Angelica Stathopoulos

Angelica Stathopoulos earned their PhD in philosophy from The New School for Social Research in New York in 2020. Their dissertation ‘Passivity: Essays in Ontology and Ethics’ placed passivity at the heart of a new understanding of ontology and ethics by drawing on Ancient thought, Continental philosophy, and queer and feminist theory. With a particular focus on the relation between passivity and femininity, Angelica Stathopoulos’s work rethinks our understanding of subjectivity, ethics, and politics by way of experiences of laziness, sleep, eroticism, failure, impotence, and sickness.

They have recently published an article on boredom from the point of view of feminine life: ‘On the Boredom of Whoredom: Re-Writing the Politics of Sex Work Through Passivity and Femininity’, The Journal of Lesbian Studies (2023). Angelica Stathopoulos is committed to public scholarship, has served as philosophical consultant for a number of performance arts projects, and functions as co-editor for the special issue Lesbians, Sex Work, Resistance for The Journal of Lesbian Studies. They are also currently translating Luce Irigaray’s magnum opus Speculum de l’autre femme to Swedish.

From the point of view of a diminutive i, this research project develops an alternative understanding of ethics by drawing on experiences of passivity. Centring on rest, illness, and eroticism, it shows that diminutive existence is lived on the side of passivity, patheticism, and femininity, and it formulates an ethics honouring these modalities. As passivity hinges on reduction rather than the expansion of active being, it teaches the subject to be smaller, to take up less space, and to relate differently to the other and our shared world.

As such, passive phenomena transform the I into a diminutive self: an i. In English the i is habitually capitalized, which hones a certain understanding of the self as the master and centre not just of grammatical units, but of all relations. Beyond the self-same and overly productive ego of Western thought, this project elaborates a diminutive subjectivity that instead always-already acknowledges its bonds to the other and the world. ‘Stories of i’ develops visceral and engaging accounts of sleeping poorly and its unsuspected moral dimensions, of an impotent ethics modelled on a sick self, and of the ethical possibilities of bottomness.