[In the following review, Knight evaluates the themes of What Is a Woman?]

Faced with the less than warm American reception of her Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Toril Moi always denied that she had set out to advance the claims of high French feminism (abstract, theoretical) at the expense of its more lowly Anglo-American counterpart (pragmatic, empirical). Rather, she thought she had written a critique of both in the light of a politically committed materialist feminism. Nevertheless, a number of American feminists—unappreciative perhaps of an academic style that Moi associates with Britain in the early eighties, where pleasurable intellectual friendships could be marked by “intense intellectual disagreements carried over from the seminar room to the pub” (261)—chose to remain offended, equating female-authored critique with unsisterly betrayal. With hindsight Moi identifies an institutionally determined context of “fears and anxieties” that confused professional and emotional support with intellectual agreement. As long as ideas are treated with respect and not reduced to the person advancing them (the ad feminam mode of debate to which Moi, herself its occasional victim, remains “particularly allergic”), “feminists do each other a service by producing serious and searching critiques of the foundations of feminist work.” As she most reasonably claims, “it is impossible to advance feminist intellectual work without engaging with other feminists” (259-60).

It is to be hoped that What Is a Woman?, Moi's long-awaited re-entry into the lists of mainstream feminist debate, will not be perceived as a reopening of hostilities. Moi shows herself extraordinarily attentive to the work of American feminists, even if she dismisses many of their arguments. And it is indeed arguments that are targeted in her two flagship essays (on sex/gender debates and on the place of the personal in theory), rather than the two women with whom she most explicitly engages (Judith Butler and Jane Tompkins respectively). After all, for all her unease with the reigning theoretical doxa—the decontextualizing deconstruction challenged in “What Is a Woman?,” the confessional academic writing, legitimized by versions of identity politics, confronted in “I Am a Woman”—Moi has chosen the United States as intellectual arena and context for her own theoretical evolution. If, as she claims, the American University remains dominated by an ungrounded poststructuralism, she has certainly chosen a demanding testing ground for her increasingly confident espousal of a different tradition of thought. This is a tradition whereby the foregrounded subject is a subject of praxis (both the subject of acts and the subject of speech acts), and whereby the psychoanalysis of Freud, Lacan and Kristeva has been joined by the sociology of Bourdieu, the existentialism of Sartre and Beauvoir and, increasingly, by the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, Austin and Cavell.

That Moi is determined not so much to be right as to get the arguments right, is demonstrated by her disarming identification of her own momentary “failures of voice” in Sexual/Textual Politics. Of her equation of an integrated humanist self with the “self-contained powerful phallus” she declares: “I don't think I can have believed this when I wrote it” (xi), while her decision to close the book with a quotation from Derrida (when she did not consider herself a deconstructionist) is deemed a good example of “theoretical alienation” (xii) which not surprisingly gave rise to misunderstandings. Above all she sees that she sometimes wrote as if it was self-evident that some theoretical idea or other was “intrinsically bad for feminist politics.” It is this “theoreticism,” with its parallel policing of the theoretically correct positions that are supposedly good for feminist politics, that forms one of the main targets of Moi's new essays. As far as her own work is concerned, these essays are an attempt to work her way out “from under poststructuralism” and to see what happens “when one goes elsewhere” (xii).

Now distanced (in time at least) from the unemployed, would-be academic freshly arrived in Britain from the “Norwegian fjords” (xv), Toril Moi possesses the intellectual capital to say what she thinks, however unfashionable, and to place that capital at the service of her bold rehabilitation of the theoretical importance of Beauvoir's feminism. Though Moi invests considerable mental energy in taking apart received or opposing views, she argues her way through to a position whereby she can unashamedly declare her radical disinterest in the concept of identity, logically refusing (since she is similarly disinterested in the “foundational claims of deconstruction”) either to posit identity or deconstruct it—it is quite simply not a concept that she uses. At stake is her right to follow Beauvoir in bringing a materialist feminist agenda to bear on the word “woman,” which means refusing to be forced into a false choice of “being a woman through and through at all times and in all circumstances” (xi), or of having to deny that one is a woman at all (for fear of the obligatory accusations of biological determinism, essentialism or metaphysical grounding). The titular “What Is a Woman?,” borrowed like “I Am a Woman” from ten pivotal lines of the opening paragraphs of The Second Sex, is an explicit challenge to American feminist orthodoxy. But it is a challenge issued only at the end of a sustained and immensely careful labor of thought: “to be able to reach the conclusion that we do not have to assume that there is anything intrinsically wrong with the word ‘woman’ was immensely liberating to me. I hope it will be to others too.” (x)

