Somaesthetics, Foucauldian Aesthetics of Existence, and Living Ethically as White
Editor(s)
Stefano Marino & Valentina Antoniol
Document Type
Chapter
Publication Date
1-2024
Abstract
My aim in this chapter is to examine Michel Foucault’s and Richard Shusterman’s conceptions of an aesthetics of existence as responses to challenges of contemporary race matters. Specifically, I situate their work in relation to recent calls for new ways of living and being in the world as white (e.g., Alcoff 2015; Yancy 2016; Sullivan 2019). As Shannon Sullivan has argued, to make a positive contribution to the quest for racial justice white people “need to develop a racial identity alternative to what a white racist society demands of them”—that is, “a different set of virtues, a different ethos” (Sullivan 2014a: 139, 147). Challenging white supremacy demands not only the critique of white power and privilege, but a reconstruction of what it means to live and be in the world as white.
Calls for the transformation and even the elimination of whiteness abound in recent work in Critical Philosophy of Race and Critical Whiteness Studies. However, these well-intentioned efforts face myriad obstacles and lacunae as they attempt to develop concrete practices for change. In ways we are still coming to understand, white privilege and white supremacy “warp” white people (Sullivan 2019: 109), both epistemically and ethically. The prevalence of white ignorance, understood as a form of cognitive-affective dysfunction that thwarts efforts at self-knowledge (Medina 2013), renders white people “incapable of behaving ethically especially with regard to racial matters, and they generally cannot see or understand themselves as unethical” (Sullivan 2014b: 596). Little clarity exists about how to remedy these ethical and epistemic deficits and advance the reconstructive project of developing a new ethics and aesthetics of white existence....
Publication
Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman's Somaesthetics: Ethics, Politics, and the Art of Living
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Pages
145-164
Chapter
7
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Recommended Citation
Voparil, C. (2024). Somaesthetics, Foucauldian aesthetics of existence, and living ethically as white. In V. Antoniol, & S. Marino (Eds.), Foucault's aesthetics of existence and Shusterman's somaesthetics: Ethics, politics, and the art of living (pp. 145-164). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350404885.ch-7
