Abstract
A feminist perspective on selfhood – bound to a perspective on otherness – is the main concern of this article. The resonance of this notion of selfhood both with ethical philosophy and with the language of humanism enables a deeper understanding of a feminist ethics as well as its internal tensions. The article considers the relationship of feminism and humanism as one of “paradoxical fluidity” rather than antithetical polarization, to explore the ways in which feminism’s alliance with contemporary ethics exemplifies its paradoxical relation to humanism. The study then underlines the vital contribution of feminist discourse to an ethical understanding of selfhood and intersubjectivity. Finally, it examines the work of experimental Canadian poet Lola Lemire Tostevin, who reveals the importance of an ethical, feminist version of selfhood that highlights the insufficiency as well as the potential of both humanist and postmodern versions of subjectivity.
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Notes
Throughout this article, by feminism or contemporary feminism, I refer to theorists and writers who have adopted a postmodern, that is to say, a post-metaphysical or post-structuralist, approach in dealing with issues of subjectivity, difference, and language. I consider the work of such authors as Jane Gallop, Donna Haraway, Kelly Oliver, and Chris Weedon on the American side, and Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Monique Wittig on the French, to fall under this broad category of postmodern feminism, while keeping in mind that their individual modes of thought remain very distinct from one another.
Such incredulity, according to Lyotard (1984: 6), “refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.”
See Moscovici’s (1996) account of French Romanticism in From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects.
See Rossi’s (1970) edition of Essays on Sex Equality by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill.
I borrow this expression from the note about the author at the end of Moscovi’s (2002: 169) Double Dialectics.
Johnson’s definition of “radical humanism is founded precisely on such a recognition, as well as its awareness of its own internal paradox, that is to say, “the universalistic character of its own aspirations and value commitments and the always particularistic, culture-bound terms in which these universalising claims are raised” (Johnson, 1994:12).
With a critique (still far from an outright rejection) of traditional metaphysics – particularly of the full and self-sufficient awareness of one’s existence – ethics becomes the initiator of ontology in Lévinas’ work. This means that the other’s irreducibility and primacy to the self initiate subjectivity (or being), and being depends on the priority of the other which in turn remains prior to the assimilative needs and powers of the self-same. In his “Ethics as First Philosophy,” Lévinas (1989: 86) explains how being becomes a “right to be” due to its fear for the other, which replaces the metaphysical notion or assured fact of self-presence as its foundation, a disarming call to responsibility by the other, to be sure. In short, the ‘I’ is never ‘I’ without the other.
The appropriations by Ricoeur and Irigaray of a Lévinasian ethics are so similar that it would be difficult not to read them as analogous, even though neither avows a connection to one another, as they both do with Lévinas.
Notably, although indebted to Lévinas’ philosophy, Irigaray also presents a forceful critique of his use of the feminine and the maternal as prototypes of his ethics. See her “Questions to Emmanuel Lévinas” (Irigaray, 1991).
It is important to note that the mother–daughter model posited by Irigaray is precisely that, a model. Philosophy has a long tradition of using models (Aristotle’s treatise on friendship, Hegel’s master–slave relationship, Lévinas’ face-to-face encounter) to describe conceptual patterns or, as Kelly Oliver observes, “a relationship that is not necessarily inherent in only this particular model” (Oliver, 1995:186). As for Irigaray’s focus on the maternal, it is “meant to vividly indicate how intersubjective relationships operate” (Oliver, 1995: 186) rather than the only possible operation of intersubjectivity. Yet, as for most psychoanalysts, the mother–child relationship is held by Irigaray to be a prototype “for all subsequent relations” (Oliver, 1995: 166).
Derrida (1979: 101) contends that “[t]here is no such thing as a woman, as a truth in itself of woman in itself,” a notion that Cixous (1994: 39) echoes: “She does not exist, she cannot-be,” in light of “his [man’s] torment, his desire to be (at) the origin.” For Julia Kristeva too “la femme, ce n’est jamais ça” (“woman can never be defined”), “a woman cannot ‘be,’ for woman does not belong and must not be reduced to the metaphysical nomenclature of ‘being’” (Kristeva, 1981:137).
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A number of ideas presented in this article also figure, in a different and more elaborate form, in my study of feminist Canadian literature, Writing in the Feminine in French and English Canada: A Question of Ethics (Carrière, 2002).
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Carrière, M. Feminism as a Radical Ethics? Questions for Feminist Researchers in the Humanities. J Acad Ethics 4, 245–260 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-006-9025-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-006-9025-1