Sara Heinämaa
Feminist studies and feminist thinking have greatly benefited from the methodological innovations, epistemological insights, and existential-philosophical results of classical hermeneutical thinkers, starting with the works of Schleiermacher and ranging over to the contributions of Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer, Benjamin, and Ricoeur.
The hermeneutical methods of textual interpretation and critical and self-critical inspection are widely used in many areas of contemporary women’s studies and gender studies. We find them applied in feminist theology and religious studies1 but also in several other areas of the human sciences, for example, ethnography and anthropology, literary studies and art studies, psychology, and psychoanalysis. Moreover, the systematic development of qualitative methods in the social sciences, including techniques of interviewing, ethnomethodology, and discourse analysis, has brought hermeneutical principles to completely new thematic areas and disciplinary contexts.
In the field of feminist philosophy, however, hermeneutics is not just a methodological approach, one among many. It is more integral to the whole enterprise serving the critical and self-critical end of making sense of an androcentric tradition, dismantling its biases, and preparing for new beginnings.
Hermeneutical methods serve as a common ground for analytical and continental philosophical inquiries.2 On both sides, feminist philosophers use hermeneutical tools when they approach historical materials in the attempt to make sense of the philosophical problems, methods, and conceptual solutions of past centuries. This work covers all the main topics of feminist philosophy, from knowledge and being to good life, justice, and power.
It is relatively easy to detect hermeneutical motifs, for example, in Luce Irigaray’s critical readings of canonical philosophical texts ([1974] 1986, [1984] 1993) or in Michèle Le Dœuff’s constructive accounts of early modern philosophy (1980), but one must not conclude from this that hermeneutics belongs to continental philosophy exclusively. On the contrary, hermeneutical methods and insights prompt feminist investigations also in the fields of analytical philosophy of science, cognition, and language. Genevieve Lloyd’s The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Philosophy (1984) and Lorraine Code’s What Can She Know? (1991) are perhaps the best-known examples. Both argue, in different ways, that the traditional norms of rationality and objectivity that guide both philosophy and the sciences must be radically rethought since they are associated, throughout the history of philosophy, with the male sex and are opposed to everything that is conceived as feminine or female. Hermeneutical methods are crucial in these enterprises, and they are used in parallel with conceptual analytical methods and textual-critical methods inspired by psychoanalysis. Today, these early contributions are followed by whole series of detailed inquiries into the philosophical past as well as by self-critical reexaminations of the early feminist accounts of the past.3
Contemporary feminist scholars also use hermeneutical methods when they approach female philosophers and/or feminist authors of past centuries. Most prominent contributions include readings and appropriations of Christine de Pizan, François Poulain de la Barre, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Simone de Beauvoir, Edith Stein, and Hannah Arendt.4 These studies have enriched our understanding of the several philosophical topics—most importantly equality, freedom, virtue, autonomy, and selfhood—but they have also contributed to the reassessment of the tasks and the methods of the history of philosophy.5
The influence of the hermeneutical classics, Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Heidegger, or Gadamer, are not apparent in all cases. Few feminist scholars tie their methodologies explicitly to the works of the hermeneutical “fathers.” Rather, the relations of influence are mediated by several generations of historiographers and historians of philosophy. Still, the hermeneutical principles of contextuality, holism, circularity, and reinterpretation inform the ways in which questions are posed and sources investigated. So, instead of functioning as an explicit methodology, hermeneutics serves as an implicit background or frame that helps raise feminist questions and address philosophical, feminist, and feminist-philosophical texts of past centuries.
