Abstract
The purpose of this article is to deconstruct the prevailing dichotomy of essentialism and constructionism and to explore the possibility of political intervention in the present sexual regime. Social constructionism, which is often regarded as antithetical to biological essentialism, has been recently criticized for its own reductionistic inclination to essentialize the social. Introducing the displacement of essentialism claimed by those who themselves call into question sexual binarism, this article then focuses upon the rereadings of Luce Irigaray, who is often called an essentialist, by two feminists in different fields : a Marxist literary critic, Gayatri Spivak, and a psychoanalytical political scientist, Drucilla Cornell. The critics, both deconstructionists, put emphasis upon the literariness found in Irigaray's writings, saying that the rhetoric used to express “the feminine” irreducible to the biological body can produce revolutionary occasions for us to intervene in the present sexist politics. Despite the risk of reverting to anatomical reductionism and despite Cornell's criticism of Spivak for her confusion of essence and particularity, the re-figuration of sexual difference by the two feminists attempts probe the condition of women who are muted in today's global gender regime in more subtle and irresistible ways. Nevertheless, both critics tend to overlook the violence caused by the rhetorical intervention itself, which challenges the political manipulation of the boundaries between the representative and the unrepresentative, and thereby sometimes violates the existing system in actual and brutal ways as well as in a rhetorical way. This is also the case with social constructionists who simply underline the liberationist phase of the performative, claiming the de-figuration of sexual difference. What should be examined now are the traces of violence that are inscribed as given entities in the scenario of desire in the process of self-formation and also projected to the outer social arrangement of sexual difference as natural or essential.
