<<TRANSMATHOME

4.2 Feminist Problems with Post-Modern Subjectivity

Benhabib takes three elements of post-modern thought as problematic when formulating an ethics for selfhood. These are the death of the subject, what she calls The Death of Man, the excavation of the truth of history or The Death of History and the death of the desire to master the self and the world by knowing everything, The Death of Metaphysics. [16] Although the second two deaths in post-modernism will be considered my main focus will be on the first death, which I will term the death of subjectivity. I see two major elements responsible for, or resulting from, the death of the subject. These are the figuration of an embodied, corporeal self (as opposed to the transcendental or metaphysical) and the need for different types of subject (always housed in different types of bodies) to become viable and ethically considered in culture. The idea of subjectivity is vast in philosophy but its ability to cross epistemes and indeed be the major focus of almost every question asked in every field, namely ‘who or what am I?’ - psychically in psychoanalysis, biologically in science and medicine, metaphysically in philosophy, elucidates the importance of being a subject in order to know what kind of subject one is.  Many feminists, especially those who are suspicious of the representation (or lack thereof) of women in psychoanalysis point to the redundancy of the question “who or what am I?” when it comes to women. I have already discussed the construction of subjectivity within phallologocentricism in the section ‘Pleasure’ but my main and most basic point is re-articulated here when I ask the question - what does the death of subjectivity mean in postmodernism for those who never really had a self-defined subject to begin with?  Anxieties which follow this question include: whether the death of subjectivity by male theorists is an appropriation of any subversive potential women had by being not fully ingrained by that idea of ‘something to lose’; whether the death of subjectivity means the wiping over of any memory of oppression women may want to remember specifically due to their being women, an anxiety Benhabib explicitly addresses in her argument on the death of the subject. In calling the death of subjectivity The Death of Man Benhabib points to an idea I addressed in the ‘Death’ chapter of this book, that only ‘man’ or male subjectivity has anything to lose through postmodernism. Situating the post-modern post-subject within the two primary locations of corporeality and difference relegates women to where they have always and already been condemned to - entrapment within their own flesh that precedes any concept of self and is spoken for and about by others, and a terminal ‘othering’ from normalized axes of acceptability. The desire of post-modern subjectivity in many ways is a desire to ‘Become-Woman’.

<<TRANSMATHOME|NEXT>>