Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-US feminist political philosopher I have been reading...
What is she talking about? The philosophical debate she enters is one in which the reasoning subject of Kantian philosophy has been severely attacked by postmodern thinkers in particular. But is there any 'universal human' we can rescue?
Postmoderns wish to destroy all essentialist conceptions of human being or nature. In fact Man on this account is a social, historical or linguistic artifact not a noumenal or transcendental Being. 'Man' is a construct of our discourse. 'Man' is forever caught in the web of fictive meaning, in chains of signification, in which the subject is merely another position in language. Taken very strongly, this means that the subject dissolves into the chain of significations of which it was supposed to be the initiator. Ouch!
For Benhabib, this version is NOT compatible with the goals of feminism.
She admits: ‘Surely, a subjectivity that would not be structured by language, by narrative and by the symbolic codes of narrative available in a culture is unthinkable. We tell of who we are, of the ‘I’ that we are, by means of a narrative.’ p.214 BUT: we can concede all that but we must argue that we are not merely extensions of our own histories but are author/characters in our own stories…
She attacks Judith Butler's position that we are all self-constructed performers:
‘if we are no more than the sum total of the gendered expressions we perform, is there ever any chance to stop the performance for a while, to pull the curtain down, and only let it rise if one can have a say in the production of the play itself? Butler's work undermines the normative vision of feminist politics.
Further, she says, it is impossible to get rid of the subject altogether and claim to be a fully accountable participant in the community of discourse and inquiry: the strong thesis of the death of the subject undermines the discourse of the theorist herself. Good point!
INSTEAD: we can think of the self as a subject, but as a 'situated subject': that is, a person who is a body and so gendered, situated in time and space and so on, and so place in a context of unique or close to unique conditions from which the self responds and reasons.
She says:
‘my goal is to situate reason and the moral self more decisively in contexts of gender and community, while insisting upon the discursive power of individuals to challenge such situatedness in the name of universalistic principles, future identities and as yet undiscovered communities.’ p.8
Nice.
3 comments:
So this is sort of like - "if I am nothing more than a construct of meaning, how come I can step outside of the construct of meaning and contemplate or even change it: what, then, is my point of reference ?" ...Though that last paragraph, the one about future identities and as yet undiscovered communities made my brain go all swimmy, and feel like what little understanding I had struggled to pull together was losing focus, (in a warm, optimistic kind of way, at least).
My favourite of my undergraduate essays, which I wrote for a communications course, seemed to traverse similar ground. It was an analysis of two texts... I chose the film clip for Madonna's Material Girl (the one where she recreates Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds are a Girls best friend" number) and the film Desperately Seeking Susan (I made much of the fact that it was directed by Susan Seidelman: ...cue the search for self!)
The song clip analysis took a materialistic / "there-is-only-symbols" route; the film analysis a feminist - but a slightly mystical "the mysterious essential feminine" direction... which I preferred really. I compared the two analytical approaches to argue that there is a yearning for "more" in feminist writing that undermines the argument in the semiotic writing that there isn't any more than constructed symbolic meaning. All very calculatedly trendy, in a late 80's kind of way and fun, but I was left with a sense of the spiritual in some feminist writing, which I liked (though I hate when people take the whole "women are from venus" thing too far).
As local christian writing, and mainstream culture, seems to have increasingly turned on feminism, I retain a soft spot for it, because despite being mostly neutral about, or even antipathetic to God, at its best it is about the enduring desire for justice and an exploration of our unique essence ... two naturally christian subjects.
In the early 1400's someone memorably named Bianco De Sienna wrote (it seems vaguely relevant...) in another of my favourite things - the hymn "come down oh love divine" - "And so the yearning strong with which the soul will long, shall far surpass the power of human telling. For none can guess its grace 'til they become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling..."
(PS: that was P Knight - gotta do the password retrieval)
Wow. Thank PK.
LOVED your album by the way. Thankyou. It kinda prompted the debate above!
Post a Comment