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Essay
News & Letters, March 2001
Feminism and speculative philosophy
by Maya Jhansi
The past couple of years have brought with them significant blows to the
triumphal hegemony of global capital by a new international
anti-globalization movement. In the pages of NEWS & LETTERS we've tried to
cover the various dimensions of this exciting movement, particularly the
new openings that seem inherent in it for a renewed international women's
movement. Yet today with the election of George W. Bush, we are faced with
the signs of a fierce retrogression, whether we look at Bush's attempt to
"Christianize" Washington or his determination to take back all rights won
during the 1960s. A vibrant and vocal movement has never seemed more urgent.
In the face of such obstacles, it becomes more urgent for us to rethink the
goal of our movement, and raise questions about vision and perspectives and
history. While there are those who will argue that this is no time for
"abstract" questions, philosophy has never seemed to me so practical,
particularly if we are to address the disorientation within the Women's
Liberation Movement that has limited it for the last three decades.
There has been some attempt to address the need for philosophy, as seen
especially in the modest but significant renaissance of interest in Marx
that runs parallel to the development of the anti-globalization movement.
Yet, even with all this renewed interest in Marx, there haven't been very
many attempts to rethink the question of Marx's relationship to Hegel. The
question of the relationship between Marx and Hegel is assumed to have been
settled long ago, and the reductionist vulgar Marxist counterposition of
Hegelian idealism to Marxist materialism, to a large extent, defines
current thought. For too long, it has been wrongly assumed that the
"speculative dimension" is unnecessary for revolutionary theory and
practice.
FEMINIST THOUGHT AND MARX
This is especially true in feminist thought where the failure to grapple
with the speculative dimension of Marx's own thought has left Engels'
reductionist view of Marx's dialectics virtually unchallenged. The only
feminist to have called for a total reassessment of Marx's relationship to
Hegelian dialectics was Raya Dunayevskaya. In doing so she uncovered a more
complex picture of the gender dimension in Marx's work than is usually
attributed to him.
For the most part, there has not been the sort of renewal of interest in
Marx within feminist thought as there has been on a more general level.
Today, even many of the formerly self-defined socialist-feminists have
moved on. Allison Jagger, for instance, has an essay in a new book called
DECENTERING THE CENTER: PHILOSOPHY FOR A MULTICULTURAL, POSTCOLONIAL, AND
FEMINIST WORLD, edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra Harding. The essay, titled
"Globalizing Feminist Ethics," focuses on morality in the global arena and
draws on, among others, the work of John Rawls. Indeed, none of the essays
in the book as a whole discuss in any sustained way Marx or dialectical
philosophy in general. Given this paucity of feminist interest in Marx, it
has become increasingly difficult to talk about the relationship of
feminism to dialectical philosophy.
To complicate matters further, where feminists have shown a renewed
interest in "Marxism" or what some like Rosemary Hennessy call "materialist
feminism," a corresponding interest in dialectical philosophy, particularly
in Hegelian philosophy, remains elusive. Nancy Hartsock is perhaps the best
example in that she has persevered in her insistence that Marxism,
especially Marxist dialectics, is necessary for contemporary feminist
theory and politics. She writes, "The dialectical mode of understanding
provides a means for us to investigate the manifold ways social forces are
related, a way to examine a world in which 'objects' are defined by the
relations coming to focus in them, and in which these objects are
constantly changing."
Yet, in Hartsock's assertion of the importance of dialectical philosophy,
what remains absent is any serious re-examination of Marx's indebtedness to
Hegelian dialectics. Although, for example, Hartsock appropriates the work
of Lukács, a notable Hegelian-Marxist, for her concept of the feminist
standpoint, she does not herself take up the question of Hegel, even in
order to more fully examine the meaning of Marxian dialectics for feminism.
It seems that in the world of feminist philosophy, theorists interested in
Hegelian philosophy and those interested in Marxism remain, for the most
part, sequestered in separate and mostly unrelated camps. What this has led
to is a reiteration of old vulgar Marxist concepts-the assumption, for
example, that Marx only dealt with class, narrowly defined as the urban,
male industrial proletariat. Such post-Marxist vulgarisms as the
"base/superstructure" concept, economic determinism and so on are not being
questioned.
The most interesting work on Hegel comes from postmodernist and non-Marxist
theorists who continue to engage with the enduring presence of Hegel in the
modern and "postmodern" world. Judith Butler, quoting Althusser, emphasizes
the ambivalence that greets this fact in her preface to the new edition of
SUBJECTS OF DESIRE: HEGELIAN REFLECTIONS IN TWENTIETH CENTURY FRANCE: "This
dead god, covered with insults and buried a hundred times over, is rising
from the grave" (quoted in Butler, p. xiii). SUBJECTS OF DESIRE, which was
Butler's doctoral thesis, traces Hegel's concept of desire from the
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND through French thinkers like Kojéve, Sartre, Deleuze
and Foucault.
Though well-known as a poststructuralist feminist, Butler writes that "all
of my work remains within the orbit of a certain set of Hegelian
questions." She even goes so far as to argue that Michel Foucault likewise
remains within the orbit of Hegelian questions: "Foucault remains a tenuous
dialectician, but his is a dialectic without a subject and without
teleology, a dialectic unanchored in which the constant inversion of
opposites leads not to a reconciliation in unity, but to a proliferation of
oppositions which come to undermine the hegemony of binary opposition
itself" (p. 225). Butler, like other postmodernists, stresses the
contingency and lack of closure inherent to the dialectic of the
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND.
