For What Can the Kantian Feminist Hope? Constructive Complicity in Appropriations of the Canon

Abstract

As feminist scholars, we hope that our own work is exempt from structural problems such as racism, sexism, and Eurocentricism, that is, the kind of problems that are exemplified and enacted by Kant’s works. In other words, we hope that we do not re-enact, implicitly or explicitly, Kant’s problematic claims, which range from the unnaturalness of a female philosopher, “who might as well have a beard,” the stupid things that a black carpenter said “because he was black from head to foot,” the poor women “living in the greatest slavery in the Orient,” to the “sheep-like existence of the inhabitants of Tahiti.” In this piece, I argue that we cannot simply hope to avoid these problems unless we are vigilant about incorporating the full picture of Kant’s and Kantian philosophy into our feminist appropriations. I will show that one way to minimize if not altogether avoid this risk is to follow the model of a new methodology that establishes the continued relevance of all of Kant’s claims for our present. Inspired by Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, I will call this alternative methodology the “constructive complicity” approach.

Charles Mills’ ‘Black Radical Kantianism’ as a Plot Twist for Kant Studies and Contemporary Kantian-Liberal Political Philosophy

“…In response, we have developed a few standard methodologies for dealing with the question of race and racism in Kant's philosophy. Often, we offer distinctions between what is central (pure ethics or normative theory) and what is peripheral (impure ethics or applied theory) in Kant's and Kantian moral-legal-political philosophy (Louden 2000;Huseyinzadegan 2019a). We say that the 'ugly', i.e.…”

“…Notes 17 On why we cannot and should not quarantine Kant's 'ugly' writings, see also Shorter-Bourhanou 2022;Lloyd 2018; Spivak 1999: 1-37;Huseyinzadegan 2018 Huseyinzadegan , 2022Huseyinzadegan and Pascoe 2021, 2022;Lu-Adler 2022a.…”