Abstract
This chapter addresses the question of feminism’s influence and inheritance through a reading of Roger Scruton’s caricature of Women’s Studies’ as a university discipline (or indiscipline) which both exerts a negative influence on its students, and inherits what Scruton regards as a morally bankrupt philosophical attitude, which he associates principally with Michel Foucault. It considers Scruton’s argument in relation to the very philosophical field he denigrates, illustrating the latter’s capacity to embarrass Scruton’s presuppositions and methodology.
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Notes
Roger Scruton, ‘The Idea of a University’, The American Spectator, 43 (2010), 50–52 (pp. 50–51).
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873), p. xi.
Drucilla Cornell, ‘The Philosophy of the Limit: Systems Theory and Feminist Legal Reform’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. by Drucilla Cornell (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 68–94 (p. 88). That this essay was written in memory of Mary Joe Frug, the New England School of Law professor murdered in 1991, is a poignant indication that the concerns of feminism are not in the least phantasmatic, as Scruton’s charge of nominalism (below) implies.
This reading of Cornell is indebted to Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim, and especially the bravura conclusion to that text’s eponymous opening chapter. See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 22–23.
Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 34.
See also Scruton’s description of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet as ‘the masterpiece of modern satanism’. Roger Scruton, Thinkers of the New Left (Harlow: Longman, 1985), p. 32.
See Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (London: Pimlico, 2004), p. 105. Later in the text, he drops this equivocation, referring to ‘the agenda of those modernists and post-modernists, from Sartre to Rorty, whose world is bereft of all authority’ (p. 477).
For the putative ‘irrationality’ of deconstruction and its appeal, see also Roger Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 166: ‘Originally applied to literary theory, deconstruction spread like wildfire through the humanities and social sciences, and led even to the “deconstructionist” approach to politics, in which the “politics of difference” is advocated as the answer to the oppressive structures of Western civilization. Its critics say that deconstruction is a meaningless hotchpotch, to which the deconstructionist replies that “they would, wouldn’t they?” However, it is doubtful that its appeal stems from any compelling rational grounds for believing it.’
Jacques Derrida, ‘Et Cetera … (and so on, und so weiter, and so forth, et ainsi de suite, und so überall, etc.)’, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington, in Deconstructions: A User’s Guide, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 282–305 (p. 284).
Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality (London: Batsford, 1969).
Quoted in Roger Scruton, ‘The Language of Enoch Powell’, in Enoch at 100: A Re-evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell, ed. by Lord Howard of Rising [Greville Howard] (London: Biteback, 2012), pp. 114–122 (p. 116).
Roger Scruton, The Uses of Pessimism and the Danger of False Hope (London: Atlantic, 2010), p. i.
Jacques Derrida, ‘Honoris Causa: “This is also extremely funny”’, trans. by Marian Hobson and Christopher Johnson, in Jacques Derrida, Points … : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. by Elizabeth Weber, trans. by Peggy Kamuf et al (Stanford: University Press, 1995), pp. 399–421 (pp. 405–406).
See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994; repr. 2006).
A shorter text which emphasizes this theme is Derrida, ‘Marx and Sons’, trans. by G. M. Goshgarian, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. by Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 213–269.
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© 2015 Niall Gilde
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Gildea, N. (2015). Roger Scruton’s Daughters: Feminism and Parasitism in the Idea of a University. In: Hogg, E.J., Jones, C. (eds) Influence and Inheritance in Feminist English Studies. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497505_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137497505_7
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