Reasons for Self-Dislocating: A review of Luciana Cadahia and Ana Carrasco-Conde (editors), Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse

Abstract

Reasons for Self-DislocatingA review of Luciana Cadahia and Ana Carrasco-Conde (editors), Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse Miriam Jerade (bio) Cadahia, Luciana, and Ana Carrasco-Conde, editors. Fuera de sí mismas. Motivos para dislocarse. Herder, 2020. This edited collection features contributions by Spanish-speaking women scholars who share the same motif—self-dislocation. The eleven authors seek to question the locus of philosophy and the discourses that frame it. The book is founded on the idea that philosophy has been historically enunciated by a male voice located in an Anglo-American geography. As the editors claim in the introduction, the self-dislocating logos is a loxos, a "taking away," being mis-placed. This is reflected in the title of the volume, Fuera de sí mismas (Out of Their Minds), a play on words that echoes the language of mania but seeks to redress it as contrary to nonsense. Editors Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde propose that this form of collaboration allows women philosophers to claim back for themselves a voice of their own. The play between title and subtitle is also worth noticing. The title phrase "fuera de sí mismas" leads the reader to think of a judgment from outside—a female "they" who is "out of their mind" or even more literally "out of themselves." The subtitle can be read as a response. There are indeed "reasons for dislocating" ("motivos para dislocarse") the self, for making themselves uncomfortable, or self-dislocating. The contributors find themselves in a place where the voices of Spanish-speaking women philosophers are not heard. In response, the authors collectively claim the need to be creative and to dislocate the discourse. As Cadahia and Carrasco-Conde state in the introduction, "Only by being out of our minds/ourselves can we dislocate imposed places of enunciation that have turned aside our way of making philosophy, so we can open up new paths for a new logic" ("Solo estando fuera de sí mismas podemos desquiciar lugares de enunciación impuestos que han relegado nuestra forma de hacer filosofía y encontrar los caminos de una nueva lógica"; 18).1 It is not enough to publish philosophical research conducted by women in Spanish; more significantly, the collection explores a new logic of philosophical discourse through their interventions. The volume was not originally conceived as a collection of chapters focusing on feminism or on Latin American philosophy. The editors asked eleven renowned Latin American women scholars to send them texts about their current work. While the volume is not organized thematically, common topics arise in the essays. Anna Maria Brigante and Emma Ingala Gómez explore the image. Laura Quintana and Amanda Núñez García examine the possibility of political thought through aesthetics. María del Rosario Acosta and Rosaura Martínez Ruiz share a concern with the performativity of listening. Rocío Zambrana, Nuria Sánchez Madrid, and Macarena Marey critique liberal and neoliberal policies. In their respective essays, Ana Carrasco-Conde and Luciana Cadahia write about evil and desire. The originality of the book lies in the way all the contributors read canonical—and mostly male—philosophers and theorists from a situated standpoint. Zambrana interprets the debt crisis and the resistance of students in Puerto Rico through the lens of Walter Benjamin's divine violence. Acosta reads political violence as an erasure of voice in Adriana Cavarero and in Ariel Dorfman's novel La muerte y la doncella, which deals with torture in the Chilean dictatorship. Quintana writes about unburied corpses in Colombia, using Rancière and Mbembe as interlocutors. The contributors do not merely apply male theorists' ideas to a particular question but take up a particular lens to read theory otherwise. Taken together, the various situations they bring into play question the locus of philosophy. For example, the subversive resistance of students in Puerto Rico allows us to better understand why divine violence is a destruction of history and how it is conceived as an expiation of debt in mythical violence. A character in the work of a Chilean author writing about the country's dictatorship who has experienced torture in relation to their voice can shed light on the...