Hegel's Dialectic and the Recognition of Feminine Difference

Abstract

Many recent feminist interpreters of Hegel have criticized his conception of dialectic as implicitly masculinist. Allegedly, Hegel figures dialectic as a process whereby a unitary, implicitly masculine, term incorporates a feminine other that has been troubling it, through an appropriative move which restores self-assurance and self-identity to the masculine term.1 In this essay, I wish to question this critique, exploring an alternative reading of Hegel's dialectic on which it incorporates both initially opposed terms within third, more encompassing, structures. To this, it might be objected that Hegel's supposedly encompassing third terms are really merely amplified versions of his first-symbolically masculine-terms. In response, I shall draw on Gillian Rose's reading of Hegel's third terms as "broken middles" that consist only in the ongoing movement of splitting and diremption between the terms they encompass.2 This reading positions Hegel's third terms as genuinely irreducible to either of their torn halves, and so as symbolically sexually dual rather than masculine. This opens up intriguing possibilities for convergences between Hegelian dialectical philosophy and a feminism of sexual difference, as my conclusion will briefly sketch. Feminist Criticisms of Hegel Let me begin by reviewing recent feminist interpretations of Hegel. Perhaps the central criticism to emerge from these interpretations is that Hegel's dialectical ontology is "masculinist": that is, it relies on a systematic and hierarchical contrast between masculine and feminine as symbols. As is well known, Hegel's entire philosophy is structured by dialectical progressions that obey a general pattern (one more complex than the traditional "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" caricature conveys). In each case, Hegel presents us with an initial reality of some kind-perhaps a concept, a type of entity, or a more fundamental ontological structure like the simple "being" with which his Logic begins. In the next phase, Hegel identifies a point at which this reality passes beyond its initial character. He calls this the moment of "dialectic" in the strict sense, the point at which the first reality contradicts or negates itself. For example, he argues that being proves entirely contentless and so identical with "nothingness." The third phase of any dialectical process involves the reconciliation of the two realities with which we are now confronted-the first element and that which has arisen as its negation or antithesis. Being antithetical, these two elements cannot simply subsist alongside one another. They must be reconciled in a third, "speculative," moment.3 For example, being and nothingness are reconciled in "becoming," which just is the complex fact that being continually negates itself to become nothingness while nothingness, equally, remains indistinguishable from being and so, reciprocally, passes back into it. The precise mechanism by which Hegel proposes to reconcile the first and second terms of dialectical oppositions, though, is disputed. How far one finds Hegel's dialectic masculinist depends, above all, on how one understands his mechanism of reconciliation. Many feminist readers of Hegel have suggested that a hierarchical contrast between the symbolically masculine and feminine subtends his overall understanding of dialectical processes. According to these readers, the first term in any dialectical process is tacitly figured as masculine insofar as it exists in an initial state of serene unity and sameness with itself (unity and sameness having historically been equated with the masculine position, as Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray-among others-have pointed out).4 The second term, contrary to the first, is implicitly feminine inasmuch as it occupies the position of other, of what is different and derivative. The third moment, in which reconciliation occurs, now presents itself as that in which the masculine element regains its unity by incorporating the feminine other that had been troubling it. …