Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy

Todd May

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844652181
• eBook ISBN: 9781317546771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Emerging Trends in Continental Philosophy" presents a comprehensive and accessible analysis of the most recent developments in European thought. From feminist thought to environmental philosophy to analytic themes in Continental philosophy to recent discussions of citizenship, "Emerging Trends" offers an overview of the currents animating contemporary Continental philosophy. The volume focuses on thematic developments rather than individual figures, allowing the reader to follow the threads that weave different thinkers together. Each essay is written by an expert in the area covered, displaying the passion of these experts for the fields they discuss without lapsing into jargon. The volume provides a broad map of the landscape of recent European thought as well as the latest thinking from leading scholars on key themes.

1

RETHINKING GENDER: JUDITH BUTLER AND FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Gayle Salamon

The historically fraught relationship between gender and philosophy has sometimes served to obscure the mutual necessity that has bound them together. Gender is that without which philosophy could not proceed, and yet it has historically evaded notice as a philosophically significant concept. Luce Irigaray¹ has demonstrated the extent to which the feminine has haunted philosophy all along, unincorporated and unacknowledged but central to its projects. If philosophy has been silently marked by gender, it is equally true that gender is in some sense marked for philosophy. Monique Wittig describes the relation between gender and philosophy as a question of ownership, and has framed their connection thus: “As an ontological concept that deals with the nature of Being, along with a whole nebula of other primitive concepts belonging to the same line of thought, gender seems to belong primarily to philosophy.”² Wittig makes this assertion about gender in something of a disparaging mode, chastising philosophy for its unthought and reflexive conflation of gender with the natural order of things while also consigning gender to philosophy as a way of dispensing with it as yet another “primitive concept” relegated to irrelevance. The problem with gender in philosophy, according to Wittig, is that its putative self-evidence has rendered it invisible, and philosophy has become the end point at which gender transforms from a speculative question into an unnoticed fact.

Despite this lack of sustained attention – or perhaps because of it – gender persists as a question in and for philosophy. Even outside the domain of philosophy proper, some of the most influential feminist discourses have been those that take gender seriously as a philosophical problem, from the robust critique of ontology and neat Cartesian inversion offered by the “Am I?” of Denise Riley’s Am I That Name? to the epistemological critique incited by Joan Scott’s reading of the power of gender as a category of historical analysis. Both the concept of gender and feminist discourse as a whole have been given an explicitly philosophical genesis by at least one author: Donna Haraway has argued that “all the modern feminist meanings of gender have roots in Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that ‘one is not born a woman.’”³ This genealogy understands gender, in any conceptual deployment, to already be engaged in a mode of critique, and offers gender as a way of questioning and challenging the naturalization of the social and identity formations that accrue around sex. This critical and interrogative relationship need not go by the name of “gender” at all, and indeed does not in Beauvoir’s case. Locating the birth of gender with Beauvoir’s philosophical critique asserts a kind of deontologization of gender from the start, since the essence of gender is then located in the relationship between “sex” and a critique meant to unseat presumptions of its naturalness or givenness.

Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women” (1975) is often cited as the moment when the distinction between “sex” and “gender” became codified in feminist thinking, primarily because of her introduction of the phrase “sex/gender system,” which she defines as “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”⁴ Rubin holds that sex, sexuality, and gender are unthinkable apart from the culture that gives them meaning, and elsewhere describes the relationship between biology and sexuality, paraphrasing Claude Lévi-Strauss, as “Kantianism without a transcendental libido.”⁵ Rubin’s phrase soon began to circulate to support the idea that sex and gender were two different kinds of things that worked in concert as a system, and “The Traffic in Women” is often cited as the origin of the theorization of sex as biological raw material overlaid with a something nonmaterial called gender. However, this is a misreading: although Rubin’s piece was indeed the first in this area to use the term “gender” to refer to identity and behaviors that are culturally tied to sexual dimorphism, it was clearly not her intent to formulate sex as biological and gender as cultural, since she is clear in her assertion that “sex as we know it – gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood – is itself a social product.”⁶ Rubin does not always distinguish between sex and gender; indeed, there are moments when the slash between sex and gender in the sex/gender system functions as a sign of collapse or dissolution rather than a marker of disjunction. Nor does she parse gender and sex and sexuality, although she will argue for their conceptual and methodological separateness a decade later in “Thinking Sex” (1984).

