Engagement and intervention: Feminism\u27s exchange with nineteenth-century master thinkers

Abstract

This study enacts a feminist engagement with phallogocentric texts and paradigms as I seek to disclose the resources that exist for liberatory projects therein, despite Western phallocracy\u27s “othering” of minority subjects. Specifically, I examine the intersection of contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory with certain key philosophical texts by formidable nineteenth-century “master thinkers,” Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. In Part 1, I explore feminism\u27s insistent return to Hegel, beginning with Simone de Beauvoir\u27s treatment of key Hegelian moments, and then illustrate how the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray interrogate the structures and themes of Hegel\u27s Phenomenology as a primary articulation of the phallic logic of masculine economies, including masculinist philosophies, but are unwilling to negate the alterity of woman without first exploring the radical potential of such status. Drawing on Beauvoir\u27s formulation of alterity as endemic to masculinist thought, Kristeva and Irigaray simultaneously refuse the discursive authority of such an ordering principle while invoking Hegelian themes for their own strategies of usurpation. By analyzing the differences in these engagements with Hegel, I demonstrate how confrontations with this exemplar of traditional philosophical thought have the potential to both disrupt complicitous and legitimating apparatuses and generate viable liberatory resources that may be appropriated for feminist ends. In Part II, I emphasize the convergence of bodies with Philosophy, illustrating how psychoanalytic feminists strategically invoke the material and metaphorical body as a means to oppose and interrogate phallogocentric thought. Corporeal paradigms are powerful tools which function to reconceptualize exchange and enact multivalent interventions. By elucidating the way in which bodies are deployed in the work of Irigaray, Kristeva, through their engagement, either covert or overt, with the writings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Hegel, I illuminate the means by which these feminist philosophers provide alternatives to dominant forms of intercourse, or exchange, that emphasize human mediation, recognition, and negotiation. By bringing corporeal substance to the discourses of philosophy in a complex and inventive manner, psychoanalytic feminists at once recover resources from traditional thought and undermine dominant narratives therein. Yet these strategies are provisional ones; ultimately, I argue, feminisms should resist paradigmatic closure