I admit: I am sick of politics. But since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, I have become quite attached to my “sickness.”
As a white, ciswoman, mid-career academic, I admittedly have the privilege of becoming disenchanted—shaking my head in disgust at vitriol from media outlets on the right and rolling my eyes at the oh-so-earnest self-righteous talking heads on the left.
But more recently, I’ve gone from being disenchanted to being downright incredulous. Bracketing my critical view of electoral politics and the impossibility of choice in a (effectively) two-party system in general, as of October 14, 2024, an NBC News Poll shows Harris tied with Trump for the popular vote. <Insert wide-eyed, blank-stare emoji>.
In a recent New York Times op-ed, Todd Purdum suggests that what the electorate really wants is to hear Harris’s answers to important policy questions that she keeps dodging.
I would generally love some thoughtful answers to these questions, too. But, seriously? Why is Harris the one who has to prove her bona fides? Since when has political campaigning been about substance over rhetoric? Purdum, who acknowledges the outright lies that Trump espouses without consequence, does not even gesture to the double standard to which Harris is held by the electorate.
Why does Trump’s rhetoric rise to a level of transcendence that is undisturbed by fact-checking, while Harris’s rhetorical choices are scrutinized for their authenticity? It seems she is neither Asian enough, Black enough, nor woman enough—which is double-speak for being too Asian, too Black, and too much of a woman to be trusted.
A not-so-thinly-veiled misogyny undergirds these demands—and one that is further complicated by the ways in which race, racism, and racialization operate with respect to gender. Purdum patronizingly writes, “For better or worse, questions—and usually the very hardest ones—come with the job of being president. . . . Listening closely, and answering questions—clearly, early, and often—is inevitably a part of passing that test.” His editorial presents with the confidence of a perspective that is so enamored with its even-handed neutrality it doesn’t see the masculine subject at the heart of its objectivity.
Purdum’s lament for “substance” behind the rhetoric got me thinking (or, rather, re-thinking) about how political discourse continually packages and repackages the materiality of differences (literally placing them in boxes) to reinforce a concept of equality in which the unit of measure is political representation itself—that is, the promise of continued participation in this system.
Liberalism, Politics, and the Representation of a Masculine Worldview
While an undergraduate in Women’s Studies and Political Science, I enrolled in an independent study to examine whether women elected to the U.S. Congress changed political representation. The answer? Not really. One theory we discussed was that, eventually, a “critical mass” of women might be elected and open new horizons for political representation that could change politics. This theorizing was obviously speculative. However, I would argue we can ground this speculation in a feminist philosophical critique of the “masculine” values of liberalism that promote universality as sameness.
At a recent conference, philosopher Mary C. Rawlinson, presenting her work on Hegel and sexual difference, remarked that the language of equal rights should beg the question, “Equal to whom?” Rawlinson’s comment reminded me of a nuanced resurrection of the feminist refrain of the 1960s radical cultural feminism that reminds us that difference is not the source of inequality; the problem is that equality has been constructed around a single idealized subject.
Luce Irigaray (b. 1930), the Belgian-born philosopher trained in psychoanalysis and best known for her theory of sexuate difference, can be counted among these early radical “difference feminists.” Irigaray’s reflections on democracy echo the “personal is political” mantra associated with women’s liberation, yet she does so with an emphasis on “emancipation” as a socio-cultural, emotional, and spiritual cultivation of difference rather than as equality based in sameness. (Irigaray, 2001: 108.)
Part of what makes Irigaray so interesting from a philosophical perspective is that she reimagines distinctions between Ego, Eros, and Polis (as one, two, and three or more, respectively) as relational. In Democracy Begins Between Two, Irigaray calls for a concept of civil identity that would transcend what she deems as secondary identities: “With this objective, which is the most democratic possible, civil identity would be defined at the intersection of individual, natural identity and of community, relational identity, a transition which each person, male and female, would have to make on their own behalf and consent to the other, male or female.” (Irigaray, 2001: 65.)
The last bit of this quote, in which Irigaray divides the world into two, is significant because it signals that Irigaray’s political philosophy—which, I think makes space for intersectional analyses—is grounded in her more primary and controversial sexuate philosophy. Irigaray distinguishes sexuate identity from what she deems cultural and social identities by virtue of their differing orientations to the symbolic realm (including the discursive realm) through which meaning is made and subjectivity emerges. Irigaray contends that social and political identifications, such as gender, race, and class, emerge within the symbolic order. The symbolic order is phallocentric in that it aspires to a singularity defined by oneness—wherein one is one and the same.