Finally, there is an important group of philosophers who discuss and develop topics relevant to feminist theory and practice—such as equality, justice, virtues, friendship, emotions, eroticism, sexuality, and embodiment—but who eschew or explicitly reject the title “feminist philosophy,” and do this on philosophical grounds. This group of thinkers is historically heterogeneous and theoretically multifaceted, but it can be distinguished on systematic and methodological grounds. Two features in particular deserve attention: first, the use of ancient, Roman, early modern, and Enlightenment sources in the illumination of contemporary problems of equality and difference, and second, an acute awareness of the plurality of the human condition.6
Martha Nussbaum’s philosophical inquiries into human emotions and human capabilities serve as an example here: Nussbaum draws heavily from Aristotelian and Stoic philosophers and uses her readings of these sources to clarify several feminist concerns—ethical, political, and pedagogical-educational. However, as she contends that philosophical reflections as such cannot change the fundamentals of a person’s life or the life of a community she is skeptical about the tenability and usefulness of the label “feminist philosophy.”7
Another example is Hannah Arendt’s political theory. All Arendt’s works—from her doctoral thesis on Augustine’s concept of love, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (1929), to The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichman in Jerusalem (1963)—combine systematic existential analyses with historical and exegetic studies and with an acute consciousness of the political demands of the present.8 The analytical concepts that Arendt has devised through her hermeneutical inquiries—natality, narration, action, and evil—have been integrated into twentieth-century feminist philosophy at large and are today used in the analysis of many different sorts of acute phenomena, from genocide, ethnicity, and justice to the finitude of human life.9 Despite the relevance of her work for feminist concerns, Arendt cannot be categorized as a “feminist thinker,”10 since she explicitly and repeatedly rejected feminist agendas11 and since her analyses question some of the most influential ideas of postwar feminism, most importantly the elimination of the public/private distinction.12
The relation between hermeneutical and feminist investigations is not merely external, consisting of one-sided or mutual influences, but is also constructive and deconstructive: on the one hand, feminist scholars have developed hermeneutical methods further and, on the other hand, they have questioned the very foundations of these methods.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Le Deuxième Sexe 1949) serves as an illuminative example of the reformative and constructive aspect of feminist scholarship. Beauvoir built on classical hermeneutical principles, but she also developed original methodological ideas while dealing with the multifaceted problems of sexual difference and sexual hierarchy.13 In Beauvoir’s analysis, both problems involve physical, mental, social, and historical factors, but both also display the fundamental existential tensions of human life.14 Thus, their solution required that empirical studies must be deepened by critical ontological and phenomenological inquiries. This implied the need to develop a methodology that would integrate philosophical reflections dynamically with the insights offered by human and life sciences. The Second Sex was the first attempt to meet this challenge.
In the late 1980s, a new generation of feminist scholars, inspired by Derrida’s deconstruction and Foucault’s genealogy, started to question the fundamental principles of feminist theory and practice and set to investigate critically their epistemic and ontological conditions. These critiques undermined the credibility of the concepts of experience, consciousness, subjectivity, communication, and understanding, central to classical phenomenology and hermeneutics. Julie Ellison argued in her Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding (1990) that the hermeneutical principles of dialogue and receptivity resulted from and built on the historical practices of Romanticism, and that these practices were not gender-neutral but heavily selective and normalizing. More radically, Judith Butler challenged the phenomenological and hermeneutical grounds of twentieth-century gender theory and feminism. Armed with deconstructive, genealogical, and semantic-analytical tools, Butler set out to expose the naiveté that in her view characterized feminist attitudes to discourse and language as means of communication and communion. In Gender Trouble (1990), Bodies that Matter (1993), and a series of related essays, she argued that the whole process of discursive exchanges rests on an ontology of forces and power relations. A later work, Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performative (1997), summarizes this Foucaultian insight as follows: “The conditions of intelligibility are themselves formulated in and by power, and this normative exercise of power is rarely acknowledged as an operation of power at all” (Butler 1997, 134). This implies that any theory or practice that sets to criticize or subvert power relations by simply deciphering meanings is insufficient, at best, and regressive, at worst.
The critiques targeted at feminist hermeneutics and feminist phenomenology by post-structuralist feminists and, more recently, by “new materialists” have generated a countermovement.15 Skeptical arguments have been met by counterarguments, counterquestions, deeper clarification, and fresh reinterpretations. Classical hermeneutics has been supplemented and reformed by Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion, by Arendtian political hermeneutics, and by pluritopic hermeneutics sensitive to cultural and linguistic differences.16 The debate is ongoing and vibrant and produces novel conceptual and methodological innovations.
We should not, however, let the latest developments of feminist critique and self-critique blind us to the contributions of the first generation of feminist hermeneuticians. These concern the idea of tradition as a unified whole and as a coherent chain of communication. Early feminist hermeneuticians argued that the philosophical tradition of the West is not grounded on the supposedly guiding ideas of truth and reason. Rather, they claimed, this tradition is established, and reestablished, by operations of selection and exclusion that are motivated by preconscious and affective experiences of familiarity and alienness.
