|
|
Derrida and Dewey both help us see that this amounts to pressing back against the imagination of the past. |
|
|
| 12. |
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, Baltimore, MD 1980, pp. x-xi. Seethe use of the passage from Johnson by Joan Scott in her "'Deconstructing Equality--vs.-Difference: Or, the Uses of Poststructuralist Theory for Feminism'", in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds, Conflicts in Feminism, New York 1990, pp. 137-8. |
|
|
| 13. |
Johnson, The Critical Difference, p. xi. |
|
|
| 14. |
I develop this analogy between contemporary feminism and the New Science of the seventeenth century at somewhat greater length in "'Feminism and Pragmatism'", Michigan Quarterly Review 30, 1991, pp. 231-58. |
|
|
| 15. |
A good example of this charge of complicity is Drucilla Cornell's criticism of Catharine MacKinnon in Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, New York 1991, ch. 3. Cornell thinks that although MacKinnon 'superficially rejects the dream of symmetry, which measures us against the male norm', she nevertheless 'cannot but fall into that very old dream given the limits of her own theoretical discourse, which necessarily repudiates the feminine as femininity because she can only 'see' from her own masculinist perspective' (p. 151). Cornell thinks that more philosophical reflection (of a specifically deconstructionist sort) than MacKinnon wishes to engage in will be needed to avoid complicity with masculinism. She also thinks that MacKinnon betrays feminism's distinctive ethical standpoint by reducing feminism to a power grab. My sympathies are with MacKinnon. I cannot see anything wrong with power grabs, and am less sanguine about the political utility of deconstructionist philosophy than is Cornell. (For more doubts about this utility, see Thomas McCarthy, "'The Politics of the Ineffable: Derrida's Deconstructionism'", The Philosophical Forum 21, 1989, pp. 146-68. For MacKinnon's view that 'men are the way they are because they have the power' and that 'women who succeed to male forms of power will largely be that way too', see Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, Cambridge, MA 1987, p. 220.) |
|
|
| 16. |
I agree with Cornell that one of Derrida's central contributions to feminism is that 'he explicitly argues that fundamental philosophical questions cannot be separated from the thinking of sexual difference' ( Beyond Accommodation, p. 98). Indeed, I should go further and say that Derrida's most original and important contribution to philosophy is his weaving together of Freud and Heidegger, his association of 'ontological difference' with gender difference. This weaving together enables us to see for the first time the connection between the philosophers' quest for purity, the view that women are somehow impure, the subordination of women, and 'virile homosexuality' (the kind of male homosexuality that Eve Sedgwick calls 'homo-homosexuality', epitomized in Jean Genet's claim that 'the man who fucks another man is twice a man'). Compared to this insight (which is most convincingly put forward in Derrida's 'Geschlecht I'), the grab bag of easily reproduced gimmicks labelled 'deconstruction' seems to me relatively unimportant. |
|
|
-234- |
| |
