Sublime

researchers working in university departments of psychology were in the grip of behaviourism, which discounted innate or genetic factors,

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat

The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background, is, however incorrigible it may se

It comes down to the unresolved question of whether gays are exactly like everybody else other than in one single characteristic. Or whether that single characteristic makes gays utterly unlike the rest of society. It is a divide which falls into two broad camps. In the first are those who believe that gays are – and should be – just like everybody

Where Balibar, as a consequence, sees our inconvertible cruelty as always about to undermine our politics, and our confidence in politics, Wendy Brown sees neoliberalism – which she defines in Undoing the Demos as ‘a peculiar form of reason that configures all aspects of existence in economic terms’ – as ‘quietly undoing basic elements of democracy

liberalism: firstly, that humans will lose their value completely; secondly, that humans will still be valuable collectively, but they will lose their individual authority, and will instead be managed by external algorithms.

“biological essentialism”

Le racisme traditionnel s’enracinait solidement dans des théories biologiques. Dans les années 1890 ou 1930, il était largement admis en Grande-Bretagne, en Australie ou aux États-Unis que certains traits biologiques héréditaires rendaient les Africains ou les Chinois naturellement moins intelligents, moins entreprenants et moins moraux que les Eur