Thus heterosexuality, whose characteristics appear and then disappear when the mind tries to grasp it, is visible and obvious in the categories of the heterosexual contract. One of them which I tried to deconstruct in a short essay [included in this volume] is the category of sex. And it is clear that with it we deal with a political category. A category which when put flatly makes us understand the terms of the social contract for women. I quote from “The Category of Sex” (with slightly revised wording):
The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief. And as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men. . . .
The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. As such it does not concern being but relationships (for women and men are the result of relationships), although the two aspects are always confused when they are discussed. The category of sex is the one that rules as “natural” the relation that is at the base of (heterosexual) society and through which half of the population, women, are “heterosexualized.” . . .
Its main category, the category of sex, works specifically, as “black” does, through an operation of reduction, by taking the part for the whole, a part (color, sex) through which the whole human being has to pass as through a screen. (Emphasis added)
When Adrienne Rich said “heterosexuality is compulsory,” it was a step forward in the comprehension of the kind of social contract we are dealing with. Nicole-Claude Mathieu, a French anthropologist, in a remarkable essay on consciousness, made it clear that it is not because we remain silent that we consent.7 And how can we consent to a social contract that reduces us, by obligation, to sexual beings meaningful only through their reproductive activities or, to quote the French writer Jean Paulhan, to beings in whom everything, even their minds, is sex?8
In conclusion I will say that only by running away from their class can women achieve the social contract (that is, a new one), even if they have to do it like the fugitive serfs, one by one. We are doing it. Lesbians are runaways, fugitive slaves; runaway wives are the same case, and they exist in all countries, because the political regime of heterosexuality represents all cultures. So that breaking off the heterosexual social contract is a necessity for those who do not consent to it. For if there is something real in the ideas of Rousseau, it is that we can form “voluntary associations” here and now, and here and now reformulate the social contract as a new one, although we are not princes or legislators. Is this mere utopia? Then I will stay with Socrates’s view and also Glaucon’s: If ultimately we are denied a new social order, which therefore can exist only in words, I will find it in myself.
HOMO SUM
1990
Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto.
(Man am I; nothing human is alien to me.)
—Terence, Heauton Timoroumenos, 25 (The Self-Tormentor)
All of us have an abstract idea of what being “human” means, even if what we mean when we say “human” is still potential and virtual, has not yet been actualized. For indeed, for all its pretension to being universal, what has been until now considered “human” in our Western philosophy concerns only a small fringe of people: white men, proprietors of the means of production, along with the philosophers who theorized their point of view as the only and exclusively possible one. This is the reason why when we consider abstractly, from a philosophical point of view, the potentiality and virtuality of humanness, we need to do it, to see clearly, from an oblique point of view. Thus, being a lesbian, standing at the outposts of the human (of humankind) represents historically and paradoxically the most human point of view. This idea that from an extreme point of view one can criticize and modify the thought and the structures of society at large is not a new one. We owe it to Robespierre and Saint-Just. Marx and Engels in their German Ideology extended the idea by affirming the necessity for the most radical groups to show their point of view and their interests as general and universal, a stand that touches both the practical and philosophical (political) points of view.
The situation of lesbians here and now in society, whether they know it or not, is located philosophically (politically) beyond the categories of sex. Practically they have run away from their class (the class of women), even if only partially and precariously.
It is from this cultural and practical site, both extremely vulnerable and crucial, that I will raise the question of dialectics.
There is, on one side, the whole world in its massive assumption, its massive affirmation of heterosexuality as a must-be, and on the other side, there is only the dim, fugitive, sometimes illuminating and striking vision of heterosexuality as a trap, as a forced political regime, that is, with the possibility of escaping it as a fact.
Our political thought has been for more than a century shaped by dialectics. Those of us who have discovered dialectical thought through its most modern form, the Marxian and Engelsian one, that is, the producer of the theory of class struggle, had, in order to understand its mechanism, to refer to Hegel, particularly if they needed to comprehend the reversal which Marx and Engels inflicted on Hegel’s dialectics. That is, briefly, a dynamization of the essentialist categories of Hegel, a transport from metaphysics to politics (to show that in the political and social field metaphysical terms had to be interpreted in terms of conflicts, and not anymore in terms of essential oppositions, and to show that the conflicts could be overcome and the categories of opposition reconciled).
