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6KDQQRQ+RIIThe Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 29, Number 3, 2015,
pp. 403-414 (Article)
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journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 29, no. 3, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
Translating Principle into Practice:
On Derrida and the Terms of Feminism
Shannon Hoff
memorial university of newfoundland
abstract: One of Derrida’s most significant insights concerns the irreducibility yet
interdependence of unconditioned ideal and conditioned actuality. First, relying espe-cially on the concept of hospitality, I argue that this insight allows for the development of a powerful account of ethical and political action. Second, I show the usefulness of this account for feminist critical practice, especially with regard to the ideal of inclusion and the concept of “woman.” Third, and finally, I explore how this insight could guide feminist action in relation to two specific situations: feminism’s relations to transgender issues and to reproductive freedom.
keywords: feminism, Derrida, inclusion, transgender, reproduction
“Feminism” is not the name of any single thing; it is a name, rather, that holds together a diverse history of people and projects, not all of which are compatible with each other. This fact legitimately raises the question of what feminism is, and, in my view, this question needs to be one that is alive within feminism itself; that is, it is incumbent upon feminism to be explicitly attentive to what its orienting principles are and to how its prac-tices do or do not correspond with these principles. Since Derrida’s “decon-struction” is precisely oriented toward noticing the divergence integral to any identity, my project here is to use Derrida’s insights to assess the
cur-rent state of feminism. In his analyses of justice, forgiveness, hospitality, democracy, and the gift, Derrida highlights a necessary tension between the unconditional norm and the conditioned realization that is constitutive of each of these realities; it is my intention to demonstrate a similar tension within feminism and to argue that this tension is intrinsic to the exercise of feminist responsibility.
I will begin with a brief discussion of Derrida’s understanding of hos-pitality so as to introduce the basic conceptual orientation of my analysis. I will then bring this framework into dialogue with feminism, identifying a parallel between feminist concerns for inclusion and Derrida’s analysis of hospitality and arguing that there is a necessary ambivalence in the found-ing term by which feminism operates: specifically, in the term woman.1
I will demonstrate this by turning to two specific issues that reveal the pressing political relevance of these concerns: the relation of feminism to transgender issues and the relation of feminism to reproductive freedom. This identification of an essential tension within feminism should by no means be understood as a simple criticism; it is, on the contrary, an attempt to illuminate the plasticity required of feminism with regard to its founding terms, insofar as it is persistently moved to answer both to its principles and to a shifting political reality, and to determine specific ways in which, in contemporary political circumstances, it must risk itself in order to be true to itself.
Derrida and the Plasticity of Founding Terms
Derrida captures the relation between unconditioned and conditioned in Of Hospitality (2000). Following Derrida, we begin simply by considering what hospitality seems to involve: that is, inviting someone into one’s own place in such a way that this person feels at home, welcomed in the way that he or she is. From this perspective, hospitality seems to involve being open to the guests’ ways of “being here,” allowing them to define the terms of their stay. If we pursue this trajectory, however, other complicating consid-erations emerge: the place in which the guest is welcomed has an existence on its own terms, and for it to be a place for the guest it has to be able to define itself, protecting those resources that would allow it to persist. In so doing, however, it will effectively refuse to answer in an absolutely open way to the guest’s terms and thus will be inhospitable in relation to them.
In his treatment of hospitality Derrida shows that, no matter where we begin, our consideration will lead us to these two conflicting points—toward the idea of an unconditional, absolute openness and toward the specific, conditioned way in which the capacity for openness is preserved. The idea of hospitality itself points to the necessity of being open to anyone at any time, unconditionally, but also to the opposed necessity of welcoming a specific someone in a specific way and preserving the resources required for such welcoming. The notion of hospitality is thus divided in itself: To wel-come anyone, anytime, without conditions, is impossible, for one would be stripped of the resources of hospitality; hospitality as unconditional can-not be true hospitality. Hospitality with conditions, however, can always be criticized, since to set limits on the guest, maintain one’s own place, and welcome a specific guest are in various ways to compromise the welcome and one’s capacity to be hospitable; here, again, we do not have true hos-pitality. Each can be challenged in the name of the other: pure hospitality cannot exist, and specific acts of hospitality manifest hostile self-assertion.
