What is a Woman?: And Other Essays (review)

Toril Moi. What is a Woman? And Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xxiv + 517 pages. ISBN 0-19-812242-X.

Faced with the less than warm American reception of her Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Toril Moi always denied that she had set out to advance the claims of high French feminism (abstract, theoretical) at the expense of its more lowly Anglo-American counterpart (pragmatic, empirical). Rather, she thought she had written a critique of both in the light of a politically committed materialist feminism. Nevertheless, a number of American feminists--unappreciative perhaps of an academic style that Moi associates with Britain in the early eighties, where pleasurable intellectual friendships could be marked by "intense intellectual disagreements carried over from the seminar room to the pub" (261)--chose to remain offended, equating female-authored critique with unsisterly betrayal. With hindsight Moi identifies an institutionally determined context of "fears and anxieties" that confused professional and emotional support with intellectual agreement. As long as ideas are treated with respect and not reduced to the person advancing them (the ad feminam mode of debate to which Moi, herself its occasional victim, remains "particularly allergic"), "feminists do each other a service by producing serious and searching critiques of the foundations of feminist work." As she most reasonably claims, "it is impossible to advance feminist intellectual work without engaging with other feminists" (259-60).

It is to be hoped that What is a Woman?, Moi's long-awaited re-entry into the lists of mainstream feminist debate, will not be perceived as a reopening of hostilities. Moi shows herself extraordinarily attentive to the work of American feminists, even if she dismisses many of their arguments. And it is indeed arguments that are targeted in her two flagship essays (on sex/gender debates and on the place of the personal in theory), rather than the two women with whom she most explicitly engages (Judith Butler and Jane Tompkins respectively). After all, for all her unease with the reigning theoretical doxa--the decontextualizing deconstruction challenged in "What is a Woman?", the confessional academic writing, legitimized by versions of identity politics, confronted in "I am a Woman"--Moi has chosen the United States as intellectual arena and context for her own theoretical evolution. If, as she claims, the American University remains dominated by an ungrounded poststructuralism, she has certainly chosen a demanding testing ground for her increasingly confident espousal of a different tradition of thought. This is a tradition whereby the foregrounded subject is a subject of praxis (both the subject of acts and the subject of speech acts), and whereby the psychoanalysis of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva has been joined by the sociology of Bourdieu, the existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir and, increasingly, by the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell.

That Moi is determined not so much to be right as to get the arguments right, is demonstrated by her disarming identification of her own momentary "failures of voice" in Sexual/Textual Politics. Of her equation of an integrated humanist self with the "self-contained powerful phallus" she declares: "I don't think I can have believed this when I wrote it" (xi), while her decision to close the book with a quotation from Derrida (when she did not consider herself a deconstructionist) is deemed a good example of "theoretical alienation" (xii) which not surprisingly gave rise to misunderstandings. Above all she sees that she sometimes wrote as if it was self-evident that some theoretical idea or other was "intrinsically bad for feminist politics." It is this "theoreticism," with its parallel policing of the theoretically correct positions that are supposedly good for feminist politics, that forms one of the main targets of Moi's new essays. As far as her own work is concerned, these essays are an attempt to work her way out "from under poststructuralism" and to see what happens "when one goes elsewhere" (xii).

Now distanced (in time at least) from the unemployed, would...