A remark here: Marx and Engels, in summarizing all the social oppositions in terms of class struggle and class struggle only, reduced all the conflicts under two terms. This was an operation of reduction which did away with a series of conflicts that could be subsumed under the appellation of “capital’s anachronisms.” Racism, antisemitism and sexism have been hit by the Marxian reduction. The theory of conflict that they originated could be expressed by a paradigm that crossed all the Marxist “classes.” They could not be interpreted exclusively in economic terms: that is, in terms of the bare appropriation of surplus value in a sociological context where all are equal in rights, but where the capitalists because they possess the means of production can appropriate most of the workers’ production and work as far as it produces a value that is exchangeable in terms of money and the market. Every conflict whose forms could not be flattened to the two terms of the class struggle was supposed to be solved after the proletarian class assumed power.
We know that historically the theory of the class struggle did not win, and the world is still divided into capitalists (owners of the means of production) and workers (providers of work and labor strength and producers of surplus value). The consequence of the failure of the proletarian class to change the social relationships in all countries leads us to a dead end. In terms of dialectics the result is a freezing of the Marxian dynamics, the return to a metaphysical thought and the superimposition of essentialist terms onto the terms that were to be transformed through Marxian dialectics. In other words, we are still facing a capitalist versus a proletarian class, but this time, as though they had been struck by the wand of the Sleeping Beauty fairy, they are here to stay, they are struck by the coin of fate, immobilized, changed into essential terms, emptied of the dynamic relationship that could transform them.
For my purpose here there is no need to go into a deep reexamination of the Marxian approach, except to say in terms of the world equilibrium that what Marx called the anachronisms of capital, of the industrial world, cover up a mass of different people, half of humankind in the persons of women, the colonized, the third world and le quart monde,1 and the peasants in the industrial world. Lenin and Mao Zedong had to face the problem with their masses early in the century.
From a lesbian political philosophical point of view, when one reflects on women’s situation in history, one needs to interrogate dialectics further back than Hegelian dialectics, back to its originating locus; that is, one needs to go back to Aristotle and Plat
o to comprehend how the categories of opposition that have shaped us were born.
Of the first Greek philosophers, some were materialists and all were monists, which means that they did not see any division in Being, Being as being was one. According to Aristotle, we owe to the Pythagorean school the division in the process of thought and therefore in the thought of Being. Then, instead of thinking in terms of unity, philosophers introduced duality in thought, in the process of reasoning.
Consider the first table of opposites which history has handed down to us, as it has been recorded by Aristotle (Metaphysics, Book I, 5, 6):
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
One Many
Right Left
Male Female
Rest Motion
Straight Curved
Light Dark
Good Bad
Square Oblong
We may observe that
right left
male female
light dark
good bad
are terms of judgment and evaluation, ethical concepts, that are foreign to the series from which I extracted them. The first series is a technical, instrumental series corresponding to a division needed by the tool for which it was created (a kind of carpenter’s square called a gnomon). Since Pythagoras and the members of his school were mathematicians, one can comprehend their series. The second series is heterogeneous to the first one. So it so happens that as soon as the precious conceptual tools resting on division (variations, comparisons, differences) were created, they were immediately (or almost immediately by the successors of the school of Pythagoras) turned into a means of creating metaphysical and moral differentiation in Being.
There is then with Aristotle a displacement, a jump in the comprehension of these concepts, which he used for his historical approach to philosophy and what he called metaphysics. From being practical concepts they became abstract ones. From terms whose function had been to sort out, to classify, to make measurement possible (in itself a work of genius) they were translated into a metaphysical dimension, and pretty soon they got totally dissociated from their context. Furthermore, the evaluative and ethical terms (right, male, light, good) of the tabulation of opposites, as used within the metaphysical interpretation of Aristotle (and Plato), modified the meaning of technical terms like “One.” Everything that was “good” belonged to the series of the One (as Being). Everything that was “many” (different) belonged to the series of the “bad,” assimilated to nonbeing, to unrest, to everything that questions what is good. Thus we left the domain of deduction to enter the domain of interpretation.
In the dialectical field created by Plato and Aristotle we find a series of oppositions inspired by the first mathematical tabulation, but distorted. Thus under the series of the “One” (the absolute being nondivided, divinity itself) we have “male” (and “light”) that were from then on never dislodged from their dominant position. Under the other series appear the unrestful: the common people, the females, the “slaves of the poor,” the “dark” (barbarians who cannot distinguish between slaves and women), all reduced to the parameter of non-Being. For Being is being good, male, straight, one, in other words, godlike, while non-Being is being anything else (many), female: it means discord, unrest, dark, and bad. (See Aristotle’s Politics.)
Plato played with the terms One and the Same (as being God and the Good) and the Other (which is not the same as God which is non-Being, bad). Thus dialectics operates on a series of oppositions that basically have a metaphysical connotation: Being or non-Being. From our point of view, Hegel, in his dialectics of master versus slave, does not proceed very differently. Marx himself, although trying to historicize the oppositions into conflicts (social ones, practical ones), was a prisoner of the metaphysical series, of the dialectical series. Bourgeoisie is on the side of the One, of Being; Proletariat is on the side of the Other, the non-Being.
