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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The notion of ‘the feminine Other’ is a vexed one for feminists. In the opening pages of The Second Sex Simone de Beauvoir asks, ‘Are there women, really? Most assuredly the theory of the eternal feminine still has its adherents who will whisper in your ear: “Even in Russia women still are women”.’ For de Beauvoir the verbal symmetry of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine is merely a matter of linguistic form. In the real world of work and love—in life in general—man is the norm and woman is man’s ‘other’, thus her famous remark, ‘He is the Subject... she is the Other’, the ‘not man’ defined by men.
Levinas may be a ‘recent read’ for many of us but already, writing in 1949, de Beauvoir quotes him; ‘Otherness’, says Levinas, ‘reaches its full flowering in the feminine, a term of the same rank as consciousness but of opposite meaning.’ T suppose’ de Beauvoir comments, ‘that Levinas does not forget that woman, too, is aware of her own consciousness. . . . But it is striking that he deliberately takes a man’s point of view. When he writes that “woman is mystery”, he implies that she is mystery for man. Thus his description, which is intended to be objective, is in fact an assertion of masculine privilege.’3 And one which, we can note with de Beauvoir, can stand in a long line of philosophical evocation of ‘the female’ and ‘the feminine’ from the pre-Socratics to Nietzsche and beyond.
In the existentialist rubric of The Second Sex de Beauvoir sees the problem as this—a woman, like anyone else, is an autonomous freedom, yet she discovers herself in a world where men force her to assume herself as the ‘Other’. Woman, philosophically speaking, lacks her own subjectivity.
1 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Pan Bodes, 1988) p. 13.
2 Ibid., p. 16.
3 Loc. cit., footnote.
4 Michelle Le Doeuff gives an amusing and insightful account of the ‘miracle’ that any kind of feminism might be based on Sartrean existentialism in her excellent book. Hipparchia’s Choice (Oxford, 1989). Briefly, ‘choosing a freedom which invents its own ends' is a difficult philosophical aspiration for the Peruvian peasant woman whose husband has left her with eight children to feed. Le Doeuff speaks of Sartre’s ‘megalomanical voluntarism’ (p. 127).
5 The Journal of Religion, 40 (1960) p. 201.
6 ‘Sexuate’ is a neologism now common, because useful, in feminist writings.
7 Although , with a few exceptions, practitioners in these two areas show little interest in, or awareness of, the existence of each other.
8 See Alice Jardine, Gynesis (Ithaca, 1985), p. 25.
9 Stephen Heath makes these observations, summarising Lacan’s position in Encore. For Lacan, the ‘woman is that which relates to the Other. Woman and Other, ‘locus of the signifying cause of the subject’ (E. p. 841), are not-all, more and less than the order of the phallus, radically other...’ Heath continues, theologians might take note, ‘Thus (the jouissance of) the woman is (in the position of) God. The Other is the only place left ‘in which to put the term God’ (SXX, p. 44).’ Stephen Heath, ‘Difference’, Screen, 19 (1978) p. 59-60.
10 This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca, 1985), p. 74.
11 Op. cit., p. 112.
12 Naomi Schor, ‘This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips With Irigaray’, differences, 1 (1989), p.56.
13 Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 181-2.
14 Braidotti, p. 254. See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, 1989), passim.
15 Braidotti, p. 11.
16 This is true of some Anglo-American critics, but also to some extent of the French philosopher, Michelle LeDoeuff, for instance.
17 Jean-Joseph Goux makes this point in “The Phallus: Masculine Identity and the ‘Exchange of Women ’’’.differences, 4.1 (1992).
18 See Elizabeth Gross, “Philosophy, subjectivity and the body: Kristeva and Irigaray,” in Carole Pateman and E. Gross, eds. Feminist Challenges Social and Political Theory (Boston, 1986), p.133.
19 Braidotti, p. 252.
20 Je,Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference (London, 1993), p.12.
21 In differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4.1 (1992).
22 Irigaray explores Plato’s allegory at some length in Speculum of the Other Woman.
23 Plutarch, Moralia, cit. Goux, p. 46.
24 To speak so generally of ‘the western tradition of metaphysics’ or ‘the onlo-theological constitution of metaphysics’, as though the same story could be told across 2,500 years. It is more accurately one particular, and we could say in the modem period particularly dominant, tradition of western metaphysics that is being criticised. Those who speak of 'the western tradition' often seem forgetful, in a way one hopes theologians are not, of medieval philosophy. Indeed, part of the argument of this paper is that recollection of the delicate philosophical arguments on the Trinity itself might be a sovereign cure against any system which degenerates into oppositional dualisms.
25 In a paper given to a conference on ‘The Trinity’, Trinity College, Dublin, May, 1992.
26 Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit (London, 1983) Vol. III, p. 161.
27 Elizabeth A.Johnson, The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female, Theological Studies 45 (1984), p. 459.
28 Johnson, 457.
29 “ ‘Feminity’ and the Holy Spirit?’’ in M. Furlong, ed. Mirror to the Church (London, 1988).
30 The following remarks are a precis of another paper, ‘Can a Feminist Call God “Father”?’ which appears in Teresa Elwes, ed. Women’s Voices in Religion (London, 1992) and also in Alvin Kimmel, ed., The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism (Eerdmans, 1992).
31 God Without Being, (Chicago, 1991) p. 142-3.
32 Catherine Mowry La Cugna, God for Vs: The Trinity and Christian Life, (New York, 1991), p. 277.
33 Ibid.,p. 153.
34 Uris does not mean, of course, that God cannot ‘relate to us’, in the vemacular sense of the term ‘relate’.
35 Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ (London, 1983), p.280.
36 This is one of the main thrusts of Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self.
37 On this theme in Lacan see Teresa Brennan’s History After Lacan. (Routledge, 1993).
38 See La Cugna, p. 251.
39 Braidotti, p. 255.
40 Identity and Difference, cit Marion, p. 35.
41 Op. cit., cit. Marion, p. 34.
42 Marion, p. 36.
43 La Cugna, p. 66.
44 See Momy Joy, ‘Levinas: Alterity, the Feminine, and Women’, forthcoming in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuse.
45 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, cit. Joy.
