Cara S. Greene is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy on the University of New Mexico. She’s a recipient of the 2022–2023 Bilinski fellowship and the UNM Dean’s dissertation fellowship, and he or she’s a member of the APA Graduate Scholar Council. Cara resides in Los Angeles and writing her dissertation on fashionable sacrifice within the considered Hegel and the Frankfurt College.
What are you engaged on proper now?
I’m engaged on my dissertation, which issues the theme of “fashionable sacrifice” within the work of Hegel and the Frankfurt School. Mostly, these thinkers make the most of the idea of sacrifice to point a second within the growth of subjectivity, “self-sacrifice” because it pertains to the structure of the fashionable ego, very like the Freudian concept of sublimation. Not like sacrifice “correct” nevertheless, which includes a sacrificial agent and a sufferer, this type of self-contained sacrifice solely includes one entity, a topic, and the harmful dimension of this sacrifice is metaphorical: the requisite destruction is immaterial. After I began analyzing these traditions’ respective critiques of recent motive—an mental paradigm Hegel calls “the Understanding” and members of the Frankfurt College name “instrumental motive”—it grew to become obvious that each perceive fashionable motive as a strategy of dividing up or “abstracting” actuality into two distinct and opposed elements—the infinite and the finite, the actual and the common, the topic and the item, and so forth.—and establishing the dominance of 1 time period over the opposite. They describe this rational motion of isolation and domination utilizing the language of violence and homicide: Hegel characterizes nineteenth-century pure science’s quest to categorize the manifold of sensuous actuality as “depriv[ing it] of life… being flayed after which seeing its pores and skin wrapped round a dull information,” and Adorno and Horkheimer describe the fashionable pursuit of controlling nature to ascertain a much less brutal technique of existence as “mimesis[…]of dying.” Although these thinkers don’t develop systematic theories of recent sacrifice as a bloody expression and consequence of Enlightenment thought, a latent idea of recent sacrifice, as a concrete slightly than summary phenomenon, is nonetheless legible on the floor of their oeuvres.
This summer time, I’m writing my second chapter, which issues Adorno and Horkheimer’s therapy of Homer’s Odyssey within the Dialectic of Enlightenment and Hegel’s therapy of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew within the Phenomenology of Spirit. Whereas my third chapter offers with the sacrifice of people in service of the preservation of the fashionable state in the course of the French Revolution and World Struggle II, my second chapter issues a phenomenon I name “discursive crafty,” a contemporary linguistic comportment that exploits conceptual or perspectival ambiguity, which successfully establishes the requisite indifference to nature and others that permits the rationalization of violence and homicide.
What do you love to do exterior work?
I’ve the privilege of residing in a spot with nice meals, excellent climate, and a year-round rising season, so my accomplice and I’ve a Sunday morning ritual that includes grabbing tacos for breakfast, perusing the native farmer’s market, and happening a protracted hike.
What’s your favourite vacation and why?
My favourite vacation is the Jewish vacation of Passover, which is widely known over a meal known as a seder. In the course of the seder, individuals retell the story of the liberation of the Jews from enslavement utilizing symbolic meals to characterize totally different features of the Exodus story. I discover that collectively retelling the Passover story yearly forces seder individuals to acknowledge that the freedoms we get pleasure from within the current are enabled by the struggles of previous generations—a recognition that additionally forces us to consider our obligation to combat types of oppression and enslavement that exist immediately. The Passover seder additionally options the “Hillel sandwich,” comprised of bitter horseradish (maror) and a candy combination of fruit and nuts (charoset) between two items of flatbread (matzah), a mixture that sounds disgusting however is surprisingly scrumptious.
Who do you suppose is probably the most overrated / underrated thinker?
I feel Spinoza is each probably the most overrated and underrated thinker (an opinion that matches properly together with his metaphysics).
What books are presently in your ‘to learn’ listing?
I simply began Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies Vol. I and I hope to learn Lukács’s The Destruction of Reason someday within the subsequent few months. These books assist illuminate the connection between fascism and the hatred of ladies, in addition to fascism and irrationalism, romanticism, and anti-intellectualism—all of which appear to be rising in reputation immediately. Although these texts concern the mental and social situations of twentieth-century German Nazism and its precursors—and as such, can’t totally account for the modern forces which have led to the resurgence of fascism within the twenty-first century—they nonetheless present that politics isn’t essentially separate from cultural and philosophical actions. These aren’t precisely seaside reads, so I even have a ebook concerning the historical past of ladies’s health, titled Let’s Get Physical, in addition to my buddy Jess’s new younger grownup novel about sleepaway camp, The Counselors, on my nightstand.
What’s your least favourite kind of fruit and why?
The unassertive melons, honeydew and cantaloupe, as a result of they’re largely used as filler to bulk up an in any other case thrilling fruit salad. A fruit salad ought to by no means include greater than 40% honeydew and cantaloupe. If these constantly disappointing melons got an opportunity to shine exterior of the fruit salad context, maybe my reply would change.
This part of the APA Weblog is designed to get to know our fellow philosophers somewhat higher. We’re together with profiles of APA members that highlight what captures their curiosity not solely contained in the workplace, but additionally exterior of it. We’d love so that you can be part of it, so please contact us by way of the interview nomination form here to appoint your self or a buddy.