One of the more controversial aspects of this liberating conclusion is Moi's claim that the ritually paired concepts of sex and gender “are useless starting points for a theory of the body and subjectivity,” and that poststructuralist deconstructors of the sex/gender binary are prisoners of “theoretical mirages of their own making” (46). Rather than wasting so much time trying to think through and beyond the pitfalls of obviously flawed concepts, it would make sense to look around for better ones. For it is the reduction of sexed human beings to the sum total of sex and gender—“to be nothing but sex, or nothing but gender” (35), so that all that is not one is the other, and vice versa—that reduces woman to nothing but her sexual difference (biological and/or ideologically imposed), and leads to the omission of all the other things that shape the experience of being of one sex or another. It is Moi's project to show that there are more useful ways of arriving “at a highly historicized and concrete understanding of bodies and subjectivity” (46), not least because absolutely nothing logically follows (either socially, psychologically or philosophically) from the fact that there are biological bases for categorizing human beings into two sexes. But equally “no particular understanding of subjectivity or identity follows from the fact of denying that biological facts justify social norms” (57). Moi makes the convincing and very important point that Judith Butler (like many others) misreads Beauvoir's famous declaration that “one is not born, but rather becomes a woman” when she glosses it as follows: “Simone de Beauvoir distinguishes sex from gender and suggests that gender is an aspect of identity gradually acquired.” In fact, if correctly read, Beauvoir offers a powerful alternative to this falsely imposed grid. In taking the sexed (female) body as the non-normative starting point of her phenomenological analysis of what woman is—the body as “situation” not destiny, situation understood not as an externally imposed structure but as an “irreducible amalgam of the freedom (projects) of that subject and the conditions in which that freedom finds itself” (74)—it never occurs to Beauvoir that human beings could be divided into a natural and a cultural part. Woman therefore “exists,” but in the existential sense of an open-ended becoming. Butler, on the other hand, conflates “woman” with gender, regards gender as the mere discursive effect of an oppressive social power structure, and therefore concludes that woman “must be deconstructed.” For Moi, “the fact that Beauvoir refuses to hand the concept of ‘woman’ over to the opposition, is precisely what makes The Second Sex such a liberating read.”

Moi's decision to use the particular case of Beauvoir as the vehicle of her debate with American feminism (as it has developed since the publication of Sexual/Textual Politics) is visibly overdetermined. In “The Challenge of the Particular Case,” an essay on Bourdieu published in 1997, Moi describes the latter as belonging to a tradition of thought where the concrete example should not be seen as a secondary illustration of a general rule, but as the primary place “where thought happens, where theoretical questions get raised, elaborated, and answered” (302). That Beauvoir is a fine example of this tradition is illustrated superbly by Moi's reading of the third paragraph of The Second Sex, where Beauvoir, by taking women's concrete, ordinary existence as the starting point for philosophical argument, and by making her own experience exemplary (for the light it can shed on a general question), is shown to invent a way of “doing philosophy” in which the personal and the philosophical are intrinsically linked (207). While Moi finds contemporary American debates about the personal and the theoretical predictable and conceptually impoverished, it is precisely because the opening pages of Beauvoir's text are fully marked by her subjectivity—staking her right to be taken seriously as a philosopher on stating “I am a woman”—that they are “uniquely powerful as philosophy” (235). Thus Moi has successfully shown by example that close attention to a particular case (the opening of The Second Sex) “can produce serious theoretical insights” (247). Yet clearly Moi has also discovered in Beauvoir's essay a concrete example that can do almost infinite theoretical work for her, as if all the philosophy and feminism she could ever need might be drawn from its pages by the very intensity of her reading. And if the third new essay of Moi's volume, a close reading of Freud's infamous question, “Is Anatomy Destiny?,” promises a more sustained future engagement with Freud's writing on femininity and sexual difference, I personally hope that this too might be staged as a dialogue with The Second Sex. For the missed encounter of Beauvoir and Freud is surely one of the lost (apparently lost?) opportunities of twentieth-century thought. I cannot conceive of a better investigator than Toril Moi to uncover the complexities of the case.