The sense of belonging: perception, pluralism and the postwar citizen-subject

Abstract

Critiquing the Rawlsian use of Kant's philosophy of experience, this dissertation draws on Benjamin's and Deleuze's intervention into the Critique of Judgment in order to affirm a "higher experience" beyond that through which postwar American citizen-subjectivity is assembled. Specifically, it engages the habits of perception and recollection as they emerged in the period with respect to sight, sound and smell, within the domains of indigeneity, raciality and ethnicity. Instead of a merely pluralist mode of political belonging, it articulates one that is pluralizing, thinking through what it might mean to belong to becoming rather than being.