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these topics, pragmatism will not provide them. But feminists who (like MacKinnon) think of philosophy as something to be picked up and laid down as occasion demands, rather than as a powerful and indispensable ally, will find in pragmatism the same anti-logocentric doctrines they find in Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida. The main advantage of the way pragmatists present these doctrines is that they make clear that they are not unlocking deep secrets, secrets that feminists must know in order to succeed. They admit that all they have to offer is occasional bits of ad hoc advice -- advice about how to reply when masculinists attempt to make present practices seem inevitable. Neither pragmatists nor deconstructionists can do more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these practices on something deeper than a contingent historical fact -- the fact that the people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time.
Notes
| 1. |
Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn, New York 1978, p. 167. |
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| 2. |
For a good expression of this fantasy-reality contrast, see Engel's "'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'", in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 693-4. |
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| 3. |
For a deflationary account of the Marxist use of 'ideology', see Daniel Bell, "'The Misreading of Ideology: The Social Determination of Ideas in Marx's Work'", Berkeley Journal of Sociology 35, 1990, pp. 1-54. This article helps to make clear why Marx would have found the phrase 'Marxist ideology' objectionable, and how inseparable Marx's use of 'ideology' was from his characterization of his own thought as 'scientific'. |
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| 4. |
Terry Eagleton, Ideology, London 1991, p. 30. I cite the fifth and sixth of Eagleton's series of progressively fuller and sharper distinctions. For further discussion of this book, see Richard Rorty, "'We Anti-representationalists'", Radical Philosophy 60, 1992, pp. 40-42. |
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| 5. |
As Catharine MacKinnon says, the history of the relations between men and women (unlike the history of sexuality -- 'the history of what makes historians feel sexy') is flat: '[U]nderneath all of these hills and valleys, these ebbs and flows, there is this bedrock, this tide that has not changed much, namely male supremacy and the subordination of women' ( MacKinnon, "'Does Sexuality Have a History?'", Michigan Quarterly Review 30, 1991, p. 6). That subordination runs through the centuries like a monotone (and so usually inaudible) ground bass -- the sound of men beating up on women. No dramatic orchestration seems possible. |
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| 6. |
I offer an account of pragmatism as anti-representationalism in a foreword to John Murphy, Pragmatism: from Pierce to Davidson, Boulder, CO 1990; and also in the introduction to Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, Cambridge 1992. For the parallels between Davidson's anti-representationalism and Derrida's anti-metaphysics, see Samuel Wheeler, "'Indeterminacy of French Interpretation: Derrida and Davidson'", in Ernest Le Pore, ed., Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford 1986, pp. 477-94. |
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| 7. |
Eagleton, Ideology p. 7. |
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| 8. |
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, Chicago 1978, p. 279. |
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| 9. |
Eagleton, Ideology, p. 205. |
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| 10. |
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis, MN 1986, p. 11 |
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| 11. |
Wallace Stevens said that the imagination is the mind pressing back against reality. |
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