Continental Feminism: Reclaiming the Dark Continent

Quite like freud, who proclaimed that "the sexual life of adult women is a 'dark continent' for psychology" (1926, 212), one could argue that both women's experience and very existence have been considered a "dark continent" for philosophy. And further, one could claim that continental philosophy itself, oft characterized as obscure and opaque, is also philosophy's dark continent. Playing with this metaphor, we can thus read a double sense into the term "continental feminism": on the one hand, we can address straightforwardly the question of continental feminism by examining continental philosophy and the various feminist mediations of it, and on the other we can think about the ways that continental feminism might be in a sense tautological—feminism of the (dark) continent.

I find myself riffing on the continent aspect in part because—fundamental differences in methods, styles, and objects of study notwithstanding—what has always struck me about the continental-analytic distinction is the way in which it makes a category mistake: one designation purports to pick out a method while the other refers to a geolocation—itself a misnomer, both because it essentializes an entire continent, Europe, based on only two of the countries that constitute it (France and Germany), and because many of the pivotal analytic philosophers (e.g., Frege and Wittgenstein) came from the continent implied. This category mistake can be attributed to the fact that the designation "continental" was made by British philosophers of the 1950s to distinguish the work they were doing from what they were not. Continental philosophy as a school, thus totalized in negation, is thereby established as not-proper-philosophy (a logic all too familiar to contemporary sex difference theorists, for example, where the ontological logic of the One cast le féminin as negation). In other words, British philosophers were not so much naming a school of philosophy as they were hurling insults at those who did not practice philosophy within the narrow contours they delimited.¹

There are many stories we can tell in order to reclaim the doubly dark continent that is continental feminism. My own trajectory can be traced back to my first encounter with the now commonly named catalyst of the bifurcation of the field into analytic and continental—it was Kant, and the dualisms issuing from his attempt to justify the possibility of genuine human knowledge, that sent me packing. To be fair, I had already encountered some of the work considered to be the foundations of continental philosophy during my earlier education in the history of philosophy. But, in grad school, I was left wondering whether philosophy had more to offer toward explaining real human experience than this detached, logical, and allegedly neutral and objective approach. It was not only the questions asked and the premium placed on a strict definition of clarity and rigor (interpreted through the lens of logic, mathematics, and natural science), but also the severely limited understanding of context and experience, that significantly constrained my thinking. Political philosophy, for example, was reduced to game theory; philosophy of science and even ethics somehow translated into formal logic. It was as if the ontological and evaluative questions that attracted me to philosophy in the first place—those pertaining to existence, ethics, and politics—were considered meaningless except in some meta-abstraction explained in symbolic logic. It all seemed so hopelessly naive, like they were missing the point or ignoring the big and, to my mind, more vital picture.

Continental philosophy, as I came to learn, considers the attempt to understand existence as the primary task of philosophy. And, on the whole, it rejects the logical positivist notion that the natural sciences are, or logic is, the most appropriate way to answer existential questions—since understanding the problem, according to continental philosophers, is not about reducing it to logical or linguistic form but rather taking account of the social and political conditions that shape the aspects of existence they attempt to understand. And while there are as many ways to think through existence as there are continental philosophers, in general, it would be safe to claim that this style...