Feminine Alterities

Abstract

Not just one form of alterity among others, but alterity at its most radically unsettling: this is the thought that has tended to characterize postmodern takes on the feminine, in which its classical subordination to the masculine is submitted to an operation and a logic that would break with, or at least interrupt, what Derrida terms ‘phallogocentrism’, and in particular the binarity with which phallogocentrism fixes the relation between identity and alterity, same and other. This attempt to challenge phallogocentrism from within is grounded in a familiar interpretation of the place of the feminine in Western thought of the kind reproduced by Levinas in Time and the Other (1948), in which he claims that ‘The Eleatic [Parmenidean] notion of being dominates Plato’s philosophy, where multiplicity was subordinated to the one, and where the role of the feminine was thought within the categories of passivity and activity, and was reduced to matter’ (Levinas 1987, 92–3). Taking as their point of departure just such an identification of the binary hierarchization of the masculine and the feminine, and the philosophical tradition founded upon it, many recent theorists of the feminine have sought not simply to reverse this binary hierarchization but also to effect its displacement through a reinscription of the feminine as that which, in its radical alterity, both precedes and exceeds binarity as such.