Fundamentally, this is a Nietzschean type of suspicion,17 but early feminists hermeneuticians gave it a gendered twist insofar as they argued that the constitution of the tradition, or canon, of Western philosophy is in gender-specific interests and norms. Moreover, they contended that the ideas of objectivity, rationality, and truth are not so much regulative as ideological in the sense that they cover androcentric and misogynous practices.
Three important problems were identified and clarified in these early discussions: (i) the factual absence of women in the philosophical tradition, (ii) the possibility of an intellectual tradition of women, and (iii) the constitution of tradition as a unified and uniform whole. I will discuss these three ideas separately.
Early feminist hermeneuticians and historians of philosophy faced an obvious problem: the philosophical canon, discussed by Heidegger, Gadamer, and their followers, was thoroughly male-centered and lacked all references to works by female authors. A related concern also drew attention: also topics associated with femininity and femaleness, such as emotions, affectivity, privacy, personal affairs, and embodiment, were marginal in the standard presentations of the philosophical tradition.
Habitually, the absence of women authors (and women-related topics) was explained by reference to presumed differences in the spiritual, intellectual, or mental capacities and roles of the sexes. Women were claimed to fall behind men in deliberation, intelligence, logical reasoning, mathematical thinking, concept formation, innovativeness, and creativity—all capacities that have been assumed to be fundamental to the practice of philosophizing. Alternatively, women were assumed to be preoccupied with private affairs and personal matters and lack theoretical interest in the universal, fundamental, and/or eternal structures of existence, being, or world.
This state of affairs suggested two basic strategies for early feminist hermeneuticians: on the one hand, feminist scholars could develop alternative, non-psychological and non-anthropological explanations for the scarcity of female philosophers and, on the other hand, they could question and dismantle canonical presentations of the tradition. Both tasks were undertaken at the same time.
Feminist scholars in the fields of history of ideas, sciences, and philosophy have identified several factors that have contributed to the absence of women in the tradition of philosophy. Today, most scholars agree that the process of inclusion/exclusion is complex, and that it includes many different sorts of causes, reasons, and motives, both historical-social and internal to the discipline. To describe the process simply in negative terms would be misleading; in addition to prohibitions, obstacles, and barriers, one has to pay attention also to incitements and forms of encouragement.
The most important historical explanations that have been given to women’s absence from philosophy are: first, material restrictions, or poverty to put it in more concrete terms; second, lack of education and encouragement; third, prejudices about women’s intellectual capacities; and fourth, institutional restrictions and prohibitions. These factors have not worked separately or independently; they are intertwined and constitute a tight network of influences. The process is historical, but this should not be taken to mean that it would belong to the past. Many of the mechanisms are still in operation today.18
But feminist scholars have not merely searched for explanations for the absence of women in the tradition. They have also questioned the deeply embedded preconception that there were no women philosophers in earlier historical periods and that women did not participate in philosophical practices before the nineteenth century. Feminist scholars have argued that modern historiographies have been systematically biased in their presentations of the past. This claim has been substantiated in the case of political and economic histories but has also defended in the case of intellectual and spiritual history, that is, histories of intellectual achievements and philosophical works.
Thus, the critical feminist claim is not only that women could have taken part in scholarly practices, if only they had been allowed to and encouraged. The claim is also that women did take part, despite difficulties and disadvantages.
Thanks to feminist-motivated scholarship, we now know of the works of such female thinkers as Aspasia of Miletus (ca. 470–400 BC), Hipparchia of Maroneia (ca. 325 BC),19 Julia Domna (170–217 AD), Hypatia (370–415), Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1100–1164), Catherine de Siena (1347–1380), Christine de Pisan (1364–1430), Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–1680), Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), Lady Anne Conway (1631–1679), Damaris Cudworth (1657–1708), Mary Astell (1666–1731), Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), Catharine Macaulay Graham (1731–1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), Harriet Taylor Mill (1807–1858), Edith Stein (1891–1942), Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Simone Weil (1909–1943), G.E.M. Anscombe (1918–2001), and Iris Murdoch (1919–1999).
Many of these women worked at the margins of philosophical institutions, academia, schools, and universities, but some of them operated at the center. Many did not appear in public, but some authored extensive treatises and published them under their own name; and some contributed to the establishment of completely new forums of knowledge production and political debate. In general, female thinkers of past centuries operated in a very similar way as their male colleagues, or contemporary female thinkers: they posed original philosophical questions, formulated innovative arguments, devised new concepts, and discussed both classical and topical problems.
