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Wittig's Material Practice: Universalizing a Minority Point of View

It is not easy to know how to read Monique Wittig’s assertion that a text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. Perhaps there is something called, for instance, a lesbian point of view, that in being universalized is being legislated to everyone. The consequence would not be that everyone is henceforth a lesbian, or even that everyone is hence­ forth lesbianized — whatever that might mean. The task is, rather, to establish a minority point of view that can sustain or bear a universal perspective. Of course, it is not immediately clear in what this universal perspective might consist and what it means to “bear” it, but let us consider for a moment how this works, if it works. There are, of course, traditions within philosophy that call for a posi­ tion characterized as a concrete universal (Hegel) or a singular universal (Kier­ kegaard), and these seem to suggest only that the subject is at once situated and generalized, and that a dual perspective is occasioned as a consequence. Some­ times the dual perspective can be occupied without conflict, as is eventually the case with Hegel, but sometimes it is lived as a contradiction or paradox, as it is with Kierkegaard. If the conjunction between the universal and the particular is a smooth one, then one can say, with ease, “Yes, I am a lesbian, but I am also a human, and I speak from both positions.” In this case, the particular adds to the universal or specifies it, but does not produce a problem for the universal as such. This is not Wittig’s claim, since the universalizing of the particular that Wittig seeks is one that poses a very serious problem for the universal, as it has been traditionally understood. Could it be that Wittig is putting forth a standpoint epistemology, a way to see and describe the world from a particular point of view that nonetheless becomes authoritative over time? Could it be that the truth of the social structure