Marzena Adamiak

This article reflects on the current philosophical tendency to construct non-dualistic subjectivity models in response to the criticism of the traditional authoritarian human subject. Following thinkers such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, the literature has largely identified traditional metaphysics based on dualistic hierarchies as the major source of violence. Perceiving phenomenology as a method that focuses on the concepts of the lived experience and situatedness, I combine this approach with the feminist calls for dismantling the hierarchical relationship of subjectivity to the world. I draw on the concepts of Sonia Kruks, Linda Martin Alcoff, Sara Heinämaa, Judith Butler, Bonnie Mann and Johanna Oksala to inquire how dualism-overcoming phenomenology can be applied to feminist thought. I focus in particular on the approach that Oksala outlines in her book, Feminist Experiences: Foucauldian and Phenomenological Investigations, where she proposes a transcendental view on feminist experience. Intriguingly, she understands transcendental as situated – historically, culturally and politically. Consequently, my final question concerns the possibility of combining the two usually conflicted approaches: transcendental and historical regarding the fundamental phenomenological distinction between the empirical and the transcendental.

The concept of a "woman figure" by Emmanuel Lévinas, is an example, in which the notions of "masculinity" and "femininity" serve to determine the character of a certain proposition of a Subject. Lévinas introduced sexual characteristics into the neutral subject, yet he is incon-sistent in his treatment of the idea of a Woman and, moreover, he assigned subjectivity to a single gender: the masculine. Nonetheless, the criticism of Lévinas’s model of femininity from a feminist viewpoint is neither simple nor clear. Lévinas continually evades such criticism. He re-established the body and sensuality as key aspects of meeting with the Other. And also, he criticizes the Western ontological tradition as a theoretical source of violence against the Other, since – as he claims – on a high level of abstraction it appears that thematisation itself is a violence. At the same time, Lévinas proposes ontology of a "woman". In relation to this, one needs to ask the question: why does Lévinas, whilst stating the need to be freed from ontology, at the same time create an ontological woman? And additionally, what are the philo-sophical and ethical consequences of the phenomenology of femininity that are presented by Lévinas?

Inspired by Karen Barad’s views I search for an answer to the question: how can we include without excluding at the same time? This question brings into view the aporia of the discourse on exclusions, which manifests that struggle against violence invariably causes a violence of another kind. Barad takes the metaphysical point of view, according to which the world is a whole rather than composed of separate objects. From the perspective of category of “entanglement” she proposes to rethink some fundamental dichotomies: nature–culture, object–subject, body–mind, and, perhaps, to change our understanding of the mechanisms of exclusion.

Jednym z istotnych współcześnie obszarów oddziaływania fenomenologii jest myśl feministyczna. Związki między feminizmem a fenomenologią obecne są przede wszystkim w refleksji na temat cielesności, tożsamości, a także spotkania z Innym. Interpretacja fenomenologii przez pryzmat współczesnych koncepcji feministycznych umożliwia inspirującą recepcję oraz identyfikowanie problemów fenomenologii z odmiennej perspektywy. Natomiast ponieważ fenomenologia jest sposobem myślenia poprzez poszukiwanie i opis źródłowych doświadczeń, feminizm odnajduje w fenomenologii metodę pozwalającą docierać do istoty kobiecości. Warto więc zapytać, na ile użyteczny jest fenomenologiczny punkt wyjścia dla feministycznego opisu płci kulturowej?