Women, Death and the Limits of Representation - under review

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Woman, Death and the Limits of Representation

1. Introduction: Spatio-Temporal Representation

Following Kant, there are two predicates that are a priori inherent in

all knowledge and understanding: that of space and time. ‘Space’,

Kant writes, ‘is a necessary a priori representation which underlies

all outer intuitions. It is impossible to have a representation of

there being no space, though one can very well think of space

without objects to fill it’ (CPR B39 | A24). ‘Time’, similarly, ‘is

a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot

remove time itself from appearances in general, though we can quite

well take away appearances from time’ (CPR B46 | A31). Kant here

uses the term representation in reference to all mental

representations or cognitions, denying the application of the

category “spatio-temporal” to noumenal reality. For we have no way

of knowing whether there is an accurate correlation between our

representations of reality and reality itself, any knowledge of such

a relation necessarily being a representation itself with no way of knowing

whether it is an accurate depiction or not.

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If we accept Kant’s argument that all our conceptions and

experiences are conditioned by space and time then these notions

form the axis of the human existential condition. Space and time, by

grounding the conditions of the possibility of experiential

existence, consequently, describe the limits of our experience of

existence (its representations), for there is no access to existence

outside the spatio-temporal. Religion shows particular awareness of

this aspect of the existential condition and even demonstrates a

desire to transcend these limitations. Monotheistic belief in an

afterlife with an atemporal God demonstrates our ancestors’ desire

to reach beyond the limitations of time, or at the least survive

death. Similarly, the creation of beings that transcend spatial

limitations such as gods, angels, demons, ghosts and souls point to

aspirations beyond that of bodily finitude.

In this essay I will argue that man has come to associate woman and

death with the conditions and, by extension, the limitations of

experiential existence and its representations. The conjunction of

woman and death in artistic representation therefore simultaneously

affirms a desire to transcend those limitations, but in so doing,

negates that very aim. I suggest that this double movement is

inherent in the very nature of representation and has resulted in

the ambivalent attitudes towards both death and women.

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2. Woman and Death

Woman, as a sex, is distinguished from man primarily by her internal

reproductive organs and their subjection to the menstrual cycle: the

monthly discharge of uterine lining. Menstruation may also be

referred to as a “period”, denoting a length or portion of time,

hinting at the association between woman and time. Systems of time-

keeping have always been measured by cyclical patterns, the rising

and falling of the sun, the different phases of the moon, seasonal

changes and so on. Woman’s biology is tied to cyclical phases and,

therefore, time. She, for example, is more fertile at certain points

in the menstruation cycle than others and ceases being capable of

bearing children after expending the last of her eggs. A man,

however, is not tied to cyclical phases in considering his fertility

and he may continue to father children well into his dotage. Man’s

body is not subject to quite the same time restraints that a woman’s

is and he therefore considers time to be more closely associated

with the female body.

With a little expansion it is not difficult to see how this

relationship between woman and time has become associated with

death. All humans originate from the womb of their mothers: woman is

therefore associated with the beginning of life. However, due to

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woman’s close relation to time the origination of life becomes

associated with its inevitable death, for time is what connects life

to death. Georges Bataille writes, in Eroticism, that since life

‘constantly exhausts its resources, it can only proceed under one

condition: that beings given life whose explosive force is exhausted

shall make room for fresh beings coming into the cycle with renewed

vigour’ (1957, p.59). To this extent, the cyclical periods that a

woman’s body is subjected to, represent the life/death cycle due to

their relation to fertility. It is temporal finitude that results in the

association of woman’s fertility with death, the fact that all that

is born will not live indefinitely. Woman, in her association with

time and generation, thus becomes associated with the inevitability

of death. This association of woman, birth and death may be seen in

the story of Adam and Eve, wherein Eve disobeys God and is punished

with the pains of childbirth and mortality (Genesis 3, NIV).

Humanity now supposedly suffers birth and death because of the

action of a woman. We can now see how the conjunction of woman and

death represent temporal finitude: woman is associated with time and

her connection with generation and death represents its limits.

The conjunction of woman and death may also be seen to represent the

limits of spatial extension. The feminine has traditionally been

associated with passivity and the masculine with active potentiality

in Western discourse, but also in the yin and yang of Eastern imagery

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and the marianismo and machismo of Latin America. A similar division

exists in Lotman’s analysis in his paper, The origin of plot in the light of

topology:

‘It is not difficult to notice that characters can be divided

into those who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to

plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the

artistic world and cross the frontier, the basic topological

feature of this space, and those who are immobile, who

represent, in fact, a function of this space’ (1973).

