Hypatia

This volume manages to bring Susan Bordo's more strictly philosophical work together with her recent critiques of Western culture and the body. Her central concerns are still the Cartesian influence on contemporary culture and science in a feminist context. But these concerns are presented here in light of a historical [End Page 190] overview of the relation between women (feminist or not) and Descartes. Furthermore, the implications of Descartes' epistemology for feminist theory and cultural studies are given against the background of actual readings of Descartes, and often reveal that what is at stake in feminist critique is, to paraphrase Bordo, not so much Descartes himself, but a dominant cultural and historical reading of Descartes (2). In some sense, then, the volume tries to bring Descartes and Cartesianism into conversation with one another.

The volume as a whole focuses attention on the ways in which the definitions of central philosophical concepts implicitly include or exclude gendered traits. However, the essays in the anthology are clearly selected to illustrate a variety of perspectives within feminist philosophy and not all the essays are thoroughly integrated with one another or even in agreement with one another.

Dividing the volume into four parts, Bordo begins with articles on "Descartes and Gender." These articles are united thematically by a concern with the "masculinization" of thought and include essays from such classics as Karl Stern's The Flight from Women (1965), as well as an excerpt from Bordo's own by now classic, The Flight to Objectivity (1987). The second part, titled, "Gender (and Other) Trouble" explores the constitutive underside of Descartes's founding epistemological principle (cogito ergo sum), and suggests the ways in which this constitutive other may be aligned with elements culturally coded as feminine. Here Bordo has recourse to a well-known exploration of wonder by Luce Irigaray. In the third part, "Descartes and Women," the tone shifts toward a more historically oriented exploration of Descartes' and Cartesianism's relation to women in the flesh, so to speak. Finally, the fourth part, somewhat unfortunately titled "Cartesian Man," examines Cartesian conceptions of the subject and the contemporary critiques that they have spawned. This final section includes another selection authored, with Mario Mousa, by Bordo herself. Since I cannot in the space of this review include a discussion of all fourteen essays in the volume, I will restrict myself to a discussion of some significant moments. In the first part, "Descartes and Gender," Stern, Bordo, and Genvieve Lloyd are united in claiming in their respective essays that disavowed materiality is always at the heart of Descartes's thinking, which they read in terms of a disavowal of the maternal body.

Specifically, in a Cartesian context, which is to say, from Bordo's perspective, in a modern context, the foreclosure of "mat(t)er" goes hand in hand with a reduction of the body to the machine. Bordo in particular, and with a nod toward Stern, suggests that Cartesian anxiety is a function of separation from the organic female universe of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (50). The result is a "supermasculinized" model of knowledge that requires detachment (principally from the body) and the rebirth of nature as a machine (62). Unlike Bordo, Stern's essay does not invoke an impersonal historic episteme to make his point; but he does rely heavily, following a psychoanalytic model, on Descartes' [End Page 191] personal history to suggest that the experience of maternal bereavement shattered Descartes' "certainty of being" (43). The flesh, for Descartes, he suggests, is thus synonymous with anguish and must be disavowed. This claim, however, is problematic, since it suggests rather too reductively that Cartesian science has its origin in an experience of personal loss. Moreover, it leaves in place the cultural identification of woman with nature and the body in ways that to a modern reader seem rather dated. However, to say this is also to acknowledge that many of his claims are prescient in relation to later feminist discussions. Indeed, in her early work Bordo herself at times...