Abstract
Until now post-structuralism and phenomenology are widely regarded as opposites. Contrary to this opinion, I am arguing that they have a lot in common. In order to make my argument, I concentrate on Judith Butler’s poststructuralist concept of performativity to confront it with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological concept of expressivity. While Butler claims that phenomenological theories of expression are in danger of essentialism and thus must be replaced by non-essentialist theories of performativity, I hold that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of expressivity must strictly be understood in anti-essentialist terms. Following this line of interpretation, “expressivity” and “performativity”—as well as phenomenology and post-structuralism—are not opposites but partners in the search for an anti-essentialist gender concept. Consequently, feminist phenomenology turns out to be a non-essentialist approach that combines phenomenological and post-structural insights.
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Notes
It was Butler herself who already spoke in the 1980s of “feminist phenomenology” respectively of “phenomenological feminism”, namely in her article “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Description. A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception” (Butler 1989).
Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogie der Moral, KSA 9, p. 279: “Es giebt kein ‘Sein’ hinter dem Thun, Wirken, Werken; der ‘Thäter’ ist zum Thun bloss hinzugedichtet,—das Thun ist alles”. In Bodies that Matter Butler says: “There is no ‘I’ who stands behind discourse” (Butler 1993, p. 225).
Note that Butler in Gender Trouble puts the word “expressions” under quotation marks, indicating her skepticism for the concept of expression. However, in contrast to her article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” Butler goes on with a discussion of Luce Irigaray’s notion of the feminine and thus neglects to explicate her skepticism for the term “expression” (ibid.).
She adds that toward the beginning of her final chapter “Critically Queer” in Bodies that Matter she was trying to clarify this (cf. Butler 1993, pp. 223–242). Following the Althusserian term “interpellation”, she argues that the “I” “only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated”, “and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’” (ibid., p. 225).
While Butler assigns Husserl and Merleau-Ponty to the more problematic approaches of phenomenology, she excludes Beauvoir’s phenomenological philosophy, claiming that she is in an innovative way “appropriating and reinterpreting this doctrine of constituting acts from the phenomenological tradition” (1988, p. 519).
By “individual assumptions” Butler means not only individual acts performed by individual persons, she adds acts by social groups such as families (Butler 1988, p. 526).
Also in Bodies that Matter Butler rejects the “expressive model of drag, which holds that some interior truth is exteriorized in performance” (Butler 1993, p. 234). Cf. also: “Counter to the notion that performativity is the efficacious expression of a human will in language, this text seeks to recast performativity as a specific modality of power as discourse” (Butler 1993, p. 187).
Cf. Shannon and Weaver (1949).
Butler cites his work Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Turner 1974).
Cf. Butler (1990, p. 140) with almost the same words.
Please note that Butler in this passage explicitly rejects the poststructuralist view that culture “is inscribed upon the individual” (ibid.).
See, for example, Bodies that Matter, where she is saying that construction is “neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects” (Butler 1993, p. 10). However, cf. Veronica Vasterling who is arguing that Butler has not freed herself from lingual determinism (Vasterling 1999, 2001).
Merleau-Ponty speaks of sexuality in general, without differentiating between female or male sexuality or without taking into consideration that there are different gender identities. This was one of the reasons why Merleau-Ponty earned substantial critique from feminist theorists. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that Butler although she speaks of gender, she (also) does so in a more general manner. For this reason her concept of gender remains a general, unspecified term. To speak of gender in this general manner means nothing else than that gender identity is something historical, constituted through social or other processes—however, it says nothing specific about whose gender it is. On the side of Merleau-Ponty, if he speaks of sexuality in a general way, this does not per se indicate that sexuality is unhistorical or independent from social processes or norms. Consequently, both theorists remain in a sphere of generality, each of them in a specific way. And instead of criticizing their use of generality, we should better reconsider this form of generalization, asking how we can philosophically benefit from such a usage?
This might be due to the fact that the French language does not distinguish between sex and gender. In both cases the word “sexuality” is to be used. For further specification the French say “sexual identity” as a synonym for gender or gender identity. But although the difference between sex and gender doesn’t play a systematic role in Merleau-Ponty it must be added that sexuality in his phenomenology of the body is indeed not restricted to its bodily function. He explicitly rejects the idea that sexuality is to be regarded as a “type of bodily function” (cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 157). This is to say, that it is already more than a mere bodily function. By way of its “original intentionality” (ibid.), sexuality in Merleau-Ponty exceeds the meaning of a mere bodily function.
As I have shown elsewhere, Merleau-Ponty was always critical of pan-psychoanalytic approaches of Freudianism (Stoller 1999). For this reason it seems only logical that he emphasizes the interrelatedness of sexuality and co-existence.
What prohibition is concerned, refer to the chapter “Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix” in Gender Trouble (Butler 1990, pp. 35–78).
See, for example, Archaeology of Knowledge, where he says that we must give up the idea that discourses [= language] are a sort of expression. See also number 85 of his Dits et Écrits, volume 2, where he critically reflects upon his early study on madness, saying that in these early times he was still too much orientated toward the idea of expression (Foucault 1994).
See his study on Spinoza, Expression in Philosophy (Deleuze 1990). One of the most illuminating passages is his “paradox of expression” in the same study: “The paradox is that at once ‘the expressed’ does not exist outside of the expression and yet bears no resemblance to it, but is essentially related to what expresses itself as distinct from the expression itself” (ibid., p. 333). For a comparison between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty with respect to their challenge of transcendental phenomenology, see Lawlor (2003).
In opposition to Lawlor, however, I do not believe that Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception “does not free itself from subjectivity”, and that only the late work The Visible and the Invisible might challenge the more problematic (subjectivist) tendencies within phenomenology (Lawlor 2003, p. 93), because identifying Phenomenology of Perception with subjectivism means to ignore the anti-subjectivist tendencies Merleau-Ponty was defending in his study.
The results of my past research on feminist phenomenology have recently been published (Stoller 2010).
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Stoller, S. Expressivity and performativity: Merleau-Ponty and Butler. Cont Philos Rev 43, 97–110 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9133-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-010-9133-x