XENOSOPHY

Philosophy, as it is understood in the West, is born of a fundamental misunderstanding. A strange inbred approach that has been hindering thinking the outside from the very moment of its conception.

Many have been the philosophers who have dealt with the notion of the 'friend' of wisdom (the philos of sophia), but very few, by contrast, have engaged with the 'alien' of wisdom (with the exception, of course, of some branches of occultural thinking). And it is precisely this cut, this suppression or barrier dividing inner space (what is known) from outer space (the unknown), that promotes a notion of the 'strangeness' as some kind of enemy to be annihilated, or at best to be tamed.

Probably, if philosophy had not been based on the philos we would have arrived much earlier to the transcendental understanding that the 'strange' (the xenos) was not a thing to be tamed, nor an object or tool to be used, nor a resource to be consumed and extinguished. The unintegrated integration of the xenos in wisdom was the only thing that could save the latter from becoming a bellicose and frontier-making murderer. A complete history of the war against germs and bacteria attests to this. Our relationship with the environment would probably have been very different if we had understood this in the beginning. 

In an interview called “New vectors from Xenofeminism,” the xenofeminist collective Laboria Cuboniks emphasized the importance of xenos as follows:

“To help clarify the operation of ‘xeno’ in xenofeminism, we can draw from etymology of the word. The meaning of the Greek word ‘xenos’ has a triple signification, which is often obscured in its simplistic reduction to that which is ‘foreign’, and can be understood as such:

a) Xenos, of course does refer to foreignness, but is more precisely someone outside a particular known community, with no clearly defined relationship; or something outside familiar modes of identification or epistemic classification;

b) Xenos as an Enemy/Stranger, or as something unknown which is potentially a promise or a threat;

c) Xenos as a guest friendship (as opposed to Philos, the root of philosophy, referring to local or known friends), or a guest relationship to that unknown thing or idea.

What this triple signification of xenos indicates, is an inherent uncertainty or ambiguity as to the status of an unknown entity. It indicates a both/-and relationship, seeing as xenos can be neutral, threatening or friendly, perhaps even all these qualities simultaneously. Xenos can be best understood in the context of ‘Xenia’, the Ancient Greek protocol for obligatory hospitality, illustrated through several myths where Gods make appearances as humans to test a given community in their enactment of xenia, by seeking refuge as strangers. In xenofeminism we see ‘xeno’ as a navigational principle, extending to both human and non-human interrelations, as well as to epistemic negotiations with the unknown.”

That is why the component of xenos cannot be considered simply nor naïvely a ‘friend’ −which would be tantamount to appropriating its strangeness, to making it enter the prison of subjectivity thus devouring all its creative potentiality, annulling it; in short, to turn it into a domesticated and bourgeois version of the otherness −a procedure that leads to exactly the same starting point we wanted to avoid.

On the contrary, the xenos must be integrated to sophia to the same extent that it is unintegrable: a 'guest friend', where the meaning of 'guest', or 'potentially a promise or a threat', is by no means secondary. This 'potential threat' is the same that we find in a wild or unruly ecological environment, which is impossible to tame; its threat status does not automatically imply an attack, and, like the environment, it only offers the possibility of riding it prudently.

Philosophy, for all these reasons, was wrong from the beginning and is probably the origin of all xenophobia (when we believe that the notion of threat necessarily implies an attack) and of all fascism (when we believe that the notion of strangeness necessarily implies a threat).

Therefore, philosophy must be changed by xenosophy: the (not)knowing of the other.