Benjamin Zonnekeyn

In 1988, Carole Pateman published The Sexual Contract. In this book, she aimed to uncover the repressed dimension of canonical theories of social contract by highlighting their obscured sexual dimension. Not only do contract theoreticians seek to authorise the government of the state over its citizens, but they also justify the “government of women by men within that state”. In this essay, I review several challenging aspects of Pateman’s work. In the first part, I describe the ontological assumptions regarding the notion of ‘contract’ that runs through The Sexual Contract. I argue that despite her explicit dismissal of contractual ways of thinking as intrinsically oppressive, Pateman implicitly reverted to them. In the second part of my essay, I contend that her unwitting adherence to a contractual ‘metanarrative’ causes Pateman to fail in properly addressing patriarchal power structures. By appealing to Michel Foucault’s work, I maintain that Pateman drew on an outdated and politically impotent ‘juridical model of power’. Although this model aptly captures repressive power mechanisms, it fails in articulating the localised ways in which techniques of power actually function.

In this article, we revisit Immanuel Kant’s frequently used description of John Locke’s philosophical project as a “physiology” of human reason and understanding. We unpack this description in a twofold manner. Firstly, we stress the foundational role it might have had for Kant’s attempt to analyse the faculty of the understanding. In line with Michael Wolff ’s proposal in his seminal 1995 book, Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel, we propose to interpret the notion of physiology as part and parcel of the set of organic metaphors used by Kant to characterise his philosophical system. In particular, we argue that the derivation of the pure concepts of the understanding (Kant’s ‘categories’) from the functions of the understanding, the latter of which are identified by Kant as the epigenetic ‘germs and predispositions’ of the understanding, can be viewed precisely as a (metaphorically) physiological undertaking. Secondly, we argue that Kant’s depiction of Locke as a physiologist might also be appreciative in another, more literal sense. Whereas Kant would warn against Locke’s project insofar as it seems to be geared towards an overly empiricist account of human cognition, this is only one aspect of Kant’s discussion of Locke’s project. For Kant, Locke’s physiology is part of a valid epistemological and philosophical project: it can serve as a stepping stone for investigating the empirical occasioning causes for acquiring categories or developing cognition generally. More precisely, we argue that the notion of physiology in the metaphorical sense might have helped Kant to systematise his views on how the categories originate in the faculty of the understanding itself, as well as his views on how those categories enable cognition to arise (part (1)), while in the literal sense physiology corresponded to Kant’s anthropological aspiration to examine how (categorial) cognition commences, develops, and is cultivated (part (2)).