Myths thus consist of the interaction between the male hero and the

female space (“cave”, “house” etc.) around him that he is free to

shape (ibid.). John Berger, in his Ways of Seeing, dedicates a chapter

to the analysis of how men and women are represented in oil

paintings and contemporary media, again finding a similar division.

He writes that ‘[a] man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of

power that he embodies…a power which he exercises on others’ (1972,

pp.45-6). This masculine external exercising of power is another

version of male active potential. ‘Presence for a woman’,

conversely, ‘is so intrinsic to her person that men tend to think of

it as an almost physical emanation’ (ibid., p.46), which again shows

the equation of woman with spatial function. Men are associated with

potentiality, the power of potential, whereas women are associated

with physicality, the actuality to be shaped by male potential.

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Potentiality has no inherent limitation, whereas actuality is

already limited by its actual existence. Female physicality thus

represents the limits of spatial location. Woman is immanent space;

man is the potential to transcend that space.1

Now humans are material beings that occupy space through our

inhabiting of a body. Following the gender division outlined above,

the mind, as the active principle behind the body, has become

associated with masculinity and the body with femininity. This

relation of woman and body has also resulted in an association with

death, similar to woman’s connection with time. Bodies are born,

bleed, decay and finally die. We attribute death to failure of the

body more than we attribute it to failure of the mind. To be

embodied is therefore to become susceptible to disease,

disfigurement and death. Birth, as brought about by a woman,

represents the source of embodiment and, menstruation, as female

bleeding, represents the possibility of bodily corruption. Maria

Tartar, in Lustmord, thus writes that ‘[t]hrough her association with

the body, bleeding, and birth, woman becomes uniquely linked with

mortality’ (1995, p.33). Lotman also writes, ‘[i]nasmuch as closed

space can be interpreted as "a cave", "the grave", "a house",

"woman"… entry into it is interpreted on various levels as "death,"

1 Simone de Beauvoir provides an excellent analysis of how femininity has become associated with immanence and masculinity with transcendence in The Second Sex (1949, part II).

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"conception," "return home" and so on’ (1973). Spatial extension

thus becomes the point of coincidence between femininity, body,

generation and death: nature becomes Mother-nature for all life is

born from and returns to it. Elisabeth Bronfen, in Over Her Dead Body:

death, femininity and the aesthetic, usefully sums this conjunction as ‘woman-

death-womb-tomb’ which results from ‘the ambivalence that the

mother’s gift of birth is also the gift of death’ (1995, p.67).

We have seen that the conjunction of woman and death have therefore

come to represent the conditions and, by extension, the limits of spatio-

temporal experience. If we follow Kant, as I noted in the

introduction, we cannot know if space and time are the conditions

and limits of reality in-itself, or whether these are just the

conditions and limits of our representation of it. Thus the conjunction of

woman and death represent the conditions and limits of spatio-temporal representation. I

show this by arguing that the very nature of representation is

inherently bound to a discourse of life/death and

masculinity/femininity. From this discussion, a double movement of

affirmation and negation will become apparent in the very nature of

representation.

3. Representation and Death

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What does it mean to represent something? We can break up the word

into its component parts: “re” and “present”. “Present”, as a verb,

means to introduce, show or exhibit; as a noun, “present” refers to

the period of time currently occurring, as in the present tense. The

term “represent” plays on both of these meanings when the prefix

“re”, meaning again or repetition, is added. To represent something

is show or make present, that which was present, but is no longer

i.e. to re-present it. Representation therefore brings to the mind

that which is not immediately available to the senses. Whilst the

term “memory” serves a similar definition, memory refers to past

events via mental representations of the remembered event;

representation is the modus operandi of memory and, indeed, following

Kant, of all experience.

Representation brings forth through mimesis: it imitates that which

was, but is no longer, whether it is an object in reality or an

image in the mind’s eye. I am quick to note that imitation is not

the same as replication; there are varying degrees of imitation.

When the artist creates a representation, he2 creates something that

both is and isn’t the same as the original object or idea; he

simultaneously affirms and negates the represented object. Although the

representation is like that which has been imitated, it is

different, to a lesser or greater degree. The artist may choose to

2 I purposely use the masculine pronoun here, rather than the feminine. I explain why in the next section.

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enhance certain aspects of the object being represented over others,

or leave them out entirely. The representation may suggest and point

to the original object, but it is not an exact replica.

Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, writes

that ‘[e]ven the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is

lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique

existence at the place where it happens to be’ (1935, II). Although

Benjamin is referring to the reproduction of art works, Berger shows

that Benjamin’s argument is as equally applicable to the creation of

works of art as it is to their reproduction: ‘[a]n image is a sight

which has been recreated or reproduced. It is an appearance, or a

set of appearances, which has been detached from the place and time

in which it first made its appearance and preserved – for a few

moments or a few centuries’ (1972, pp.9-10). Whether it’s the

original piece of art or the object chosen for representation both

are separated from their reproductions or representations by a

separate existence in space and time. Indeed, Benjamin’s argument is

that reproductions can never be exact replicas, but must always be

representations: the process of reproduction inherently changes

aspects of the original work. ‘For example, in photography, process

reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are

unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is

adjustable and chooses its angle at will’ (ibid.). Benjamin argues

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that every original piece of art work has an “aura”, which

diminishes when the work is reproduced (ibid.). If so, then the

“aura” of the object chosen for artistic representation must also

diminish. Yet we do not necessarily devalue works of art on this

basis; although the original “aura” diminishes, we may say that a

different “aura” is created as the artist judges those aspects of

the represented object worthy of imitation and those that are not.

It is this difference between the “aura” of the represented object and

the “aura” of the representation that allows us to claim that the

process of representation gives birth to something new. To represent

an object is to create something that is both independent of and yet

dependent on the represented object – to this extent the represented

object has given birth or life to the representation, has created

something new and simultaneously the same. This analogy between

representation and birth or creation is best seen in Ovid’s story of

Pygmalion. Pygmalion became dissatisfied with the women of Cyprus,

sculpted his own perfect woman and ‘[a]s if coming awake he fell in

love’ (Hughes, 1997, pp.145-6). He asked Venus for a wife that would

resemble his sculpture and as he kissed the sculpture’s lips and

groped its breast, he found that Venus had instead brought his

sculpture to life (ibid., pp.148-50). Pygmalion’s representation of

a women, his perfect woman no less, is literally brought to life.

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An objection arises: how accurate is it to use life and birth

terminology in the context of artistic representation? To

legitimate its use I draw on Batailles’ claim that ‘[r]eproduction

implies the existence of discontinuous beings. Beings which reproduce

themselves are distinct from one another, and those reproduced are

likewise distinct from each other, just as they are distinct from

their parents’ (1957, p.12). The term “reproduce” need not be

limited to sexual reproduction, indeed the term only came to denote

sexual reproduction due to its original meaning: “to make a copy”.

To the extent that a copy is distinct from the original, be it a

representation of an object or a child of a mother, that copy is a

unique being in that there is a discontinuity between it and its parent

object; it is a discontinuous being. Reproduction thus describes the

process whereby one being becomes two, wherein a new being is

brought into existence, creating discontinuity with the first

(ibid., p.14). It is in this way that we can use the terms “life”

and “birth” with some justification when referring to the process of

representation, for the represented object is discontinuous with its

representation and is therefore given birth to by it.

Although we can talk of the process of representation giving birth

in the sense of bringing something new into existence, we know that

representations do not come alive in the same way that Pygmalion’s

sculpture did. In actuality representations are inanimate, but give

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the illusion of animation. Roquentin, in Sartre’s Nausea, notes of a

statue that ‘[h]e isn’t alive, true, but he isn’t inanimate either’

(1938, p.47). Anyone who has seen the Mona Lisa will comment on how

her eyes appear to follow you across the room (1506). Film also

appears to be animate, switching between frames so quickly that our

eyes cannot detect that each individual frame is actually

stationary, the illusion of animation coming from the change in the

content of the frames. What I am referring to here is

representation’s ability to draw into the present that which lies in

the past, representation’s ability that ‘allows the past, with its

element of loss and death to be revived before the living, in and

through representation, in the here and now’ (Marin, 1977, p.87).

