Standing on the earth of ignorance: Feminist philosophers and the criticism of metaphysical violence

One of the most important criticisms of metaphysics in recent philosophical scholarship has been concentrated on the concept of violence of metaphysics. Levinas, Derrida, and feminist philosophers have contributed in developing arguments against the violence rooted in the metaphysical tradition. Within their different works, feminist philosophers have uncovered some invisible aspects of metaphysical violence. They argue that, through categorizing the beings, metaphysical systems develop the politics of stabilization, deletion, and valuation. They also justify, even empower totalitarian politics by way of exclusive insistence on rationality and transcendence as the only warranted methods of discovering reality. Moreover, metaphysics has reduced all of the approaches toward reality into limited a discourse of being. Thereafter, many humanist experiences of reality including non-being have been ignored in the metaphysical discourse. In this way, metaphysics has covered the very humanist ground against which it has been standing so far. In this article, I will recover and reconstruct the different criticisms of feminist philosophers about the violence of metaphysics and withal some of the problems of these criticisms.