Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

possibility that the other will destabilise and transform us. Thus, it is a matter
of prompting students (and the young generations in general) to consider
in a positive light what Western philosophical thought has for the most part
considered negative: dependence, fragility, the Self’s openness to change and
the uncertainty of relationships with the other.
Secondly, the stress I placed on the transformations produced by
globalisation may have an important impact not only on the sphere of
philosophical teaching, but also on sociology and anthropology. I believe
that feminist thought has not yet devoted enough attention to this aspect,
which is fundamental in order to understand the radical novelties of our times.
Learning to understand the present not only means learning to recognise
the unprecedented challenges of the present, but also to know how to face up
to them and to build alternative scenarios so that thought is always intrinsically
connected to practice. Only by diagnosing the present day can we think
of (and act to produce) a better future. The global age is an age of uncertainty
and fear that can generate immunitary reactions of closure, violence and
exclusion. But if our teaching aims to make uncertainty and fragility a value,
these negative aspects can become a positive resource for acting in the world. If
it is true that one of the greatest challenges of our times is the presence of diversity
in our daily lives, making the most of contamination means transforming
the negative into a resource for a sustainable cohabitation; it means opposing
the conflict and violence that we see crossing the planet everyday, the ability
to recognise the other in his difference and to accept that we are transformed
by the other, so as to put our own identity at stake and imagine a world as a
cosmopolis of differences.
Thirdly, the importance that I attribute to the emotional life provides
the presupposition for building what I would like to define a paideia of feeling.
I think that one of the pathologies of our times lies in the very loss of our ability
to feel, which translates first and foremost into a sort of indifference towards the
other. Contemporary reflection on this factor by the mainstreams of the various
disciplines to me seems particularly lacking; even psychology, often dominated
by a cognitive approach, does not seem to have grasped the importance of this
aspect. Without doubt though, some voices of feminist thought have underlined
the importance of the emotions. However, what I propose here is not
just to recognise the emotions’ decisive function (in constructing the Self and
in relations with the other), and hence to educate us to a reawakening of our
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