Berger notes that ‘[i]mages were first made to conjure up the

appearances of something that was absent’ (1972, p.10). To repeat an

earlier statement, representations make present something that is no

longer present; they re-present. Representation is therefore a

contradiction between presence and absence, between affirmation and

negation. Bronfen writes that ‘representation renders present what is

absent, [it] fashions itself out of an absence, which at the same

time it specifically confirms’ (1992, p.30). This is because every

represented object has a unique existence in space and time that

cannot be replicated, as noted earlier. In this context, the process

of representation brings the represented object to life by making it

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present, but also suggests the death of the represented object

because it points to something that exists in the past and cannot

live any longer. Thus, we can say that an artist’s desire to represent the original

object is negated by the very process of representation itself in the double movement

towards presence and absence, life and death.

This contradiction is the result of the limits of spatio-temporal

representation. A representation cannot extend its existence beyond

the limits imposed upon it by its creator. When an artist creates a

representation he decides which aspects of the original object to

enhance or denigrate. Pygmalion, for example, made his sculpture

modest and ‘[l]ovelier than any living woman’ (Hughes, 1997, p.146).

The artist’s selection and exclusion of traits and aspects creates a

frozen representation of the represented object; it does not continue to

live beyond the artist’s judgement, it does not continue to change

its constitution over time. Representations encounter their finitude

from the very first moment of their existence. Just as we do not

have a life outside our own mortal limitations, neither do

representations have life outside the limitations imposed upon them

by the artist. Finitude is the demarcation between life and death. The

difference between human finitude and representational finitude is

that of temporality. As temporal beings, we humans meet our mortal

limitations after the passing of a certain amount of time.

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Representations however are atemporal; they are frozen slices of

time and therefore sit on a knife’s edge between life and death.

They are alive and dead, rather than alive then dead; they achieve

immortality through death.3

This relationship between representation and life/death has been

made explicit in a number of literary works. One such work is Poe’s

The Oval Portrait, which tells the story of a beautiful maiden unhappily

married to a painter. The painter obsessively paints a portrait of

his wife to the point where he no longer even looks at his original

model (1951, pp.223-5). As he finishes the last stroke he claims the

portrait to be ‘indeed Life itself’ – only to find that his wife lies

dead beside the canvas (ibid., p.225, original italics). What is

interesting about this story is that it is told in the context of a

narrator who takes great interest in the paintings in the chateau

that he is staying in and prepares for bed so that he may ‘criticize

and describe them’ (ibid., p.223). Carol Christ, in her paper Painting

the Dead: Portraiture and Necrophilia in Victorian Art and Poetry, notes that the

enclosing of the story within this context sets it up in a ‘self-

referential literary context’ (1993, p.135). To put it another way,

by making the narrator someone who is preparing to criticise and

describe paintings, Poe explicitly tells the reader that the story

3 Marin notes how this temporal paradox is made explicit in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia ego, wherein we find at the centre of the painting death pronouncing a sentence without a verb, therefore lacking a tense (1977, p.83).

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has something to say about the nature of painting, or in our case,

representation. The unhappy maiden dies as her representation is

brought to life, literalising the notion that the represented object

is denied a future by giving life to its representation. A similar

connection may also be seen in Browning’s poem, My Last Duchess,

wherein the narrator describes the creation of a portrait of his

previous wife: ‘I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.

There she stands / As if alive’ (1842). The Duchess is killed, but

is immortalised in her portrait ‘as if alive’.

I have now shown that because the nature of representation is

inherently bound to a series of dialectics concerning presence and

absence, creation and negation, temporality and atemporality it is

consequently involved in a discourse of life and death.

Specifically, the artist negates (kills) the represented object in

his attempt to affirm (give life to) its representation. Most of the

examples I have used have involved the use of female subjects in

order to say something about the relationship between death and the

nature of artistic representation. This, I now argue, is because

representation is inherently engendered and that representations are

gendered female in relation to the male artist. Similarly, we will

find another double movement of simultaneous affirmation and

negation.

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4. Representation and Women

Berger extends what I have said in section two about the

masculine/feminine distinction to our way of seeing so that we may

think of vision as being gendered. He writes:

‘[M]en act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch

themselves being looked at. This determines not only most

relations between men and women but also the relation of women

to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the

surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and

most particularly an object of vision: a sight’ (1972, p.47,

original italics).