There are, of course, a variety of feminist approaches to Hegel. Many seem
to focus on Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, the most influential being
Simone de Beauvoir's adaptation of the master/slave dialectic in her book
THE SECOND SEX. However, far from seeing the dialectic in the PHENOMENOLOGY
as having anything to do with women's struggles for self-determination, de
Beauvoir saw it as the expression of women's necessary Otherness and
objectification.
Another feminist writer, Mary O'Brien put it this way: "There is one
important sense in which Hegel's system is a 'whole,' a sense in which it
does mark a break in history's hitherto unfaltering stride. The system is
the most ambitious attempt ever made to define humanity as masculine, to
celebrate the transformation of real people to the abstract concept of
Universal Man." De Beauvoir's appropriation of Hegel did not challenge or
critique this view of Hegel because she was primarily interested in arguing
Otherness as the existential condition of women.
A NEED FOR SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY?
Given the suspicions with which feminists have greeted Hegel, I was
surprised to find a book that argued for the importance of speculative
philosophy for such profane realities as sex, love and family. HEGEL AND
THE LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF LOVE: AN ESSAY ON SEXUALITIES, FAMILY AND THE LAW
by Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos argues that: "When our
awareness becomes speculative, it is an absolute negativity in the sense
that its being is wholly indeterminate. If speculative awareness is the
kind of awareness from which to resolve the problem of the meaning of the
world's (potential) mode of being, it must construct this meaning
immanently. This means that speculative awareness begins with its awareness
of its lack of determinate being and of its need to determine itself as, or
to become, the notion of the world's mode of being. This is the sense in
which speculative awareness becomes speculative."
The authors argue that it is precisely the failed attempts at revolution
that have revealed to the world the need for speculative philosophy, since
speculative awareness is meaning or conceptuality derived from our total
alienation. They critique the "theme-centeredness" of modern philosophy,
its anti-systematic nature.
Much of the book attempts to argue the syllogistic relationship between
Hegel's three major "mature" works, the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, the PHILOSOPHY OF
NATURE and the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND. In the SCIENCE OF LOGIC, the Idea
develops itself in and for itself, "in the element of its pure
self-recognition, that is, in pure thought and as pure thought," and at its
completion (as the Absolute Idea) recognizes "itself as a being that lacks
determinateness" and turns to Nature and then returns to itself in the
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND.
Yet although the authors seem to capture the self-movement of the Idea, and
talk about its self-determination, they don't really address Hegel's
dialectic of negativity itself. The latter half of the book consists of
their attempt to show how the categories of Mind are developed into a
system of social and ethical life, particularly family, love and law. They
make some interesting points, arguing that there is nothing in Hegel to
prohibit same sex relationships and that there is much in Hegel to support
a feminist conception of human relationships.
Yet their premise is one that spirits away Marx. That is, their call for a
return to speculative philosophy is based on the idea that since we are
totally alienated beings, speculative philosophy best articulates our
reality because it is itself "meaning derived from our totally alienated
relationship to the world." Our failure to transform reality "turns our
reflective self-relation into pure awareness." Thus, they begin with the
SCIENCE OF LOGIC because it develops the Idea's awareness of its lack of
determinate being. From that they derive social and political realities.
Living in a time of retrogression such as ours, such an approach seems to
have validity. That is, philosophy seems not to inhere in reality, to be
rather in a separate compartment altogether.
Yet this is precisely Marx's critique of Hegel: that he remained
sequestered within an alienated mode of thought. Thus, though he credits
Hegel with articulating the "moving and creative principle of history," the
dialectic of negativity and transcendence, yet still for Hegel, Marx argued
in his now famous 1844 "Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic," transcendence
meant the transcendence of objective reality. Hegel equated alienation with
objectivity itself. Thus, transcendence meant the transcendence, not only
of alienation, but of objectivity itself.
This is also what the authors of HEGEL AND THE LOGICAL STRUCTURE OF LOVE
seem to argue as the basis of "speculative philosophy." "Marxists" have
taken Marx's critique of Hegel to mean that Marx was opposed to Hegelian
"idealism." What Dunayevskaya has shown, however, is that far from turning
Hegel on his head, as Engels and vulgar post-Marx Marxists after him argue,
Marx appropriated the Hegelian dialectic with a "real corporeal" human
subject at its center.
MARX ENGAGES HEGELIAN PHILOSOPHY
It is a difficult and complex question. On the one hand, Marx did argue
that the Hegelian dialectic was mystified and dehumanized. On the other
hand, the Hegelian dialectic "in and for itself" served Marx, and later
those like Dunayevskaya, as "the source of all dialectic." That is, Marx's
philosophy does not begin with the abolition of Hegelian philosophy, but is
rather always in engagement with it.
It is ironic that feminists are doing and have done such interesting work
on Hegel. Butler, for example, follows the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and other
French Hegelians in arguing that Hegel himself confounds those who would
attempt to locate dogmatism and teleology in his philosophy. Yet when it
comes to the very separate world of "Marxism," the dogmatism, teleology,
economic determinism, and gender reductionism that is attributed to Marx go
virtually unchallenged!
But these are very related phenomena-the refusal to delve into the
Marxian-Hegelian dialectic helps to perpetuate the vulgarisms of "post-Marx
Marxism." It is only by addressing the question of Hegel that looms so
large in Marx that we can prevent the reification of Marx's ideas into an
heirloom, a set of political conclusions, slogans, programs, dogma.
An interrogation of the Marx/Hegel relation can open up vistas for
feminism. That was Dunayevskaya's argument. Instead of accepting the
reductionism instigated by Engels as Marx's, we need to try to delve into
Marx's own comprehension of his body of ideas as a philosophy of
revolution.
Doing so will enable us to reconceptualize a truly revolutionary feminism
and even re-energize the Women's Liberation Movement.
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