Plato and Sex E-Book

Stella Sandford

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Feminist ReVision
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 446

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

What does the study of Plato’s dialogues tell us about the modern meaning of ‘sex’? How can recent developments in the philosophy of sex and gender help us read these ancient texts anew?

Plato and Sex addresses these questions for the first time. Each chapter demonstrates how the modern reception of Plato’s works Ð in both mainstream and feminist philosophy and psychoanalytical theory Ð has presupposed a ‘natural-biological’ conception of what sex might mean. Through a critical comparison between our current understanding of sex and Plato’s notion of genos, Plato and Sex puts this presupposition into question. With its groundbreaking interpretations of the Republic, the Symposium and the Timaeus, this book opens up a new approach to sex as a philosophical concept.

Including critical readings of the theories of sex and sexuation in Freud and Lacan, and relating such theories to Plato’s writings, Plato and Sex both questions our assumptions about sex and explains how those assumptions have coloured our understanding of Plato. What results is not only an original reading of some of the most prominent aspects of Plato’s philosophy, but a new attempt to think through the meaning of sex today.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Sex and Genos (Republic)

The relevance of sex

The relevance of genos

Becoming women, becoming men

Para doxan

2 The Origin of Sex: Aristophanes, Freud and Lacan (Symposium)

Human nature, then and now

Aristophanes: One, two, three, four . . . 

Freud: two to infinity

Lacan: m/f

X, Y, Z, etc.

3 ‘Ers’ and ‘Sexuality’, Plato and Freud (Symposium)

What is ers?

What is the sexual drive?

The (non)-sexual: sublimation

The ambiguity of ers

4 ‘I, a Man, am Pregnant and Give Birth’ (Symposium)

The royal road

The odd image

Plato dreams in female

The carnival

The structure of the fantasy

5 Of Gods and Men: The Natural Beginning of Sex (Timaeus)

First sex, second sex

Degenerative evolution and sexual reproduction

And yet

Coda: The Idea of ‘Sex’

An object only in the idea

Bibliography

Index

For Ilya and Felix, because some of us do prefer our human children

Copyright © Stella Sandford 2010

The right of Stella Sandford to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Acknowledgements

In the long gestation of this book I have benefited from the comments, criticisms and suggestions of colleagues (especially Éric Alliez, Christian Kerslake, Stewart Martin and Peter Osborne) at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy staff seminar at Middlesex University, and of participants at the research seminars and philosophy societies at various universities, notably the Center for Psychoanalysis and Philosophical Anthropology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, and the Philosophy Departments at Middlesex University, the universities of Dundee, Reading, Sussex, Lancaster, Hertfordshire and South Stockholm University College. For productive conversations (in person and in print), inspiring ideas and critical debates I would like to thank, in particular, Kathleen Lennon, Peter Osborne and Alison Stone, as well as the two anonymous readers of the manuscript.

An earlier and shorter version of Chapter 1, ‘Thinking Sex Politically: Rethinking “Sex” in Plato’s Republic’, was published in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 104, No. 4, Fall 2005 (special edition on Thinking Politically, edited by Alberto Moreiras). Material from Chapter 2 was published, with a different emphasis, as ‘The Origins and Ends of “Sex” ’, in Ray Brassier and Christian Kerslake, eds., Origins and Ends of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis, University of Leuven Press, Leuven, 2007. Chapter 3 was developed out of ‘Sexually Ambiguous: Ers and Sexuality in Plato and Freud’, Angelaki Special Issue, ‘Encounters with Ancient Thought’, ed. John Sellars, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2006, and Chapter 4 from ‘ “All Human Beings are Pregnant” ’: The Bisexual Imaginary in Plato’s Symposium’, Radical Philosophy 150, July/August 2008. The chapters of the present book will, I hope, be read as the final and overriding versions of these earlier attempts.

The advantage of taking a long time to complete a book (this one twice very happily interrupted by the birth of a child) is the opportunity afforded for thought to develop, against the precipitate demands of intellectual industrial production. Even so, I am grateful to a series of editors at the Polity Press, but especially the last, Emma Hutchinson, for their patience and continued support over several years.