We can break up the act of seeing into its constituent components:

the seer and the seen. The former describes an active engagement and

is thus assigned to the male gender, whereas the latter describes a

passive state and is thus assigned to the female gender. Laura

Mulvey, in her seminal work Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, links

scopophilia (literally “love of looking”) to the searching voyeurism

and exploration of childhood that ‘is essentially active’ (1975,

IB). The point is not so much that the male sex looks, whilst the

female sex is looked at; it is more the case that looking, as an

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active engagement, is gendered as masculine and being look at, as a

passive state, as feminine. This means that a female can look, but

she is taking up a masculine practice and is therefore gendered as

male (as in exhibits characteristics associated with masculinity)

when she does so. Indeed, Berger notes that because women are so

used to being gazed at, they come to gaze at themselves in the same

way: ‘she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as

the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity’

(1972, p.46, original italics). Equally, to maintain consistency, a

man may also be gazed at, but he is gendered as female in the

process. The use of gendering terminology (i.e. association with

masculine/feminine characteristics) over sex terminology (i.e.

determined by biological sex) accounts for any examples that don’t

seem to fit the pattern described.

The act of looking requires subjectivity, in that it chooses what to

look at and proceeds to judge and shape it. The act of being look

at, on the other hand, does not need subjectivity, only a spatial

existence – the provision of an object to be looked at. It is in

this way that the gazing male becomes associated with the subject

and the gazed at female becomes associated with the object. Or, to

put it another way, the gazing subject is male, the gazed at object

is female.4 We can now begin to see how the process of

4 It is in this context that I am inclined to agree with Irigaray’s claim that ‘any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the

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representation is gendered. The artist is the active agent that

gazes at his passive object and consciously decides what to re-

present and what to negate. The referent object is female as it

endures the male gaze of the artist. The representation of the

referent object is also female – especially female – as it submits

entirely to the manipulation of the male artist. Bronfen notes that

we can therefore not only describe ‘woman as image’, but also the

‘image as woman’ (1992, p.122). The process of re-presenting then is

masculine, whereas the actual representation itself, the end

product, is feminine. This is why Pygmalion’s sculpture, Poe’s

portrait and Browning’s Duchess were all female and their creators,

male.5

What I have been describing is the appropriation of the creative

principle by man. ‘Aeschylus, Aristotle and Hippocrates proclaimed

that on earth as on Mount Olympus it is the male principle that is

the true creator: form, number and movement comes from him…woman’s

fertility is considered merely a passive virtue’ writes Beauvoir

(1949, p.167). The equivalent in the Christian tradition is the

notion of divine creativity, logos spermatikos. If we recall section

two, I noted that generation contributed to woman’s association with“masculine”’ (1974, p.133); the conjunction running subjectivity=intentionality=potentiality=masculinity.5 The Picture of Dorian Gray is one example that bucks this trend, but, as I argued earlier, the representation need only be gendered as female, not actually of the female sex; this certainly seems plausible due to the allegations of homosexuality that were levied at Wilde on its publication (Wilde, 1890).

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death. Here however generation results in man’s association with the

creation of life. Man is movement and transcendence and therefore

cannot be associated with immobile and bodily death like woman can.

Of course biological generation in actuality requires both male and

female input, and, equally, masculine subjectivity is not the sole

power involved in artistic creation.

The male artist is not the transcendent deity that he pretends to

be; he is not entirely free to represent as he pleases. Pygmalion’s

perfect woman, for example, came to him in a dream:

‘As a spectre, sick of unbeing,

That had taken possession of his body

To find herself a life.

She moved into his hands,

She took possession of his fingers

And began to sculpt a perfect woman.

So he watched his hands shaping a woman

As if he were still asleep’ (Hughes, 1997, p.146).

Although Pygmalion is the one actively creating the sculpture, he is

described as doing so in passive terms, having been possessed by the

object that he seeks to represent. Pygmalion is described as having

‘adored woman’, but one suspects that this adoration is not entirely

his choice (ibid., p.145). Indeed, the root of adore means “to

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worship”, suggesting that Pygmalion is not the autonomous subject

that he first seemed. An artist’s choice of what to represent and

how it is represented then is influenced by what objects and the

extent to which they attract him (the verb now being assigned to the

objects rather than the artist). As long as objects are able to

exert this influence over the artist his power will not be absolute.

Tartar writes that ‘[s]exuality and femininity…threaten the notion

of autonomous masculinity held up as a social ideal’ (1995, p.32).

