Alt Text

Show parent replies

honestly just read Snaza in general
Posthuman(ist) Education and the Banality of Violence

The production of humans through educational assemblages is indissociably linked to processes of dehumanization. As the human is produced as a particular, contingent subject of politics and history, it is articulated over and against the nonhuman, the inhuman, and the not-quite-human.47 This production of the human, within imperialist modernity, works through dialecti- cal negation: the human is distinguished from the animal, the machine, the savage, the slave, the object. In this dialectical production of the human, the human reserves for itself the domain of politics (they are subjects) while all those rendered nonhuman – including those humans who are dehumanized by the ‘fully human’ humans – are cast into the realm of objects of political action.
tbh hes not innovative at all and it can get kinda saccharine and banal, but it's a fine restatement of boring truisms
alt text backfill
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alyson-escalante-gender-nihilism-an-anti-manifesto
alyson escalante - gender nihilism, an anti manifesto
The self, the subject is a product of power. The “I” in “I am a man” or “I am a woman” is not an “I” which transcends those statements. Those statements do not reveal a truth about the “I,” rather they constitute the “I.” Man and Woman do not exist as labels for certain metaphysical or essential categories of being, they are rather discursive, social, and linguistic symbols which are historically contingent. They evolve and change over time; their implications have always been determined by power.
Who we are, the very core of our being, might perhaps not be found in the categorical realm of being at all. The self is a convergence of power and discourses. Every word you use to define yourself, every category of identity within which you find yourself place, is the result of a historical development of power. Gender, race, sexuality, and every other normative category is not referencing a truth about the body of the subject or about the soul of the subject. These categories construct the subject and the self. There is no static self, no consistent “I”, no history transcending subject. We can only refer to a self with the language given to us, and that language has radically fluctuated throughout history, and continues to fluctuate in our day to day life.
The self is a product of power. Statements which claim a categorical identity do not reveal a transcendental truth about the “I,” rather they constitute the “I.”

Assertions of identity do not reveal a truth about the “I,” rather they constitute the “I.”