DN Reading Group

Dear all

We wanted to make you aware of our DiscourseNet Reading Group, which e-meets every month for 90 minutes on Zoom to discuss a pre-selected reading. If you are interested in joining in, just sign up here https://discourseanalysis.net/readinggroup and you will receive further information on dates and readings, as well as the meeting invites. 

In our next session on Tuesday, 8 February 2022, 13-14.30 CET, we will discuss the essay "Black Radical Kantianism" by the Jamaican and US-American philosopher Charles W. Mills, who sadly and rather suddenly passed away last September. In the essay, Mills discusses how a Kantian philosophy of moral politics can be appropriated in Afro-modernity. Learning from Marxian and feminist appropriations of Kant, the Kantian ethics of Rawls, various Black radical writers, as well as from Kant's own racist passages, Mills demonstrates that the modern nation state and liberal democratic capitalism are fundamentally predicated on the category of race: "If the ideal is the Rechtsstaat, the reality is the Rassenstaat" (Mills 2018: 26). Mills' formulation of a black radical Kantianism deploys a matrix of racialised relationships of respect and disrespect to explore the moral and political possibilities of a race-sensitive categorical imperative and it's role in the Afro-modern anti-racist struggle. 

We hope to see you next Tuesday. We will send out a Zoom link on Monday evening. More information and a link to the reading, can be found on our group page: https://discourseanalysis.net/readinggroup

If you have some questions, or if you would like to suggest a reading for the next months, please send Jaspal a message at jaspal.singh@open.ac.uk.

All best wishes

Jens, Kaushalya, Jaspal and Jan