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Staff Profile

Dr Tina Chanter

Reader in Philosophy and Feminist Theory

Background

My interests are in contemporary French philosophy (Levinas, Rancière, Kofman, Kristeva, Irigaray, and Derrida, for example), and feminist theory. I have published in the areas of art and politics, tragedy (with special reference to Antigone), film, and psychoanalysis. Among my current research interests is a continuing attempt to think with (and sometimes against) Rancière's engagement with the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics, an ongoing effort to reflect upon how philosophy has been shaped by its problematic encounters with sites of race, gender and class, and an engagement with Shakespeare and continental philosophy around the question of language and names. In recent work I have considered Sylvia Wynter's critique of Irigaray, drawing connections between this critique, which focuses on Shakespeare's The Tempest, and the way in which public memorialisation of women subjected to violence continues to be racialised. I have also explored the relationship of Rancière's understanding of politics to black lives matter. I am also engaged in some creative writing, that straddles prose and poetry. While grounded in philosophy, my work is self-consciously interdisciplinary. In ongoing or forthcoming work, I engage the relationship between Levinas and Arendt, asking how their work approaches similar questions from different angles.

The modules I currently teach are Ethics and the Modern World, Phenomenology, and Consciousness, Art and Technology.

I am interested in, and invite PhD proposals in areas connected to the topics indicated above, and related areas. Specifically, these include (but are not limited to):

aesthetics and politics (especially in relation to Ranciere)

feminist theory (especially in relation to race theory, literature, art and film)

Levinas (especially in relation to aesthetics and the il y a or there is)



Research

Abstracts of recent and current work:

Kristeva’s Traumatic Real: Securing the Symbolic Nation Through the Law of the Veil 

 

Western imaginaries have become invested in the symbolism of the veil as threatening, as castrating, as a placeholder for the traumatic real—that which holds in place systems of meaning but which itself can only be indicated as somehow unimaginable, unrepresentable, the objet petit a. The logic that is installed here involves a projection in which the trauma of colonization for the colonized is denied or disavowed, displaced onto the colonizer, who finds him/herself traumatized in the face of the veil. This essay asks: do Kristeva’s views on veiling amount to a performance of castration anxiety with regard to those who practice it? While answering affirmatively, I also indicate the resources offered in Kristeva’s work to suggest an alternative answer. If art, along with psychoanalysis, is understood as a site of expression for singularity, why is the singularity of each woman’s decision of whether to wear a veil not appreciated?


Rethinking the Sublime in Kant and Shakespeare: Gender, Race and Abjection

I discuss Kant’s understanding of aesthetics, by supplementing feminist critiques of the way Kant aligned the sublime with masculinity, and the beautiful with femininity with a consideration of race. I argue that Kant’s gendered aesthetics is thoroughly enmeshed in his views on race. In order to illustrate this, I draw on recent feminist discussions of abjection in relation to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which, Kristeva has argued, is ‘edged’ with the sublime. Building on Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, which she regards as the defining text of modernism, I suggest Wynter retrieves the figure of Caliban from the abject monstrosity into which it has been cast, by her decolonial reading which posits his absent ‘physiognomically complementary mate’ as the true abject figure of modernity.


How can Rancière help us to think the black lives matter movement, and how can the black lives movement help us to rethink Rancière?

 

To what extent can Ranciére’s understanding of politics as dissensus shed light on the black lives matter movement, and to what extent can the black lives matter movement shed light on Ranciére’s understanding of politics? In order to address these two questions I consider black lives matter, and in particular taking a knee, as exemplary of the polemical dynamic that Ranciére construes as a staging of politics, which contests the common-sense distribution of the sensible, characteristic of the police order. I also respond to Nick Bromell’s challenge to those who use Rancière as a frame of reference to discuss the black lives matter movement, without also drawing on black thought to problematize how Rancière’s thought participates in an invisibly white philosophy. While I dispute some of the details of Bromell’s critique of Rancière, I agree in some respects with the broad claim that Rancière speaks from a position that is not marked by race. I explore how this is the case, for example, specifically in relation to how Rancière formulates disidentification in relation to a demonstration that took place in the 1960s toward the end of the Algerian war.

Becoming Beyoncé: Disidentification and Racial Imaginaries

In this essay I hold in tension with one another two identificatory scenarios, the first of which shores up and recapitulates racial stereotypes, while the second, I suggest, stages an ethico-political intervention in the circulation of such stereotypes by offering a divergent racial imaginary. The first scenario is that which fuelled, informed, and was crystallised in, a cartoon depicting African-American tennis star Serena Williams and mixed-race tennis champion Naomi Osaka after the controversy that marked the final of a tennis grand slam event. The second scenario is humorously and poignantly explored and celebrated in Luisa Omeilan’s comedic performance What would Beyoncé Do?, originally performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and subsequently filmed by the BBC.

In a complex negotiation of her identificatory relationship in Beyoncé, Omeilan navigates her disidentification with the pop star icon in various registers, while firmly installing her in a position of symbolic authority at the same time as invoking her as the figure she wishes to resemble. Omeilan humorously declares herself to be Beyoncé, and continually invites her audience to play at being Beyoncé too. Omeilan recuperates the ‘often effaced presence of black production’ (Muñoz 1999, 44) thereby making a symbolic intervention that destabilizes whiteness as a master signifier. In doing so she disidentifies white feminist subjectivity from an unproblematic relationship to the privilege of whiteness, placing Beyoncé at the centre of her identificatory narrative. If Irigaray enacts a parodic mimesis, showing how women’s bodies and thought have constituted the excluded ground of the Western canon and culture, Omeilan answers to her call to produce positive imaginary and symbolic interventions, by supplementing Irigaray’s focus on sexual difference through a transformation of mimesis into a joyful celebration of Beyoncé that not only challenges whiteness as a master signifier.

Teaching

In all my teaching my effort is to be clear without sacrificing sophistication. I try to inject considerations concerning race and gender into the modules I teach to some degree.

Recent figures and topics in Ethics have included Arendt, Butler, Levinas and Maldonado-Torres et. al., focusing on Arendt's discussion of Eichmann, Butler's considerations of what it means to give an account of oneself, Levinas's conception of substitution, and reflections by Maldonado-Torres (and his co-authors) on decolonisaiton.

Recent figures and topics in Phenomenology have featured Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Levinas, Ricoeur and Waldenfels, focusing on the theme of the Other.

Recent figures and topics in Consciousness, Art and Technology have included Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, Heidegger, Levinas, Lacan, Kristeva and Wynter, focusing on topics such as the death of the author, Levinas on art and philosophy, Heidegger's discussion of art, psychoanalytic critiques of film, abjection and art, and decolonising Shakespeare.

Publications