This tension points to the need for what Derrida calls a “hyperbolical ethics” (2001b, 29).2 In order to respond to a particular situation I must
act, but in acting I interpret what the ideal requires for this situation and so assert my own authority in place of its authority; I take on the conditions that acting requires and thus fail to enact an unconditional ideal; I bring about another one-sided situation that may need to be transformed for the sake of the ideal of justice. The demand to be ethical persists in command-ing me in a way that is in some sense fundamentally unanswerable, insofar as every answer I give is both responsible and irresponsible. To try to evade this situation and aim for absolute answerability, however—refusing to act in a conditioned way in the name of unconditional hospitality—will entail simply the failure to enact any hospitality at all.3
There is no way out of this bind. Its “impossibility,” however, calls not for “throwing up one’s hands” in moral resignation but for the effort of understanding it and allowing that understanding to shape one’s orientation to action. In other words, one can respond to the ethical ideal by acting and by being open to criticism of that action, which will continue to be accountable to an ideal that outstrips it.4 Responsibility is located in this
very dynamism between unconditional and conditional: unconditional, pure hospitality needs to “enter into conditions of all kinds” (Derrida 2001a, 44–45) in order to be actualized, and the conditioned enactment of hos-pitality needs the unconditioned ideal in order to be able to be addressed
in its shortcomings. Something must be done, but its very openness to criticism and transformation is a way of actualizing the “(im)possible” ideal.5 Between the ideal and the practice exists “distinction, radical
hetero-geneity, but also indissociability. One calls forth, involves, or prescribes the other” (Derrida 2000, 147).
The challenge facing action is to enact ideals in situations that are always one-sided and conditioned. It is precisely these one-sided situations that require our care; they are the primary instantiations of “what is good.” These situations and actions, however, in their one-sidedness, do not ulti-mately define a norm of goodness, and our care will involve a critique of their limits and exclusions as much as a protection of them: a critique of our incapacity to act without subordinating the concerns of the other to our own terms and without creating new exclusions.
Derrida’s account of this undissolvable relation between unconditioned and conditioned highlights both the urgency of action and the danger of hubris. The unique demands of our contingent political circumstances are nonuniversal specificities that demand our attention, but these situations in turn are not authoritative solely on their own terms, and we risk losing our capacity to deal with them well if we presume that there is no other way in which to enact our ideals or if we presume that any given finite terms are acceptable.6 Let us now turn to discussion of feminist attempts to address
specific gender-related occasions of injustice, identifying the relevance thereto of this theoretical framework.
The Deconstruction of Feminism: Feminist Ideals and Feminist Situations
The originary, general impulse of feminism was to address the situations of women, discerning the ways in which women are mistreated by both individuals and basic social structures and identifying the basic goods that they lack. Generally speaking, the most basic good that is missing is inclu-sion in the domain of “what matters,” or incluinclu-sion in the domain of that which receives recognition, protection, and support. “To be included” is a vital and significant feminist demand, whether it is articulated in support of or in opposition to existing structures. This ideal of inclusion faces precisely the tensions identified in the analysis of hospitality.
