Inventing Enlightenment's Gender : The representation of modernity in dispute

In the philosophical and cultural controversy between modernity and postmodernism one often gets the feeling that 'modernity' is being reduced to an implausible simplicity. This book is an attempt to counter that reductionism and the resulting opposition. It does so with feminist motives. Feminist philosophy has become divided against itself along lines which may be misbegotten from the view of its proper concerns. Instead of having feminism drawn into either of the 'grand narratives', I will employ its proper well-tried strategy of re-interpreting and replenishing the canon of texts involved. The Enlightenment has been made to pose as providing the foundations of modern thought and hence is subject of my study of what exactly is being 'invented' under this title.

In this book, feminist scholarship on Enlightenment thought is reviewed, and placed within the context of the debates on modernity versus postmodernity. I propose some novel conceptual perspectives from which to understand Enlightenment's wrestling with the problem of gender. The result is a history of discourses, rather than a history of ideas. The entanglement of 'modern women' in modern politics, society, and aesthetics is described, and various configurations of the modern representation of gender, and the representation of gender in modernity, result. In the first chapter several theoretical issues that arise in interpreting the Enlightenment from a feminist perspective are addressed. Most of these relate to two questions: first, how to make relevant for feminist concerns the notion that we narrate, not find, history, and second, how to grasp the vital motives of critique pertaining to the project of Enlightenment. The chapter concludes with reflections on a notion of feminist politics which does not simply duplicate the identity politics ensuing from modernity's powerful domain of the 'social'. The subsequent chapters are essays on respectively natural rights theory and in particular Thomas Hobbes; Enlightenment's salons and art idioms; eighteenth century civic humanism; David Hume as the founding father of the Scottish Enlightenment; and finally Immanuel Kant.

The novel conceptual perspectives proposed allow for arguing that in many instances, so-called 'postmodern' themes show up in the texts of the Enlightenment. I will focus on concepts which from postmodern views are not usually associated with the Enlightenment, like irony, contingency, and style, as well as representation in constructionist, not just depictional sense and from nominalist, not just realist concerns. The essays address diverse ranges of thought and various lines of argument, but eventually are principally concerned with reflecting on issues relevant to a feminist political philosophy. 'The Enlightenment' turns out to offer astute reflections on such issues, and sometimes where they are probably least expected, as with Hobbes, republicanism, and Kant. Enlightenment thinkers were hardly oblivious to the notion that the personal is political. This study, then, turns against reductionist depictions of 'the' Enlightenment as a discourse of foundationalist epistemology, dualist codes, abstract universalism and rationalism, and narrowly conceived of identity politics - representations which appear merely to serve heroic counter-assertions. This study invites reactivating the motives of criticism pertaining to enlightenment thought, while granting the rightness of several critical motives guiding postmodern philosophy. It is a philosophical inquiry into a 'contingently determined' problematic of modern gender, in which irony rather than dualism characterizes knowledges about gender, and in the face of which a feminist conception of politics is to counteract the defining powers of 'the social' with respect to identity and knowledge.

Thesis Judith A. Vega - Inventing Enlightenment's Gender - PDF file (1.7 MB)

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