Overcoming Objectification: A Carnal Ethics by Ann J. Cahill (review)

Ann Cahill Asks: What is wrong with objectification? If objectification treats a carnal subject as the “material entity or the recipient of a sexualizing gaze” that he or she is, then far from being ethically reprehensible, it is perhaps an ethical task. Cahill provocatively argues that feminist ethicists have, in reading objectification as an a priori ethical wrong, inadvertently precluded the possibility of an ethics of encounter between material, inter-subjective selves. Attention to objectification may have turned up crucial ethical failures, but as a concept it cannot do justice to the ethical harms suffered by carnal subjects. What’s more, if objectification is automatically wrong, there is no hope for a sexual ethic that can “create the possibilities for sexuality without shame, desire without degradation” (11). This interpretation of objectification makes mistaking the other for a (mere) body an ethical wrong. What if taking the other for a body, distinct from my own, is crucial for sexual ethics?

Cahill proposes an alternative that might allow for a better delineation of unethical from ethical forms of objectification. The real ethical danger is to be found in what she calls “derivatization,” regarding what is in fact the complex particularity of another carnal subject as a reflection of or derivation from one’s own subjectivity. As Cahill explains, “If ‘objectify’ means to ‘turn into an object,’ then ‘derivatize’ means to ‘turn into a derivative’” (32). Derivatizing gazes and actions lack the wonder, the un-anticipatable thrill of encountering and being changed by another body. We are already objects in a world of interdependent objects, even if this language cannot capture the movement of life. This model of subjectivity as more than “em-bodied,” as in fact bodily and interdependent upon other bodies builds upon the work of Gail Weiss (1999), Roslyn Diprose (2002), Jessica Benjamin (1980; 1988; 1998), and Cahill’s own Rethinking Rape (2001). Ethics for Cahill is a matter of engaging in this movement in a way characterized by “mutual, dynamic interaction” (54). Fundamental to this ethical interaction is the desire for difference, instead of the desire to find myself in the other. Scholars of existential phenomenology might immediately recognize in this clear and well-argued presentation the first work ever of applied existential ethics. The body-for-others, “being-with,” the look, and the fundamental excesses of the for-itself are all here. While I will suggest below that Cahill dispenses far too quickly with the work of Simone de Beauvoir, the concept of derivatization as a cause of ethical harm is an interpretation and application of Luce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference.

Chapter 1 begins with a consideration of objectification in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Catherine MacKinnon. Beauvoir and MacKinnon, however, do not develop an analysis of objectification, of what it is or of what is ethically spurious about it. Linda LeMoncheck, Martha Nussbaum, and Rae Langton do, but they rely so heavily on a Kantian model of persons as rational and autonomous that they are unable to account for any sexual expression as ethical. Nussbaum in particular takes autonomy to be an indicator of moral status, which is by definition independent and yet identical from person to person. On this view, ethics requires that autonomous subjects recognize autonomous subjects. But Cahill argues that a balanced autonomy between identical individuals moving in tandem is neither true to nor desirable for lived experience, especially lived sexual experiences. The concept of derivatization, which is presented in chapter 2, regards what this Kantian model hankers after as the thrill of distinctness, the appreciation of the bodily ontological, beyond which the other is for me as I am for her. This distinctness is indeed important, but Cahill argues that this is because of the distinction between “the self and the other—the non-reducible difference between them—that allows for the connection, dialogue, and alliances that are necessary from the development of the human subject” (52). Two-ness is precisely what...