Woman as Witness, Beginner, Philosopher Jana V. Schmidt
In “Regarding the Cave,” the Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero offers a reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave that expands on an interpretation of that same narrative by Hannah Arendt. Cavarero is perhaps the first to notice how Arendt’s remarks in “Tradition and the Modern Age,” “What Is Authority?,” and The Human Condition connect, how together they form a spirited critique of Western philosophy, and how indispensable they are for a feminist reckoning with what might be called masculinist ontology. This last project is further developed by Cavarero in her 1995 monograph In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, which presents Arendtian natality alongside the philosophy of sexual difference to bend ancient myths toward their slighted female heroines. In her discussion, the question of whether Hannah Arendt was a feminist is immaterial to Cavarero, and yet in reading Cavarero and Arendt together I am left with the sense that any feminism worth arguing for would be centrally concerned with the possibility of women-as-philosophers, and with their dialogue. In this spirit, I want to follow feminist readers of Arendt in engaging her in a dialogue with two female philosophers—Cavarero and the French philosopher Catherine Malabou—as all three wrestle with the legacy of the philosophical universal. No doubt woman will never become impenetrable, inviolable. That’s why it is necessary to imagine the possibility of woman starting from the structural impossibility she experiences of not being violated, in herself and outside, everywhere. An impossibility that echoes the impossibility of her welcome in philosophy. (Malabou 2011, 140) In her book Changing Difference, Catherine Malabou underscores that the impossibility of a woman philosopher—“there is no woman philosopher”—is foundational to the possibility of philosophy, because only the long exclusion of women has rendered the thinking of its concepts “pure.” If women were to challenge philosophy as they have challenged art and literature, Malabou claims, they would “change the given rules” rather than continuing to receive the same old questions (102). Because the feminine is split between its actual, ontological, and metaphorical repression by philosophy, which renders it a modality of being that is always yet to arrive, and its simultaneous boundedness to an essential position, which forever ties it back to established dichotomies, Malabou turns to a reconsideration of the concept of essence as “plastic.”
Woman as Witness, Beginner, Philosopher
Jana V. Schmidt
175
