The Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy

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Adriana Cavarero

Translated by Robert Bucci

Binary Logic

Describing the birth of the universe, Plato stated in the Timaeus (Plato 1997: 1245, 42b) that, as human nature was of two kinds, the superior race would hereafter be called man and the inferior race woman. More precisely, according to him, woman was created when the prototype of man, having lived an unrighteous life, passed into another, lesser life and returned as a woman. After having defined man as zoon logon echon—a rational animal—Aristotle affirmed in the Politics (Aristotle 1988: 19, 1260a) that, while the slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element of logos, the female has it but that it lacks authority: that is, women lack rationality. These are two significant examples of the various sexist and misogynistic aspects that characterize ancient philosophy and expose it as an expression of a patriarchal society in which the human being, broadly understood, is modeled on the male sex only. Consequently the female sex is characterized as a kind of being that is not fully human and that is deficient, inferior, and for this reason subordinate.

Scholars in feminist and gender studies have long drawn attention to the patriarchal stain of ancient culture by insisting above all, with regard to the field of philosophy, on the positions of its two greatest representatives, Plato and Aristotle. Having intensified during the 1990s in important edited collections on Plato and Aristotle (Bar On 1994; Tuana 1994; Ward 1996; Freeland 1998), numerous feminist essays have had the merit of showing how, in the works of the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, the conception of sexual difference—far from being the simple and naïve reception of a sexist stereotype—intersects with Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought in profound and complex ways, often influencing their theoretical frameworks. As much as it is interesting and curious, the mere exercise of unmasking the misogynist prejudices that span the ancient philosophers’ work risks, in fact, being an exercise that sets out to discover the obvious. With rare and rather problematic exceptions, philosophy—like other forms of knowledge—cannot but reflect and reproduce the overtly patriarchal culture of the time. Feminist criticism has therefore taken on the particular task of delving into the texts of the ancient philosophers in order to demonstrate how the treatment of sexual difference and of gender stereotypes falls back on the overall construction of their philosophical systems and often places them in crisis. Above all, these systems are characterized by a binary logic—by an oppositional, dual, and hierarchical structure—which, starting from the man–woman dichotomy, constructs a series of oppositions: mind/body, spirit/matter, public/private, active/passive, etc. In these the first terms, considered positive and dominant, coincide with the masculine pole, while the second terms, considered instead negative and subordinate, coincide with the feminine pole.

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It is not at all surprising that the patriarchal stain, easily observable in the entire history of philosophy as in the history of culture in general, already characterizes the thought of ancient Greece, in which philosophy had its origin. In recent decades feminist studies of ancient philosophy have, first and foremost, been inserted into the wider horizon of studies, which—from diverse disciplinary perspectives—have revisited almost the whole production of classical antiquity in light of the concepts of sexual difference, sex and gender, sexuality and sexual desire, or sexual orientation. From epic to tragedy, from mythology to poetry, from art to politics, from medicine to cosmogony, reflections on these themes now constitute a vast and fertile field of research. Exemplary in this respect is feminist scholars’ particular and constant attention to Antigone, the character from Greek tragedy who has never ceased to interest philosophy, from Hegel onward (see, e.g., Söderbäck 2010). Also notable, though, is the attention given to feminine figures from myth—Demeter, Athena, Medea, and many others—to whom, in the 1980s, the French historian Nicole Loraux dedicated seminal books that marked a radical innovation in classical studies by opening the way to a different reading of the relationship between politics and sexual identity (Loraux 1991; 1998).

The intermingling of the various disciplinary perspectives and multiple styles of thought that re-examine classical culture through recent categories of sexual difference and gender is a distinctive feature of feminist interpretation of ancient philosophy, which contributes to the originality of this field. The fact that it deals with recent categories that are bound to the historical origins and current developments of feminist theory constrains interpretative work to engage with at least two methodological questions. On one level the work is to examine the problematic nature of applying the concept of sexual difference to ancient texts, and, even more so, of applying the current although controversial distinction between sex and gender. On another level the work recognizes that the fundamental starting point for a genealogical reconstruction of the same ideas of sex and gender, if not of sexual difference, is in classical antiquity (Sandford 2010; Holmes 2012). The first question concerns the terminological and conceptual layout of feminist theory, while the second evokes the theme of the origin of philosophy that always presents itself when we speak of the Greeks.

