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Introduction to Kofman's “Rousseau's Phallocratic Ends”

Sarah Kofman came to Berkeley at a point in my graduate career when I was much in need of role models, and it might provide something of an introduction if I can accurately represent the effect her lectures had on me then. A small, intense woman, she would quietly enter the lecture hall or classroom, wait for the hour to begin, and then explode into an almost overwhelming barrage of rapid-fire French. As she deconstructed both Freud and Nietzsche, she used all those words that I still found so hard to say: "phallus", "penis", "vagina". Listening to her, it became easier to see myself using those words and those methods in studying philosophical texts. In short, Sarah Kofman played a significant role in my becoming comfortable as a woman and a philosopher who did deconstruction. Part of the problem of introducing Kofman's work to American philosophers, however, is exactly how to introduce deconstruction itself, since in this country it is most often seen as a literary, rather than a philosophical, theory. The confusion is perhaps understandable insofar as deconstruction is often presented as a way of "reading" texts, not as a way of determining their "truth". When the text that is "read" is Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, however, one calls the reading "literary", and hence irrelevant to the "truth" of the text, only at considerable risk to both philosophy and literature. Kofman's choice of Rousseau as a subject in the paper that follows only complicates this problem. Since Rousseau is most often considered a minor philosopher, or worse, a "mere" literary figure in the United States, Kofman's argument assumes a familiarity with Rousseau that many philosophers may lack. This makes it difficult to evaluate her "reading", especially since the links between her conclusions and the text are occasionally somewhat obscure. Furthermore, given what we do know about Rousseau and what Kofman has to say about him, one obvious question is why a feminist philosopher would want to "read" Rousseau at all. Kofman tells us why: she is interested in supporting a thesis about how references to nature function in various phallocratic (that is, patriarchal) texts to rationalize and naturalize the subordination of women. That this process of rationalization can be shown to rely on very irrational logical "phallacies" provides an excellent example of the use of deconstructive method in the feminist "reading" of a philosophical text.