Levinas, feminism and the feminine

Abstract

Why is it that Levinas's work has attracted so much - and such varied - feminist attention? One answer turns on a historical coincidence. Philosophical interest in Levinas's work, especially in the anglophone world, blossomed spectacularly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the years which also saw the first full flowering of 'feminist philosophy', a strange and sometimes exotic plant that has still to establish itself in the academy. Given the intellectual climate (which has now chilled considerably), it would have been surprising if there had been no feminist interest in Levinas. However, there is also an explanation particular to Levinas’s work itself, and one which explains why it was already drawing feminist fire as early as 1949, in Simone de Beauvoir’s magnificent and omnivorous study The Second Sex . In a move which he may may not have lived to regret, Levinas chose to make a discussion of what he called ‘the feminine’ central, or at least integral, to much of his work from the 1940s up to and including Totality and Infinity in 1961. Although there has been feminist interest in other aspects of Levinas’s work, I will restrict myself here to a discussion of the role and the nature of ‘the feminine’ as he understands it and the main features of the feminist controversies that this has provoked. For ‘the feminine’ is a term that has attracted vastly different – indeed diametrically opposed – responses from feminists, ranging from the wholly affirmative to the absolutely dismissive. Reading the feminist responses to Levinas within the terms of a debate over the meaning of the feminine, I will conclude with a suggestion for an alternative contemporary feminist reading.

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