Undoing Gender (40 page)

Moving from high school to Bennington College and then to Yale was not easy, and in some ways I never became acclimatized to the profession of philosophy. As a young person, I came upon philosophy as a way of posing the question of how to live, and took seriously the notion that reading philosophical texts and thinking philosophically might give me necessary guidance on matters of life. I was scandalized the first time I read Kierkegaard’s remark that one could make out of philosophy a queer comedy if it were actually to occur to a person to act according to its teachings. How could there be this ironic and inevitable distance between knowing a thing to be true and acting in accordance with that knowledge? And then I was scandalized again when I heard the story about Max Scheler, pressed by his audience on how he could have led such an unethical life at the same time that he pursued the study of ethics, who responded by saying that the sign that points the way to Berlin does not need to go there to offer the right direction. That philosophy might be divorced from life, that life might not be fully ordered by philosophy, struck me as a perilous possibility. And it wasn’t until several years later that I came to understand that philosophical conceptualization cannot fully relieve a life of its difficulty, and it was with some sadness and loss that I came to reconcile myself to this post-idealist insight.

But whether or not my belief about the relation of philosophy to life was right, it was still a belief that referred philosophy to existential and political dilemmas, and my disillusioned idealism was not as shocking finally as my entrance into the disciplinary definitions of philosophy. That happened in high school when I attended an introduction to philosophy class at Case Western Reserve University in 1977.

My teacher was Ruth Macklin who is now a bioethicist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She taught us Plato and Mill and an early essay on justice by John Rawls; the approach was distinctively analytic, something I did not understand or even know how to name at the time. I stumbled through that first course and then, determined, took another one with her on moral philosophy in which I read mainly British analytic thinkers from Russell and Moore through Stevenson and Phillipa Foot, interrogating the various senses of the word “good” as it is employed in ethical argument and expression. Although I triumphed finally by the end of that year, my senior year, I knew as I entered college that I might not find my version of philosophy mirrored for me in any institutional form.

After I traveled to Germany on a Fulbright to work with Hans Georg Gadamer and study German Idealism, I returned to Yale as a graduate student and began to become politically active within the university, to read books by someone named Foucault, to ask after the relation between philosophy and politics, and to inquire publicly whether something interesting and important might be made of feminist philosophy and, in particular, a philosophical approach to the question of gender. At the same time, the question of alterity became important to me in the context of continental philosophy. And I was interested in the problem of desire and recognition: under what conditions can a desire seek and find recognition for itself? This became for me an abiding question, as I moved into the area of gay and lesbian studies. This and the question of the “Other” seemed to me, as it did for Simone de Beauvoir, to be the point of departure for thinking politically about subordination and exclusion: I felt myself to occupy the term that I interrogated—as I do today in asking about the Other to philosophy—and so I turned to the modern source of the understanding of Otherness: Hegel himself.

My dissertation work on desire and recognition in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit
took up some of the same issues that had preoccupied me at a much earlier age. In
The Phenomenology
, desire (paragraph 168) is essential to self-reflection, and there is no self-reflection except through the drama of reciprocal recognition. Thus the desire for recognition is one in which desire seeks its reflection in the Other. This is at once a desire that seeks to negate the alterity of the Other (it is, after all, by virtue of its structural similarity to me, in my place, threatening my unitary existence) and a desire that finds itself in the bind of requiring that very Other whom one fears to be and to be captured by; indeed, without this constituting passionate bind, there can be no recognition. One’s consciousness finds that it is lost, lost in the Other, that it has come outside itself, that it finds itself as the other or, indeed,
in
the Other. Thus, recognition begins with the insight that one is lost in the other, appropriated in and by an alterity that is and is not oneself.

Recognition is motivated by the desire to find oneself reflected there, where the reflection is not a final expropriation. Indeed, consciousness seeks a retrieval of itself, a restoration to an earlier time, only to come to see that there is no return from alterity to a former self, but only a future transfiguration premised on the impossibility of any such return.

Thus, in “Lordship and Bondage,” recognition is motivated by the desire for recognition, and recognition is itself a cultivated form of desire, no longer the simple consumption or negation of alterity, but the uneasy dynamic in which one seeks to find oneself in the Other only to find that that reflection is the sign of one’s expropriation and self-loss.

It may be that institutionalized philosophy finds itself in this strange bind at the moment, though I know that I cannot speak from its perspective. It has before it something called “philosophy,” which is emphatically “not philosophy,” that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigor and clarity. I say “apparently transparent” only because I sit on several committees that review grant applications from the humanities, and the practice of clarity that many philosophers espouse and enact is one that often leaves other humanities scholars quite confused. Indeed, when standards of clarity become part of a hermetic discipline, they no longer become communicable, and what one gets as a result is, paradoxically, a noncommunicable clarity.

This institutionalized “philosophy,” which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. Further, it may be that what is practiced as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments in this country has come to constitute the meaning of “philosophy,” and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. Philosophy can no longer return to itself, for the boundary that might mark that return is precisely the condition by which philosophy is spawned outside of its institutional place.

There are, of course, more than two versions of philosophy, and here the Hegelian language no doubt forces me to restrict my characterizations to a false binary. Institutionalized philosophy has not been at one with itself for some time, if ever it was, and its life outside the borders of philosophy takes various forms. And yet, there is some way that each is haunted, if not stalked, by the other.

