Undoing Gender (41 page)

These are all clearly philosophical concerns, but they are pursued through a variety of means, forms of analysis, reading, and writing irreducible to argumentative form and which rarely follow a linear style of exposition. There are those who will say that Benjamin can become philosophical if one writes a book that transmutes his writing into that linear exposition of arguments. And there are others who claim that the very challenge to linear argumentation carries its own philosophical meaning, one that calls into question the power and appearance of reason, the forward motion of temporality. Unfortunately, most of the people willing to make the second sort of argument belong to humanities departments outside of the field of philosophy.

If one looks at the work of Luce Irigaray, for instance, we read a feminist interrogation of the problem of alterity that draws upon Hegel, Beauvoir, and Freud, but also Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, one that is profoundly immersed in the history of philosophy even as it counters its exclusion of the feminine and forces a rearticulation of its most basic terms. This work cannot be read without philosophy, for that is its text, and yet including it in the canon of the philosophy is not possible for most philosophy departments.

The question of what belongs to philosophy and what does not sometimes centers on this question of the rhetoricity of the philosophical text, whether it has any, and whether those rhetorical dimensions must or should be read as essential to the philosophical character of the text. We can see as well that certain ways of extending the philosophical tradition to touch upon questions of contemporary cultural politics and questions of political justice as they emerge in the vernacular or contemporary social movements also pave the way for an exit from institutional philosophy into a wider cultural conversation.

What do we make of the enormously influential philosophical work of Cornel West, for instance, whose utopian pragmatism and commitment to the DuBoisian vision has brought philosophical concerns to the forefront of African American politics in this country? He finds his home in a divinity school and in religion. Does it say something about the limitations of institutional philosophy that he finds no home there?

In some ways, his work shows the continuing relevance of the tradition of American pragmatism for contemporary struggles for racial equality and dignity. Is it the transposition of that tradition onto the context of race relations that renders the philosophical dimension of that work impure? And if so, is there any hope left for philosophy unless it actively engages precisely such an impurity?

In a similar vein, nearly every feminist philosopher I know is no longer working in a philosophy department. When I look at the roster of the first anthologies of feminist philosophy in which I published (
Feminism as Critique, Feminism/Postmodernism
), the names were Drucilla Cornell, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Linda Nicholson, Iris Marion Young, all students of scholars like Alasdair MacIntyre and Peter Caws and Jürgen Habermas. At one point or another in the last ten years, they were not primarily housed in philosophy departments; some of them remain sheltered elsewhere, as do I. We have all found auspicious homes in other disciplines: law, political science, education, comparative literature, English. And now this is true of Elizabeth Grosz as well, perhaps the most important Australian feminist philosopher of our time, who has moved through comparative literature and women’s studies departments in recent years. This has been remarkably true as well of the many feminist philosophers of science who work in women’s studies or science studies or education departments without an affiliation with philosophy. Some, if not many, of the most influential people in these fields are no longer grounded in philosophy as their primary or exclusive institutional home. The problem here is not simply that philosophy as practiced by these individuals remains to some extent outside the discipline of philosophy, creating once again the specter of “philosophy outside of philosophy.” Awkwardly, these are the philosophical contributions that are constantly in contact with other fields and that establish the routes by which interdisciplinary travel of philosophy into the other humanities takes place. These are the philosophers who are in the conversations across disciplines, who are producing interest in philosophical work in French and German departments, in English and comparative literature, in science studies and women’s studies.

Of course, philosophy has pursued interdisciplinary contacts in cognitive science and computer science, as well as in those areas of medical ethics, law, and public policy that are so essential to the field of applied ethics. But with respect to the humanities, it has been for the most part a loner, territorial, protective, increasingly hermetic. There are clearly as well exceptions to this rule, and one sees, for instance, in the work of Rorty, Cavell, Nehamas, Nussbaum, Appiah, and Braidotti, active ways of engaging with the arts, with literature, with cultural questions that form a common set of concerns across the disciplines. Moreover, I would suggest to you that none of these individuals has crossed the border into the wider conversation without paying some sort of price within his or her own discipline.

The presence of philosophy in the humanities disciplines is not simply the effect of trained philosophers having, as it were, been derailed. In some ways, the most culturally important discussions of philosophy are taking place by scholars who have always worked outside the institutional walls of philosophy. Indeed, one might say that what emerged after the days of high literary theory, what John Guillory understands to be literary formalism, was not the dissolution of theory but the movement of theory into the concrete study of culture, so that what one now confronts is the emergence of theoretical texts in the study of broader cultural and social phenomena. This is not the historicist displacement of theory; on the contrary, it is the historicizing of theory itself, which has become, we might say, the site of its new life. I’ve made that theory/philosophy conflation again, but consider that philosophical texts have a central place in many of the most trenchant of cultural analyses. Indeed, I would suggest that as philosophy has lost its purity, it has accordingly gained its vitality throughout the humanities.

Take the work of Paul Gilroy, a British sociologist and cultural studies practitioner, whose book
The Black Atlantic
has made a profound impact on both African American and diasporic studies in the last five years. The first ninety pages of that book are concerned with the Hegelian notion of modernity. He argues there that the exclusion of people of African descent from European modernity is not a sufficient reason to reject modernity, for the terms of modernity have been and still can be appropriated from their exclusionary Eurocentrism and made to operate in the service of a more inclusive democracy. At stake in his subtle historiography is the question of whether the conditions of reciprocal recognition by which the “human” comes into being can be extended beyond the geopolitical sphere presumed by the discourse of equality and reciprocity. And though Hegel gives us the strange scene of the lord and bondsman, a scene that vacillates between a description of serfdom and slavery, it is not until the work of W. E.