Terminology and the Question of Origin

Feminist interpretations of ancient philosophy are affected by the various vicissitudes that, in the feminism of the last decades, have seen the term gender placed side by side, sometimes polemically and at other times in a conciliatory fashion, with that of sexual difference. Prevalent in the English-speaking world, the category of gender alludes to a culturally and socially constructed representation of female and of male, a representation that is distinct from the biological category of sex. Having spread throughout international feminism together especially with the texts of the French philosopher Luce Irigaray, sexual difference is instead employed as a critical concept that calls on the intersecting web of symbolic and material structures in order to re-think the feminine radically and free it from the logic of the patriarchal order. In general, with the term “patriarchal,” the language of feminist theory refers to a cultural system, a discursive register, a regime of truth—more simply, a vision of the world—structured by a binary logic. That logic defines the human being by modeling it on a single masculine subject, reserving a subordinate role for women, who, not being men, are thus imperfect or inferior humans. Along with the term “patriarchal,” which alludes to the power of fathers, feminist criticism in recent decades has elaborated other terms that express the same concept or approach it in greater depth. These include “androcentric” (centered on man), “phallologocentric” (centered on the phallus and on the logos), and “phallogocentric” (a simplification of the preceding term that underlines the identity, almost the inseparable fusion, between the phallus and the logos). Because philosophy, at least since the pre-Socratic thinkers Parmenides and Heraclitus, has been a reflection on logos—whose fundamentally untranslatable meaning ranges from “speech” to “language,” from “thought” to “reason”—many feminist interpreters tend to privilege the term “phallogocentric” in order to denounce the masculine stain of the philosophical tradition. This allows us to pass to the second question mentioned above, that of the historical origin of philosophy.

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As the Western tradition understands it, philosophy was born in the Greek world during the seventh century bc, and was established, as a form of knowledge with its own precise disciplinary charter, under Plato and Aristotle. In particular, it is Plato who used the term philosophia (love of wisdom) in a technical sense and who underlined the superiority of this new method for reaching knowledge of truth compared to other discursive or performative registers such as epic, poetry, rhetoric, and tragedy. Proudly declaring its innovative character, philosophy is constructed polemically and antagonistically ever since its historical origin with Plato. All the terminological baggage that comes from Plato’s writings and that passes to the philosophical tradition— primarily idea, theory, epistemology, and so forth—is inserted into a system of discourse that proclaims itself to be different, more powerful, and more valid—as well as the only exact, true, and correct system—in comparison to the other discursive regimes that dominate the culture of the time. It is a battle of logos in the name of a superior logos, a philosophical logos that reflects upon itself in order to discover its universal truth and, more precisely, the method by which to reach that truth. It is worth noting that the term “method” is a Greek word that means the way, the path (odos), through (metà) which discourse must proceed in order to know truth. The famous myth of the cave, at the beginning of Book VII of Plato’s Republic, describes this path. It recounts how the philosopher must turn his back on the Athens of his time—which is depicted as a dark cave where rhetoricians, Sophists, poets, and artists manipulate public attention with their deceptive discourses. The philosopher must turn his back on this in order to adopt the method that leads to the incontrovertible clarity of the philosophical discourse on ideas, and—no less important, as the second part of the myth narrates—to assume the order of ideas as the model for designing the optimal city, kallipolis, to be governed by the philosophers who are its “guardians.” From a feminist perspective, the theme of the guardians of the kallipolis is particularly interesting because, in a well-known passage in the Republic (Plato 1997: 1078–1079, 450c–451e), it results in stirring up a sort of enigma. In this passage, Plato makes a proposal that seems to retract the thesis of the inferiority of women that he sustains in the entirety of his work: surprisingly, through the mouth of Socrates, he declares in fact that there is no reason not to admit women into the role of the city’s guardians. A question can therefore be posed: Was Plato a feminist?

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Was Plato a Feminist?

