Donna Haraway’s Antiphilosophy: Objectivity Without Objectification

Abstract

Donna Haraway’s article “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Femi- nism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988) has been translated into Rus- sian by Lolita Agamalova and Elena Kostyleva, and their translation is published for the first time in this issue of Logos. The translators provide a foreword which dis- cusses the relationship between power and knowledge as a central issue for Haraway and for feminist epistemology. For Haraway, this question primarily concerns posi- tions of power in the production of scientific knowledge. The foreword explores the context in which Haraway’s work emerged and its synthetic attitude toward both the social-constructionist approach to the problem of objectivity in science and femi- nist critical empiricism. Haraway’s position reaches a critical understanding of the metaphysical method as producing knowledge obtained “from nowhere,” knowledge as if seen by the eye of God. From her point of view, men undertake the production of knowledge as if they are disembodied, not burdened with corporeality, as if they have leaped out of their bodies (she calls this the “god trick”). As an alternative, Har- away suggests using other methods of visualization (vision from a specific point, an embodied position, a particular body) conceptualized by her as multiple “situated knowledges.” Taken to its limit, this approach would be antiphilosophical. But at the same time, what happens to philosophy itself if power and knowledge are denoted within it? Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s article La transcendance finit dans la politique (1981) is considered on this issue for its analysis of Heidegger’s attempt to assert the hegemony of philosophy over other sciences.