Amia Srinivasan: belief

Transcript context

…Let me give you my answer to my own question. Just to be clear, I am not at all a canonical source here. I’m just making this up. This is not you, but I guess I read you as a consilience theorist. There are all these complexities and ambivalences in your own work, which you’re well aware of. To be sure of what you’re doing, the point is to change the world in a Marxian sense. You want consilience from a lot of different directions. You’re broadly feminist-Marxist, so you see Marxism, which has too much emphasis on the objective. Then you see continental philosophy that has too much emphasis, sometimes, on the subjective. The interest in biography, genealogical fallacy, is somehow syncing your subjective experience with what you feel you know is true. Then there are these broader social structures determining things, and we can’t quite be sure of our own supposedly Cartesian knowledge. You want to bring together all those different forces in this broadly consilient picture, in a way that lets you move forward in the Marxian sense of someone determined to change the world, be a prophet, be a world maker, rather than just writing about it. But because you see complexities, you need all those things to feed into this big river. Does that at least make some sense to you? [laughs] That makes some sense. I think I’m not sure about the word consilience in particular, just because it suggests a perfect coherence. Whereas I think I see myself as sometimes just embracing fundamental tensions without trying to offer a perfect synthesis. What you describe is also just very recognizable from lots of feminist theorists, who, as you say, found Marx either too objective or too obsessed with “material,” insufficiently interested in the psyche and the psychoanalytic. So then you bring in Freud, but then Freud and Marx both have their problems, either an unwillingness to read the family, or an overreading and misreading. I think that general desire to pick up these various kinds of intellectual strains, which often come out of mass male traditions or traditions founded by men, and then creatively appropriate them and put them in conversation with each other and do something new is very much a feminist tradition of its own. What’s the best Brian Eno album?…

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