Finally, for everything, I thank Peter.

Stella Sandford

London, May 2010

Introduction

Plato and sex? What is the nature of this relation? As this book aims to show, it is neither obvious nor simple, despite the brevity and apparently descriptive form of my title. This is not a book about Plato’s views on sex or sex ‘in’ Plato. The ‘and’ in the title – Plato and Sex – is as much disjunctive as conjunctive. Rather, the book stages what I hope is a productive confrontation between aspects of Plato’s philosophy and issues in the contemporary philosophy of sex and gender, via discussions of the modern reception of the relevant aspects of Plato’s dialogues in philosophy (especially feminist philosophy) and feminist and psychoanalytical theory, and the conceptual presuppositions in that reception. The result, I hope, is new interpretations of particular passages in the dialogues and, simultaneously, a contribution to the contemporary philosophical debate on sex.

Here ‘sex’ means sex difference – the difference between the sexes (male and female) – in distinction from ‘gender’ (a category describing historical, cultural and institutional demands or norms), from ‘sexual difference’ (a specifically psychoanalytical concept, referring to subject positions within the symbolic order), from ‘sexuality’ (sexual desire and/or its orientation) and from sexual intercourse. It is important to make these conceptual distinctions, even if, ultimately, we do not hold that the different concepts name discrete things or phenomena, and even if it is obvious that they form a conceptual constellation in which they depend on each other. For it is important to be able to say what is specific to the concept of sex even if, ultimately, we are not able to identify any decisive empirical referent for it. Of course making these conceptual distinctions has its consequences. In particular, distinguishing sex from gender predisposes us to think of sex as a biological phenomenon, a natural given, in opposition to the cultural construction of gender norms. The analytical priority of the category of gender in Anglophone feminist theory from the late 1960s left sex, understood in that way, temporarily untheorized, and the critique of the sex/gender distinction, which put sex back in the spotlight, was perhaps the most important development in late twentieth-century feminist theory.

Although the category of sex was the object of certain French feminist discourses from the 1970s – notably in the work of Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig – it was not until the 1990s, subsequent to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) that Anglophone feminist theory really sat up and took notice of sex, although the question of sexual difference, inspired largely by the work of Luce Irigaray, was prominent, especially in ‘continental’ feminist philosophy. This is a description of the dominant trajectories in feminist theory, and of course there are exceptions to them. Simone de Beauvoir, the most influential figure in the history of feminist theory, did not work with a sex/gender distinction and may easily be read as the first critical theorist of sex.1 Sex was the central analytical category of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which was more influential in the 1970s than its current status in feminist theory might suggest; one of its main aims was to ‘attack sex distinctions themselves’.2 And of course some Anglophone feminists were already focusing on sex before Butler’s intervention, especially those influenced by Wittig and Delphy. However, since the 1990s, the far-reaching influence of Butler’s work means that the question of the ontological status of sex has become one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary feminist theory. Is there such a thing as ‘sex’? If so, what kind of a thing is sex? Are sexes natural-biological kinds, or political categories or medico-legal or cultural constructions?3

As will become obvious to readers of this book, my own theoretical sympathies are with those for whom ‘sex’ is a problematic object, not a natural given. But this does not mean, as it does for some, that ‘sex’ is subsumed under the category of ‘gender’. The now classic argument to this effect in Butler’s Gender Trouble is that categories such as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ are productions of specific formations of power that ‘create the effect of the natural, the original, and the inevitable’.4 More specifically, the production of ‘sex’ as the idea of a ‘natural’, prediscursive origin is an effect of the cultural apparatus of gender, such that ‘sex’ is, effectively, to be thought under the sign of gender: ‘If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.’5 Some years prior to this Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna argued, in Kessler’s words, ‘that “gender” should be used exclusively to refer to anything related to the categories “female” and “male”, replacing the term “sex”, which would be restricted to reproductive and “love-making” activities’. The rationale for this was that it ‘would emphasize the socially constructed, overlapping nature of all category distinctions, even the biological ones’.6 Kessler and McKenna’s and Butler’s position would seem to be that to continue to speak of sex is to collude in what Butler called ‘the fictive construction of “sex” ’ as the natural foundation of gender and of the stable identity of the sexed subject itself. Gender, on the other hand, in many ways a more complicated category, could be understood, at least for Butler, as the site of possible resistance to or transformation of the ‘gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined’.7

