Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy*

Penelope Deutscher’s book Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy locates a major nerve in contemporary feminist debates and thus has already earned a place in feminist cyberspace. ¹ She analyzes the concept of instability by successfully interweaving three different strands of analysis: she focuses on the debates about the instability of gender that the works of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick have generated; she draws on Jacques Derrida’s notion of the instability of textual logic that is a key interpretive strategy of deconstruction; and she uses the concept of instability to analyze the function of the contradictory, ambiguous, and unstable meanings of women in the history of philosophy. Deutscher’s thesis is that the instability of the meanings of women and the feminine is constitutive of phallocentrism in Western philosophy.

Deutscher begins by tracing the debates initiated by Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Sedgwick’s The Epistemology of the Closet (1990) about the instability of gender. Butler refers to the “constitutive ambiguity of ‘sex’” and Sedgwick to the “operations of . . . incoherence of definition” (Deutscher 1997, 14), and thus they undermine the notion that sexual categories are natural, stable, coherent forms of identity. But in the popularized version of these texts that one hears often from students, the notion that gender is troubled (that is, constituted as ambiguous or contradictory) is turned into the notion that one is troubling gender (that is, subverting it). Thus, students gleefully declare that gender politics is passé (a recent article in the Danish journal for Women, Gender and Research referred to feminism as a “dead herring” ² ) and that one is now free to create one’s true individual identity.

Deutscher’s careful reading of the interpretations and misinterpretations spawned by Butler’s text focuses on the terms constitution and subversion. Although Gender Trouble puts forth an argument for the constitutive instability of gender, Butler’s text leads the reader, rhetorically and structurally, to expect a discussion of instability as a subversive category and hence contributes to the misinterpretation that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of gender. Deutscher concludes that what is crucial in Butler’s proposal is the thesis that gender is constituted as troubled (that is, built on ambiguities and contradictions). But this constitutive trouble does not necessarily destabilize gender, as so many have optimistically believed.

Deutscher’s analysis of the reception of Derrida’s work follows a parallel course, though with inverted consequences. In Derrida’s analysis, textual logic is “thought of as an unstable, endlessly deferred, hence unreconstructible non-‘unit’”(Deutscher 1997, 53). But while Butler’s use of instability has been interpreted mistakenly as troubling gender and hence earned her popular acclaim, Derrida’s use of instability has been interpreted mistakenly as troubling philosophy, and hence earned him professional stigmatization (1997, 55). Deutscher’s point is that for both theorists, paradox or instability is constitutive of identity or meaning, but is not necessarily troubling. Revealing instability, however, may open up the possibility for subversive intervention.

Deutscher uses the concept of instability to interpret the contradictory meanings given to women in the history of philosophy. Feminists have noted that following what philosophers have said about women’s nature is a complex and complicated enterprise. Deutscher examines the varying methodologies that feminists have used in reading texts in the history of philosophy. She criticizes the “subtractive” methodology exemplified by the Australian philosopher Karen Green in The Woman of Reason (1995). In this book, Green argues that appreciating the complexity of a thinker such as Jean Jacques Rousseau diminishes the misogyny of his writings. Deutscher also criticizes the methodology of her countrywoman and teacher, Genevieve Lloyd. Lloyd’s method in The Man of Reason (1984) can be characterized as the “despite” approach. Despite the complexity of Rousseau’s thought, according to Lloyd, Rousseau excludes women from a reason that is associated with the masculine (Deutscher 1997, 5). Deutscher’s own approach can be characterized as the “because” approach. It is because of the instability of the terms woman, man, feminine, and masculine—signs of internal contradictions in the argument—that Rousseau can sustain his phallocentric thought.

