Comments on Johanna Oksala's Feminist experiences

Andreea Aldea

Kent State University

pp. 125-134

in: Continental Philosophy Review 52 (1), 2019.

Abstract

Johanna Oksala’s book seeks to defend feminist philosophy as a form of social critique that aims not only to expose potent epistemic and normative structures but also to open new possibilities for social betterment and justice (3).1It thus challenges us to think carefully about the resources such a social critique could draw on. According to Oksala, feminist philosophy would benefit from mining the resources of a potentially rich intersection: Foucault’s work and what she refers to as ‘post-phenomenology.’ Rather than viewing these two theoretical traditions as mutually exclusive, Oksala sees them as fertile grounds for feminist philosophy understood as immanent critique (4). And since feminist philosophy seeks to analyze the manner in which these structures constitute our social reality, it is necessarily metaphysical in a Kantian sense (6). However, unlike the Kantian universalist approach, Oksala’s proposal is deeply historical. To expose these structures—or...

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Foucault Michel

Oksala Johanna