Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Although Irigaray argues that the subject is always already masculine Wittig disputes the notion that the subject is exclusively masculine territory.The very plasticity of language, for her, resists the fixing of the subject position as masculine. Indeed, the presumption of an absolute speaking subject is, for Wittig, the political goal for “women,”
which, if achieved, will effectively dissolve the category of “women”
altogether. A woman cannot use the first person I because as a woman,
the speaker is particular (relative, interested, perspectival), and the invocation of the I presumes the capacity to speak for and as the universal human a relative subject is inconceivable, a relative subject could not speak at all.”
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Relying on the assumption that all speaking presupposes and implicitly invokes the entirety of language, Wittig describes the speaking subject as one who, in the act of saying I reap- propriates language as a whole, proceeding from oneself alone, with the power to use all language This absolute grounding of the speaking “I”
assumes godlike dimensions within Wittig’s discussion.This privilege to speak I establishes a sovereign self, a center of absolute plenitude and power speaking establishes the supreme act of subjectivity This coming into subjectivity is the effective overthrow of sex and, hence, the feminine no woman can say I without being for herself a total subject that is, ungendered, universal, whole.”
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Wittig continues with a startling speculation on the nature of language and being that situates her own political project within the traditional discourse of ontotheology. In her view, the primary ontology of language gives every person the same opportunity to establish subjectivity. The practical task that women face in trying to establish subjectivity through speech depends on their collective ability to castoff the reifications of sex imposed on them which deform them as partial or relative beings. Since this discarding follows upon the exercise of a full invocation of I women speak their way out of their gender. The social reifications of sex can be understood to mask or distort a prior ontological reality, that reality being the equal opportunity of all persons, prior to the marking by sex, to exercise language in the assertion
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of subjectivity. In speaking, the I assumes the totality of language and,
hence, speaks potentially from all positions—that is, in a universal mode. Gender . . . works upon this ontological fact to annul it she writes, assuming the primary principle of equal access to the universal to qualify as that ontological fact.”
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This principle of equal access,
however, is itself grounded in an ontological presumption of the unity of speaking beings in a Being that is prior to sexed being. Gender, she argues, tries to accomplish the division of Being but Being as being is not divided.”
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Here the coherent assertion of the I presupposes not only the totality of language, but the unity of being.
If nowhere else quite so plainly, Wittig places herself here within the traditional discourse of the philosophical pursuit of presence,
Being, radical and uninterrupted plenitude. In distinction from a
Derridean position that would understand all signification to rely on an operational différance, Wittig argues that speaking requires and invokes a seamless identity of all things. This foundationalist fiction gives her a point of departure by which to criticize existing social insti- tutions.The critical question remains, however, what contingent social relations does that presumption of being, authority, and universal sub- jecthood serve Why value the usurpation of that authoritarian notion of the subject Why not pursue the decentering of the subject and its universalizing epistemic strategies Although Wittig criticizes the straight mind for universalizing its point of view, it appears that she not only universalizes the straight mind, but fails to consider the totalitarian consequences of such a theory of sovereign speech acts.
Politically, the division of being—a violence against the field of ontological plenitude, in her view—into the distinction between the universal and the particular conditions a relation of subjection.
Domination must be understood as the denial of a prior and primary unity of all persons in a prelinguistic being. Domination occurs through a language which, in its plastic social action, creates a second- order, artificial ontology, an illusion of difference, disparity, and, consequently, hierarchy that becomes social reality.

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