The work of Judith Butler (1956– ) has a singular place in this genealogy. Butler completed her PhD in philosophy at Yale University in 1984, where she worked with phenomenologist Maurice Natanson, and has spent most of her career to date in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. All of Butler’s work might be described as an exploration of the conditions of possibility of the subject, where the condition that has received Butler’s most sustained attention is gender. Butler rethinks gender by casting it as a performative, a doing rather than a being, and her theory of gender performativity can be read as a continuation of a tradition in twentieth-century French philosophy that finds its point of germination in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, although Beauvoir serves as an explicit interlocutor only in Butler’s earliest work. In tracing the genealogy of Butler’s reconceptualization of gender within and beyond its philosophical context, we will not ask what Butler’s concept of gender does, less still what it is. We will ask instead after the conditions of gender’s emergence and the possibilities of its subversion, psychically and socially, and suggest that a tension between legibility and possibility, between the structuring force of that which is given and the yet unseen horizon of the possible, motivates Butler’s engagement with the philosophical tradition in her articulation of gender performativity.⁷

True to Haraway’s assessment, Beauvoir’s dictum also functions as a point of departure for Butler, particularly in the kinds of speculation it invites about choice and situatedness in relation to gender. Beauvoir is also a temporal starting-point for Butler’s work, in that Butler quickly leaves the existential and phenomenological paradigm in which Beauvoir writes in favor of more psychoanalytic terrain, although some have asserted that the importance of her earlier phenomenological and, in particular, existential engagements has been overlooked.⁸ Butler reads Beauvoir’s assertion as an invitation to use insights about the formation and acquisition of gender as a kind of critique, with the aim of social transformation and change. In her earlier work, Butler’s emphasis on gender as a doing rather than a being is a critique of ontology similar to Beauvoir’s: a counterargument against fixed, essential, or materialist understandings of sex and gender. Butler offers this critique of gender determinism as given alongside a critique of gender as a free choice, and this dual critical impulse – the desire to deny gender and sex as essential or inevitable while at the same time rejecting a conception of gender (or sex) as a project freely chosen by a willful subject – is a persistent refrain in Butler’s work and present in her earliest writings on the subject. These critical impulses are mobilized through her engagement with different philosophical figures, where Jean-Paul Sartre comes to stand in for the willful agent who would choose gender (“a ‘project’ in Sartrean terms”⁹) and Beauvoir’s “become” is read sometimes as echoing that Sartrean project and sometimes as challenging it. Butler’s conception of gender is a challenge to certain ideas that have long preoccupied philosophy: the possibility of universalizability; the metaphysics of substance; the relation between spirit and flesh. If the challenge that she poses to traditional conceptions of sex proceeds by arguing against a metaphysics of substance in thinking sex and gender, this challenge does not proceed through rejecting the language of philosophy or leaving its domain, but rather by reassembling its terms elsewhere. Butler offers Beauvoir as the progenitor of an “act” theory of gender, reading her formulation of woman’s becoming as establishing gender as a “stylized repetition of acts,” and the language of “acts” as Butler deploys it borrows from both speech act theory and phenomenology.¹⁰ Butler has recently defined gender as “a practice of improvisation within a scene of constraint,” and for Butler the question of gender involves two different kinds of inquiry.¹¹ The first is a description of the limits of intelligibility that constitute the borders of gender, and attention to how that constitution designates some subjects as livable and marks others as abject. Butler emphasizes the mutually constituting nature of these different positions, where that which is unassimilable to the domain of proper gender must still persist as a necessary and structuring ideal, giving coherence and boundedness to the category that excludes it. Her discussions of gender melancholia, most fully explicated in The Psychic Life of Power, describe just this structure, whereby those homosexual attachments that must be repudiated in order for the subject to achieve normative sexuality (and also gender) remain alive and stubbornly held at the heart of heterosexuality. The proximity and persistence of these repudiated identifications or objects do not persist despite the subject; they are rather what form the subject:

My sense is that it is always the case that the subject is produced through certain kinds of foreclosure – certain things become impossible for it; certain things become irrecoverable – and that this makes for the possibility of a temporarily coherent subject who can act. But I also want to say that its action can very often take up the foreclosure itself; it can renew the meaning and the effect of foreclosure. For instance, many people are inaugurated as subjects through the foreclosure of homosexuality; when homosexuality returns as a possibility, it returns precisely as the possibility of the unraveling of the subject itself: “I would not be I if I were a homosexual. I don’t know who I would be. I would be undone by that possibility. Therefore, I cannot come in close proximity to that which threatens to undo me fundamentally.” Miscegenation is another moment …

Now I think it’s possible sometimes to undergo an undoing, to submit to an undoing by virtue of what spectrally threatens the subject, in order to reinstate the subject on a new and different ground. What have I done? Well, I’ve taken the psychoanalytic notion of foreclosure, and I’ve made it specifically social. Also, instead of seeing that notion as a founding act, I see it as a temporally renewable structure, and as temporally renewable, subject to a logic of iteration, which produces the possibility of its alteration.¹²