Pygmalion certainly not only adored the women of Cyprus, but also

became infatuated with his sculpture: ‘his love / For this woman so

palpably a woman / Became his life’ (Hughes, 1997, p.147). The

feminine image (doubly so) affirms the artist’s masculinity (in the

sense of being attracted to women) and negates it (in the sense of

free subjectivity). Equally, the process of representation affirms the

artist’s desire for transcendence (in the sense of independence from

space) and negates it (by demonstrating the artist’s utter dependence

on it). This duplicity is best expressed in Gabriel von Max’s Der

Anatom, wherein an anatomist is depicted with his hand ambiguously

holding a sheet over the corpse of a beautiful woman: is he covering

the body so as not to see her, or is he uncovering the body to take

a better look (1869)? The female corpse arouses feelings of sexual

desire, affirming male identity, whilst simultaneously arousing

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disgust and fear of mortality, threatening male autonomy and

transcendence.6

5. Conclusion: The Limits of Representation

I have argued that since man associates himself with transcendence,

we read those representations involving the woman-death aggregation

(primarily created by males, if not exclusively) as demonstrating an

awareness of spatio-temporal limitation as well as a desire to transcend them.

But as any desire to transcend spatio-temporal representation must

necessarily be represented by the very limitations that it seeks to

transcend, such a representation must affirm what it seeks to negate. In other

words, as we can only express the desire to transcend the spatio-

temporal within the limitations of the spatio-temporal, the result is an

ambivalent double movement of affirmation and negation. This double

movement is also mirrored in our duplicitous attitudes towards woman

and death: our fear and demonising, yet simultaneous fascination and

obsession.7

6 Tartar’s excellent analysis of the representation of sexual violence in Weimar Germany concludes that ‘masculine identity and artistic identity [came] to be constituted over the bodies of women’ (1995, p.178).7 Bataille writes of death: ‘[o]n the one hand the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life; on the other an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us profoundly’ (1957, p.45).

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What I have termed “double movement” may be better explained using

Freud’s notion of unheimlich (meaning “uncanny”): ‘the unheimlich is what

was once heimisch, homelike, familiar; the prefix “un” is the token

of repression’ (1919, p.15). I am not relying on the specifics of

Freudian psychoanalysis; instead, I want only to note the structure

of the concept, that the uncanny invokes both familiarity and

unfamiliarity in the same feeling. It is this unified structure of

simultaneous affirmation and negation, of being stuck between making

two contradictory statements “this is” and “this is not” that

describes the structure of the double movement that I have argued is

inherent in mimetic-based representation. Indeed, Freud notes the

link between the uncanny and representation’s contradiction between

the animate and the inanimate: ‘it is in the highest degree uncanny

when inanimate objects – a picture or a doll – come to life’ (1919,

p.16).

Representations of the woman-death conjunction simultaneously make

the statements “spatio-temporal is good” and “spatio-temporal is

bad”. Whilst men are happy to live (having been given birth to by a

woman) and enjoy the sexual gratification that may be found in a

woman’s body, men equally recognise that their desire for woman

threatens their transcendence and that being born also means that

they will die.

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Voltaire, in Candide, asks if there is anything more absurd than ‘to

detest existence and yet to cling to one’s existence’ (1759, XII);

yet this absurd conclusion is precisely what man has drawn from his

ruminating upon the existential condition and he has justified it by

using woman as a scape-goat.8

6. Postscript

Looking back at this essay a year later, I can’t help but make two

comments. The first is that my use of Kant now seems somewhat odd

and its intention unclear. Did I mean to use Kant as a justification

for my investigation or is my investigation a reflection on Kantian

representation? I never bring myself to admit the former, though it

appears that the legitimacy of the conclusion rests upon it, and the

latter remains too poorly developed, unless we take the main line of

the essay to be an ethical critique of Kantian representation, that

its dualism locks us within a patriarchal epistemology?

My second comment feeds into this. The presupposition that the

argument works with is that representation is defined as mimetic,

excluding any notion of metaphorical representation. According to

Kofman’s interpretation of Nietzsche, metaphor is integral to

8 It remains to be seen whether woman duplicates this conclusion or not.

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understanding Nietzsche’s notion of truth and it this that allows

him to move beyond the Kantian framework (Nietzsche’s Metaphors). What’s

more Nietzsche explicitly refers to truth as a woman in a number of

passages (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, preface). Nietzsche’s comments on

women are often taken to be sexist, but could his metaphorical

epistemology actually offer liberation from Kantian mimetic

patriarchy as proposed in this essay?

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