Hypatia

Christine Battersby, author of Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1990), undertakes the difficult task of arguing on behalf of metaphysics in the antimetaphysical environment of postmodern and reconstructive feminist theory. In The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Pattern of Identity (1998), Battersby engages ancient, continental, and analytic philosophy, constructing a metaphysics of self and identity, a metaphysical position that takes the female subject position as its norm. Her search for a metaphysics of becoming rather than being is motivated by her observation that much of contemporary feminist theory is ensnared in an epistemological web of strands traceable to Emmanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. According to Battersby, the problem with Kant's philosophy is its dependency on "the other" in construction of the self, the interdependence of the constitution of the transcendental subject and transcendental object. Kant is the "culprit" of modernity, whose metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics—transcendental subject, personhood, the sublime—marginalize, even exclude the female subject position. To rectify that omission, Battersby turns to Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, and Theodor Adorno, and finally to Søren Kierkegaard, to establish a "flowing" concept of self and identity that derives from the female subject position.

In the first three chapters of The Phenomenal Woman, Battersby analyzes the features that make the female subject position a unique object of analysis, the [End Page 157] basis for a "new" concept of identity. Stressing natality, birthing, caring—as well as fleshiness and woman's exclusion from the (male) norm when denied personhood, autonomy, and freedom—Battersby has sufficient ammunition to shoot down the metaphysics of substance, which she finds inaugurated by Aristotle, transformed into nominalism by John Locke, and reconstructed by Saul Kripke into natural kinds.

In Chapter Four, "Kantian Metaphysics and the Sexed Self," Battersby provides ample textual evidence that Kant's metaphysics leads to a hylomorphic sense of identity, where mind shapes inert matter into essences: a "top-down" way of doing identity. The central role of space leads Kant to differentiate between what is within him and what is outside, creating a chasm between active form and passive matter, shaped into identifiable things by the spontaneous activity of the understanding (67). Kantian metaphysics is consonant with Newtonian physics, but that raises the question of the demands and allowances of the new physics and mathematics for a metaphysics of identity. Battersby does not shy away from current investigations in topology and quantum physics to further her rejection of Kant and to fuel her search for a new metaphysics. As Battersby points out, Kant's philosophy explicitly excludes the female from the moral realm by locating woman halfway between personhood and animality, pointing to a somewhat monstrous status for the female. Kant's greatest shortcomings are his inability to reconcile his metaphysics with biology and his failure to come to terms with sexual difference.

In the second section, Battersby gives sweeping critiques of deconstruction and postmodern feminism, showing how some thinkers remain boxed in the subject/object dualism and others treat the entire history of philosophy as homogeneous. Jacques Lacan, she says, still works within the Kantian subject/object antagonism, clearly seen in his treatment of woman as "the other": the unattainable and scary object of desire in need of being overcome and ruled by the law of the father. This, she illustrates through a critique of Lacanian analysis of infant development, where the mother provides the boundless "otherness" whose negation and exclusion ultimately give rise to the conception of the "I." Battersby reinforces her analysis of Lacan's reading of Antigone: "Woman is simply 'the otherness' against which the oedipalized/masculinized self constructs itself as itself" (111-12).

Jacques Derrida fares no better: his position can either be construed as an undoing of Martin Heidegger's metaphysics of presence or, in a Lacanian framework, as another way of building identity on the "binary" ground of self/other, where the cut from the feminine constitutes the masculinized self. Battersby accuses Derrida of being afraid or...