In the field of ancient philosophy, just as in every other field of knowledge, feminist studies are a very rich constellation, articulated in many theoretical perspectives and multiple styles of thought, which cannot be traced to a simple framework. The aforementioned important lexical variation between gender and sexual difference signals the development of two conceptual currents, from whose mixing further trends arise. To the latter one can add, at a minimum, the position of liberal and socialist feminism, which is based on the history of the emancipation of women and therefore insists on the principle of equality. In fact, even if the denunciation of the misogynistic version of the differences between the sexes in the Western tradition is shared by almost all feminists, a vast and articulated area of contemporary critical feminist theory holds that sexual difference is to be retrieved and re-signified in a new context that values the otherness of the female by removing it from patriarchal binary logic. The area of liberal and socialist feminism, on the other hand, holds that the modern principle of equality between men and women must prevail over their difference. Even though the criticism of androcentric binarism is shared, in the first case the outcome is the radical rethinking of difference, while in the second case the outcome is instead the resolution of difference in equality. One should therefore not be at all surprised that, from the latter perspective, Plato’s proposal in the Republic on the equality between the sexes proves to be particularly interesting.

Plato’s proposal does not pertain to all citizens but rather only to the two superior classes of the guardians into which the kallipolis is organized: the warriors who defend the city and the philosophers who govern it. Overlooking his frequent declarations of the natural inferiority of women, Socrates argues that the difference between the sexes in regard to the reproductive act—“the female bears and the male mounts” (Plato 1997: 1081, 454e)—is inconsequential with respect to the political and military work of the guardians. Tellingly, so convinced is Socrates of an egalitarianism between the sexes that was completely unacceptable and scandalous at the time that he expects a “great wave” to beat down on him and crush him in reaction to his proposal.

Despite highlighting some aspects of Plato’s egalitarian proposition and its disruptiveness in respect to the prejudices of the time, the greater part of feminist philosophers have stressed that Plato cannot be considered a proto-feminist and that his thesis does not anticipate the entirely modern question of the rights of women (Annas 1976). In particular, it has been observed that Plato’s thesis of equality between the sexes is symptomatically inscribed in a political and social project that, for the guardian classes, abolishes the family and thus the domestic role of care and service, a role traditionally taken on by women, which is instead relegated to the class of the other citizens, who are the most numerous (Moller Okin 1979: 15–50). In order to render women equal to men in the government of the polis, Plato therefore turns women into de-sexed and unnatural females (Saxonhouse 1996: 147–157). In the Republic, the admission of women to the class of the guardians is realized in the context of a “communism” before its time, which was based on the customs of ancient Sparta and has unsettling eugenic aspects. This “communism” replaces the family with the political program of sexual unions for a reproductive purpose whose results—that is, children—are raised collectively and who call all the women and men who carry out the role of guardians their mothers and fathers.

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Although interesting in terms of an archaeology of the emancipationist idea in the West, the Platonic proposal on the equality of the sexes is very complex and involves themes that concern the institutional engineering of the philosopher and his so-called utopia. The extensive critical literature that feminist scholars have dedicated to the argument reflects this complexity (Kochin 2002; McKeen 2006; Brill 2013). The fact remains that the sexist prejudices that Plato expresses in other passages of the Republic and in all his work also, inevitably, appear during the speech in which he states his egalitarian thesis. At the same point that Socrates holds that men and women have the same nature for education and employment, he says that the guardians share women and children in common, thus leaving it to be understood that men remain the true subjects of this revolutionary social order.

Plato’s Cave and the Chora

There is another passage in the Republic on which feminist philosophers have focused their attention: the myth of the cave. Constructed by Plato in a polystratified manner, and marked by an overabundant symbolic density, the myth has generated an infinite series of interpretations throughout the centuries. We owe one of these interpretations to Luce Irigaray. In her book Speculum of The Other Woman, published in French in 1974 and translated into English in 1985, Irigaray breaks away from the canons of the interpretative traditions, rereads the myth in the light of sexual difference, and furnishes an interpretation that has become an obligatory reference for all successive feminist considerations of Plato’s cave (Irigaray 1985: 243–364). It is important to note the dates of publication and of translation of Irigaray’s book because Julia Kristeva’s book, translated into English in 1984 as Revolution in Poetic Language, was also published in French in 1974, a work that has also had considerable influence on feminist studies dedicated to Plato. Interdisciplinary thinkers who work between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and linguistics, Irigaray and Kristeva, although in different ways, are two central figures of the current of thought that bears the name “French Feminism,” which has been very popular with contemporary feminist studies in general and, in particular, with those studies relating to Plato. Both scholars treat an enigmatic category in the Timaeus, the chora, which—together with the myth of the cave—constitutes one of the principal points on which feminist interpreters of Plato focus their attention.

