James Garrison, "Reconsidering the Life of Power: Ritual, Body, and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy" (SUNY Press, 2021)
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What is the central thesis of James Garrison’s book and why did he write it?
Welcome to the new books network.
Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Malcolm Keating and today we'll be talking to James Garrison, author of Reconsidering the Life of Power, Ritual, Body and Art in Critical Theory and Chinese Philosophy, published in twenty twenty one by SUNY Press. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy, James.
Oh it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Malcolm.
Yeah, thanks for for for joining us. So your book focuses on, as the title says, Chinese philosophy and the broadly continental tradition of philosophy. So uh before we get into the details, can you tell us your book's thesis and kind of a nutshell and why you thought it was important to write?
Yeah, um well I'm not sure if I can uh uh get it into a nutshell, but I'll do my best here. Um So very simply On the continental critical theory side of things, we have thinkers like Judith Butler and Michelle Foucault who variously examine The contemporary condition of the subject of of the person in society. as um being uh bodily as being um discursive so being called into a certain mode of existence uh through how we're addressed um it and and throughout the everyday uh and being ritually impelled where our uh various identities be that they as um black, woman, professor, police officer, uh whatsoever, um uh and our forms of address hail us into a kind of performative script, uh uh living out this performative script.
And uh whereas this is dealt with in uh often uh pejorative terms in this i uh in the critical theory tradition I want to look at resources from other traditions that А де дав симлер прецепс. uh and uh that that that um have maybe been working on this notion of ritual a lot longer and and dealing with uh conceptual forks in the road um for for uh you know a couple of millennia that the critical theorists are only now kind of dealing with so uh the Here I'm turning to the Confucian tradition, uh both old and new, uh classical thinkers going back to say four hundred B C E or so, all the way up to the contemporary, um Confucian theorists that are maybe uh inflecting um Marxism a and uh
And Uh looking at um resources uh uh that m one might call aesthetic in nature looking at uh the self cultivation uh um uh potential with uh with ritual um and and uh primarily focusing on confucianism. uh but also anticipating and I have to tackle this in future works, uh critiques from other East Asian traditions uh uh um concerning this topic of ritual that we get from say Taoism and Buddhism.
Right. So that that's a I'd say a very good nutshell there, and we'll be able to unpack a lot of the the different aspects that you just mentioned as we go on. But let's take a uh second just to ask you how you came to be interested in the topics in this book and uh Chinese philosophy, continental philosophy in particular.
Well, it's rather roundabout. Uh I Uh I I I did philosophy as an undergraduate student and I studied German at the time. I'd been working in IT um and just to kinda support myself while uh being a student. And um Had Kind of um floated into grad school. I I that might not be the right term, but but um I I had kind of thought I might be doing an IT sort of career and um that just didn't quite take And I'd always had uh an interest in global philosophy and intercultural philosophy. So I directed myself to uh what I think is is probably the uh at least one of the preeminent institutions for this, the University of Hawaii. And uh I'd actually thought uh that I would take uh Indian philosophy courses when uh starting there that uh with my background and
uh in IT and in programming and in logics and and whatnot. that uh you know, like looking at Niaya number theory and whatnot would be interesting. Um, it just so happened that my first semester there there just weren't any such classes like that. um available, but there were classes in Chinese philosophy. So I fell into the orbit of uh of Roger Ames, the uh major uh translator and interpreter uh uh of the uh Chinese tradition, um and uh absolute role model to me.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central thesis of James Garrison’s book and why did he write it?
0:01–9:29
2
How does Garrison connect contemporary critical theory (Butler, Foucault) with Confucian philosophy?
9:29–16:31
3
What personal and academic experiences led Garrison to focus on Chinese and continental philosophy?
16:31–24:10
4
How does Garrison define the role of ritual, body, and art in Confucian thought?
24:10–31:43
5
What is ‘subjectivation’ versus ‘subjectality’ and how do they relate to power relations?
31:43–39:57
6
How does the book address race, embodiment, and the politics of mourning?
39:57–49:11
7
What is the significance of the ‘rectification of names’ and funerary rites in Confucian ethics?
49:11–58:03
8
What future projects is Garrison pursuing and how might they expand on his current work?
58:03–1:04:51
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