“We Are From Nowhere: Feminism Today” with Katerina Kolozova
KATERINA KOLOZOVA: “I wanted to take this as a cue in order to engage in my own presentation and engage in opening up the questions that I intended for this presentation. [redacted] mentioned that she actually never writes about women, and I realise that I actually never write about women despite being so firm about being a feminist, or a feminist philosopher. I try to undo, through analysis, patriarchy – I want to see the historical materialist class underpinnings that are forming the structures of oppression which have been there forever, called patriarchy. So I am dealing with an analysis of this system for the purposes of some sort of emancipation, but actually I've never written about women and I have no answer to the question of what a woman is, for example, as an illustration.
On the other hand, talking about being “from nowhere,” how did I find myself in feminism? I promise I will eventually go into the topic that is the crisis of third wave feminism, but I think, in order to get there, we have to say something about this “nowhereness.” On the other hand, I remember before studying philosophy, I studied classics, and I had a presentation on some Greek tragedy—I don't know what it was, Electra, for example—and I remember my professor telling me,”uh, listen, this does not work this way. There are some clear rules about interpretation of poetics in Aristotle and so on, and so if you want to do feminist takes on this, then why don't you go to the gender studies department.” I said “Listen, I did not intend to do feminist anything... I think that this is an accurate reading of the tragedy.” So, anyway, I found or realised through this that I did have a niche where I could say things in a certain way that would be considered legitimate or worth hearing, listening to, and taking intellectually and academically seriously.
This was just a minor episode, I think I was 18 at the time, and back then I didn’t think I was a feminist, so I was surprised that I was labelled as one by the professor — a male professor, by the way. So this is about not writing about women somehow, but still being a feminist. For a while, I was a gender studies scholar. I still teach gender studies, but I firmly identify as a feminist philosopher, not as a gender studies scholar. I do think that we need gender studies as a field because of this, again, non-territory in Academia. So we do need it as sort of a framing. It's interesting that the first time I met Judith Butler, She/They—she insisted that both pronouns were okay—did not identify as gender scholar or queer scholar at all. Judith simply insisted “I'm a feminist philosopher,” and that’s it, and if you even look at the most recent interviews, where she/they, there is very strong defence of, and identification with, the position of being a feminist fellow.
Now, I think that I stand there, as well, and maybe I will go into why, but if I go too narrowly into why I still choose to be called ‘feminist philosopher’ and not a ‘gender scholar,’ then I risk talking too much about myself. So I think that it's time to address this question. “Being from nowhere” is an epistemological situation — my first big “international project” was this book Cut of the Real (2014), and in that book I attempted to reckon with certain problems within the post-structuralist paradigm which I undoubtedly embraced back then, but felt a certain unease about the status of certain categories of thinking. For example, the real is not there, it was considered like a retrograde metaphysics, to insist on any sort of conversation of “realness,” or the status of the real or materiality. I did not want to give up on post-structuralism because I did not want to give up on the emancipatory potential of the constructivist proposal—let's put it that way—but I could not agree with the doxa—let's put it that way. This was ages ago, as I was still in my 30s. So, I had to find a way to speak of things that were either left unspoken, or even considered forbidden to speak about. I still remember one instance of an explicit prohibition by Rosi Braidotti:
It was in 2004; we were really young back then, me and Alenca Zupančič, at a conference. We are both, by the way, from ex-Yugoslavia, we both grew up in Yugoslavia, if you think of it, even though we became adults, we are still from Yugoslavia—I think there is a link there. Everybody was there, like Donna Haraway and all the women of post-structuralism. Rosi was going on and on and on, and she was like “this universalism crashed feminism,” or, “gender studies does not accept this universalist proposals” and so on. Universalism, or the idea of Universality, or of any possibility of “a universal,” was absolutely forbidden. And in that moment, Alenka stands up—and it was an intellectual scandal—and she says “I'm a Universalist,” To which Rosi said “What? No…!”, and Alenka said “Yes, I am,” “and I'm a realist, too.” Alenka was just about to publish The Ethics of the Real (1995). I would say that my experiments were, let's say, more diplomatic, because I did not just call out post-structuralism altogether, because I actually wanted to see, because I felt that there is an epistemology and a philosophy in it that was being turned into ideology, and then the ideology being turned into something like a “shallow sloganism,” to be honest, and it's impossible to do serious philosophy anymore.
I was struggling and struggling to write this book to demonstrate that Foucault and Judith Butler allow for emancipation, and that there is a space of possibility for emancipation in the discourse because all the attacks against them in the early 2000s posited that they were too deterministic—discourse determines everything—and so where is the site of resistance? There is a little book by Butler called The Psychic Life of Power (1997), which is all about the site of resistance to this discourse that determines us. And with the help of Francois Laruelle, with the tools of this so-called “non-philosophy”—he has his own version of Marxism, which he calls “non-Marxism,” which is paradoxically supposed to be mean “radical Marxism”—Marxism without philosophy—and he has this whole project called non-philosophy. So, with this “non-,” as a prefix, he has his own version of psychoanalysis. It's called non-(psycho)analysis… and so, you know, I had a constant problem trying to explain the subtitle to my book Capitalism’s Holocaust of Animals (2019). All of my colleagues and friends that were Marxists were like, “what is this?” Well, it's non-philosophical Marxism. So anyway, the contribution of Laruelle and his non-philosophy is an actually-radical materialism engaging in radically-materialist intellectual or research practice of scholarly and philosophical interrogation.