Interpretative and historical inquiries into the works and lives of female scholars have also shed light on the problem of exclusion. They have shown that women, more often than not, were respected and appreciated by their contemporaries. This suggests that the main effect of exclusion is that of later historiography. Thus, it would be misleading to state that women were excluded from the philosophical discussions of earlier centuries; rather, it seems that they have been written out from contemporary histories of philosophy.
However, sometimes women’s contributions were not publicly recognized by their contemporaries or near descendants. This is not just because their contemporaries may have had prejudices about female creativity and intelligence, but more often because of the role that women had in philosophical communities.
Several women philosopher have worked in close dialogue or cooperation with one particular male teacher or male colleague without any institutional position or public role. Often, these intellectual couples or pair relations have been mutually supportive, at least to a certain extent.
The relation between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes serves as an example of this dialogical way of practicing philosophy: Princess Elisabeth corresponded with several contemporary philosophers, but she developed her philosophical insights furthest and fullest in her exchange with Descartes. In 1642, she read Descartes’ Meditations of First Philosophy (1641) and became puzzled about his idea of the mind–body dualism. A year later, in 1643, she composed a letter to Descartes presenting her critical views. Descartes answered, and their correspondence continued thereon till Descartes’ premature death in 1650.
Elisabeth challenged Descartes by asking him to explain in detail how his definitions of mind and body as separate substances could allow him to defend any notion of the mind–body interaction:
I beseech you tell me how the soul of man (since it is but a thinking substance) can determine the spirits of the body to produce voluntary actions. For it seems every determination of movement happens from an impulsion of the thing moved, according to the manner in which it is pushed by that which moves it, or else, depends on the qualification and figure of the superficies of this latter. Contact is required for the first two conditions, and extension for the third. You entirely exclude extension from your notion of the soul, and contact seems to me incompatible with an immaterial thing.
(in Descartes [1964–1976] 1996 III 661)20
Descartes answered Elisabeth, but his explications did not convince her. She required more clarifications and more distinctions, and thus their philosophical discourse continued and developed further. Eventually, the exchange covered several central topics, from mind–body interaction to the nature of the passions and further to the Stoic philosophical therapy and its efficiency in extreme life situations. Descartes dedicated his later works, Principles of Philosophy (1644) and Passions of the Soul (1649), to Elisabeth since her persistent and direct questions and her ingenious counterarguments helped him clarify his early position and develop this position farther by a theory of emotions and the passions of the soul.
Elisabeth’s critique of Cartesianism is recorded in the correspondence between her and Descartes. However, as she declined Pierre Chanut’s requests to publish her side of the exchange, her arguments were not included in the seventeenth-century “debate over Cartesianism” that later became a central part of the philosophical heritage of modernity and is handed on to new generations today. Elisabeth’s contribution to early modern philosophy remained unknown until the end of the nineteenth century when her letters were rediscovered and published.21 The general acknowledgment of the importance of her contribution owes largely to feminist scholarship.
The dialogical and semipublic practice of philosophizing has been common in past centuries. For female thinkers, however, it remained long the only appropriate access to the universe of philosophy.22 Some female thinkers developed their views merely in correspondence and notebooks and did not publish any treatises; others published their insights anonymously or under false names,23 and yet others contributed by editing, expanding, correcting, and revising works by male teachers and colleagues.24
This complicates the work of contemporary feminist hermeneuticians and historians of philosophy in their attempt to revise the canon of Western philosophy. The task is not merely that of interpretation and understanding but also that of location, identification, archival excavation, discovery, rediscovery, invention, and imagination.
The first feminist hermeneuticians and historians of philosophy aimed primarily at reconsidering the works of canonical philosophers and at bringing to light the forgotten and neglected works of individual female thinkers. More recently, feminists have started to search for female or feminine traditions, that is, for topics, problems, and/or ways of thinking that are shared by several generations of women philosophers.