Central to Irigaray’s critique of psychoanalysis and philosophy is that the transcendence afforded discourse is a consequence of philosophy’s forgetting of the maternal-feminine. In this critique, “woman” has been rendered synonymous with reproduction, such that the power of women’s roles in constituting life can be coopted and secondarized (because of its materiality) by a narrative of logocentric divine origination that doesn’t really need her at all. Of course, this disembodied transcendence is not only the logos of Greek thought and Platonic Christian theology. Today this transcendence of discourse has manifested in a society where truth is perpetuated by algorithms that prey on our egoisms.
I don’t have the space to get into the potential essentialism of Irigaray’s use of sexed and gendered discourse to describe the irreducibility of sexuation here, though I have engaged these debates thoroughly elsewhere. Rachel Jones comprehensively situates the tensions in Irigaray’s work in relation to and beyond essentialist-constructivist debates and the various receptions of her work. And, Emily Anne Parker is particularly good at moving beyond the old problem of essentialism to a more nuanced criticism of Irigaray’s cisnormativity, though I’m not in full agreement with her reading of Irigaray of what she refers to as the dimorphism of Irigaray’s sexuate difference. But for now, I want to focus on what I view as one of the most important contributions of Irigaray’s thought—her efforts to reimagine embodiment—to refuse the binary of metaphysics’ prioritization of transcendence—holding the physical and metaphysical together in a way that revalues the corporeality underlying experience.
The Matter of Mimesis
In Classical Greece, mimesis was conceived narrowly as an artistic imitation of life. The more closely art imitated life, the better its representation. Plato assumed this distinction, associating mimesis with the poets in Book III of The Republic. But Plato also suggests that good citizens should be wary of conceding too much to the poets. Jane Bennett argues that mimesis was, at least in part, dangerous to Plato because it had no grounding in the truth of forms (Bennett, 1190). . . . Resonating yet?
But as Mark C. Taylor remarked in Erring, “Perfect mimesis is no longer mimesis” (Taylor, 2013, 82). For the theorists whose names are now synonymous with deconstructing subjectivity by way of interrogating the representational function of language—Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy—mimesis is invariably more complex than speaking in the voice of another. In his book on Lacoue-Labarthe, John Martis—citing a similar list of all-male philosophers to compose a genealogy (no less) of postmodern philosophies of representation—writes that mimesis is, in a sense, the performance of life itself.
Of course, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Gayatri Spivak, among others, deserve inclusion in that above list, alongside their contemporaries, but serious engagement with their work is too often undertaken only in relation to “feminist” questions in philosophy. Indeed, intellectual celebration of the inevitability of mimesis as constitutive of a radically deconstructive way of living occludes an important feminist criticism: relation to the symbolic realm of language and culture—of representation—is not a neutral condition. There are others to this symbolic order (of which language is part) for whom mimesis is not merely some inevitable failure of language such that all subjectivity is becoming undone as part of a horizon of linguistic excess. For these others, mimesis constitutes a failure on a different level, on a prediscursive level. These are others who are the constitutive absent of the symbolic. For Irigaray, these others are—you might have guessed it—women. Mimesis, she says in This Sex Which is Not One, is the condition “historically assigned to the feminine” (Irigaray, 1985: 76).
Book X of The Republic notwithstanding, perhaps Plato is right that we should be wary of forms of representation that are devoid of a relationship to some truth. Mimesis, framed as parroting another, sounds pretty dangerous. The problem, of which Irigaray’s Ethics of Sexual Difference reminds us in her criticism of Plato’s appropriation of Diotima’s voice in The Symposium, is that his transcendentalization of truth coincided with a denigration of the material, carnal, fleshiness which became synonymous with the feminine. By turning to the corporeal differences of women’s relation to language, Irigaray harnesses mimesis’s potential to create space for another “woman” to emerge apart from its representation in a disembodied feminine. This mimesis exposes the crisis of representation for women as the constitutively absent other of our philosophical, cultural, social, and political discourses. This Irigarayan mimesis exposes the space and time sacrificed when we endow representation with an unchecked power to create reality.