Thus the need, the necessity of questioning dialectics consists for us in the “dialecticizing” of dialectics, questioning it in relation to its terms or opposition as principles and also in its functioning. For if in the history of philosophy there was a jump from deduction to interpretation and contradiction, or, in other words, if from mathematical and instrumental categories we jumped to the normative and metaphysical categories, shouldn’t we call attention to it?
Shouldn’t we mention that the paradigm to which female, dark, bad, and unrest belong has also been augmented by slave, Other, different? Every philosopher of our modern age, including the linguists, the psychoanalysts, the anthropologists, will tell us that without these precise categories of opposition (of difference), one cannot reason or think or, even better, that outside of them meaning cannot shape itself, there is an impossibility of meaning as outside of society, in the asocial.
Certainly Marx intended to turn Hegel’s dialectics upside down. The step forward for Marx was to show that dialectical categories such as the One and the Other, Master and Slave, were not there to stay and had nothing metaphysical or essential about them, but had to be read and understood in historical terms. With this gesture he was reestablishing the link between philosophy and politics. Thus the categories which are today called so solemnly categories of Difference (belonging to what I call the thought of Difference) were for Marx conflictual categories—categories of social conflicts—which throughout the class struggle were supposed to destroy each other. And, as it had to happen in such a struggle, in destroying (abolishing) the One, the Other was also going to destroy (abolish) itself. For as soon as the proletariat constituted itself as an economic class, it had to destroy itself as well as the bourgeoisie. The process of destruction consists in a double movement: destroying itself as a class (otherwise the bourgeoisie keeps the power) and destroying itself as a philosophical category (the category of the Other), for staying mentally in the category of the Other (of the slave) would mean a nonresolution in terms of Marxian dialectics. The resolution then tends toward a philosophical reevaluation of the two conflictual terms, which as soon as it makes clear that there is an economic force where there was before a nonforce (a nothing), this force has to deny itself on the side of the Other (slave) and to take over on the side of the One (master), but only to abolish both orders, thus reconciling them to make them the same and only one.
What has happened in history throughout the revolutions which we have known is that the Other (a category of others) has substituted itself for the One, keeping under it huge groups of oppressed peoples that would in turn become the Other of the ex-others, become by then the One. This happened already (before Marx) with the French Revolution, which could not deal very well with the questions of slavery and did not deal at all with the questions of women (Woman, the eternal Other). To dialecticize dialectics seems to me to question what will really happen to the question of humanness once all categories of others will be transferred onto the side of the One, of Being, of the Subject. Will there be no transformation? For example, in terms of language will we be able to keep the terms “humanity,” “human,” “man,” “l’homme,” “homo,” even though all these terms in the abstract mean first the human being (without distinction of sex)? Shall we keep these terms after they have been appropriated for so long by the dominant group (men over women) and after they have been used to mean both abstractly and concretely humanity as male? Mankind: Malekind. In other words a philosophical and political abuse.
This necessary transformation (a dialectical operation) was not dealt with by Marx and Engels. They were dealing (as usual with revolutions) with a substitution. For a good reason: because they were writing about the issue before the event of a proletarian revolution and could not determine before the fact what would happen. For a bad reason: the bearers of the Universal, of the General, of the Human, of the One, was the bourgeois class (see The Communist Manifesto), the yeast of history, the only class able to go beyond the national bounds. The proletarian class, although the climbing one, had stayed for
them at the stage of limbo, a mass of ghosts that needed the direction of the Communist Party (its members themselves mostly bourgeois) to subsist and fight.
Thus perished our most perfect model of dialectics, of materialist dialectics, because the dice were loaded: the Other from the start was condemned to stay in the place where it was to be found at first in the relationship, that is, essentially in the Other’s place, since the agency that was to achieve the class transformation (that is, to break down the categories of the One and the Other, and to turn them into something else) belonged to the parameter of the One, that is, to the bourgeoisie itself.
When it was upon the bourgeoisie by the means of its revolutionary fraction that Marxian dialectics imposed the demand of fighting itself and of reducing itself to nothing, through the reduction of both classes, could we expect them to do it? For the representatives of the Communist Party mostly did belong, did come from, the bourgeois class through its intellectuals.
This issue, even more crucial as far as women and men are concerned, is still in its infancy, barely questioned. It is scarcely possible to position women in relation to men. Who is actually reasonable enough to conceive that it is necessary, or that it will be necessary to destroy these categories as categories and to end the domination of the “One” over the Other? Which is not to say to substitute women for men (the Other for the One).
The Straight Mind Page 6