Imagine a subterranean cave, says Socrates in the Republic (Plato 1997: 1132, 514a), where men sit who, “since childhood, fixed in the same place, with their necks and legs fettered, able to see only in front them,” observe a sequence of shadows on the wall before them. So begins the myth of the cave. The story proceeds to narrate how one of the prisoners frees himself from the chains, gets on his feet, turns around, and walks in ascent through the narrow tunnel that leads toward the entrance to the cave. Outside there are fields, trees, lakes; a landscape illuminated by the midday sun. Drawn by the light—and after having discovered that the shadows on the cave’s wall were produced by strange mechanisms of projection and formed but a deception of poetic and sophistic discourses—the prisoner, now free and in the open, can turn his eyes to the sun and contemplate it (theorein) as the bright and fertile source of all that is and is knowable. Socrates sketches an analogy between the sun and the Idea of the Good, and he calls them respectively “son” and “father.” Full of political and ethical significance, the myth is an allegory that illustrates the educational and formative itinerary—the paideia—of whoever practices philosophy. The methodos allows the prisoner to rise from the darkness into the light, from false and misleading discourses to the true discourse, or rather to the knowledge of what truly is: the realm of ideas, eternal and unchanging forms, the originals of which the shadows in the cave are copies of copies. Exiting the cave, the philosopher is born and is constructed by Plato as solitary and immobile, a “vertically erect” contemplator of the phallogocentric order of ideas (Cavarero 2013). High up and very bright, the truth without shadows, Plato states, recalls the figure of the father.

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Luce Irigaray notes in Speculum that the cave is a uterus and that the labor undergone in order to come out of the cave, through a narrow cervix, mimics childbirth. This is not, however, a naïve, naturalistic imitation. Although the term “mother” does not appear in the text, the account has a precise structure and is, first and foremost, constructed around the polarity between a father/sun, guarantor of truth and knowledge, and a mother/cave, the seat of sensory deception and ignorance. At first glance, here as in all of Western tradition, the design is part of what Irigaray herself calls a binary economy. This is a system of dual oppositions in which the basic element of coming into the world sexed male or female, or rather the fact of sexual difference, is translated into a symbolic order in which man occupies an essential, founding, and dominant position, whereas woman holds a subordinate role often characterized by negativity and spite.

Upon closer inspection, as clarified by Irigaray and others, Plato’s allegory has very interesting manifestations of instability with regard to sexual difference. Beyond operating as the female pole of the binary economy, the cave/uterus also functions as a screen—material that is given and not representable—on which the philosopher projects and represents his gnosiological and educational journey toward the bright truth of the father. This means that philosophy or, if one wants, Platonic metaphysics, as the outcome of a process of the disincarnation, abstraction, and verticalization of the rational subject, is built on the mother/matrix that, precisely because it serves as the material for representation—as a screen for the system’s projection—cannot be represented and therefore exceeds the system itself. Elsewhere in the Timaeus, Plato calls this material chora, an untranslatable term that is essentially characterized by not having any form, indeed by being shapeless, the amorphous matter on which the forms and ideas of the father are imprinted.

It is interesting to connect the myth of the cave and the passage on the chora in the Timaeus. On the one hand, the recourse to the metaphor of sexual difference in the Timaeus is much more explicit, and on the other hand that explicitness is part of a “family romance”—mother, father, and son are named—that involves a clear allusion to the sexual act. The theme of the Timaeus is cosmogony, the generation of the perceivable world: the cosmos. Indicated by Plato as the son, the cosmos is at once the copy and the product of the intelligible model, corresponding to the father, which generates it; the father imprints his forms, namely his ideas, in the shapeless, inert, and passive chora, which carries out the role of mother. It is worth insisting on the amorphous character of the chora and on the difficulties of conceptualizing it, something that Plato himself exposes. Resorting to a metaphorical, varying, and imprecise language, he calls it “mother,” “receptacle,” “wet nurse,” thus taking advantage, for the most part, of the polyvalence of the term chora, which in Greek oscillates between the meanings of “space,” “abundance,” and “place.”

