The Persistence of the Feminine: Negative Dialectics and Feminist Thought

by Ariane McCullough

The women’s liberation movement (WLM) can only produce its positive goal of autonomy if the woman question is not reduced to any principle or system of thought. This paper advances a feminist philosophy as a critique of civilization, understood as capitalist-patriarchy. The introductory section, entitled “Capitalist-Patriarchy and its Discontents”, elaborates on the theory of capitalist-patriarchy (developed by Maria Mies) and outlines modern philosophy, from the Enlightenment to Marxism to postmodernism, as its theoretical reflection. This critique of modernity follows from the contributions of Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, with his conception of 'negative dialectics' as dialectics without identity or system. “’Subjection’ and ‘Subjectivization’” responds with an alternative theory of the subject that escapes the impasse of the object-relation which characterizes patriarchy. The feminist subject is established without object-relation, but as a radically solitary embodiment of the real, borrowing from the contemporary theoretical work of Katerina Kolozova, Alain Badiou, and Francois Laruelle,  as well as from the psychoanalytic discourse of Jacques Lacan. “Feminist Theory and Practice” expands on the theory of the subject to explain the implications of the patriarchal object-relation in the concept of labor and inthe separation of revolutionary theory and practice. The section furthermore discusses feminism as the invocation of “the feminine” as a virtual reality in which the subject appears without object, but as the instance of the real. The final section "The Body in Pain, Care of the Self" considers blackness as social death in relation to the feminist critique of capitalist-patriarchy. Black women occupy an especially vulnerable space incapitalist-patriarchy which is often taken for granted in the WLM. "The Body in Pain" advances a thesis that the critique of capitalist-patriarchy must be enacted with concern to the designation of black bodies as sentient but dead. This paper proposes to struggle with the persistence of the real against identity-thinking.