Buy

BODY, SUBJECT AND WOMAN CONDITION, Buenos Aires, Biblos, 1999. This is not exactly a feminist book. But it does mention over and over again women and their confrontations, limitations, misfortunes, as well as the fortunate findings of present day feminists. It is not a book on sex, but it does mention gender difference repeatedly. It is a book on philosophy, and it ponders on the cultural meaning of food, dress, eroticism, pornography, illness, nudes, the dead, the body in large cities, bio-politics and bio-power. All this does not imply difficult reading. It is a refreshingly complex work. Real life cannot accept lack of illusion, or live without hope. At a time when relations between man and objects have become hard, when an objective and abstract order is split from the actual subject, the quest for illusion and hope can only be embodied in a critical approach, in the capacity of saying "no".? The body, suffering, being a man or a woman, death, have all become negative issues, abstractions: the field for an hegemonic self has been cleared up. Death and the body are not "human", they are bothersome clefts of the self, which point out to the pain caused by the loss of harmony between the individual and the cosmos, oneself and others. The purpose of this book is to unveil the back side of culture: the actual desolate, individual inner life; the sorrowful body, woman’s ignored gender condition, the metamorphosis of subjectivity.? All this is compounded by the realities of large cities. The urban crisis, the anonymity of the human condition in present day cities seem to reflect the violence which marked the beginning of our century, our global and globalising civilisation, a subtly controlled culture. It all contributes to turn the actual human being into rags and tatters. Something was torn in that man’s life, and changed him into Dostoyevski’s "underground man". We termed it "crisis"; a word that, because it says nothing, at least it protects the heart. Oddly enough, the road of modernity implies a process of destruction of the subject. Kafka described it with a wonderful literary obsession: on the one hand, the progress of rationality ruling large cities; on the other, the feeling of oppression, anguish and irrational destruction experienced by the actual individual. Gregor, in Metamorphosis, wants to be somebody else, he wants to turn into an animal --if such a thing were possible-- but he dies in the process. WHY AM I A FEMINIST? IN CASE SOMEONE SHOULD ASK... Let us remember two notions of Kant’s philosophy. First, "economy of reason" or its self-conservation in its universality and abstraction separated from the human individual. Second, "pain" as an attribute of real human existence and opposed to the "progress" of that supposedly autonomous rationality. Kant defends this pain as the lesser evil and sacrifices the individual. Modern idealism becomes the servant of an abstract will and non-rationality defines the bourgeois subject. In spite of which, and quoting the clever words of Eduardo Subirats, whoever attacks that patriarchal reason in an administered and computerised society, is deemed a terrorist. Feminism questions the autonomous self as a very peculiar abstraction: the self of an abstract male, bodiless; someone whose growth, learning, etc. are cancelled. "This is an odd world," says Seyla Benhabib, "a world where children become men before being children; a world in which neither mother, sister, nor wife have any existence whatsoever..." Therefore, the ethical and political agent seems to be a man, but he has not grown. He is forced into such a lack of vital commitments that he seems to have no personal history. As to woman, and also from the point of view of ethics, she does not exist insofar as, through some kind of ontological death, she is what the male is not. And a male is precisely all what is expected from a moral actor abstracted from real situations in life and the world where his actions place him. If this figure had any sense, that of an "abstract male", the end result would not be objective assessments and preferences; rather it would mean the loss of both. A partial and biased approach, though imperceptible because it is ingrained in modern ideology, albeit thoroughly historical, prevents attaining what is posited as ideal. Denunciations such as that stated by this kind of feminism unveil the incapacity of a universal and legalistic reason to cope with non determined and multiple contexts and vital situations.