Abstract This article brings two divergent theoretical approaches into dialogue around the topic of philosophical universalism. The goal is to foreground dangerous beliefs motivating the contemporary neoreactionary (NRx) movement and their connections to the ideological underpinnings guiding extreme US cultural and political shifts. While feminist universalism does not promise unassailable solutions in the face of tyranny, it does provide critical attention to those most damaged by it and thus serves as a necessary contribution to resistance. This article first puts European Enlightenment articulations of universal autonomy and personhood in conversation with feminist critical reformulations and transformations of these same values. An overview of key tenets of the Dark Enlightenment follows, which shows an inverted and perverted view of the principles of freedom, equality, and dignity. The final section takes up some contemporary implications of this shadow ideology in the current Silicon Valley evangelists of Advanced Generalized Intelligence (AGI) and adherents to trans‐ and posthumanisms.
Abstract This essay introduces the concept of onto‐plasticity as a framework for understanding Africana women's intersubjectivity within Western modernity, shaped by race and gender. Building on Zakiyyah Iman Jackson's concept of ontological plasticity, Hortense Spillers's distinction between body and flesh, and Africana Womanist thought, I argue that Black women are constantly shaped and reshaped by racial, sexual, legal, and knowledge systems. Onto‐plasticity describes this forced flexibility but also points to something beyond being treated as interchangeable: the ability to take part in shaping and reshaping oneself. Through practices such as fugitivity, testimony, pleasure, joy, and rest, Africana women resist the categories imposed on them and define themselves. Looking at these practices from Black feminist and Africana philosophical perspectives, I suggest that Africana womanist intersubjectivity is more than just surviving in an anti‐Black world. It is a way of being that lets Africana women refuse imposed labels and imagine new ways of living.
Abstract A common criticism of supposedly Enlightenment ideals is that, in the light of racial, gendered, and colonial injustice, they have never actually been universal. This article proposes a novel set of methodologies for testing the universalizability of normative ideals by attending to patterns of parasitic injustice , or the ways in which normative ideals such as freedom and equality are premised upon access to the labor, bodies, or resources of others in ways that make them nonuniversalizable. Assessments of injustice that focus on disparity, asymmetry, or exclusion tend to take supposedly normative ideals as an appropriate measure of success, and to map justice in terms of equal access to these ideals. A parasitic injustice framework demonstrates that if such ideals are structured through entitlement to the labor, unfreedom, or inequality of others, then they treat an extractive pattern as a normative standard and fail to address the root causes of the injustice. By drawing on Kantian political philosophy, feminist analyses of care chains, and discourses of disparity from the COVID‐19 pandemic, this article maps a set of methodological resources for recognizing and grappling with parasitic forms of injustice by reconceptualizing the content of normative ideals such that they are indeed universalizable.
Abstract Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Monique Wittig, Sylvia Wynter, Suzanne Césaire, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig), I offer an analysis of the relation between landscapes, bodies, desires, and academia. Of primary importance in developing these relations is to offer an account of how universities often replicate the harms of the past and the ways in which we might seek to upend these harms and create different spaces of learning.
Abstract The significance of the principle of sufficient reason for the philosophy of Deleuze has long been recognized. Predominantly drawing from Deleuze's two 1968 publications, Difference and Repetition and Expressionism in Philosophy , commentators have tended to read Deleuze as engaging primarily with Leibniz's formulation of the principle, and to a lesser extent Spinoza's. By contrast, we argue that the problematic that determines Deleuze's earliest published works in the 1950s is framed by an engagement with the principle that predates his work on Leibniz and Spinoza. This engagement leads to the discovery of a “principle of difference” in Hume, anticipating the notion of individuation as differentiation. Hume's empiricism, however, is unable to provide a conception of “difference‐in‐itself,” prompting Deleuze to move “from Hume to Bergson.” We argue that Deleuze's distinctive differential ontology is therefore articulated in these earliest texts as an explicit response to a problematic encounter with the principle of sufficient reason. In doing so, we seek to provide a “genetic” reading of Deleuze that is capable of illuminating these concepts as they emerge in the texts themselves.
