectuals' emotionloaded coalitions of the mind. The article maps out the intellectual coalitions in IR with respect to the feminist question by reconstructing the citation networks emerging from the special issue of Millennium, published in 1988 on 'Women in IR'. The maps we put together are read as snapshots of the emotional economy of IR, allowing further refl ection about the status of feminist scholarship in IR, about intellectual creativity and about change and stasis in our discipline. We conclude that it is IR which is in trouble, not feminists, with regard to creative potential. Feminists are not marginal in or to IR; instead they are part of a ring of creativity connecting the emotional energies of different disciplinary fi elds.
Ever since feminist voices started to be heard in the field of International Relations (IR) more than two decades ago, the discipline has undergone important changes. These changes unfold at the level of the disciplinary imaginary, which means that our accounts of the legitimate units in the organization of knowledge are unsettled and the center–periphery topography of the discipline is reconfigured. By reflecting on the case of feminist knowledge production in IR, I propose a rethinking of the encounter orthodoxy‐meets‐heterodoxy, which allows us to conceive of heterodoxy as an active part, one that does and is not only being done. Ultimately, this contributes to the understanding of the creation of novelty in contemporary intellectual fields, and it recovers feminists in IR as reflexive artisans devising local modes of subversive action.
Abstract:The article is an exploration of urban imaginaries emerging through a play with materials. Starting from a complex activist exercise for reimagining the space of a park in decay, whose protagonists are children, we propose a reflection on the productivity and resilience of matter. We argue that a new materialist sociology is one that takes disappearances seriously. Capitalism renders space abstract not only through flow and circulation, but also through stillness. We follow the curious disappearances and reappearances of the park in question, tracing the mutations of urban planning, of the juridical domain, and of the everyday use of space. Finally, we analyse the making of a maquette of the park by a group of children and their alliances with activists. The maquette is a political "thing": it leads us away from an urban imaginary populated by discrete objects to an urban imaginary of depth and it reconcretises space. Key words: children's imaginaries, radical social imaginaries, new materialism, children's participation.3 Introduction In his writings Althusser (2006) insisted that materialism is the most difficult problem that we encounter as social thinkers. We here propose a sociology of disappearances and reappearances, as part of a new materialism of the encounter. Things are not static, but they are in constant movement. Things leak out of themselves. Things leak into invisibility. The new materialist sociology we argue for is one that takes disappearances seriously.In the past two decades, a creative place of utterance has emerged in critical urban scholarship: it is a place defined by surpassing a firm opposition between poststructuralism (which has tended to dispense with things) and Marxian phenomenology (which has tended to substitute things for objects, and to argue that we have lost the thingness of things to objects). The productivity and the resilience of matter became the most important materialist story to recuperate (Coole and Frost 2010). Matter returned, but in its processual insistence, as matter that becomes, rather than as matter that is.To this discussion, we add two peculiar questions. How can we tell a story of a disappearance of an urban space (here, it is the space of a park) from urban imaginaries? As we show, capital accumulation turns space invisible. How does space reappear through creative alliances of children and activists around materials? By
Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) brought a lot of new possibilities to psychoanalytic theory, but also a series of losses. While I recognize the importance of the death drive as a metapsychological construct, I argue that the first thing that went missing with the arrival of this groundbreaking Freudian text is the theorization of the ego instincts or the self-preservative drives. Freud never articulated some plausible inheritors of the ego instincts. I follow the Budapest School, and especially the voice of Sándor Ferenczi, for addressing this loss. The second thing that went missing after Beyond the Pleasure Principle is our openness in thinking through repetition. With the seductive formulation of the "daemonic" repetition in this 1920 text, our theoretical imagination around repetition seems to have been affected. I draw on the work of Sándor Ferenczi for exploring new forms of repetition. Finally, I offer a Ferenczian re-reading of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit, which I see as crucial in the process of pluralizing our thinking on repetition.
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