In this sense, “nothing” is a system that should be treated as an organic whole. “I am a Deleuzian, and everything I write is in a Deleuzian vein, or I'm a Foucaultian or I am a Marxist” — No, everything is material, including transcendental material building blocks that you, if you exit philosophy, as Marx proposed, you can take, one by one. He has this method called “unilateralization,” so I don't even care how it correlates with the other conceptual parts, I care instead how it correlates with the real, albeit while admitting that the real is inaccessible — and it is inaccessible. But Laruelle says, even though inaccessible, it determines us and language in some way. So it's very complex to explain how this ontology translates into epistemology, then into method, but through this reading I tried to propose that not only is there a “real” that post-structuralism can speak of, or post-structuralist feminist philosophers speak of, but there is a real, of which some of the founding figures in post-structuralism already speak of, for example Lacan: he is obsessed with how language correlates with the real. His first paper was called Beyond the Reality Principle, and his whole obsession revolved around how getting trapped in a chain of signification correlates with the real? So, there is that. And then there was a need to move toward materialism. As I said, through Francois Laruelle, I ended up essentially following his advice to just read Marx's texts directly, in order to come up with a form of Feminism, which argues that capitalism and patriarchy, and even philosophy, work in the same way, and especially through the dialectic of value and the material, but it's a long story. I was really just supposed to illustrate how I'm “from nowhere…”
[...]
CLAIRE ELISE: I was just going to prompt something, in order to return back to the question about oceanic animals, because on some level—and I feel like this does relate to the question of feminism, but I think that I'm not in a position here to elaborate on Laruelle’s work, as to how this claim makes sense, though hopefully those who are familiar with this might get what I'm saying here, that if we return to the island and the ocean, it makes me want to first say that we are oceanic animals. We have come from the ocean, and the story of human life or the story of life tends to focus very much on Pangaea, but then Pangaea comes from Panthalasa and Panthalasa is maybe the answer to the question of where I am from. “I'm not from this island,” “actually, I'm from this infinite nothingness that you are looking at.” And I think that is the contradiction, that we are an infinite thing that is sort of stuck… on this rock somehow, and so there's this gross over-representation of the physical thing we are standing on, and a complete abandonment of some sort of deeper context.
I want to make the link to Psychoanalysis, perhaps, where we would talk, not about Freud or Lacan, but about Ferenczi, who has the concept of the Thalassa, some sort of deep memory, that we are sea creatures, and that we have access to the memory of all forms of life that have preceded us. And in that sense we are oceanic, as well in the sense that we are supermassive and unable to even begin to comprehend how huge our home is because the horizon so limits it in that way. So, I mean that's sort of basis of the prompt, and I think maybe if you're familiar with Laruelle, you would get this sense that there's a way of collapsing the duality of Pangaea and Panthalassa, into the realisation that, first of all, there is no Pangaea, only Panthalassa, and then second, that even pantalassa is not, so to speak, “real,” and this kind of demarcates the zone in which we operate. So, I don't know if you're familiar with Ferenczi, but yeah..
KK: I remember that I have read Ferenczi, like ages ago, during my Ph.D; it was an era which is far behind me. But I'm very familiar with Laruelle, I worked with, and I was a very close friend of Francois. I don't know, I've never thought of this metaphor—because I take it as a metaphor—I'm sure if he could hear it, he would love it, so you must be on to something… But I would say that, because of what you just said, that is why I work with animals. So… My “post-humanism” is “non-humanism,” which comes down to this animal with tentacles, these extensions that we call technology, so it's kind of a radicalization of something we can take from Donna Haraway, but I subject it to this unilateralization, as he calls it, and it becomes a bit more complex, because there is no, you know, amazement around the fact that, “wow, we're split, we're both animals and technology,” no. As he puts it, when you fetishize the parents, or when you fetishize the split, you actually want to unify the radical dyad, no, we have this radical dyad, with a gaping absence of reconciliation between the two. And in that way, even in that sense, even intimately like, if you take, for example, his Theory of the Stranger (2026)—It was just translated...
CE: I'm reading it now. Well, I’m trying to.
KK: I hope it's a good translation. Jeremy [R. Smith] is a good friend, he was helped by good reviews, but it's a difficult book, and you really have to be skilled. Lindsay [Lerman] translated Laruelle, she knows how difficult it is, maybe she can say something to your point.
LINDSAY LERMAN: I had one thing to say about the metaphor of the oceanic animal, and especially Laurelle's earlier work. There's this, I might even say fetishization, but there's this kind of love affair with that which is fluid and sinuous and, or has the beautiful graceful movement. I think there's probably a lot there, and I mean, I think there are ethical claims inside of his fascination too with that which is sinuous and fluid.
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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