Had We but World Enough, and Time: A Response to Adam Kotsko

Kotsko states that in his expanded course on the Canon he includes 'contemporary works of scholarship that themselves count as "primary sources," with a preferential option for women-particularly women who aren't writing solely on "women's issues."' This seems to me to be something of an uncharacteristic slip in Kotsko's approach, celebrating only those works by women deemed not to be 'partial' or 'partisan'. What lies behind the construction of any Canon, whether classical or Biblical, postcolonial or philosophical, is perhaps a fear of structurelessness, a fear of the impossibility of having some kind of hold on an image of the world, the absence of a mirror. Nina Power teaches Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and Critical Writing in Art & Design at the Royal College of Art.