If I continue to speak of sex and to insist in this context on the conceptual distinction between sex and gender (amongst other things), this is not for the purposes of distinguishing between any allegedly empirically determined entities or actually existing phenomena that are the referents of the concepts. It is because it is necessary to make the distinction in order to specify the peculiarity of the concept of sex – of the way in which this concept has functioned and continues to function in various texts and in the everyday worlds of men, women and children. This is not an anti-Butlerian point; far from it. It has Butler’s argument in Gender Trouble as its condition of existence.

So what is the specificity of the concept of sex? This is not, first of all, a question about the ontology of sex – it does not ask what sex is, or whether it is, or what kind of a thing it is. It asks how ‘sex’ actually functions as a meaningful element in discourses of many different kinds, what ‘sex’ actually means when it is employed, as if unproblematically, in everyday speech and more formal contexts. Of course ‘sex’, like any other concept, has a history, and that history is complicated in being multi-lingual; so much so that significant issues arise in translation. The history of the concept of sex is as yet unwritten, but this book works with the presumption that we might speak very broadly of the ‘modern’ concept of sex to characterize the popular, hegemonic view that operates today, as a way of acknowledging that the presumptions of, say, the past 200 years may not have been shared by the ancient world.8

One might expect that ‘sex’ would function differently in different discourses, but the peculiar thing is that by and large it does not. The peculiar functioning of the concept of sex is such that it tends to figure in the same form in both popular discourses and – the relevant arena here – philosophical texts. I refer to the modern, popular, hegemonic concept of sex as the modern ‘natural-biological’ concept of sex because of the presumptions that constitute it, not to commit it to a particular disciplinary-scientific origin or ontological status. According to the presumptions that constitute the modern natural-biological concept of sex there simply is sex duality (the exclusive division between male and female) and that duality is naturally determined.9 As such, its referent is presumed to be a natural and not a historical object, and the possibility that the concept is, precisely, modern, is hidden. I contend that this concept has no purely descriptive function in relation to human being, although the presumption in its use is, precisely, that it does. The main reason for thinking this is that the constitutive and exclusive duality of its terms – ‘male’ and ‘female’ – is empirically inadequate to the phenomena that it would allegedly encompass without remainder, meaning that its duality is in fact normative and prescriptive. This is as true of the uncontentiously sexed infant who allegedly embodies one term of the sex duality as it is of the intersexed infant who will be made to conform to one. Further, the modern natural-biological concept of sex functions in relation to human being to refer to a natural foundation for existence, such that it offers itself as a naturalistic explanation for some aspects – sometimes even all aspects – of human psycho-social existence and behaviour, from the choice of children’s play objects, to the choice of sexual objects; from the colours and clothes that toddlers prefer to the life choices and professional capabilities of adults. Thus the modern natural-biological concept of sex functions as something both naturally determined and naturally determining and it is effectively impossible to separate these two aspects. In allegedly describing a natural foundation for human existence the modern natural-biological concept of sex prescribes a duality, the nature of which is taken to be more or less determining of aspects of that existence. This is its specificity in distinction from the concepts of gender and sexuality, for example, which are often conceived as determined by sex.

