Reasons for Self-Dislocating

Miriam Jerade (bio)

A review of Cadahia, Luciana, and Ana Carrasco-Conde, editors. Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse. Herder, 2020.

This edited collection features contributions by Spanish-speaking women scholars who share the same motif—self-dislocation. The eleven authors seek to question the locus of philosophy and the discourses that frame it. The book is founded on the idea that philosophy has been historically enunciated by a male voice located in an Anglo-American geography. As the editors claim in the introduction, the self-dislocating logos is a loxos, a “taking away,” being mis-placed. This is reflected in the title of the volume, Fuera de sí mismas (Out of Their Minds), a play on words that echoes the language of mania but seeks to redress it as contrary to nonsense. Editors Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde propose that this form of collaboration allows women philosophers to claim back for themselves a voice of their own. The play between title and subtitle is also worth noticing. The title phrase “fuera de sí mismas” leads the reader to think of a judgment from outside—a female “they” who is “out of their mind” or even more literally “out of themselves.” The subtitle can be read as a response. There are indeed “reasons for dislocating” (“motivos para dislocarse”) the self, for making themselves uncomfortable, or self-dislocating. The contributors find themselves in a place where the voices of Spanish-speaking women philosophers are not heard. In response, the authors collectively claim the need to be creative and to dislocate the discourse. As Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde state in the introduction, “Only by being out of our minds/ourselves can we dislocate imposed places of enunciation that have turned aside our way of making philosophy, so we can open up new paths for a new logic” (“Solo estando fuera de sí mismas podemos desquiciar lugares de enunciación impuestos que han relegado nuestra forma de hacer filosofía y encontrar los caminos de una nueva lógica”; 18).¹ It is not enough to publish philosophical research conducted by women in Spanish; more significantly, the collection explores a new logic of philosophical discourse through their interventions.

The volume was not originally conceived as a collection of chapters focusing on feminism or on Latin American philosophy. The editors asked eleven renowned Latin American women scholars to send them texts about their current work. While the volume is not organized thematically, common topics arise in the essays. Anna Maria Brigante and Emma Ingala Gómez explore the image. Laura Quintana and Amanda Núñez García examine the possibility of political thought through aesthetics. María del Rosario Acosta and Rosaura Martínez Ruiz share a concern with the performativity of listening. Rocío Zambrana, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, and Macarena Marey critique liberal and neoliberal policies. In their respective essays, Ana Carrasco-Conde and Luciana Cadahia write about evil and desire.

The originality of the book lies in the way all the contributors read canonical—and mostly male—philosophers and theorists from a situated standpoint. Zambrana interprets the debt crisis and the resistance of students in Puerto Rico through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s divine violence. Acosta reads political violence as an erasure of voice in Adriana Cavarero and in Ariel Dorfman’s novel La muerte y la doncella, which deals with torture in the Chilean dictatorship. Quintana writes about unburied corpses in Colombia, using Rancière and Mbembe as interlocutors. The contributors do not merely apply male theorists’ ideas to a particular question but take up a particular lens to read theory otherwise. Taken together, the various situations they bring into play question the locus of philosophy. For example, the subversive resistance of students in Puerto Rico allows us to better understand why divine violence is a destruction of history and how it is conceived as an expiation of debt in mythical violence. A character in the work of a Chilean author writing about the country’s dictatorship who has experienced torture in relation to their voice can shed light on the political dimension of listening, the acoustic dimension of violence, the horror produced by silencing, and even the effect of drowning out the voice.

Fuera de sí mismas is based on modern philosophical-theoretical assumptions that pair with political concerns as a response to injustice. Cadahia reads desire in Antigone as a transgression of normativity. Her reading questions Hegel’s and Žižek’s interpretations of Antigone as well as feminist interpretations by Butler, Honig, and Copjec, which are situated in an Anglo-American context. Cadahia shows the difficulty of thinking about the feminine, taking into account the norms and hierarchy instituted by sexual difference. Cadahia writes:

If there is something really revolutionary in the feminine, if there is something that capitalism cannot capture, it is precisely the feminine’s place in sexual difference as the discourse of Not-All, a discourse that detotalizes the place of feminine desire when it assumes its own right to materialize in public life. [Si hay algo realmente revolucionario en lo femenino, si hay algo que el capitalismo no logra capturar es justamente su lugar en la diferencia sexual como discurso del No-todo, un discurso que destotaliza el lugar del deseo femenino cuando asume sus propios derechos a materializarse en la vida pública.] (211)

Sánchez Madrid explores suffering caused by capitalism in the work world. Taking as her starting point a sense of time that tends to a commodification of an “exhausted mind and crushed body” (“mente exhausta y cuerpo molido”; 342), her exploration leads her to question Adorno and critical theory. Marey explores consensus and consent as vehicles of normativity in Kant’s theory of the social contract, and shows, against Rawls, that the social contract is not a covenant made by self-interested pre-political individuals but by political communities with a legal normativity. The social contract is not founded in the individual categorical imperative of an idealized rational agent but in the formation of agency and collective will in the doctrine of law that founds political community. Discussing O’Neill and Darwall, she concludes that theories of social contract become exclusionary structural systems because of their ambition to universality as an ideal consensus.