Deutscher turns for inspiration to French feminist theorists—not for their contribution to debates about sexual difference but for their contribution to methodologies for reading the history of philosophy. In discussing the methodologies of Michèle Le Doeuff, Sarah Kofman, and Luce Irigaray, Deutscher distinguishes between what she calls a causal or motivational analysis and an effects-based analysis. Both Le Doeuff and Kofman give some evidence of an effects-based analysis. For example, Le Doeuff focuses on how imagery operates rhetorically (Deutscher 1997, 68); nonetheless, she also at times operates with a motivational language that seeks to explain the intentions that might have caused the textual instability. Kofman, in Deutscher’s view, leans even more towards the causal-motivational view, despite Kofman’s explicit invocation of Derridean deconstruction. For example, in Le Respect des femmes - Kant et Rousseau (1982), Kofman invokes Freudian psychoanalysis to explain these two thinkers’ contradictions surrounding the enigma of woman, who is characterized as both the good and bad mother. Thus, it is to Irigaray that Deutscher turns for the most consistent use of an effects-based analysis of contradiction. Irigaray indicates the paradoxical nature of the representation of the feminine: women, who are not represented in the history of philosophy, “can” not be represented, but at the same time this exclusion gestures towards its possibility (Deutscher 1997, 77). Because a paradoxical structure generates both masculine and feminine identity, Deutscher describes Irigaray’s position as follows: “these identities function on the strength of this internal destabilization: they are the effect of structural instability” (1997, 79).

Deutscher applies this strategy of analyzing the effects of paradox, drawn from Derrida and sexualized by Irigaray, to three figures in the history of philosophy that have been a focus for feminist debate: Rousseau, Saint Augustine, and Simone de Beauvoir. Deutscher seeks to illustrate that in the history of philosophy women have not been identified simply with emotion and irrationality and men with rationality, as sometimes has been represented simplistically in feminist readings. These writers exemplify a more complex structure. For example, Augustine writes that, “in the original condition of humanity, since the woman was a human being also, she certainly had her own mind, and a rational mind, according to which she too, was made in the image of God” (Deutscher 1997, 145). Yet he also assigns to women a subordinate position to men: “Suppose it was necessary in order to live together for one to command the other to obey . . .” (Deutscher 1997, 145). Rather than following Lloyd’s explanation that Augustine’s symbolism pulls against his doctrine of sexual equality “despite his good intentions” (Deutscher 1997, 147), Deutscher refuses to isolate one or another of his conflicting tendencies or to neutralize the contradiction. Her proposal is rather that his account not only of woman but also of man and of the man-God relation, is filled with contradictions that enable Augustine’s account of these identities. For example, it is the slippage between the terms man and masculinity that allows Augustine to view man as both contaminated by feminine materiality and yet distinguished from it, to view man as both like and unlike God. The divine thus serves as a vanishing point that justifies man’s superiority to woman by the promise of his identification with the divine, though identification with this transcendent ideal is impossible (Deutscher 1997, 160–62). Deutscher concludes that Augustine’s alignment of masculinity with reason is actually an effect of his contradictory accounts of woman as both rational and irrational. Only through this strategy can Augustine maintain that reason transcends the bodily and yet define reason through its devaluation of the body and emotions (Deutscher 1997, 165).

Deutscher’s book gives evidence of a rare combination of strengths. She combines the skills of careful reading (her discussion of Butler’s Gender Trouble is outstanding) with a sophisticated methodology inspired by deconstruction, which she applies to reading texts in the history of philosophy. Her proposal that contradictory accounts of women and the feminine in the history of philosophy have the effect of sustaining phallocentrism raises to a new height feminist methodological considerations in re-reading the canon. Deutscher underscores the usefulness of deconstruction for interpreting the function of gender in the history of philosophy—a strategy that often has been overlooked. As she notes, Irigaray has attracted more attention for her work on sexual difference than for her significant contribution to reading the history of philosophy.

Yet Deutscher’s methodological commitments raise a number of important questions. She is committed firmly and consistently to an effects-based analysis of textual argumentation, as opposed to any attempt to provide an explanatory account of authorial motivation or intention. Although she does not rehearse all the reasons why causal accounts are in her view less fruitful, she does remind us that Derrida’s strategy focuses on the textual, not the extra-textual, questions that would take us “outside of the writing toward a psychobiographical signified . . .” (Deutscher 1997, 86). Derrida seeks to avoid a mythical metaphysical, historical, or psychobiographical referent so that he can focus on textual logic (Deutscher 1997, 87).

