Philosophy, Sexism, Emotion, Rationalism

Something important is happening within and to Philosophy.1It is something that has happened a thousand times over, yet every time it repeats it happens as if for the first time. The dif-ficulty is making this event stick. What is this event? The event of the disruption of Philosophy by its own outside, the outside that it pretends it does not have. Philosophy, by virtue of being the most universal subject, the most generic art, cannot imagine that there is something which it cannot capture or has not al-ways already captured, one way or another. But things fall apart. They fall apart a lot, and very quickly. I want to focus here on Philosophy as a discipline in its academic form, particularly in the UK and US, before turning to some of the claims made in the recent Xenofeminist manifesto2 and the Gender Nihil-ism anti-manifesto3 regarding the feminizing of reason and the abolition of gender. I will ultimately agree with the Xenofemi-nist manifesto when it states that “[r]ationalism must itself be a feminism” and with the Gender Nihilist text when it argues that the subversion of gender is a dead-end. I want only to add that what usually gets sidelined and undermined as “emotion,” and is frequently gendered as feminine or female, is also itself a rationalism, and that emotion and reason are in fact not mortal enemies, but rather inseparable branches of the collective ex-perience of social and political life that Philosophy purports to address.