For example, Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck argue, in their collection, Presenting Women Philosophers (2000), that contemporary studies of the work of women over many centuries reveal a number of persistent themes and practices. Tougas and Ebenreck list several such topics: appreciation of body and matter, faithfulness to lived experience and caution regarding abstractions, emphasis on love and the life of feeling in establishing moral community.25
In the search for female traditions, feminist hermeneuticians and historians of philosophy have learned from the work done in literary studies. In this field, the first feminist questions about traditions were posed over 90 years ago. In 1928, Virginia Woolf published a small book about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1928). There she answered those who rejected the idea of women’s literature by appeal to its sporadic and fragmented character and lack of traditionality. Woolf argued that a literary tradition is not so much a fact to be found than a task to be accomplished. This implies that the word “tradition” does not function merely as a descriptive term in our discussions of ourselves and our activities but also has a crucial performative and normative function. The word does not only depict or represent an actual reality but also works to establish a reality, and thus it appeals to us as potential constitutors of realities.
Woolf criticized and mocked those who explained the lack of literary and scholarly traditions of women by the inborn weaknesses of female minds and bodies.26 She emphasizes that the lack of tradition is not a permanent state or an inevitable fate of women, but is their present condition and thus implies the possibility of change. So Woolf accepted the notion that women do not have a literary tradition of their own. In this respect, she is in direct disagreement with many contemporary feminists, for example, Tougas and Ebenreck, discussed earlier. She acknowledged that women have engaged themselves to creative activities in many centuries, but she pointed out that their creations do not form an accumulative series in which new works would refer to earlier ones, affirming and questioning, modifying and elaborating further.
Woolf argued that there are several preconditions that have to be met for a literary tradition to be established: material and economic but also spiritual-linguistic. This is a conditional claim; it states that if one aims at establishing a female tradition, then one has to work on several frontiers at the same time.
First, what is needed is that women in general start practicing and refining the skill of writing. Woolf asserts that a literary tradition is not possible until masses of women write ([1928] 1945, 66). So it is not enough to have a bunch of “literary women.” Rather, writing has to become a habit, a “second nature,” for women in general. What is needed is a multiplicity of texts and many different kinds of texts, written for different purposes: letters, notes, chronicles, biographies, histories, romances, and lectures. All this is necessary, Woolf claims, for even though a literary tradition consists of poetry and fiction, it rest on the bedrock of ordinary writing.
Woolf’s idea here is that it is not until different modes and ends of writing have been mastered by many women in several generations that some women can concentrate, as women, on writing for no other end than writing itself.
In the case of philosophy, one would need to make, not writing, but thinking and reasoning in public a habit for numerous women. One would also need to promote different forms of thinking, practical and theoretical, political and scientific. Women would also need to learn to use many different channels for publishing their thoughts. They would have to express themselves in speech, in writing, and in public discussions, and they would have to develop their skills of answering and presenting critical questions and comments in different languages. One would need not just doctoral theses and journal articles written by women, but also philosophical essays and interviews, philosophical reviews, overviews, assessments and critiques, histories of philosophy and introductions to philosophy, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and collections and textbooks written by women.
But this is not enough; Woolf also emphasizes another necessary condition. In order to establish a literary tradition of women, female writers would also have to create explicit connections between their own works and the works by other female writers, present, past, and future. Women would have to write, not just for contemporaries and not just with reference to possible female successors, but also, and more importantly, with reference to female forerunners. Woolf expresses this notion in her ironic way by declaring:
[M]aster pieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter—the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that she might wake early and learn Greek.
(Woolf [1928] 1945, 66)
The main idea here is that in order to establish a tradition of women writers, individual female authors would have to recognize the literary contributions of their forerunners and would have to create relations between their own works and whatever attempts have been made in the past in the way of writing-as-woman. Moreover, contemporary female writers would have make these connections explicit in their own works, that is, they would have to acknowledge the connections in public, despite the fact that their female forerunners may have had merely marginal, if any, positions in the tradition of Western literature or high literature in general.
The point is not that contemporary female authors should remember to mention women who in the past have created literary works, nor is the point that they should praise or commend such creations. Rather, Woolf argues that if a person is determined to create literature as a woman and she is convinced of the power of traditions, then she is obliged to establish explicit connections, whatever types of connections, to other women who in the past had similar vocations and determinations. The connections can be thematic or topical, but they might also concern style, syntax, prosody, rhythm, or diction, or the organization of ideas, images, and other figures of thought. In other words, what must be saluted in public is not any particular literary invention but the resolution to write-as-woman.
We have discussed earlier the nature of our philosophical tradition in two critical respects thematized by feminist hermeneuticians: first, the absence or scarcity of female authors within the tradition and, second, the conditions of establishing traditions and, in particular, a philosophical tradition that would not include women merely sporadically but would incorporate whole lines of female authors in transgenerational nexuses. The first topic concerns tradition as a factual reality, and the second concerns our possibilities of establishing something new.
