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Is Hegel Useful in a Feminist Challenge to Masculinism?

Radin nevertheless implicitly makes one powerful critique of traditional Hegelian theory. This critique, when combined with Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, can form a devastating feminist-Hegelian critique of patriarchy.

Hegel was empirically writing from the masculine position. At first blush, he seems the most psychoanalytically masculine of philosophers—emphasizing the symbolic order of exchange. Perhaps reflecting traditional European-Christian misogynist theology, which identifies the body and sexuality with the Feminine and the mind and personality with the Masculine,^[159] Hegel never attempted to account for sexuality per se. Specifically, he never reflected upon whether one's sexuality is so intrinsic to one's personality as to be inalienable even at the level of abstract right. One possible Hegelian argument might be that the very concept of "abstract right" deals with "abstract personality," stripped of all contingent, concrete characteristics, including sexuality. This would suggest that Hegel has postponed this issue to a later stage in the dialectic.

Indeed, Hegel did discuss sexual difference briefly in The Philosophy of Right and The Phenomenology of Spirit . Despite Hegel's claims to logic and his disdain for unsupported presuppositions, as is so often the case when men talk about women, logic flies out the window. Hegel's discussion of marriage consists largely of conclusory statements reflective of nineteenth-

[158] See Wood, supra note 97, at xxiv–xxvi (explaining Hegel's vision of the state as "ultimate end"); Westphal, supra note 90, at 44–45.

[159] See generally Jeanne L. Schroeder, The Taming of the Shrew: The Liberal Attempt to Neutralize Radical Feminism , 5 Yale J.L. & Feminism 123 (1992); and Jeanne L. Schroeder, Feminism Historicized: Medieval Misogynist Stereotypes in Contemporary Feminist Jurisprudence , 75 Iowa L. Rev. 1135, 1160–97 (1990).

century misogyny.^[160] He echoes nineteenth-century sexual stereotypes and then claims that these sexual differences are rational. He does not logically prove the existence of sexual difference as a theoretical necessity. He merely declares that because these differences could exist, they do and must exist. Moreover, he assumes, without proof, that these "rational" sexual positions are inevitably assigned to the two biological sexes.^[161]

A combination of Radin's legal theory and Lacan's psychoanalytic theory opens up the issue of whether the positions of sexuality are already logically necessitated, even at the levels of abstract personality and abstract right. Lacan characterizes the Hegelian theory of subjectivity as inter-subjective recognition (i.e., the desire of man is the desire of the Other) as hysterical. But hysteria is not a defect, it is the paradigmatic mode of desire.^[162] The hysteric's question is always one of sexual identity, "Am I a man or a woman?"^[163] This is the great question which Hegel, the most

[160] Women may well be educated, but they are not made for the higher sciences, for philosophy and certain artistic productions which require a universal element. Women may have insights . . . , taste, and delicacy, but they do not possess the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the difference between animal and plant; . . . When women are in charge of government, the state is in danger.

Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, supra note 76, at 207. Unfortunately, Hegel's viciously misogynist account of women's knowledge is frequently echoed today by many self-identified feminists who speak of women's concrete knowledge and women's ways of knowing generally.

[161] Specifically, Hegel wrote:

The natural determinacy of the two sexes acquires an intellectual and ethical significance by virtue of its rationality. . . .

The one [sex] is therefore spirituality which divides itself up into personal self-sufficiency with being for itself and the knowledge and violation of free universality , i.e. into the self-consciousness of conceptual thought and the violation of the objective and ultimate end. And the other is spirituality which maintains itself in unity as knowledge and volition of the substantial in the form of concrete individuality  . . . and feeling . . . . In its external relations, the former is powerful and active, the latter is passive and subjective.

Id . at 206.

A complete analysis of Hegel's inadequate treatment of sexuality is beyond the scope of this book. I would suggest, however, that certain aspects of Hegel's seemingly misogynist analysis may look forward to a more sophisticated Lacanian analysis. For example, Hegel's notorious assertion that women have only an unconscious intuitive understanding of ethics, as opposed to the masculine conscious understanding, G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit 274 (A.V. Miller trans., 1975), may look forward to the Lacanian concept of the feminine as the position of being and the masculine as the position of having and speaking, as well as to the Freudian analysis of the feminine and masculine superego.

[162] Zizek,^[*] The Indivisible Remainder, supra note 7, at 167.

[163] Lacan, Seminar III, supra note 144, at 171. See also Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero 59 (1983).

hysterical (and, therefore, the most feminine) of all philosophers, refuses to confront directly. But because he represses it, this question pervades his entire philosophy.

Consequently, when Lacan psychoanalyzes the Hegelian dialectic and brings out what has been repressed, he shows that Hegelian recognition requires a sexuated position, with the Masculine taking on the subjective and the Feminine taking on the objective role. Sexuality would, therefore, seem to fall within that category of objects of personality minimally required for recognizability as a subject and, therefore, inalienable as a matter of abstract right. Sexuality, in this view, is not contingent, but is constitutive of subjectivity. The Lacanian insight supports the feminist insistence that the Hegelian system cannot fulfill its claim to being a theory of concrete human freedom in society unless it expands to include both a theory of sexuality, generally, and a theory of property that deals with the objectification of the female body, specifically. In light of Lacan's theory, Hegelians must address whether sexuality is essential to personality at the level of abstract right.