It is because sex is conceived in this way that it tends to appear as an unproblematized and untheorized referent in philosophical discourse in general, including much feminist philosophical discourse, and in discussions of Plato’s dialogues, in particular. This determines the interpretation of certain passages and arguments in Plato’s dialogues where the issue of sex seems to arise. What could be less surprising? Not just in the case of the mainstream literature on Plato, which is hardly concerned with sex or gender, but also in the feminist literature, defined by its interest in the latter. What could be less surprising than that feminist philosophers, battling against the presumptive determinism of sex difference, should interpret Book V of the Republic in these terms; that, battling against the denegation of all things female or feminine in the history of philosophy, they should read the Symposium through the lens of sex?

But this book began with the curious suspicion that, surprisingly, Plato’s texts did not yield or support the presumption of the modern, natural-biological concept of sex in their interpretation, precisely where one would most expect them to. It developed into the thesis that certain passages and arguments in Plato’s dialogues may be interpreted in such a way, indeed, as to contest this conception of sex. This is not the claim that an alternative, perhaps ancient Greek, concept of sex animates Plato’s dialogues, nor that the dialogues reveal or even support, speculatively, a theory of sex or of sexual reproduction. (It is not, then, like Thomas Laqueur’s claims about the alternative model of sex in the ancient period, which he opposes to the modern account of sex.10) It also does not involve the claim that the relevant passages of the dialogues aim to do anything that can now be interpreted in terms of the contestation of the modern natural-biological concept of sex – it has nothing to do with Plato’s intentions, whatever they may have been. Rather the claim is that certain important passages in these texts do, from the standpoint of the present, nevertheless contest the modern natural-biological concept of sex, understood in the way outlined above, in being recalcitrant to its imposition upon them.

The approach to Plato through which this book attempts to make good this claim needs to be specified in order to understand the nature of the claims in each chapter, and to distinguish it from other approaches. It is perhaps too early to write the history of feminist interpretations of Plato, but it is possible to characterise the broad trends in the literature to this point, some of which parallel the broad trends in the history of feminist philosophy more generally. First, interpretations from the liberal feminist tradition, with its central concepts of equality and rights, read Plato – principally the Republic and, to a lesser extent, the Laws – and judge him according to the requirements associated with these concepts. This work – often from political philosophers and theorists in its earliest instances – tends to focus on Plato’s explicit mention of women (women’s nature, women’s defining characteristics, women’s capacities and proper role) and those aspects of the dialogues that might reasonably be judged to be of most concern to women (for example, arrangements for the care of the children of the Guardian class in the Republic). The title of Gregory Vlastos’ famous essay – ‘Was Plato a Feminist?’ – might seem to sum up the guiding question of this tradition of criticism, but feminist work (notably that of Julia Annas) very quickly went beyond this.11 Foregoing anachronistic questions about Plato’s sexual politics or personal intentions, much of the feminist literature in this tradition focused on the place and nature of the female Guardians in the Republic and (what seemingly contradicts this) the instances of sexism or misogyny in his work and attempted to show either how the latter is related to his philosophy as a whole – even to Western philosophy as a whole – or how it is fundamentally unrelated.12

This dovetails with the literature from what is sometimes called the ‘sexual difference’ tradition.13 This is most famously associated with Luce Irigaray, whose own work on Plato offers interpretations of aspects of the dialogues which span both extremes of the critical feminist compass of this tradition – from the archaeological reconstruction of the suppressed feminine or female in Western thought out of moments in Plato’s dialogues, to the coruscating criticism of Plato as the founding philosopher of the (masculine) metaphysics of the same, covering over sexual difference and man’s maternal origins.14 But this tradition also contains an extremely broad range of other positions and theoretical commitments, from Arlene W. Saxonhouse’s feminist essentialism to David Halperin’s Foucaultianism.

If these are the two most articulated traditions, there are, of course, contributions to the feminist literature that do not fit into either: for example, the more recent, often Derridean, readings claiming to discover theoretical resources for feminism in concepts reappropriated from the dialogues. Mine is also a feminist approach that does not fit into either tradition, but neither is it an attempt to appropriate concepts from Plato. In confronting particular passages in Plato’s dialogues from the standpoint of a particular position in the contemporary philosophy of sex and gender the aim is not to read the former through the latter but to create a short circuit without a protective fuse. The aim is not to establish the relation between Plato and ‘sex’ but to prise it apart, even break it – to relieve the texts of the imposition or presupposition of ‘sex’ in their modern reception. In this I make no claim to discover their ‘original’ meaning. It is ‘sex’, not Plato’s philosophy, which has to answer for itself today.

