Più grande, più lento di qualsiasi impero. Le alterità inassimilabili dell’immaginazione politica femminista

Abstract

From Ursula K. Le Guin's Vaster Than Empires and More Slow (1971), the paper focuses on the issue of relationship to otherness from a philosophical and political perspective, taking into account its characters – specifically Harfex, the biologist, and Osden, the "empath" – in dialogue with feminist theorists such as Irigaray, Cavarero, Butler, Haraway, among others. On the one hand, we find a dichotomous vision of difference rooted in confrontation, categorization, hierarchization (and hence oppression and exploitation); on the other hand, we find otherness as interdependence and connection: a tactile, mucosal, not pacified relationship that is not anthropocentric, nor rational, and recognizes agency in otherness. A situated and embodied dynamic that is never given in advance.

Together with Osden we will explore the possibility of empathy as a form of truth, and, linking up to Le Guin’s Earthsea saga and The Dispossessed, we will highlight two different modes of power-knowledge production: on one side, knowledge as organization, classification, and anthropocentric reduction to human perspective; on the other, knowledge as intimacy, equilibrium, connection, and unassimilability of the other.