Image source: title: i emptied everything, 2022 [production still from i emptied everything, video performance, https://vimeo.com/693159307] artist: Julian A M.P.
How should the practice of philosophy change in response to intersectional and decolonial criticism?
The “intersectionality” argument challenges the preponderance of what Crenshaw calls “single-axis thinking,” and the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism in philosophy challenges the assumption of neutral universality, or what Castro-Gómez calles “zero-point hubris,” on the part of Western coloniality. Spurred by these critical paradigms and mobilized by the hope that lies implicit within them, this project uses Merleau-Ponty to explore the character of thinking as such, witnessing how it takes shape inside of partial perspectives and in interaction with partial and specific others. It identifies two different operations of partiality–the ordinary, phenomenologically illuminated condition of being within a perspective, and the unjust assertion of certain modes of partiality as dominant and universal–and argues that we can work through the ordinary to oppose the unjust. In the very operation of partial perspectives, that is, it discerns strategies for thinking beyond single axes and against zero-point hubris.