Thread by @shengokai

I'm going to respond to this one because it is important. In "Feminist Killjoys and Other Willful Subjects" Sara Ahmed says the following:

"That you have described what was said by another as a problem means you have created a problem. You become the problem you create."

Put in an academic context, that I have described the "quest for truth" as practiced by the academy as a problem, means that I have created a problem. In creating the problem, in problematizing the quest for truth, I have become a problem. Hence, I am an example of the problem.

Let's run this back. I've become the problem because I've shattered the "happy image" of what the quest for truth entails, what the consequences of that quest have been, and how those consequences have caused suffering. The "happy image" of an unproblematic life of mind is gone.

More than that, in Ahmed's terms, my commitment to "woke ideology," whatever the fuck that is, serves to "disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places." Places like the academy. Places like departments of philosophy.

And in disturbing the collective fantasy of the academy, of philosophy, as an unproblematic place where we can engage in the quest for truth, I'm suddenly the source of the problem. That is, I'm the problem, not the problems with philosophy that I point out.

Moreover, I become "willful" in the negative sense when I insist on critical examination of the harms philosophy has done, and continues to do. My "willfulness" becomes a sign of my disagreeableness, my unwillingness to dialogue, and thus a sign that I am "not serious."

Ironically, the transformation of "woke" into an insult functions in the same way. I am "too aware," "too woke," "too conscious" of the problems of philosophy and the "quest for truth," and this being too much puts me in the way of "how things should be."

All of this is to say that if I am an "example of the problem," if I am being assigned the role of a problem, I'm quite happy to take up the charge. After all, as Ahmed says:

That is to say, if the philosophical quest for truth is a social order which is protected as a moral order (by academic freedom, tbh) then to go against this moral order is to cause unhappiness for philosophy and philosophers. To upset the "department tables" we gather around.

Further, insofar as I am willing to cause unhappiness for philosophy and philosophers, being willing to "kill joy" taken in an unproblematic fantasy of philosophy might just be about how I live a philosophical life.