Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy (review)

Publishers have told me that both feminism and edited collections of essays are no longer viable or marketable projects. With the advent of queer theory, gender theory, and postfeminism, feminism has apparently lost its voice, right, and urgency. If there is no longer a general project with which women can identify—and no longer an identifiable body of women—how can feminism provide any sort of ground or consensus for a collection of essays? Dorothea Olkowski's Resistance, Flight, Creation (2001) answers this question forcefully, not because of the coherence of the volume so much as its capacity to articulate the common question of feminism from diverse perspectives. Feminism is, here, a provocation of philosophy, taking some of philosophy's foundational terms—from 'subjectivity' to Martin Heidegger's 'dwelling'—and asking how those terms might intersect with sexual difference.

This would, indeed, be a valuable volume to read for anyone who feels that the feminist project has had its day, for here the questions and project of sexual difference are related to a series of different, and sometimes incommensurable, philosophical concerns. The volume is, avowedly, an enactment, or a series of feminist enactments, of French philosophy. It does not assume the existence of a feminist philosophy.

In "Philosophy and Gender," Hazel Barnes, whose translations and writings on existentialism have provided important contributions to philosophy, reflects on her position as a woman in a male-dominated discipline. Barnes defends the Sartrean concept of the subject, and does so through a desire to grant women the right and power to do philosophy. Barnes's defended subject is not the normative subject of reason and male rights so much as a subject achieved through a process of achieving, rather than recognizing, humanity. Humanity is not a model of equality and sameness, but a "regulative idea" (38). If this is so, then philosophy, or the capacity to question and think, is crucial to the politics of gender, but rethinking gender is likewise crucial to philosophy, for one can no longer rely on an image of "man."

Iris Marion Young, who, like Barnes, has been highly influential in bringing the insights of Continental philosophy to English-speaking feminists, acknowledges the lamentable and nostalgic politics of locating women within a domestic private sphere. Her essay draws upon Heidegger's concept of dwelling in order to establish "home" as a way of thinking of the subject. This subject is not a Cartesian power that constructs its world, but is "the materialization of identity" (2001, 62) achieved by dwelling in relation to one's world and others. This understanding of a shifting and fluid, but anchored, identity allows Young to revalue a homemaking of preservation rather than construction. This, then, leads Young both to revalue traditionally feminine activities, such as homemaking, as crucial to subject formation, and to retrieve some positive concept of the subject in the wake of its postmodern abandonment.

Gail Weiss's essay, "Splitting the Subject," tries to look at the body not just as a site of agency, from which the subject launches himself into the world, but as a complex, fragmented, and split horizon of possibility. Weiss looks back to Young's work on the body, which argues that the male body is lived as a site of transcendence, action, and affirmed identity, while the female body—constructed through the desiring male gaze—is experienced as immanence, as object, as other than active and therefore as split from the subject. Rather than reinforcing this binary, Weiss suggests that splitting might be revalued and given a new aesthetic. This will be so, she suggests, if we no longer assume the subject as a self-transcending unity but rather as a way of assembling the parts of one's body into a created whole, a whole that can differ from body to body. Weiss cites the new aesthetic valuation of the bodies of women who have undergone mastectomy.

In a similar vein, Debra B. Bergoffen looks at the opposition between the immanent body of...