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As the third element necessary for the “family romance” of the generation of the cosmos, and placed to the side of the son that corresponds to the cosmos itself, and the begetting father that is its intelligible model, the chora is variously defined by Plato in the Timaeus. He calls it “an invisible and formless being which receives all things” (50a), or “a receptacle, in the manner of a nurse, of all generation” (49a), or “like the mother and receptacle of generated things which are visible and fully perceivable” (50a), or yet again as “the natural recipient of all impressions” (50c) (Plato 1997: 1251–1253). Far from showing the richness of Plato’s imagination, this variety of expressions exposes the philosopher’s confusion with respect to something that eludes conceptual grasp, something that escapes the sphere of intelligible forms, which, not by chance, is reserved for the father. In other words, there is an element that is necessary for generation and for knowledge, the chora, which remains outside the hold of discourse, of logos as a conceptual system and rational model, but that discourse itself, wanting nevertheless to name it, calls mother and other names that allude to the female. Logos, in its desire to say everything, to understand everything, and to place everything in the rigid, vertical order of ideas, is forced to recognize the existence of something irreducible—unconceptualizable, uncontrollable, unintelligible—that is described as maternal, as feminine.

In the final analysis, in the Platonic philosophy that emerges from the Republic’s myth of the cave and from the passage on the generation of the cosmos in the Timaeus, the female therefore assumes a double face and ambiguously occupies two different positions. On the one hand, the less problematic of the two, we find the female inside the binary logic of the system. Opposed to man and subordinate to him, woman performs a precise role in the domestic setting and within social organization as wife and mother. On the other hand, much more problematically, having been crucially named as mother/matter, woman is outside of the system and elusive to it, but she is nonetheless necessary so that the system can be built and can function. The cave is necessary for the games of projection that lead to the philosophical journey to the light of the father; the chora is indispensable in order that the father’s logos can create the cosmos.

One can maintain that, at least beginning with Luce Irigaray’s Speculum, the problem of the relationship between these two types of representation of the female—the domestic and domesticated woman inside the system’s binary economy, and the undomesticated woman, irreducible to the system—becomes a decisive theme for a large part of feminist critical philosophy. Rather than focus on searching for and unmasking stereotypes of the female inside of the patriarchal binary, many feminist philosophers work to make the most of and to give new meaning to that irreducible female—the feminine other—which the patriarchal order itself, starting with Plato, recognizes as unsettling, unclassifiable, and therefore potentially subversive. The strategy is not only that of a thinking of sexual difference, but also to give rise to a different thinking in which the feminine other defines a camp of radical alterity that can extend to welcome all who are excluded from the system, that is, those subjects that the binary system casts into its constitutive outside: gays, lesbians, queers, or what has been called “the abject” (Butler 1995). The binary economy that characterizes ancient metaphysics and is inherited by Western tradition is in fact also a normative device that establishes, inside itself, what is normal as it rejects that which, not fitting into these norms, is abnormal, monstrous. Indeed, Plato’s discourse in the Timaeus illustrates the tension between these two types of movement: one that is normative and assuaging, that places the chora within the binary opposition form/matter, and another that is expulsive and worrisome, that recognizes the strange and horrific, the inexpressible and unconceptualizable character of the chora.

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The experimental richness of Irigaray’s engagement with ancient philosophy and Greek intellectual tradition cannot be stressed enough (Tzlepis and Athanasiou 2010). Her exemplary manner of tracing that feminine other, which eludes the binary economy in ancient philosophy, and of transforming it into the fulcrum of a different thinking, is fruitfully harnessed by various feminist strategies that insist on revisiting Plato’s chora. They highlight the chora’s anarchic and disruptive but also fluid, dynamic, and vital character, the source of a universe that is becoming and in perpetual change, which contrasts to the rigid and lethal fixity of the realm of ideas.

