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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote (edited )

Here’s a clearer political example than using a mug.

Philosophy of sameness grounds ideas like what it means to be a full person, but people are usually wrong about that and use their ideas of personhood to make dehumanising arguments.

In philosophy of sameness assumptions are hidden in the idea of personhood that circularly reinforce the current order.

Hidden assumptions about personhood usually imply the global north white male cishetero able-bodied subject, and people without those elements to be less than human. Here you see that sameness with a subtraction happening.

So that kind of thinking becomes the ground for colonisers and state-thinkers to understand ‘others’ as lacking in full personhood, which they use as a justification for their colonising processes.

Hopefully that’s an additional explainer to help out, u/kore.

If anybody is interested, I recently wrote up a short comment what personhood might look like from a philosophy of difference perspective, thinking of all relation in relation to everything else always.

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ukuleleclass wrote

this was really interesting to read thanks for sharing ! i always cringe at the very common “idea” that we live in, or can simulate reality but am not always good at describing why. i think your way of talking about difference as primary and sameness as secondary is a very real or “natural” process. i just read an essay called Darwin and Feminism that kind of outlines a more radical interpretation of evolutionary theory that is based on difference and repetition rather than a fixed or teleological entity.

i would be curious to know what things you’ve read that’s similar to what you’re writing about with philosophies of difference. i’m working my way to Deleuze’s Dofference and Repition but would love to read lots of different interpretations of difference ;)

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Tequila_Wolf OP wrote

You are welcome.
So mainly the interesting anarchists doing this kind of play where I am are using Deleuze even in some cases they aren’t referencing him in order to develop their own anticolonial theories as separate from the white canon. Working through Deleuze is definitely a good start point, though Difference and Repetition (my favourite book of his in many ways) is probably also the toughest.

Feminist theorists like Saidiya Hartman and Sara Ahmed and anticolonial theorists Glissant and Mbembe are seamlessly bringing Deleuzian thinking into their work. In my own spaces you might find texts like this one which will speak directly to what I am thinking with.

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ukuleleclass wrote

oooo ty ! i actually printed out and bound a physical copy of that text you linked ! i’m very adhd so always get distracted with different things to read haha thanks for all the suggestions <3

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Majrelende wrote

I have never heard of sameness and difference before, but now I know a good word for the kind of thinking that infuriates me to no end!-- and is a simple way of describing it.

Fukuoka wrote of "relativity" which I suppose might be something like sameness-- that is, treating things relatively, often relatively to human desire and modern culture-- that they believe in strong and weak, harmful and beneficial, life and death, past and future-- so on. But the absolute way of seeing, is to see each thing as perfect, and that we might fix the damage inflicted that brings things away from nature, so that they can all begin to find their proper (and entirely unknowable) ways. It is a different approach though.

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