Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…The way in which he was philosophical, I think is the greatest influence of his on most people. But your answer may be different. No, that’s absolutely right. The truth be told, I think his greatest influence on me was just his quite indiscriminate kindness and generosity, philosophically speaking. He just wanted to know what everyone thought philosophically, and treated each and every person he encountered — whether a philosopher or not — as someone who could contribute to his own endeavor of making sense of the world. It was profoundly democratic, almost Whitmanian, and very startling to encounter. I knew him well, as much as anyone knew him. I knew Derek pretty well. He was my advisor as a graduate student, which isn’t the same thing as being my supervisor. We had no formal pedagogical relationship, but he read a lot of my work and commented on it, but he also asked me to comment on his work all of the time. He did this with everyone. There was a kind of generosity and openness and a genuine horizontalism about his approach to philosophy that I think is extraordinary. Let me try another read on your work. This occurred to me when I read Judith Butler’s very good review of your book. It struck me that you’re, I think, quite a bit more libertarian — small-l libertarian — than the mainstream gives you credit for. This comes out of your view on sex workers. You’re trying to rebuild some new kind of utopian libertarianism, based not on capitalism. You see the vanguard here as trans individuals who — precisely because, to so many people, it’s shocking — represent something that is new and breaking down a hierarchy. That trans is fundamental to your notion of how to undo previous hierarchies, which are anything but emancipatory, and to rebuild the foundations of some noncapitalistic libertarianism on this idea of ambivalence, complexity, and context, and the sense of novelty, difference, diversity, even shock, from the trans movement, and those are your new foundations. Again, I’m not the canonical source here, but how would you respond to that?…

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