As I have already stated, the interest of feminist philosophers in the chora has also been influenced by the analysis of Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language. Kristeva identifies the chora in what she calls the “semiotic,” the bodily element of language, associated with rhythms, movement, and tones, which opposes but permeates the symbolic, understood as the realm of the denotative meaning of words. By engaging with Lacan’s vocabulary, Kristeva primarily calls on the chora as the feminine locus of subversion of the paternal law. However, the chora’s subversive effect, on which most contemporary feminist philosophers insist, unveils the problematic core of Plato’s philosophy even more directly and deeply. On the one hand, if we assume that the chora is the bodily and rhythmical realm of the vocal, made up of plural voices communicating their incarnate uniqueness, then this very chora/voice becomes the perfect contrast to the abstract universality of logos, that logos that Plato in the Sophist (1997: 287, 263e) describes as the soundless thought of which the spoken discourse is a simple sonorization (Cavarero 2005). On the other hand, in as much as the chora alludes to the bond between the material and the maternal, between matter and mother, crucial questions arise about Plato’s notoriously ambiguous relationship to the issue of maternity.

In this regard feminists have spoken of “symbolic matricide.” In Plato, there is an explicit mimesis of maternal power when philosophy—and, above all, the Socratic method, which is compared to that of a midwife—is described as a work of logos for ensuring that the souls of young men may give birth to the ideas with which they are pregnant. Together with the topic of love (eros), the issue is developed in “Diotima’s speech” (Irigaray 1993: 20–34). We read in Plato’s Symposium (1997: 491–493, 209b–210d) that, pregnant in soul, men bring to birth many beautiful, even magnificent, words and thoughts in a love of wisdom, while women, pregnant only in body, give birth to human and mortal children. It is a woman, Diotima, who says these words. Plato decides to place in the mouth of a woman the definition of philosophy as the method that, on the one hand, mimetically takes on childbirth as a feminine characteristic, and that, on the other, debases childbirth as the production of mere mortal children, a product incomparable to the immortal thoughts born of philosophers. The rhetorical device of having a woman offer a speech that claims maternal power but at the same time degrades it functions, therefore, as a symbolic matricide.

Diotima is an ambiguous character who underscores the typical difficulty of the Platonic system with respect to a female who enters into the binary economy and, at the same time, exceeds it. From one point of view, breaking every stereotype of the domestic woman, Diotima is presented by Plato as the wise priestess and teacher of Socrates. From the other, she formulates a definition of philosophy that imitates and dispossesses maternity. Symptomatically, a mimesis of childbirth that raises crucial questions is also present in the allegory of the cave/uterus and in the figure of the chora. In the writings of Plato, maternity functions as a sign of a metaphysics that is not yet perfectly structured, as a theme that supports but concurrently puts into question the hierarchical verticality of the system.

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Aristotle

With Aristotle the organization of philosophical writing becomes more systematic and takes the form of the treatise, which will later become customary. Feminist scholars who reread Aristotle have often noted that his misogynistic canon is more explicit and less problematic than Plato’s. “The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled,” Aristotle states in the Politics (1988: 7, 1254b13–15). One of the essential aspects of Platonism’s binary logic, the dichotomy between mind and body—respectively identified within the limits of the masculine and of the feminine—is not only confirmed by Aristotle but also revisited in terms of a separation between the public and the private. Systematizing the customs of his society and at the same time furnishing a model of gender roles that would endure up until modernity, Aristotle maintains that free men—that is to say, those who are not slaves—belong to the sphere of politics while women belong to the domestic sphere: two separate and distinct settings, one public and the other private, where each of the two sexes best fulfills its nature (Cavarero 1992; Elshtain 1993).

