The impasses of the reversibility of perspectives

Abstract

In Situating the self: gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics, 1992, Seyla Benhabib presented the idea of reversibility of perspectives, as a real or imagined exercise, through which we could make present the perspectives of the others. Afterwards, Iris Young criticized the concept, questioning its possibility and even its desirability. For Young, the problem is the idea of symmetry that underlies specially its imagined version. Through the analysis of the arguments in the texts, and the contextual evaluation of two encounters with the negro question in the United States – that of Hannah Arendt and that of Benhabib – the article will question this idea, returning to Young’s criticisms and the concept’s role in Benhabib’s democratic theory, arguing that there is an impasse between the need for an imagined dialogue considering contemporary politics and its impossibility and even undesirability.