Kvinna-i-tillblivelse. Könsskillnaden på nytt

Abstract

In this article, a shortened version of the first chapter in her book Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Rosi Braidotti discusses the concept of sexual difference by comparing feminist theory to post-structuralist - especially Luce Irigaray's radical feminist bodily materialism to Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of 'becoming'. These theories share a number of crucial assumptions, one is a stated desire to move beyond Lacanianism. But whereas Irigaray wants to replace the phallic signifier with a female symbolic, expressed in an imaginary no longer mediated by Phallus, Deleuze's nomadic approach instead suggests a rethinking of subjectivity without any symbolic system whatsoever. The main dividing line between them is, according to Braidotti, a different emphasis on sexual difference understood as the dissymetrical relationship between the sexes. Here she depicts a tension that points to the difficulties involved in freeing the subject Woman from the subjugated position of Other. From a feminist perspective the redefinition of female subjectivity is how to make the feminine express 'different difference', released from the hegemonic framework of oppositional, binary thinking within which Western philosophy has confined it. The focus is as much on the deconstruction of the phallogocentric representations of the feminine, as on the experience and the potential becoming of real-life women, in their diverse ways of inhabititing the subject position of Woman. Deleuze's ultimate aim to move towards the final overcoming of sexual difference, cannot solve the main problem for feminists, Braidotti argues: one cannot deconstruct a subjectivity one has never been fully granted control over. Still in these two diverse ways of theorising difference - Irigaray's multiple, "no-one" feminine sexuality and Deleuxe's theory of the folded and unfolding intensive subject of becoming - Braidotti discerns a serious challenge to both the liberal vision of the autonomous subject and to the psychoanalytic dialectics of lack, loss and signification. She observes a shared view on the universalistic posture of separating the symbolic from the material as the mark of the partriarchal, cash-nexus of power, and in this unity traces the emergence of a new radical materialist type of politics.