The Uses of the Imaginary

In their diagnosis of the ways in which Anglo-American philosophical and legal traditions are flawed, and in their accounts of the steps that feminists should take in order to renew them, Moira Gatens and Drucilla Cornell are largely agreed. Feminist philosophers and legal theorists, they tell us, should eschew the dualisms around which philosophy has been organized; unmask analyses which privilege the masculine by presenting it as human; be careful not to reinstate traditional male and female stereotypes in their own theorizing; pay much more attention to the significance of embodiment and bodily differences; and, rather than taking the existence of individual agents for granted, draw on the resources of psychoanalysis to provide an account of the processes by which masculine and feminine selves are created and maintained. Beyond this, however, the projects of these two creative and thought-provoking authors diverge, in ways which suggest that there is more work to be done on their shared assumptions. Gatens presses the view that in order to satisfy these desiderata we need a monist metaphysics in which the self is conceived as essentially embodied, and a non-universalist ethics where the moral significance of states of affairs is shaped by imaginaries which vary from culture and culture and individual to individual. Cornell (reacting against what she sees as the excessive subjectivism of views like that of Gatens) holds that feminist legal theory can and should work within the framework of neo-Kantian liberalism. By adding a Lacanian twist to Rawls’ primary good of self-respect, we can develop a universalist ethics where the feminine is not devalued.

As these divergences suggest, Imaginary Bodies and The Imaginary Domain have rather different aspirations. Cornell is in search of a conception of moral and political freedom to underpin reform of the U.S. laws about abortion, pornography, and harassment. She aims to find a point of reflective equilibrium at which her interpretation of freedom supports her interpretations of these legal issues and vice-versa, while allowing that a satisfactory jurisprudential solution may fall short of more comprehensive moral and philosophical ambitions. By contrast, Gatens’ book (which contains a series of papers written between 1983 and 1994) explores the broad, ethical and ontological implications of sexual difference, and probes the deep relations between the human body and the body politic.

In pursuing these interconnected themes, both writers appeal extensively to the idea of the imaginary as developed by Lacan and Castoriadis, and I shall mainly discuss the uses they make of it. For Gatens, this is an inclusive notion which takes in both the sexual imaginary and the culturally-specific “images, symbols, metaphors and representations which help construct various forms of subjectivity” (viii). In the opening section of her book she employs it to develop the criticisms of the sex/gender distinction for which she is particularly well-known, arguing that sex and gender are allied with the distinctions between the biological and the social, and the body and the mind, in a way that reinforces these uncritical dualisms. Feminists need to avoid the trap of treating the body as a neutral, biological ground on which female and male identities are socially inscribed, and to take account of the fact that our understanding of the body is already shaped and differentiated by the imaginary. We are not simply embodied creatures, but embodied females and males who think with our understandings of our own embodiment. To understand masculinity and femininity it is therefore not enough to look for ways in which these categories are socially constructed; instead, we must look to the imaginary, and to the differing significances and values accorded to different bodies.

Gatens’ interest in the imaginary body also draws her to two further questions. First, if thinking is essentially embodied, and if what we think somehow reflects our bodies as we imagine them, what metaphysical model will capture this insight, and at the same time accommodate sexual difference? Secondly, can we understand the state not in contractarian vein, as a body of...