substance:
| accident
| form:
| matter
| univocity:
| division and difference
| soul:
| body
| meaning:
| language
| signified:
| signifier
| natural:
| artificial
| essential:
| ornamental
11
|
|
It is quite obvious that in all of these pairs of opposed terms, the first is the privileged one in our post-platonic culture and the second marked as "supplement." Many feminist analyses of gender seem to be as bound up in that metaphysics as the discursive practices that they seek to displace.
12
Butler demonstrates the operations of the very same platonic metaphysics within the writings of an important radical feminist theorist, Monique Wittig:
|
 | | Hence, Wittig calls for the destruction of "sex" so that women can assume the status of a universal subject. On the way toward that destruction, "women" must assume both a particular and a universal point of view. As a subject who can realize concrete universality through freedom, Wittig's lesbian confirms rather than contests the normative promise of humanist ideals premised on the metaphysics of substance. In this respect, Wittig is distinguished from Irigaray, not only in terms of the now familiar oppositions between essentialism and materialism, but in terms of the adherence to a metaphysics of substance that confirms the normative model of humanism as the framework for feminism. Where it seems that Wittig has subscribed to a radical project of lesbian emancipation and enforced a distinction between "lesbian" and ''woman," she does this through the defense of the pregendered "person,'' characterized as freedom. This move not only confirms the presocial status of human freedom, but subscribes to
|
| | 11. Cf. also Bynum (1986, 257): "
Male
and
female
were contrasted and asymmetrically valued as intellect/body, active/passive, rational/irrational, reason/emotion, self-control/lust, judgment/mercy, and order/disorder."
|
| | 12. See also the inscription of this dualism in the following statement: "For them [the Shakers], celibacy implied communal familial and economic systems, unified social classes, and, most important to this discussion,
equality along with genuine, spiritual (rather than false, physical)
unity of males and females" (Kitch 1989, 3, emphasis added). I am convinced and moved by Kitch's demonstration of the genuine feminist commitments of the Shakers, Koreshantists, and Sanctificationists, though the opposition between "genuine, spiritual" and "false, physical" seems to me no solution. My "old Adam," it seems, is not expunged.
|
|
|