While the basic principle of inclusion in “what matters” seems operative in feminist action, it encounters restrictions in actuality that cast it in doubt. Namely, to include people requires specific criteria and resources, specific judgments and decisions about how reality should be structured differently so as to better answer to the ideal of inclusion. Feminism has had to iden-tify the goods to which people should have access and make decisions about their distribution; the mechanisms required for the protection of inclusion, mechanisms such as rights, freedoms, and various forms of access to extra-individual tools of agency; and the bodies required for the protection of such goods and mechanisms, such as laws, educational institutions, social orga-nizations, and so on. These goods, mechanisms, and bodies, however, can operate in ways that are exclusionary in turn, and hence much feminist analysis has been dedicated to exposing the ways in which inclusion in existent domains is problematic from the perspective of the ideal of inclu-sion. Further, to work for inclusion requires judgment about those on whose behalf feminism should struggle. Because identities have been shaped in relation to specific patterns of exclusion, however, claims on their behalf may indirectly legitimate these patterns, perpetuating forms of identifica-tion that exclude others.7 Again, determinate actions undertaken on behalf
of the ideal of inclusion can be criticizable in the terms of the very ideal that inspires them. With every “solution” comes the risk of reinforcing the established terms of a culture that has excluded people from recognizability and the risk of creating new modes of hierarchy and exclusion. Whereas specific judgments are made in answerability to general principles of jus-tice, they can in turn transgress them, undermining rather than realizing these principles.
It is not my purpose to simply reiterate these critical points, which have been made before, but, rather, to argue that such challenges are intrinsic to such forms of political struggle. Therefore they require a com-mitment, first, to be aware that any specific means of enacting justice could be one-sided; second, to engage with that which might challenge that one-sidedness; and third, to be willing to risk our commitments. Answerability does not end with the accomplishment of specific goals, and it requires that we conceive of action as the site of learning and transformation, not simply as the static mechanism for self- expression. Historically, feminism has been an important site for this kind of learning, and it can continue to be so. With the aim of demonstrating
concretely some ways in which this is a pressing issue for feminism now, let us look first at the encounter between feminism and transgender politics.
Feminism and the “Transgender Critique”
In turning attention to issues facing transgender persons, we can see that the assertion of a concern for the inclusion of women can come to oper-ate as a mechanism of exclusion, and, accordingly, tensions have arisen between transgender persons and feminists. A concern for inclusion can perpetuate the exclusive injustice it aims to redress by affirming the unjust, static system of identification in terms of which “woman” has come to be meaningful, precluding plasticity with regard to identification and excluding transgender people from recognizability.8 In the name of the
value of inclusion, feminism could confront (and has often confronted) broader assumptions about identity, sexuality, and desire that emerge out of a rigid positioning of men and women in relation to each other. C. Jacob Hale’s (1998) work is relevant here, as it encourages active recognition of “border zone dwellers” and the “demilitarization” of border zones. Indeed, as Stryker, Currah, and Moore note, trans studies importantly emphasizes the incoherence of the idea that “certain concrete somethings could be characterized as ‘crossers,’ while everything else could be characterized by boundedness and fixity” (2008, 11).9 It is therefore, as Halberstam
and Hale suggest, “an ideal site for the enactment of localized debates of potentially widespread consequence about genders, embodiments, and identifications” (1998, 284–85). The experience of transgender persons, as Cressida Heyes notes, attests clearly to “intense and public attempts to discipline gender in ways feminists have long criticized”; thus feminism should engage “emergent identities that reconfigure both conventional and conventionally feminist understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality” (2003, 1093–94).10
The argument for expansion is not, again, particularly new. What I see to be helpful here, however, is the identification of the principle behind such transformation. Committed to the idea that the exclusion of certain people from political recognition is unjustifiable, feminism is also committed to changing the terms, not simply to struggling for inclu-sion within existing terms, and committed to answerability to those who
profess about it that it excludes them. It can never absolve itself of the need to be responsive to the norm of inclusion; no response to the demand of inclusion can ever be a final response. An essential part of dedication to an idea of justice is to be willing to be in league with one’s critics, pushed to the outskirts of one’s position, called by a “hyperbolical ethics” beyond the terms with which one began. It is to be willing, indeed, to risk the very identity of feminism as a specific political practice, since to live up to the value of inclusion and participate in making life livable for others can require one to develop a transformed view of what counts as “inside” and “outside” the concerns of feminism.11 Feminism risks the very values that
urged it into being in the first place if it makes retention of its own specific identity its ultimate goal.
Let us turn now to the issue of reproductive freedom to explore a second way in which the feminist project, in the name of inclusion, may require expan-sion beyond its traditional boundaries and the risk of its founding terms.
Feminism and Reproductive Freedom
A broadly asserted feminist aspiration is that inclusion in basically liberal societies that take themselves to grant their citizens a high degree of dom of self-determination requires the recognition of reproductive free-dom. This issue is particularly charged at the moment, given the ever more vocal demand for an increase in limits on reproductive freedom in the United States and elsewhere.12 Reflecting on this issue should allow us to
see a further sense in which feminism should be open to the renegotiation of its basic terms in the name of the ideal of inclusion.
While newly developing restrictions on reproductive choice (intro-duced largely by men) are obviously a matter of women and sexism and should certainly be addressed as such, to conceive of this issue merely in these terms would be ineffective. This is because the political move to inhibit reproductive freedom seems to be part of a larger trend: namely, the undermining of the commitments of a basically liberal framework for the sake of the protection of powerful economic interests. If we follow the repressive measures of social control to their consequences, in other words, we find a deeper policy: the insulation and protection of powerful economic players that can effectively mobilize social policy for the advancement of their interests. There are other such analogous
erosions of the liberal social structure: massive increases in levels of incar-ceration, the imposition of quasi-slave labor on incarcerated people, the unprecedented slashing of budgets for education, the increase of draco-nian immigration laws, the financial bailout of institutions implicated in the mortgage crisis, the imprisonment without charge of people suspected of terrorism, and so on. Accompanying these problems is a failure to sus-tain the conditions that make basic livelihood possible—a livable natural habitat, for instance, and the security of retirement funds. If we consider the wider social contexts, the attack on women’s reproductive freedom seems to be not an isolated political development but part of a broader transformation in social policy.
The link between these developments and “neoliberalism”—the sub-jugation of political policy and power to the facilitation of capitalist accu-mulation—would need further exploration, but if this correlation is correct, then here again the aims of effective opposition require of feminism a kind of practiced flexibility. Challenging the assault on reproductive freedom might require, for instance, a strategic defense of the basic principles of liberal politics that can without care quickly deteriorate, even when a prom-inent theme in contemporary feminism has been the limitations of liberal-ism. Further, successful opposition to this erosion of liberal social values may require a kind of class consciousness, a solidarity with unanticipated allies, some of whom could seem, by traditional feminist standards, to be agents of sexist exclusion: so-called terrorists, victims of police brutality, victims of foreclosure in the housing market, the incarcerated, immigrants and refugees, and so on. The values of such groups may not accord with the basic values at work in feminism—an incarcerated person, for instance, could be a perpetrator of violent, gender-related crime, and an immigrant from a socially conservative culture could have views about gender that are opposed to typical feminist views—but if what is happening politically and economically is more than simply an issue facing women, then the enact-ment of a shared struggle is necessary for effectively reorienting the politi-cal machinery of the state toward the goal of politipoliti-cal emancipation. Any struggle for inclusion has to reckon with the real conditions under which exclusionary practices are exercised, and doing so may lead one to advocate for the inclusion of people and groups who were previously thought to be agents of exclusion. The generality of our ideals could require that we be open to those who share them and to those who suffer with us from the weakness of their operation.
Conclusion: Feminist Responses
The various forms of assault on transgender individuals and on women’s reproductive rights are pressing issues in the contemporary political land-scape that show that feminist ideals need to be risked in order to be enacted, that they operate in one-sided forms, and that their one-sided actualiza-tions must be kept open to criticism in their name. In the context of the first example, it seems necessary, in the name of inclusion, to support the development of new forms of gender identification between and beyond existing forms—or risk becoming a conservative force in a changing reality. In the context of the second example, it seems necessary, in the name of inclusion, to engage with other groups in solidarity against the disintegra-tion of basic rights and freedoms and the powerful alliance of political and economic forces—or risk effective opposition to the real forces behind the mistreatment of women. In both cases, we can see how the specificities of political life require that, in order to be true to the basic ideal of inclusion, this ideal must be risked. Indeed, if it is to be true to the unconditioned ideal by which it is moved, feminism will always be pressed to take up new, specific forms of openness that could undermine its existent deci-sions, conditions, and structures. To live a finite, human reality is to live in this tension between that to which we answer and the answer that we give—the irreducible points of reference of ideal and actuality, principle and practice—and to learn how to live there well.
notes
1. I will not address the ways in which Derrida takes up the idea of woman and feminism explicitly. For such discussions, see, for example, Armour 1999; Deutscher 1997; Elam 1994; Feder, Rawlinson, and Zakin 1997; Oliver 1994; and Schor, Weed, and Rooney 2005.
2. For an excellent discussion of the ethical significance of this relation between unconditioned ideal and conditioned actuality, see Russon 2013.
3. This is a matter of allowing a thought, as Tina Chanter writes, “to be guided by that which exceeds it, by its other, knowing all the while that it cannot possibly be adequate to that for which it tries to account—for its exclusions—and knowing also that this thought bears the imprint of what nonetheless exceeds its grasp” (1997, 108). If, as Mary Rawlinson writes, “responsibility will always involve this guilt and failure to respond,” the task “is to develop a strategy of response . . . that will hold open the future to the other who is not the same” (1997, 79).
4. Jeffrey Nealon captures this double character of answerability in his
treatment of Derrida’s discussion of Nelson Mandela; see Nealon 1993, especially 170–71. A similar dynamic is at work in Derrida’s treatment of democracy in
Rogues. Democracy is threatened by the very attempt to give it shape: hence the
“incompletion and essential delay, the self-inadequation of every present and presentable democracy” (Derrida 2005, 38).
5. Derrida uses the term (im)possible here to identify the way in which ideals such as democracy and hospitality that are themselves impossible to realize are in a sense made real in their influence on our specific attitudes and actions (see 2001b, 29).
6. See, for instance, Derrida’s discussion of four “aporias” in “Force of Law” (1992, 22–26).
7. As Judith Butler (2004, 15) argues, because gendered identity is constituted by a social reality we do not author, in being gendered we act out this social reality and its norms, which have insinuated themselves into the most intimate aspects of our sexual identity.
8. Butler writes that “feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (1990, 18).
9. Similarly, Halberstam observes that “as gender-queer practices and forms continue to emerge, presumably the definitions of gay, lesbian, transsexual, and
transgender will not remain static, and we will produce new terms to delineate
what the current terms cannot” (1998, 306).
10. Despite this fact, Heyes observes, “‘trans liberation’ and ‘feminism’ have often been cast as opposing movements.” Our practices of seeking out homes as “gendered or sexual being[s] . . . too often congeal into political ideologies and group formations that are exclusive or hegemonic” (2003, 1094, 1097).
11. Chanter suggests that “it is a matter of dislocating ourselves from the safety of the environments in which we can play the ones who are put upon, and asking ourselves what we are putting on others when we gather our strength and stand up for ourselves,” of finding out how feminism “proliferates the exclusion of others in its attempt to secure its own inclusion” (1997, 107, 109).
12. Many states have introduced bills and passed laws setting constraints on abortion providers, protecting doctors from lawsuits if they lie about the fetus so as to prevent abortion, categorizing pregnant women as criminal if they endanger the fetus’s life, freeing insurance companies from the requirement to provide birth control, and requiring multiple procedures prior to abortion, the relevance of which is questionable. Such restrictions can be found, for instance, in Code of Virginia §18.2-76; Iowa Code Title IV, Subtitle 2, Chapter 146.1 and Chapter 146.2; North Dakota’s “Abortion Control Act”; and Kansas’s Bill SB 142.
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