But Deutscher does not reflect explicitly on the ethical and political dimension of deconstruction that she invokes. She criticizes explicitly uses of deconstruction that seek to neutralize it and cites Derrida’s affirmation that “Deconstruction . . . is not neutral. It intervenes” (Deutscher 1997, 54). Moreover, her own reading is inspired by what she thinks is “most enabling” for “feminist purposes” (1997, 167). The ethical-political dimension of a Marxist-inspired reading is perhaps more transparent because there an analysis of textual contradictions is used to sharpen one’s critique of social contradictions. (See Lucien Goldmann’s The Hidden God, 1964.) But how does feminist deconstruction “intervene”? This claim can make sense only if an effects-based reading makes a difference, that is, has an effect on the reader/recipient. (To challenge the homogeneity of a phallocentric tradition is somehow enabling for feminism.) But deconstruction cannot be interested explicitly in what this effect does because that would then propel it to the extra-textual terrain.

Nor does Deutscher consider explicitly the question of the scope of this strategy. To what kinds of texts can feminist deconstruction be applied? Can it be applied to all texts within the history of philosophy, even those that do not address explicitly questions of women and femininity, as Deutscher’s three historical examples do? Or is it focused exclusively on contradictions surrounding gender? If the latter, it could be argued that feminist deconstruction limits feminist readings in the history of philosophy to a narrow domain. ³ Oddly enough, Deutscher also overlooks the need to give an account of why she selected Rousseau, Augustine, and de Beauvoir as examples from the history of philosophy. One is left to surmise that because she focuses on feminist methodologies, she has chosen texts that feminists have debated heatedly, with no interest in extra-textual concerns such as historical chronology or influence. Moreover, one is tempted to ask whether this strategy can be extended beyond the texts of the history of philosophy to forms of contemporary discourse such as political discourses of nationalism. Here there is evidence that effects-based analyses can be very fruitful, for example, in considering how the nationalist discourses in the former Yugoslavia used the representation of the mother as a symbol for national solidarity that transcended economic and geographic differences. On the other hand, it is more difficult to cast aside all forms of causal or motivational analysis when addressing issues in a political domain. Could feminist deconstruction accept a pluralism of methodologies that grants the fruitfulness of diagnostic analyses as well?

Finally, Deutscher does not work thoroughly through the question of subversion that she raises so pointedly in relation to Butler’s work. Her overarching concern is to modify the optimism often associated with the concept of instability. She concludes Yielding Gender with the following: “since instability is understood as rendering possible phallocentric arguments, the subversive potential of exposing their instability may be limited. Instability can be read as simultaneously destabilizing and stabilizing, consolidating and subverting the tradition” (Deutscher 1997, 198). And she notes that although Butler criticizes Kristeva for failing to offer a strategy of subversion that could be a sustained political practice, this critique can be turned against Butler herself (Deutscher 1997, 24). Nonetheless, Deutscher shies away from clarifying what she means by the possibility of subversion. She does provide us a clue for this in her account of Irigaray, where she describes Irigaray’s intervention as “the generation of disruptive, exorbitant concepts of sexual difference, which are then inserted back into such texts” (Deutscher 1997, 87). So subversion might consist in a subversive reading of the history of philosophy, but her own historical interpretations do not emulate Irigaray’s sort of intervention. Thus, both the substantive and rhetorical import of Deutscher’s own work emphasizes the constitutive dimension of instability and de-emphasizes the problematic of subversion.

Deutscher’s book makes a powerful argument for the strengths of feminist deconstruction, although inevitably it opens a discussion about its limits as well. All in all, Yielding Gender testifies to an important new voice in feminist philosophy. Deutscher displays a rare talent for both methodological sophistication and careful textual reading. Her analysis of instability raises questions that feminists will have to confront for many years in their efforts to reread the philosophical canon.