Four of the five chapters in this book focus on a few passages from Plato’s Republic, Symposium or Timaeus where the question of sex seems to arise. After expounding these passages in some detail, each attempts to show how the modern reception of these passages – in both mainstream and feminist philosophical literature and in feminist and psychoanalytical theory – presupposes the modern natural-biological concept of sex in their interpretation, before suggesting alternative interpretations.

Chapter 1 focuses on Socrates’ arguments, in Book V of the Republic, for the equal education of women in the Guardian class and for their participation in the rule of the polis. In the main interpretations of these passages hitherto, despite their often significantly different conclusions, there is a common presumption that what Socrates must oppose with his arguments is his interlocutors’ assumption that sex difference – one’s being male or female – determines for which function or job (ergon) one is naturally fitted. However, through an analysis of, and a comparison between the functions of, the classical Greek concept of ‘genos’ and the modern English concept of ‘sex’ – the latter often used to translate genos in these passages – this chapter argues that, strictly speaking, the modern natural-biological concept of sex, understood in the way outlined above, is absent from these passages. It argues that what Socrates must oppose is not the idea that sex difference is determining, but a conception of men and women as different in every aspect of their physical, social and psychical existences, where ‘men’ and ‘women’ are constituted ontologically by a set of manly and womanish characteristics, respectively, rather than by their being-male or being-female. Beyond Socrates’ arguments in Book V of the Republic, the idea that men and women are constituted in this way sheds an interesting light on the prohibition of womanish behaviour for men in ancient Athens, and thus on the arguments to that effect in the Republic and Laws. In demonstrating the possibility of distinguishing between the conceptual pairs male/female and man/woman in Plato’s Republic, Chapter 1 endorses the possibility of an alternative ontology of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as primarily social and political categories, one that sits uneasily with the professed modern faith in the natural determining role of sex.

Chapter 2 concerns the account of the origin of human beings in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. That account seems to offer a mythical explanation for the non-mythical fact of sex duality – the derivation of the two sexes from a race of humans originally divided into three – and indeed that is how it is usually interpreted in the philosophical literature, where the question of the status of sex itself is not at issue. This chapter argues, however, that Aristophanes’ story is more complicated than this interpretation suggests. Its implicit postulation of the cosmic principle of the division of all things into male and female and its thematization of originary hermaphroditism suggest an interpretation that problematizes, rather than explains, the origin of male and female. The chapter then examines the reception of Aristophanes’ myth in the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan, where sex is a central and contested category, to show how they seemed to take on this problematization in their own ‘mythic’ accounts of sex. In relation to Freud this involves a discussion of his enduring commitment to the theory of anatomical bisexuality and his speculative biological account of the origin of sex inspired by Aristophanes’ tale. An interpretation of Lacan’s brief references to Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium then lead, via a discussion of the conceptual distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘sexual difference’ in psychoanalytical theory, to an interpretation of the mythic role of ‘sex’ in Lacan’s theory of sexuation. Finally this chapter asks, in the light of the difficulties posed by even the most ‘scientific’ use of the concept, whether the modern natural-biological concept of sex can ever escape a mythic function.

