Critique of Continental Feminism

It could be argued that nominally continental feminism emerged as a category of philosophy in 2007 with the founding of philoSOPHIA: A Society for Continental Feminism by Kelly Oliver, even though, of course, philosophers such as Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and even Simone de Beauvoir had already been de facto writing in the genre for decades. As part of the initial group of continental feminist philosophers who met and formed the society and the journal, we to a certain degree assumed the self-evidence of our identity: we were all feminists whose work in continental philosophy had already established us to some degree as professional philosophers, and the feminist perspective allowed us to both turn a critical eye toward and bring new meaning out of the classical texts that were most often our subject of research. Today, as that self-evidence is being queried and sometimes critiqued, a demand arises to look more closely into the meaning of the designation "continental feminism." What do we mean when we name this category? In particular, we must ask ourselves if, in aligning ourselves, however non-mindfully, with the "continent" of Europe, we repeat injustices inherent in Western language and systems of thought. In addition, we might inquire into the value of reading canonical texts from the history of European philosophy, and ask if this can be done in a way that exhumes and reinvigorates rather than entombs the ideas within them.

I will proceed by looking at the meaning of the word "continent," its terrain and its implications, as does one of my co-discussants in this roundtable, Jami Weinstein. "Continent" comes from the roots continens, or continuous, and terra, or earth. Although, as Andrew Cutrofello notes, the very notion of continental philosophy is in large part a negative, "Anglo-American disciplinary formation" (Continental Philosophy, 25), continental philosophy has embraced its given name. The continent of Europe, in contradistinction to the island countries that neighbor it, connects many nations to each other, allowing them to share some kind of common identity, one that is continually being negotiated even today. Not coincidentally, questions of earth, territory, and the related concepts of blood, kinship, nation, and race, are concepts that, predominating in Western philosophy as a whole, also mark continental philosophy, although it prides itself in subjecting the history of metaphysics and all its stable categories and concepts to critique. What, then, does it mean to "add" feminism to continental philosophy, and can this new discipline really be considered an addition, an accretion, or is it important, necessary even, that feminism, along with antiracism, anticolonialism, and attention to disability and sexual identity, disrupt the continuity, the disavowed yet omnipresent assumption of totality, foundationalism, and belonging that the word terra evokes?

Andrew Cutrofello discusses continental philosophy as a divergent (from that of Anglo-American philosophy) approach to the conclusions of Kant. Both schools of thought wrestled with the clear distinction Kant draws between concept and intuition, seeking to overcome this dichotomy either by sensualizing concepts (British empiricism) or by intellectualizing appearances (German idealism). Continental philosophy in a sense emerges out of the impossible task of attempting to overcome what Kant took to be a necessary and insurmountable division.¹ Cutrofello argues that it is Kant's conception of reflective judgment, which Kant introduces in the Critique of Judgment, that is the inspiration for much of continental philosophy's ability to go beyond analyzing the basic building blocks of reality or the conditions under which we may know or should act. Cutrofello allies reflective judgment with the "spontaneous receptivity" of intuition as opposed to the "receptive spontaneity" of the understanding; rather than subsuming an object of intuition under a pre-given concept of the understanding, reflective judgment calls attention to our inability to subsume a form under any concept that we possess (2). Reflective judgment's promise is thus one of possible newness, opening to a universal that is not predetermined. As such it has been associated with aesthetics, just as determinative judgment is associated with science, and, as Cutrofello points out, it is also at the origin of Hegel's and Schelling's...