This then is the first kind of inquiry that Butler follows regarding the nature and operation of the psychic and social norms that constitute us as sexed and gendered subjects. Butler is committed to keeping a number of tensions in play with this formulation, most significantly the tension between the seemingly fixed norms of sex and gender, which always come to us from elsewhere, and the ability to style one’s life in opposition to or to the side of those norms. This tension is inherent in her definition of gender, with its unresolvable pull between “improvisation” and “constraint.” That conceptual balance requires a methodological tension as well, a pairing of the psychic with the social, so that the weight of the symbolic determinism of the socially enforced norm might be met with the possibility of choosing otherwise that iterability affords. The result is an undoing at the level of the subject as well as the symbolic; it is not only the subject that is undone in this instance, but also some of the rigidity of the structure of the Lacanian symbolic.¹³

The notion of the “otherwise” occupies the second kind of inquiry Butler pursues: an interrogation of that “we” who are constituted as sexed and gendered subjects and an asking after the conditions of life on the sexual margins. Butler is interested in expanding the domains of legibility for those who violate the norms of gender and sexuality, and doing so without appeal to a shared sense of identity. That expansion cannot be achieved by simply enumerating a list of gender configurations that might supplement male and female, since such a list would quickly become proscriptive or positivist. Butler wants to secure gender as an open site of as yet unarticulated possibility in order to resist the kind of foundationalism or ontological thralldom that would restrict the realm of the possible to its normative iterations. The task of recognizing gender as it is lived outside norms necessarily entails a holding open or a suspension of the position, thus supplanting a description of norms with what might be considered a speculative project in a Hegelian sense. Describing gender becomes a matter of describing the way that it is done and the way that it is undone, and if gender is a doing, that doing is accomplished in several different modes at once.

There have been attempts to divide Butler’s early work on gender from her later work in various ways: psychic versus political, normative versus ethical.¹⁴ It could be suggested that the first decade of her work has been concerned with doing, and the second with undoing, evidenced by her recent works Undoing Gender and Giving an Account of Oneself, in which she poses the question: what does it mean to become undone by another? One of the limitations of such pairings is that they reinstall just the sorts of binaries that Butler’s work seeks to undo. She uses Michel Foucault, for example, not only oppositionally to a Sartrean view of the relation between subject and world, but augmented with feminist theory at the same time as it is used in conjunction with more psychoanalytic or intrapsychic models. Butler asks that we attend to the constrictions and the violence wrought in the service of gender norms and the unequal distribution of that violence onto bodies depending on their markers of race, class, ethnicity, and ability, while at the same time insisting that we not misrecognize genders lived on the margins as necessarily marked by fatality. This paradox is central to Butler’s theory of gender: to recognize the power of norms, to understand that there is no way to live outside the grasp of that power, and yet to affirm that such power can never be fully constituting, and that the future iterations of gender possibility cannot be mapped or predicted. We must both expand the bounds of what is recognized as a livable life, as fully human, yet must not understand legibility to be the sole precondition for a livable life. It is to this end that Butler has focused on undoing, in her most recent work on gender, using the term not in the sense of relinquishing or dismantling gender, but rather as a way to describe a more reflexive movement, a moment of vulnerability or openness that comes about in the face of my encounter with the other. If she is not quite calling for gender to be dismantled when she speaks of undoing, she is writing in favor of a partial dismantling of the conditions of its legibility, a disruption of its taken-for-granted signifying practices.

There are other paradoxes in the relation between sex and gender as Butler outlines them. Through an explanation of the ways in which girls are socialized into women, and her attention to the efforts and labors of becoming a woman, Beauvoir’s reconception of sex as a series of acts provides the ground for what is for Butler a still more trenchant question: how can an understanding of gender as a stylized repetition of acts, where tho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Rethinking gender: Judith Butler and feminist philosophy
• 2. Recent developments in aesthetics: Badiou, Rancière, and their interlocutors
• 3. Rethinking Marxism
• 4. Thinking the event: Alain Badiou’s philosophy and the task of critical theory
• 5. Rethinking Anglo-American philosophy: the neo-Kantianism of Davidson, McDowell, and Brandom
• 6. Rethinking science as science studies: Latour, Stengers, Prigogine
• 7. European citizenship: a postnationalist perspective
• 8. Postcolonialism, postorientalism, postoccidentalism: the past that never went away and the future that never arrived
• 9. Continental philosophy and the environment
• 10. Rethinking the new world order: responses to globalization/American hegemony
• 11. Approaching the real
• Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index