When Aristotle formulates the famous definition of man as an animal equipped with logos, a rational animal (zoon logon echon), and therefore also a political animal (zoon politikon), he models the paradigm of the human on a single male subject, giving that subject a universal valence at the same time. It is worth recalling that this universalization of the masculine, definitively put in place by Aristotle, is a typical expression of the androcentric foundation of the whole of Western tradition and is also reflected at the level of language. Still today, in modern languages just as in Greek, the term “man” denotes, at the same time, the human being universally understood and those humans of the male sex, something that does not occur with the word “woman.” With all coherence, Aristotle argues in Politics that, since they do not fully possess logos, women are not political animals but, rather, domestic animals, inferior and imperfect humans destined, along with slaves, to tend to caretaking—which is necessary for corporeal life—in the setting of the home. Exemplary in each of its details, the Aristotelian model also foresees that, within the domestic setting, it is again the man who is master of the house—indicated in Greek with the revealing name of despotes, despot, who commands women and slaves. Binary logic here finds a quintessential expression.

Feminist studies dedicated to Aristotle have shown how sexist binary logic, which emerges from his political writings and characterizes all of his work, finds an additional foundation in his biological writings. These are very complex texts in which he undertakes a detailed examination of sexual reproduction within the teleological process of nature (Lange 1983; Nielsen 2008). In the Generation of Animals (1942: 109–111, 729a) Aristotle claims that in the production of embryos the male semen supplies the form of the potential child, while woman supplies the matter, consisting of menstrual blood. Moreover, the embryo, according to Aristotle, is always of the male sex, turned into the female sex when the maternal matter fails to function properly. Thus the uterus works as a little oven that, depending on its good or bad performance, produces the perfect male child that the father deposited in it in the form of a male embryo, or the imperfect female child as the unfortunate outcome of the functioning of a defective womb. Yet, although the female offspring is the result of a material mishap—although, as Aristotle argues in the Generation of Animals, a deviation from nature takes place “when a female is formed instead of a male”—nonetheless, “this indeed is a necessity required by nature, since the races of creatures” can only be perpetuated through the copulation of the two sexes (1942: 401, 767b7–9). Thus a deviation from nature that produces the female as a deformed male—but also produces some further peculiar monstrosities, depending on the matter/mother’s unpredictable and aleatory, errant status—ends up endorsing the final purpose (telos) of nature. There is a speculative turbulence in Aristotle’s biology, a “feminine symptom,” which destabilizes the structural coherence of the text. Obscure site of unaccountable movements, deviations, deformations, and even potential creative revolutions, the Aristotelian matter (hyle) perhaps has much more in common with Plato’s chora than is generally acknowledged (Bianchi 2014).

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Although there are feminist scholars who appreciate the Aristotelian texts and develop a positive reading of them (Homiak 1996; Witt 2011), Aristotle is certainly the ancient philosopher who, more than others, succeeds in providing a solid, speculative foundation for the gender stereotypes present in his society and inherited by tradition. One need only think of the success of the oppositional couples public/private and active/passive in subsequent literature on the natural subordination of women to men. Nevertheless, just like the works of Plato especially when they thematize and strain to rationalize the issue of matter/mother, Aristotle’s texts also reveal some symptoms of instability and deep anxiety. In the final analysis, feminist criticism finds it more interesting to reflect on these symptoms and to take advantage of their disruptiveness rather than to denounce the obvious phallogocentrism of the Aristotelian system.

In Conclusion

Although the innovative contribution of feminism to studies on Aristotle is noteworthy, it is not a coincidence that feminist scholars have focused their attention largely on Plato, producing experimentally dense and original interpretations. Organized in the form of a dialogue, and able to blend the definitional attitude of philosophy with narrative digressions, allegorical accounts, and inventions of myths, Plato’s philosophy—unlike Aristotle’s—is not constructed as a treatise, a potentially closed system. Instead Plato develops an experimental, discontinuous, incomplete, and substantially open composition. There are unsutured knots in the fabric of Plato’s writing that can be retrieved, decoded, and resituated within a feminist horizon that changes their meaning. There are female figures who can be extracted, “stolen” from context and re-thought in light of sexual difference (Cavarero 1995). A large part of the feminist consideration dedicated to Plato excavates his texts, along its fissures, interstices, caesuras, and fault lines, in order both to deconstruct patriarchal metaphysics and to think the feminine other differently. In tune with Plato’s experimental practice of thought, the result is not so much an academic revisiting of ancient philosophy as it is a way of philosophizing that, free and unprejudiced once again, confronts the conceptual and lexical structures of the entire philosophical tradition with the texts in which they have their origin.

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