From Sex Objects to Sexual Subjects

This well-presented volume offers a brief and incisive feminist meditation on identity, difference, and Enlightenment universalism, critiquing still-current theories of subjectivity based in Rousseau and Kant and seeking a more egalitarian code of democratic justice. It combines good writing with a poised synthetic overview of its agenda.

Chapter One, "The Trope of Dissimulation," contrasts Rousseau's rigid gendering of nature and culture with "the more fluid and fragmentary models of social and sexual identity proposed by Diderot," Moscovici points out how Diderot was favored, arguing that the eventual victory of Rousseau model's was not evident during the Enlightenment. Moscovici elegantly maps these alternatives onto modern debates, making good use of Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault among others and suggesting that Rousseau genders both nature and culture as female--only the polis is male.

Chapter Two, "Sexual Subjects," improved my opinion of Irigaray, even the intersubjective labial 'copula' Irigaray which Moscovici chooses to oppose to what she sees as routinely upright or "ek-static" phallocentric analogies in discourse. Moscovici links this feminine dialogic model with parallels in Buber's I and Thou and Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination going on to argue that Iriagary's rejection of enlightenment universalism in favor of a model based in alterity does not in fact, as PC theorists have predictably claimed, automatically entail those twin evils of heterosexism and denial of racial difference. Moscovici has an ear for supporting quotation. I like Mae Gwendolyn Henderson's insight that any testimonial discourse, for instance that of a black woman author, will simultaneously be a competitive discourse, depending on whether its receiver is black or white, male or female; or Levinas who notes "If the other could be ... known, it would not be the other."

Chapter Three, "Turning Toward--the Universal," critiques Kant's and Rousseau's idea of the "general good" and its use by Habermas. Moscovici notes that Rousseau's social contract is presented as the result of a cost-benefit exchange, whereas Kant refuses to ground his social contract in commerce or utility; for Kant might say it is a categorical imperative. Kant, unlike Rousseau, also considers rational beings as infallible. Habermas argues analogously that a simple reliance on dialog in what he calls the lifeworld, can transcend subjective judgment; Moscovici replies that even after repudiating the enlightenment's hegemonic "constraintof neutrality," with its deletion of all minority voices as marginal, simple agglomeration of everybody's own individual epistemologies will result in a universal perspective. The author misreads Kant as describing a feminine private sphere, when her text shows that he refers to Prussian bureaucracy--"Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office"--but she is right that Kant prefers the non-dependent public sphere which excludes women and blacks, whose rationality he believed was genetically and thus irrevocably compromised; he nowhere forbids treating non-rational beings solely as means to higher ends, taking it seems the colonialist position that the world should be "free" - - he opposed slavery- - but directed by white men in a world federation. The postcolonialist critic Trinh Minh-ha calls these margins invalidated by the enlightenment project "our sites of survival, [...] our fighting grounds and their site for pilgrimage"; they are the product of what Kristeva elegantly defines as a process of abjection which was necessarily coterminous with the production of universalist agreement. Habermas for instance nods to how enlightenment counterpublics did in fact contest the bourgeois public's universalism, remarking that though political and literary public spheres were treated as identical, women were mute in one and prominent in the other; yet he simultaneously argues that consensus requires the bracketing of differences, and as Judith Butler observes, what constitutes agreement for one party may mean coercion for another. Habermas tends to subordinate race and gender to Marxist class antagonism.

Chapter Four, "The Field of Cultural Production," interestingly turns this meditation on Kantian absolutism toward art and Bourdieu. Moscovici walks her usual tightrope, taking issue with three resilient modernist claims: the linking of the erotic and the aesthetic, the "puzzling" association between the erotic and the subversive, and the implicit censoring of ideological art as false art. Her target is the last, which is a pity, though she critiques well Kant's construction of aesthetic autonomy, arguing that the myth of autonomous genius aptly suited the new opacity of relations between artists, patrons and public in an emergent capitalist free market. Moscovici adds that essentializing écriture feminine similarly isolates production from social realities, without gaining a larger market segment.

Chapter Five, "Justice, Equality and Proportional Group Representation," reviews three models for the polis. Rousseau's republican model, whether individualist or fraternal, implies that a nation's citizens are similar enough to attain systematic consensus, when its citizens are isolated from groups and all personal interests are bracketed. Wollstonecraft's sexual parity model seeks simple parity between two hermetic gender groups, it calls for treating women "just like men" and thereby encloses its propositions "within self-defeating masculinist codes," while Olympe de Gouges's model states that men and women are not equal or the same, and the law must recognize that, as we are reminded by Affirmative Action reminds us. Both women are answering 1789's Rousseauist Declaration of the Rights of Man. Ultimately, Moscovici chooses Condorcet's model of group-based proportional representation, arguing for a modern unit of citizenship thus replaces the abstract individual with groups, where "the shared and diverging interests within each group would discourage the formulation of dogmatic and unitary ideologies and would enable each group to form affiliations with other groups." She sees this as producing dialogue, not division or identity politics. I have three reservations. First, are groups not open to exploitation (Farrakhan)? Second, would the subgrouping of different interests not be an infinite process? Third, would individuals not have a say, or vote, in any number of groups, thus having disproportionate influence? Choosing a single group would hardly allow, say, a Vietnamese-American lesbian to be truly heard. Condorcet has a small answer, since his groups are geographical; like Jefferson, he wanted local assemblies. All politics is local, runs the adage, and I know of no better answer to universalist abstraction.