Writing from Colombia, Quintana focuses on the topic of corpses. Finding inspiration in the artistic installation “Cadáveres indisciplinados” (“Undisciplined Corpses”) by Colombian artist José Alejandro Restrepo and also in Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics, she assumes that politics masks the corpse because the life of the political body depends on the production of dead bodies. Images play a major role in the way bodies—and corpses—are made visible or invisible. Corpses distress us but they can also help us to think emancipation anew because of their ability to persist, to affect us, to make their testimony audible. In contrast to the virtual or theoretical, corpses possess a very real existence in a country such as Colombia, where missing persons number in the tens of thousands. As Quintana writes, one should “expose oneself to the call of so many defeated bodies, deprived of their possibilities; of so many deaths and lives forgotten here and now, again and again, in Colombia.” (“Exponerse al llamado de tantos cuerpos derrotados, desposeídos de sus posibilidades; de tantas muertes y vidas olvidadas aquí y ahora, una y otra vez, en Colombia” [103].)

The reader should not look for a single answer to the problem of violence in this book, but a series of responses emerges throughout the chapters. Violence is understood not only as the legitimate or illegitimate use of force by the state but as a force against political, economic, and social injustices, including the structural epistemic injustice in mainstream philosophy that has silenced conversation conducted in Spanish. Writing in Latin America, some authors in the book link the inaudible nature of horror to this epistemological silencing, relating it to silencing that appears as a drowning out of the victims’ voices, their witnessing. Martínez Ruiz, writing from a psychoanalytical point of view, exposes the political dimension of listening and describes how listening to someone who has experienced trauma can subvert or provide healing from that trauma. This form of listening can become a counterpart to the experience of being silenced. As Acosta points out in her commentary on Ingala Gómez’s text, one possibility is “to subvert and question the criteria for visibility and intelligibility through which things (bodies, senses, modes of existence and articulation) appear to us.” (“Subvertir y cuestionar los criterios de visibilidad e inteligibilidad mediante los cuales las cosas (los cuerpos, los sentidos, los modos de existencia y articulación) se nos aparecen” [84].) Acosta’s philosophical point raises the question of whether the conversation, and further publications related to it, should be broadened to include other groups that have been marginalized in these discourses—Black and indigenous women, for example. These voices are badly needed; their absence in academic philosophy is poignant.

This reviewer is a Latin American woman academic writing from Latin America. Racial and class structures inherent to the region’s research and university system become even more obvious when reading this volume. Fuera de sí mismas fits into the practice of academic writing while questioning the nature of academic structures in our region. Academic culture in Latin America does not expect an explicit, genuine critical exchange; the full weight of the notion of “intellectual authority” falls on the noun rather than on the adjective. Cultural ideas about critique consider it almost akin to a personal insult. Additionally, the expectation is that scholarly work in male-dominated research institutions in Latin America—and elsewhere—will be carried out by an individual, especially in the field of philosophy. This volume goes against those assumptions. Each text comes with a commentary by another woman scholar, and their commentaries take a somewhat careful tone, demonstrating a refusal to engage either in praise or in disdain. The exchanges generally read as a conversation between friends, although a few of the commentaries question or criticize the argument of the chapter they are assigned. The reader is left to wonder whether this reflects academic cultures in which a debate between peers is not expected. The chapters by Zambrana and Acosta, who work in the United States, are distinct in this respect. They seem to reflect a process of extended discussion and rewriting, which may be found in their work environment but is not as characteristic of Spanish- speaking academia. This is a salient feature in other chapters in the book, where the overall argument is not explicit. A different tradition of academic discourse may be at play here. This may also be shown in the use of language in Carrasco-Conde’s chapter, which presents an array of the polysemic and grammatical possibilities that Spanish carries with it.

Fuera de sí mismas. Razones para dislocarse allows a first encounter with important voices from Latin American and Spanish language philosophy. The approach is explicitly feminist but the standpoint is nuanced. A voice of their own does not result from the space women have won in academic structures but rather from the hard work of questioning frames of intelligibility. As the editors state in the preface,

The fact that women have broken into the discipline of philosophy gives no assurance on its own that women will develop a voice of their own. This is due, in great part, to the fact that the feminine is not tied to a biologization of our bodies. This is why developing a women’s voice requires a patient labor of thought and language, a labor that consciously makes possible a place of enunciation of our own. [La irrupción de las mujeres en el ámbito de la filosofía tampoco garantiza, de manera automática, la consolidación de una voz propia. En gran medida esto se debe a que lo femenino no está atado a una biologización de nuestros cuerpos. Por eso nos parece que la voz de la mujer es algo que exige un trabajo paciente desde el pensamiento y la lengua, un trabajo que de manera consciente posibilite un lugar de enunciación propio.](18)

The creation of this discourse requires a new place of enunciation that will let “those historically silenced voices” (18) into academic discourse and thought, and will allow the witnessing of other lives—those marked by suffering, loss, grief, erasure of memory, debt, precarity, and exclusion.

Miriam Jerade Miriam Jerade is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Faculty of Liberal Arts, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, in Santiago de Chile. Previously, she was an assistant professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Ivan and Nina Ross Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies in the University of Pennsylvania. Recent works include articles on political readings of speech act theory, Derrida’s reading of the death penalty, and representation and sovereignty in Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida. Her first book is Violencia. Una lectura desde la deconstrucción de Jacques Derrida (Metales Pesados, 2018).

Footnotes

1. All translations from Fuera de sí mismas. Razones para dislocarse are the author’s.