Abstract

The feminist critique has shown how Kant’s conception of the female sex breaks his pretended ethical universalism. The supposed male natural superiority, particularly expressed in his Die Metaphysik der Sitten, excludes women from rational autonomy and from the capacity for self-legislation. This exclusion is based on women’s own characteristics and makes women not participate in what Kant conceptualizes as distinctive of humanity. In addition to the critical-feminist revision of this incoherence, this text collects psychoanalyst Sarah Kofman’s analysis of Kant’s discourse on femininity. We will try to show here how the reading of this contemporary thinker, which is not carried out primarily from a critical-feminist perspective, nevertheless comes to coincide fully with it.