Chapter 3 centrally concerns not the modern natural-biological concept of sex but the modern popular conception of sexuality, such as it was identified by Freud. It aims to demonstrate the same kind of conceptual imposition in the interpretation of Plato’s concept of eros via the modern popular conception of sexuality as in the interpretation of aspects of the Republic and Symposium via the modern natural-biological concept of sex discussed in the previous two chapters. It begins with Freud’s claim that the enlarged concept of sexuality in psychoanalysis coincides with Plato’s concept of eros, and with the difficulties inherent in the translation of the Greek ‘ers’ with the vocabulary of ‘the sexual’ and of ‘love’. These difficulties bear directly on a central issue in the interpretation of Socrates’ speech in the Symposium: is ers a specifically sexual passion or a metaphor for some more general desire or existential force? This chapter investigates both Socrates’ account of eros and Freud’s psychoanalytical concept of the sexual drive, the latter forged in opposition to what Freud called the (restricted) popular conception of sexuality. Freud’s enlarged conception of sexuality, along with the related concept of sublimation, is often mooted, even if only to be dismissed, as a possible interpretative key to Socrates’ account of eros in the Symposium. However, this chapter tries to show the way in which the persistence of the presumption of the restricted popular concept of sexuality in discussions of Socrates’ account continues to determine one particular debate concerning eros in such a way as to prevent an appreciation of what may be its conceptual specificity – namely, its constitutive ambiguity.

Chapter 4 focuses on another intriguing aspect of Socrates’ speech in the Symposium – the metaphors of pregnancy (specifically male pregnancy) and birth. A survey of the literature, feminist and otherwise, on this topic identifies a common interpretative strategy across widely different and even opposing interpretations of these metaphors in their attempts to separate out what properly belongs to the male from what properly belongs to the female. The chapter argues that this interpretative strategy fails to do justice to the literary specificity and complexity of these images in the Symposium, images that work and are constituted precisely by refusing this separation. Instead of presuming sex and the distribution of what is proper to the male and what is proper to the female as the literal ground of the images in the Symposium, this chapter investigates instead the possibility that the images can be interpreted as saying something about ‘sex’ and the distribution of masculine and feminine identifications. Rather than distinguishing between the metaphorical image (the illusion of male pregnancy) and its presumed literal basis (the reality of sex difference), the chapter suggests a reading of the images of pregnancy and birth as aspects of a complex structure of fantasy, in the interpretation of which the opposition reality–illusion is inadequate. In this way the images of pregnancy and birth are interpreted not as the metaphors or fantasies of a man, but in terms of the fantasmatic structure of sexed subjectivization – ‘being man’ – itself.

The final chapter, Chapter 5, focuses on three passages in the Timaeus. In the last of these, almost at the very end of the dialogue, there seems to be an account of the origin of sex difference. This account refers back to two previous passages in which the origin of women and men and the origin of women from men are mentioned. These passages have tended to be dismissed, in modern commentaries on the Timaeus, as jest or embarrassing non-philosophical incursions. But to the extent that they have been taken seriously, discussion has focused on two particular issues: according to Timaeus, were men created before women or were men and women created simultaneously? And were there originally sexless human beings? This chapter looks at the difficulties faced by commentators (principally Proclus and the main modern commentators in English) trying to extract a coherent position on sex difference from Timaeus’ comments, and shows how this has only been achieved through extremely selective and partial readings. Referring back to the argument of Chapter 1, this chapter then attempts to show how, distinguishing between the conceptual pairs man/woman and male/female, a more complete and coherent reading is possible, a reading in which ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are primarily moral categories.

However, much like Timaeus’ discourse itself, this chapter then begins again, placing the three passages on men and women in the context of the dialogue as a whole, and in particular in the context of Timaeus’ principled insistence that, in every subject, we must begin at the natural beginning and – what sometimes contradicts this demand – his limiting claim that accounts of things must be of the same nature as those things themselves. The remainder of the chapter then shows the impossibility of locating the ‘natural beginning’ of sex in the Timaeus, an impossibility that conforms to the demand that the account of sex reflects the nature of sex itself, and suggests that it is here that the metaphysical meaning and contemporary significance of this aspect of the Timaeus is to be found.

Four of the five chapters described above end with a brief indication of the consequences of their arguments for our understanding of the modern natural-biological concept of sex – for what ‘sex’ might mean for us today. Plato and Sex concludes with a Coda in which I attempt (with help from Immanuel Kant) to draw these indications together and to give a philosophical account of the nature of this concept.