At the point where I started lecturing for the Department of Philosophy at Yale on feminist philosophy, I noticed a few rather disturbed figures at the back of the hall, adults pacing back and forth, listening to what I had to say and then abruptly leaving, only to return again after a week or two to repeat the same disturbed ritual. They were acting in the ways that I had acted when I tentatively attended de Man’s seminars. They turned out to be political theorists who were enraged that what I was teaching took place under the rubric of philosophy. They couldn’t quite come in and take a seat, but neither could they leave. They needed to know what I was saying, but they couldn’t allow themselves to get close enough to hear. It was not a question of whether I was teaching bad philosophy, or not teaching philosophy well, but whether my classes were philosophy at all.

I don’t propose today to answer the question of what philosophy should be, and I think that to be quite honest I no longer have definite views on this matter. This is not because I have left philosophy, but because I think that philosophy has, in a very significant way, departed from itself, become Other to itself, and found itself scandalized by the wandering of its name beyond its official confines. This became clear to me when I practiced feminist philosophy. I was appalled to learn that a few years ago graduate students at the New School for Social Research held a conference titled: “Is Feminist Philosophy Philosophy?” That was the question posed by the skeptics of feminist thought, and it was now being quoted by the young practitioners of feminism in earnest. Some may want to argue that, yes, feminist philosophy is philosophy, and proceed to show all the ways that feminist philosophy poses the most traditional of philosophical problems. But my own view is that such a question should be refused because it is the wrong question. The right question, as it were, has to do with how this redoubling of the term “philosophy” became possible such that we might find ourselves in this strange tautology in which we ask whether philosophy is philosophy. Perhaps we should simply say that philosophy, as we understand the institutional and discursive trajectory of that term, is no longer self-identical, if it ever was, and that its reduplication plagues it now as an insuperable problem.

For a while I thought I didn’t have to deal with this issue because once I published on gender theory, I received many invitations from literature departments to speak, and to speak about something called “theory.” It turned out that I had become something called a “theorist,” and though I was glad to accept the kind invitations that came my way, I was somewhat bewildered and began trying to understand what kind of practice this enterprise called “theory” was supposed to be. Ah, yes, “the state of theory,” I would say at the dinner table on such occasions, sipping my Chardonnay, and then look around anxiously to see whether there might be a kind soul there who might tell me precisely what this “theory” was supposed to be. I read literary theory and found my own work lodged on shelves under that rubric.

I understood from my earlier days that there was such a practice (I thought of Wellek, Fletcher, Frye, Bloom, de Man, Iser, Felman), but it wasn’t clear to me that what I was doing was “theory” and that that term could and should take the place of philosophy. At this point, it no longer bothered me that I wasn’t doing philosophy, because the world of literature allowed me to read for rhetorical structure, ellipsis, metaphorical condensation, and to speculate on possible conjunctions between literary readings and political quandaries. I continued to suffer bouts of anxiety every time that word “theory” was used, and I still feel something of an uneasiness about it, even as I now know that I am part of it, that I am perhaps indissociable from that term.

I have come to see, however, that this confusion is not mine alone.

It is now with some surprise that I pick up the catalogs of various publishers and see under the name “philosophy” several writers whose work is not taught in philosophy departments. This not only includes large numbers of continental philosophers and essayists, but literary theorists and scholars of art and media studies, scholars in ethnic and feminist studies. I note with some interest the number of dissertations on Hegel and Kant that emerge from the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins or the Department of English at Cornell or German Studies at Northwestern; the number of young scholars in humanities departments who have traveled to France in the last ten years to work with Derrida, Levinas, Agamben, Balibar, Kofman, Irigaray, Cixous, or those who continue to travel to Germany to learn the tradition of German Idealism and the Frankfurt School. The most interesting work on Schelling and the Schlegels is being done by cultural and literary theorists at the moment, and the extraordinary work by a scholar like Peter Fenves on Kant and on Kierkegaard emerges from comparative literature and German studies. And some of the most philosophically important work on Foucault is produced by scholars such as Paul Rabinow, the philosopher of anthropology.

Consider the extraordinary interdisciplinary life of a figure such as Walter Benjamin, who in many ways epitomizes the excessive travels of philosophy outside the gates of its containment. One might expect to find him taught under the rubric of the “Frankfurt School” in philosophy departments that offer such courses (I would imagine there are about a dozen such departments at this point), but the difficulty of his language and his aesthetic preoccupations often lead to the excision of his work from philosophy courses and its reemergence in English, comparative literature, French, and German departments. I noted a few years ago with some interest that
New Formations
, the leftist British journal, published a volume on his work at the same time as the ostensibly postideological
Diacritics
, and now the most recent issue of
Critical Inquiry
joins the fray. Is it that his writing is not philosophical? The philosopher Jay Bernstein has argued passionately to the contrary. Or is it that philosophy appears here in a contentious and scattered form, through cultural analysis, through the consideration of material culture, or in light of failed or inverted theological structures, in language that moves from the aphoristic to the densely referential, or in the wake of Marxism, in the form of literary readings and theory.

The multidisciplinary trajectory of this work makes a presumption about where one might look to find the question of the meaning of history, the referentiality of language, the broken promises of poetry and theology intrinsic to aesthetic forms, and the conditions of community and communication.