Harris’s campaign struggle is emblematic of this crisis. Harris (or Hillary Clinton) cannot mime expectations for presidential nominees, simply. It’s not just that Harris is a woman of color that makes her efforts to mime the ethno-racialized and gendered ideal presidential candidate an inevitable failure (though it is that, too); it’s that our politics cannot make space for an embodied mode of representation. Contemporary political discourse has thrived on the undoing of the subject; its taxonomies become call signs for endless identities that become sources of further identifications. I want us to consider whether we have invested so much in philosophical and political discourses in which autonomy becomes synonymous with identity that we have empowered political discourse to reshape the plurality of embodiments that were meant to disrupt the neutrality of discursive representations of subjectivity in the first place. If mimesis remains a playful representation at the level of discourse, then it participates in a notion of bodies as embodiments of discursive identifications. That may be useful in politics, but it doesn’t disrupt the problem of the political.
What of a different form of mimesis of bodies themselves, of their living (and breathing, Irigaray would insist) as relation to a world of and with others? What if we tweak our point of inquiry and begin not with mimesis as an inevitable (and totalizing) consequence of language but with mimesis as an effect of an economy of representation that sacrifices embodiment that must be interrogated? Could this slight shift rescue us from the reproduction of the same, including the same expectation, the same candidate, in perpetuity? Would thinking of mimesis as a form of relation rather than re-presentation mean that we stop focusing on differences as products of identity politics but rather as reimagined through the unique pluralities of enfleshed living? Could thinking about corporeality, not as inevitably caught in the discourses about life as though carried along in a story about bodies yet without them, allow us to transcend representations of bodies? Might this allow us to imagine some other way of being in relation to our others based on a more fundamental sharing that is not identification (and therefore not the ground of identity)? Perhaps this return to corporeality implies that the singularities of our embodiments do not need some discourse to make them real or true.
Campaign Signs and Conclusions
Where I live in North Carolina, an unconscionable number of campaign signs litter every intersection and roadway leading to polling places. In September, Tropical Storm Debby caused creeks to rise, and floodwaters ruined homes and stranded people for days in our area. When the winds were first picking up, however, my mind went to those goddamn election signs. On a normal day with the coastal winds, the signs jerk violently as though they are mocking their nervous energy in the air.
Aside from being a hideous waste of resources, the elections signs are not representations of democratic values; they are re-presentations of a politics that is wedded to winning at all costs rather than changing the rules of the game—they are harbingers of a storm that threatens all of those in its path, but some bodies (not just human) more than others, the “not quite a self” who is the “constitutive lack within human subjectivity” (Bennett, 2018: 1188).
To Purdum and his op-ed: it seems to me that your (and the electorate’s) ask of Harris has much more to say about you (your readership and the electorate) than about her.
Mimesis, if understood only as a rhetorical device in which the bodies deploying it are somehow neutral, will never change anything. But I do believe that perhaps it isn’t about a “critical mass” of a particular identity that makes a difference but rather it’s about bodies that look and sound different because they refuse neutrality—in this way, they are neither ontologically doomed to ventriloquism, nor are they Plato’s poets, endlessly manipulating representation.
Bennett concludes her examination of Lacoue-Labarthe’s mimetic philosophy writing as follows: “It is not that everything is always at the precipice of dissolution, but that every thing is changing in relations with others—at speeds that are sometimes slow and gradual and sometimes fast and overwhelming. This is the fate of mimetic bodies, human or not” (Bennett, 2018: 1199). If we appreciate that mimesis is an embodied relation to rather than an effect of representation, how might that help us rethink a democratic vision? Might we look toward the poetics of mimesis not as failures to imitate but to borrow from Irigaray, as re-doubled mirrors urging continuous returning to ourselves anew? The onus is not on Harris. The onus is on us as a civil society to stop disembodying our political discourse such that we let it spin endlessly, devoid of relation to the ever-changing materiality of relations.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my colleague Tim Craker for his insights on Lacoue-Labarthes’s reading of Plato and to Elisabeth Paquette for her generous feedback.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Wesley N. Barker
Wesley N. Barker is associate professor of Religious Studies and Chair of the Department of Liberal Studies at Mercer University’s College of Professional Advancement. She is author of the forthcoming Desire Beyond Identity: Irigaray and the Ethics of Embodiment (SUNY Press, 2025).