Notes

1 See Stella Sandford, ‘Contingent Ontologies: Sex, Gender and “Woman” in Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler’, Radical Philosophy, 97, September/October 1999; Stella Sandford, How to Read Beauvoir, Granta, London, 2006, especially Chapter 7, ‘Sex’.

2 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Paladin, London, 1972 (1970), p. 24. On Firestone’s concept of sex see Stella Sandford, ‘The Dialectic of The Dialectic of Sex’, in Mandy Merck and Stella Sandford, eds., Further Adventures of ‘The Dialectic of Sex’, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2010.

3 For recent debate on these questions see the articles by Alison Stone (‘The Incomplete Materialism of French Materialist Feminism’) and Stella Sandford (‘Sexmat, Revisited’) in Radical Philosophy, 145, September/October 2007.

4 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Routledge, New York and London, 1990, p. viii.

5 Ibid., p. 7. See also, Butler’s ‘Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique, Polity, Oxford, 1987.

6 Suzanne J. Kessler, Lessons From the Intersexed, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 1998, n. 2, p. 134. Here Kessler is referring to the terminological decision made in Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1985, carried through to the later Lessons From the Intersexed.

7 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. ix, 17. See also p. 148: ‘The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself.’

8 There is nothing to say, even now, that the popular, hegemonic view of sex is shared by all peoples in all places.

9 A recent, popular textbook in the philosophy of biology illustrates this. Although many aspects of species distinctiveness – for example, ‘absence of extreme sociality among the birds’ – ‘turn on small accidents of history … there are other patterns in life’s richness that are not likely to be historical accidents. Sex – one, two, but no more – is a good candidate for such a pattern.’ Kim Sterelny and Paul E. Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1999, p. 26.

10 See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender From the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1990, especially Chapter 2, where Laqueur argues that for Galen and Aristotle and in the Hippocratic Treatises ‘[a]natomy in the context of sexual difference was a representational strategy that illuminated a more stable extracorporeal reality. There existed many genders, but only one adaptable sex’ (p. 35). Laqueur is concerned with different ‘biologies’ and the relation between these biological theories and ways of understanding the nature of sexed bodies and aspects of sexual politics: ‘My goal is to show how a biology of hierarchy in which there is only one sex [characteristic of the ancient Greeks], a biology of the incommensurability between two sexes, and the claim that there is no publicly relevant sexual difference at all, or no sex, have constrained the interpretation of bodies and the strategies of sexual politics for some two thousand years’ (p. 23).

11 Gregory Vlastos, ‘Was Plato a Feminist?’, in Nancy Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato, Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1994; Julia Annas, ‘Plato’s Republic and Feminism’, in Julie K. Ward, ed., Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.

12 Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1992, is one of the best examples of the former; Angela Hobbs’ ‘Female Imagery in Plato’ (in James Lesher et al., eds., Plato’s Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2006) is a recent example of the latter. These are discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, respectively.

13 See, for example, Alison Stone, An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy, Polity, Cambridge, 2007, Chapter 4.

14 Both elements are to be found in Luce Irigaray, ‘Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech’, trans. Eleanor H. Kuykendall, in Tuana, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Plato. This is discussed at greater length in Chapter 4.

1

Sex and Genos (Republic)

When Socrates said, well over 2,000 years ago, in Book V of the Republic, that he and his interlocutors were about to rouse ‘a swarm of arguments’ (450b), he was certainly not mistaken, although the angry buzzing did not reach its height until the second half of the twentieth century. The provocation comes in the form of three well-known proposals concerning the Guardian class of the : the holding of wives and children in common, the equal education of men and women, and the participation of women in all aspects of governance. Although the history of written responses to these proposals begins with Aristotle, it is the debates within the context of second-wave feminism, from the 1970s onwards, that will be the focus here. This chapter critically investigates what I identify as a basic shared assumption in the different positions within these debates and – moving away from this assumption – offers a new interpretation of the relevant sections of the , an interpretation that suggests why these already heavily commented passages claim our attention today.