Events Related to the NETRePerform Program

Imagining Otherwise.

Ricoeur and Butler on Ideology, Utopia and Imagination

by

Annemie Halsema

Socrates Professor of Philosophical Anthropology and the Foundations of Humanism, Institute for Philosophy, Leiden University

&

Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, VU-University Amsterdam.

Abstract

What is the role of imagination in envisioning a future without discrimination? What is its role in reorienting ideas that categorize and classify groups of people and pit them against each other?

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Venue

Department of English Studies Conference Room
9 Klimentos Str. (2nd floor, Eliades Building), 1061 Nicosia
Department of English Studies

Date
  • Wednesday, 4 December 2024 @ 14:00
Past Event
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Talk Abstract

What is the role of imagination in envisioning a future without discrimination? What is its role in reorienting ideas that categorize and classify groups of people and pit them against each other? In this lecture, I first of all address the different aspects of imagination in the contemporary debate about gender. My starting point will be Judith Butler’s recently published Who is Afraid of Gender? (2024). I will analyze the notion of ideology Butler uses with the distinctions Paul Ricoeur makes in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986) and in the recently published Lectures on Imagination (2024).

Imagining otherwise not only refers to another future for mankind but can also be taken as referring to personal identity. A second problem I address concerns the extent to which alternative identities than the ones assigned to us can be understood in terms of imagination. Using the notion “imagination” in order to consider alternative gender identities might seem to contradict the intimacy of feeling to belong to a certain gender. Speaking of “imagination” in this respect might even seem a repetition of the antigender discourse of right wing radicals, the Vatican, and some feminists, who consider gender identity a phantasy, that misrecognizes sex, nature, reality. This use of the notion is pejorative and superficial, I will argue. My aim instead is to relate alternative gender identities to the productive side of imagination that for Ricoeur is crucial and opens new ontological possibilities.