Lost Confidence and Human Capability: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject

Pamela Sue Anderson

doi:10.2478/texmat-2014-0003

Authors

Pamela Sue Anderson University of Oxford

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.2478/texmat-2014-0003

Abstract

In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to each lived body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse.

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Author Biography

Pamela Sue Anderson, University of Oxford

Pamela Sue Anderson is Professor of Modern European Philosophy of Religion, University of Oxford, and Fellow in Philosophy, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, UK. Anderson has published numerous essays and chapters on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur and on the writings of Julia Kristeva. She published her thinking on Ricoeur and on Kristeva in two different monographs, Ricoeur and Kant (1993) and A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief (1998), respectively. Her most recent monograph is Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). She is also the guest editor for a special issue of Sophia: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics on “feminist philosophy of religion” (June 2014).

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