THE PROBLEM OF DISEMBODIMENT IN FEMINIST POSTSTRUCTURALISM

It is our pleasure to invite you on 18th of June 2016 at 18o’clock at the premises of the Institute of social sciences and humanities Skopje on a lecture by Stanimir Panayotov titled “The Problem of Disembodiment in Feminist Poststructuralism”. The lecture will be followed with a commentry by Katerina Kolozova.

The Problem of Disembodiment in Feminist Poststructuralism

In this lecture I propose that recent advancements in feminist philosophy coming from new realism are both shaking the very notion of “feminist philosophy” and are moving it in a direction closer to a compromise between feminist structuralism and speculative philosophy than this is practiced in Eurocentric continental thought. I claim this is done by the ongoing reception of Francois Laruelle and Anne-Francoise Schmid, and that, as Alexander Galloway has suggested, they have to be treated as precursors of so-called “speculative realism/materialism.” To show this, I engage with the dominant emphasis on “embodiment” in feminist poststructuralism, and the work of Katerina Kolozova and her specific blending of feminist poststructuralism, postfoundationalism, new realism, and non-philosophy. At these intersections the problem of embodiment is also the problem of disembodiment as seen from the side of Laruelle’s and Kolozova’s One. I will also give as an example the recent work of Madhavi Menon. In both cases there is an engagement with the “indifference” of either the Real or the Universal, a quality which is at odds with the realizations of “embodiment.” Kolozova’s feminist philosophy has the heuristic power, I claim, to re-shape the field of feminist philosophy by building bridges around the problem of “correlationism” rather than burning them, and addressing the problem of disembodiment, which is doctrinally attacked by feminist poststructuralism. Kolozova manifests a specific engagement with Laruelle’s non-philosophy and a turn – or rather restitution – of the old Platonic notion of the One. The feminist focus on the One from a non-philosophical perspective has the potential to redefine how we do feminism in philosophy in terms of the inherited dialectical residues from structuralism and Marxism. I will first discuss the relation of gender to new realism and OOO, then I will discuss how new realism, OOO and feminist poststructuralism react to each other in terms of gender, and will finally explain how the restitution of the One could reorient feminist philosophers in its being dependent upon the “indifference” and “unilateral duality” of the One.

Stanimir Panayotov is a PhD student in Comparative Gender Studies at the Central European University, Budapest, working at the intersection of non-philosophy, new realism, feminist philosophy and Neoplatonism. He is currently academic fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje.