Stella Sandford

This chapter examines the relationship between feminist theory and critical theory in Gillian Howie’s Between Feminism and Materialism, and the relation of both to philosophy. The chapter suggests that the relation between feminist theory and critical theory is a contradictory one in which the partners are at the same time close and yet estranged. It examines how Howie characterises this state of affairs and affirms her aim of 'putting Critical Theory to work for feminist theory’, explaining how her return to a set of revivified Marxist categories does this. However, it also argues that Howie’s specific attempt to bring a certain aspect of critical theory to bear on the understanding of sex and gender is limited by its relation to feminist philosophy. But it ends by suggesting that the work undertaken in Between Feminism and Materialism can be extended in another direction to begin the project of a critical theory of sex and a critique of the gender industry.

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’1) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary problematic. For the question requires a theoretical response capable of recognizing that it concerns a cultural and political (and therefore neither a specifically philosophical nor a merely empirical) problem. It requires an account of sex which is theoretically satisfying whilst being both adequate to and critical of everyday experience; a critical-theoretical account capable of embracing the everyday experience of sex, its lived contradictions. This article represents a first attempt to construct a transdisciplinary concept of sex to this end. It traces a line from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to some recent attempts to define ‘sex’ and various related but importantly different concepts, and ends by proposing an answer to the question ‘What is sex?’ that draws on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For our transdisciplinary efforts will of necessity spring from some specific discipline(s) while not remaining confined within them, and not allowing them to remained confined within themselves (which has been something of a problem for philosophy, historically).

In 1930 Husserl wrote that phenomenology is ‘a transcendental idealism that is nothing more than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of an egological science, an explication of my ego as subject of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have a sense for me, the ego.’ In transcendental-phenomenological theory, according to Husserl, ‘every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a “product” of transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance.’ This appears so inimical to the fundamental bases of feminist theory that the question of the very possibility of a ‘feminist phenomenology’ inevitably arises, not least because so much associated with the contributions of feminist theory to philosophy concern precisely the critique of the transcendental, isolated, disembodied subject. This chapter explores the different kinds of feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth with this problem in mind. Although phenomenology has developed and transformed itself in ways more accommodating to feminist theory we are still entitled to ask what makes it phenomenology? What are the presuppositions of any feminist phenomenology if it is still to count as phenomenology, rather than descriptive social-psychology or feminist metaphysics or feminist ethics? Is phenomenology essentially tied to first-personal description, or can third-person accounts be a legitimate part of its analyses? If third-person descriptions are accepted as a legitimate, what considerations govern the inevitable interpretative aspect of their analysis? Can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is at stake in the continued use of the transcendental problematic, granted its immanent phenomenological criticism and its various theoretical transformations? This chapter addresses the question of the philosophical specificity of feminist phenomenology by pursuing its distinction from the use of phenomenological research methods in practice disciplines and qualitative psychology, via two of the pivotal questions raised above: can there be any phenomenology, feminist or otherwise, without some conception of transcendental subjectivity? And what is the role of third person testimony in phenomenology? I will argue that the first of these questions remains a problem for feminist phenomenology, in a way that is not easily solved with recourse to third person testimony, the use of which remains under-theorized in the feminist phenomenological literature. Finally, I will show how the problem of transcendental subjectivity is particularly acute for the feminist phenomenology of pregnancy and birth when we consider the generative metaphorics of its philosophical origin in Kant’s philosophy.

This paper examines the metaphors of 'preformation' and 'epigenesis' in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and his other references to and various uses of theories of biological generation. It asks what these metaphor are meant to do, philosophically, and whether the idea of epigenesis, in particular, can help explain the specificity of transcendental idealism in relation to empiricism, or whether it illuminates anything concerning the status or the function of the categories. Discussing the most important interpretations of the epigenesis metaphor in the Critique of Pure Reason by Philip Sloan, Günter Zöller and John Zammito, this paper suggests an alternative interpretation of the generative metaphorics surrounding Kant’s presentation of the spontaneous production of the pure concepts by the understanding. Placing the single reference to epigenesis in Critique of Pure Reason in the context of the book’s larger set of metaphors of generation, birth and biological ancestry, this paper argues that the generative model for the production or origin of the categories is in fact that of parthenogenesis, and that this is the only generative model that could have secured the epistemic status and legitimacy of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for Kant. This argument also reveals the gendered imaginary subtending Kant’s transcendental idealism and allows us to consider the implications of the parthenogenic model for Kant’s transcendental idealism in this light.

This article comprises a critical examination of some aspects of the English-language comparative literature on Heidegger and East Asian thought. It questions both its transcendental conceptual ground – the conditions of possibility for the comparative exercise – and its account of Heideggerʼs philosophy itself. For the comparative literature, I will argue, can only make its specific claims, sympathetic to the Heideggerian philosophical project, with a reading of that project that represses most of what is fundamental to Heideggerʼs conception of philosophy and almost everything that we know about his politics. Furthermore, in its emphasis on the ancient it facilitates the repression of the history of Heideggerian fascism in modern East Asian, and particularly Japanese, thought. The point of this critical examination of the comparative literature is not, however, to expose a misreading of Heidegger. It is to reveal what is at stake in the mobilization of the imaginary geopolitical and geophilosophical unities of ʻthe Eastʼ and ʻthe Westʼ in relation to Heideggerʼs political-philosophical thinking of ʻthe Westʼ. Accordingly, I will look first at the claims typical in the advocatory comparative literature and then at the problematic conceptual ground of the comparison, both in terms of its immanent logic and its relation to Heideggerʼs conception of the history of philosophy.