There is, however, also a third line of critique that deserves attention here. It concerns our habitual practice of philosophizing and the conceptual tools that are integral to this practice. Feminist scholars have proposed that our philosophical practice and our means of philosophizing may involve factors that contribute to the marginalization of women and women-related topics, independently of the explicit intentions and aims of the practitioners.
This line of inquiry has been developed by French feminists, inspired and influenced by twentieth-century psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and structuralism,27 most noticeably and vigorously by the Belgian-French philosopher Luce Irigaray ([1974], 1986, [1977], 1985, [1984], 1993).
Irigaray is best known for her inquiries into the sense of sexual difference, that is, the difference between man and woman. What is less familiar is that she also puts forward a strong argument about our philosophical tradition as a whole.
Irigaray claims that this tradition is established and reestablished on repeated acts of unification and totalization. What is at issue is not just an exclusion of this or that author or this or that topic but an exclusive practice of thinking and writing that proceeds by contradictory and hierarchical conceptual oppositions: unity/difference, oneness/twoness, spirit/matter, mind/body, thought/extension, intellect/emotion, reason/sensation, human/animal, culture/nature … In such conceptual “logic,” the centrality of one member of an oppositional pair necessarily implies the marginality of the other. If such concepts dominate our articulation of being, knowledge, and human relations, then our ontologies, ethics, and political theories will be monistic or hierarchically dualistic.
Moreover, Irigaray also argues that the oppositional principles of Western philosophy are associatively linked together, and thus thinkers and authors who follow these principles can easily move from one contrast to another without much argumentation and explication. Unity suggests oneness; oneness belongs to spirit; spirit is mind; mind consists of pure thought, is renewed by the intellect and governed by the reason; and all this characterizes the culture of human beings who are best represented by male exemplars. On the other hand, difference is associated with twoness, matter, body, extension, emotion, sensibility, animality, and nature, and female human beings seem to stand for all this—or stand between all this and what is properly human. When philosophy is practiced by such conceptual means, some aspects and areas of (human) life are necessarily prioritized, others are marginalized, and the resulting philosophical-theoretical systems become exclusive in their very constitution.
Ultimately, Irigaray contends that the practice of thinking by contradictory oppositions is established, as a whole, on a ground of a concealed or secret opposition between paternity and maternity.28 The claim is not that the father/mother opposition would be fundamental in terms of topics, operative concepts, or methods. On the contrary, paternity is rarely thematized in Western philosophy, or is merely discussed in the peripheral areas of the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of household. Irigaray argues, however, that the father/mother opposition regulates the establishment of the identity of philosophers as speaking-thinking subjects. More precisely, the primary self-constitution and self-identification of philosophers as subjects of language is governed by the hierarchical opposition between two contradictory alternatives: insofar as one wants to become a leading father, one must exclude from oneself from one’s aspirations and interests, everything that is associated and associable with mother, maternity, and the matrixes29 of life. By associative links and analogues, the original exclusive repudiation applies to animality, sensibility, embodiment, twoness, and difference.
Thus, in Irigaray’s analysis, the absence of women and women-related topics in the tradition of Western thought is not a contingent fact, revisable by supplements and complements, but issues from the systematicity of the enterprise and from the mechanisms of conceptualization that support the system.
This analysis suggests an enormous task of critique to contemporary female philosophers. In This Sex Which is Not One (Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un 1977), Irigaray outlines the charge as follows:
For each philosopher, beginning with those whose names define some age in the history of philosophy, we have to point out how the break with material contiguity is made, how the system is put together, how the specular economy works.
(Irigaray [1977], 1985, 75)
Irigaray undertakes this task herself in her readings of the tradition: she studies ancient sources and early modern writers as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, with the aim of identifying and problematizing the concepts and analogues that contribute to the unification and totalization of life and that work against the articulation of difference.
In her ethical writings from the early 1980s onward,30 however, she turns back to the tradition with a new aim, that of finding alternative conceptual resources that help to express duality instead of oneness and difference instead of unity. The tradition is not anymore pictured as a monolith but is conceived as a repository of diverse traces of living thought. Thus, we read:
To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first of passions: wonder. This passion has no opposite or contradiction and exists always as if for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted one for the other. I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other ([1984] 1993, 12–13).