B. DuBois, Orlando Patterson, and Paul Gilroy that we start to understand how the Hegelian project of reciprocal recognition might be renarrated from the history of slavery and its diasporic effects.

Gilroy argues that the perspective of slavery “requires a discrete view not just of the dynamics of power and domination in plantation societies dedicated to the pursuit of commercial profit but of such central categories of the Enlightenment project as the idea of universality, the fixity of meaning, the coherence of the subject, and, of course, the foundational ethnocentrism in which these have all tended to be anchored” (55). Less predictably, Gilroy then argues that it would be a great mistake to dismiss the project of modernity. Citing Habermas, he notes that even those who have been most radically excluded from the European project of modernity have been able to appropriate essential concepts from the theoretical arsenal of modernity to fight for their rightful inclusion in the process. “A concept of modernity worth its salt,” he writes, “ought, for example, to have something to contribute to an analysis of how the particular varieties of radicalism articulated through the revolts of enslaved people made selective use of the ideologies of the western Age of Revolution and then flowed into social movements of an anti-colonial and decidedly anti-capitalist type” (44).

Gilroy takes issues with what he calls postmodern forms of skepticism that lead to a full-scale rejection of the key terms of modernity and, in his view, a paralysis of political will. But he then also takes his distance from Habermas, noting that Habermas fails to take into account the relationship between slavery and modernity. Habermas’s failure, he notes, can be attributed to his preference for Kant over Hegel. Gilroy writes, “Habermas does not follow Hegel in arguing that slavery is itself a modernising force in that it leads both master and servant first to self-consciousness and then to disillusion, forcing both to confront the unhappy realisation that the true, the good, and the beautiful do not have a shared origin” (50).

Gilroy proceeds to read Frederick Douglass, for instance, as “lord and bondsman in a black idiom” and then to read the contemporary black feminist theorist, Patricia Hill Collins, as seeking to extend the Hegelian project into that of a racialized standpoint epistemology. In these and other instances, he insists that the Eurocentric discourse has been taken up usefully by those who were traditionally excluded from its terms, and that the subsequent revision carries radical consequences for the rethinking of modernity in nonethnocentric terms. Gilroy’s fierce opposition to forms of black essentialism, most specifically, Afrocentrism, makes this point from another angle.

One of the most interesting philosophical consequences of Gilroy’s work is that he provides a cultural and historical perspective on current debates in philosophy that threaten to displace its terms. Whereas he rejects the hyperrationalism of the Habermasian project, even as he preserves certain key features of its description of the Enlightenment project, he also rejects forms of skepticism that reduce all political positioning to rhetorical gesture. The form of cultural reading he provides attends to the rhetorical dimension of all sorts of cultural texts and labors under the aegis of a more radically democratic modernity. Thus, his position, I would suggest, is a position that is worth considering as one rehearses the debates between the defenders and detractors of the Enlightenment project.

But how often do we see job advertisements that emanate jointly from philosophy and sociology departments that seek to find someone who is versed in the philosophical and cultural problem of modernity in the context of slavery and its aftermath? Now, my example will not be compelling to most philosophers since Hegel is, in many departments throughout this country, not taught as part of any listed course; and, in some instances, he is explicitly excluded from the history of philosophy sequence. The resistances to Hegel are, of course, notorious: his language is ostensibly impenetrable, he rejects the law of noncontradiction, his speculations are unfounded and, in principle, unverifiable.

So it is not within the walls of philosophy that we hear the question: according to what protocols that govern the readability of philosophy does Hegel’s writing become unreadable? How is it that so many have, in fact, read him, and that he continues to inform so much contemporary scholarship? What is the argument that he offers against the law of noncontradiction, and what rhetorical form does that argument take? How are we to read that argument once we understand the rhetorical form by which it is structured? And what is the critique of verifiability that emerges in the course of his work? Because the standards that these questions seek to interrogate are
taken for granted
by those philosophers who invoke those standards in dismissing Hegel, we find the questions pursued elsewhere, in the humanities, in German and history and sociology departments, in English and comparative literature departments, and in American studies and ethnic studies.

Similarly, when was the last time you heard of a philosophy department joining with a German department in a search, looking for someone who works in German romanticism, including Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Hölderlin? Or when did you hear of a philosophy department joining with a French department to hire someone in twentieth-century French philosophical thought? Perhaps we have seen a few instances of philosophy departments joining with African American studies or ethnic studies, but not often, and surely not often enough.

This is but one way that philosophy enters the humanities, redoubling itself there, making the very notion of philosophy strange to itself. We should, I suppose, be very thankful to live in this rich region that the institutional foreclosures of the philosophic have produced: such good company and better wine, and so many more unexpected conversations across disciplines, such extraordinary movements of thought that surpass the barriers of departmentalization, posing a vital problem for those who remain behind. The bondsman scandalizes the lord, you will remember, by looking back at him, evincing a consciousness he or she is not supposed to have had, and so showing the lord that he has become Other to himself. The lord is perhaps out of his own control, but for Hegel this self-loss is the beginning of community, and it may be that our current predicament threatens to do no more than to bring philosophy closer to its place as one strand among many in the fabric of culture.

Notes

Introduction: Acting in Concert

¹
. The Human Rights Campaign, situated in Washington, D.C., is the main lobbying organization for lesbian and gay rights in the United States. It has maintained that gay marriage is the number one priority of lesbian and gay politics in the U.S.