I have never been human: on the possibility of an autistic ethos of asymmetrical reciprocity

 Philosophies of Difference Group

 August 2025 POD Seminars 

 Tuesday 26/8 6-7:30pm at RMIT City Campus 

Allan James Thomas (RMIT)

I have never been human: on the possibility of an autistic ethos of asymmetrical reciprocity

The universalising pretensions of humanism derive from a moment of mutual recognition: I am like you; you are like me; we are all human together. But where this recognition fails, difference becomes a criterion for dehumanisation: human rights are for humans only. A genuine equality cannot be premised on symmetrical recognition, but rather calls for an ethos of asymmetrical reciprocity. In this paper I aim to draw on my own neurological difference as a framework for just such an ethos. My autistic specificities are such that the world as I live and experience it – my form of life, my lifeworld – is distinct from that of the neurotypical. They don’t recognise themselves in me, but neither do I recognise myself in them. Damian Milton calls this empathic disjuncture the “double empathy problem”: neither side really “gets” how the other works, or thinks, or communicates. Neurological privilege means that neurotypicals interpret this empathic breach as evidence of dysfunction: the autistic other isn’t just different, they’re wrong, disordered, less than fully human. The autist, on the other hand, has no choice but to work to find the terms in which we can approach the other as other, rather than looking to find ourselves reflected in them as the same. I propose this demand as a model for a situated, local, and particular response to the ethical demand that other forms of life, other lifeworlds impose upon all of us: to neither reduce the other to the same, nor reject them for their difference.

Bio: I teach Cinema Studies at RMIT, with a particular interest in the work of Gilles Deleuze (which resulted in Deleuze, Cinema and the Thought of the World, published by EUP in 2018). The discovery of my own multiple neurodivergences has turned those interests inwards, towards a politics of neurological difference, its consequences and possibilities.

This is an in person seminar at the RMIT City Campus, Building 80 Level 10 Room 17

445 Swanston Street Melbourne

 All welcome!