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ABSTRACT
Thousands of people are drowning in the Mediterranean and in the South Asia Seas. At the USA borders or elsewhere, at this time, hundreds are killed or pushed back against the principle of non-refoulement of the 1951 Geneva Convention. There is global warming and the devastation of our only planet, through the suicidal power we command in the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, the violence against women (in peace and war) persists. In order to overcome the current epistemological hegemony, we need new radical ideas about our sustainable world, at least about the global south(s), feminism and the Anthropocene. We need to think of a different choice of civilization, one that has not yet been tested, with less competition, less individualism and less national selfishness. Let’s insist upon the primacy of life as such over human life, over specism, in an alternative future where humans, and men at that, are not always in charge.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to professors Françoise Král and Sam Coombes for the invitation to their joint seminar “Diasporic Trajectories” at the University of Edinburgh in February 2016, of which the present paper is the result, as well as for their constant encouragement and feedback on ideas that we exchanged. A version of the present paper was also presented at the conference “Philosophy in a Globalized World. Mobility and Borders” under the title “Beyond the Current Epistemic Hegemony: Towards a Sustainable World?” in Berlin on July 9–10, 2015, organized at the Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin by Dr. Stefania Maffeis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. From “Sustainability and Spirituality”, a flyer of the Global Centre for the Study of Sustainable Futures and Spirituality (GCSSFS; Mindful Narratives. Interconnected Futures) https://arecabooks.com/product/environment-sustainability/ .
2. I am grateful to professors Françoise Král and Sam Coombes for the invitation to their joint seminar “Diasporic Trajectories” at the University of Edinburgh in February 2016 of which the present article is the result, as well as for their constant encouragement and feedback on ideas that we exchanged. A version of the present article was also presented at the conference “Philosophy in a Globalized World. Mobility and Borders” under the title “Beyond the Current Epistemic Hegemony, Towards a Sustainable World?” in Berlin on July 9–10, 2015, organized at the Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin by Dr Stefania Maffeis. I have developed these ideas in much of my writing over the last few years, one of them being the (as yet unpublished) paper i wrote in 2018 for Cornelia Möser and Marion Tillous for a collective volume in French on queer-feminist critiques of the state (Les critiques queer/féministes de l’Etat) under the title “Les femmes, les migrant.e.s et l’Europe”.
3. I write “i” and not “I” for the singular first person when it refers to me.
4. “A ‘piecemeal’ World War III may have already begun with the current spate of crimes, massacres and destruction, Pope Francis warned in commemorating the centenary of World War I.” BBC News, September 13, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-29190890 .
5. Theories on the Anthropocene usually hold that modern industrial societies have destroyed nature out of ignorance, but that specific knowledge can repair the damage. The problem might be seen as narrowly ecological or just anthropological, and is usually dated back to only the Industrial Revolution. Others think that the political-economic context of contemporary capitalism produced the Anthropocene or that the latter is identical with it. Is technology political? Feminists have insisted on women’s unpaid labour as the basis of the Anthropocene; while Dipesh Chakrabarty (Citation2010) blurs, in his somewhat catastrophist vision, class divisions.
6. W. Streeck (Citation2016) accuses Merkel of having other personal interests.
7. Garfield (Citation2014) comments: “The Buddhist tradition encourages us to see ourselves as impermanent, interdependent individuals, linked to one another and to our world through shared commitments to achieving an understanding of our lives and a reduction of suffering. It encourages us to rethink egoism and to consider an orientation to the world characterized by care and joint responsibility. That can’t be a bad thing.”
8. See below on Laclau’s and Mouffe’s concept of the chain of equivalence.
9. I held a seminar on “What Can we Learn from Loss?” (“Qu’apprendre de l’échec, de la perte?”) in 2008 at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris (Iveković Citation2011).
10. No “all-Yugoslav” and impartial commission was acceptable to the nationalists on all sides in the successor states: they all wanted to judge the others, each seeing themselves as victims.
11. Among other things, subject–object, absolute–relative, immanence–transcendence, female–male, as well as other hierarchical binaries.
12. I have called such inflexible split reason la raison partagée as opposed to le partage de la raison, which, in the dynamic mood, means shared reason(ing) (Iveković Citation2007). The relation called la raison partagée, inflexible “reason”, features concepts that are formalized, forced, clogged.
13. But in French, both can be said: “partage” (sharing).
14. One of the first mentions of the Gramscian tandem of concepts in this array is by Guha (Citation1998).
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Rada Iveković
Rada Iveković was senior research fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in 2013. A former programme director (2004–10) at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, a philosopher and Indologist, she was born in Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1945. She taught in the philosophy department of Zagreb University, then at various universities in France (Paris-7; Paris-8 Saint-Denis), and has held visiting professorships at many other universities in different countries. Her recent books include Politiques de la traduction. Exercices de partage with a preface by Étienne Balibar (2019), Les Citoyens manquants (2015) and L’éloquence tempérée du Bouddha. Souverainetés et dépossession de soi (2014).