ABSTRACT
In Hegel’s model of the constitution of identity and difference sexual difference is understood as opposition, complementarity or duality. A male embodied ethos operates as the norm of social identity and women are constituted as man’s ‘other’. There are two points about this model of sexual difference which bear repeating: (1) man’s self-identity, the meaning and value of his ethos, is given to him through the work of women who universalise his body and remain other to the norm as a result; (2) there is a remainder to be found in the constitution of the difference between the self and the Other in habit formation, the self and the world in the work of desire and between man and his other woman in ‘ethical’ life. That the maintenance of a dominant male ethos is based on a gift from women suggests a model of social ‘exchange’ different to that of contract. And that there is a remainder of difference beyond sexual duality suggests a more dispersed structure of identity than Hegel allows. In this chapter I will explore these two themes further through the idea of the gift as the basis of social exchange. This leads inevitably to a discussion of the relation between deconstruction and an ethics of sexual difference.
