ABSTRACT
In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , the structure of engendering judgments brackets metaphysics, and within the scope of reason gives order to the manifold of appearances; it abstracts from emotion, and makes (a) room (of one’s own) for the autonomous enlightenment subject. However, Kant’s Anthropology puts a male gaze in power. By looking at how Kant en-genders judgment, I question whether this structure can be made to tame its own male misogynist hysteria.
Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew opens with an “Induction” or frame tale, within which the taming of the shrew is performed as a play. The Induction ostensibly frees the subject of this theatre from its inner performances; at the end of the play within the play, however, that view is determined by male hegemony. Thus while the Induction begins with a woman chasing a man to get what is owed her, by the end, that theme is harnessed by a character in the play within the play, a woman, Kate, whose final speech is about how women owe everything to men.
The opening revolutionary stances of Kant and Shakespeare are structurally parallel, as are the positions of Kant’s (male) voice in the Anthropology and Kate’s voice at the end of The Taming of the Shrew. (Unlike Kant, Shakespeare was aware of this and this awareness is inscribed in the play.)
Kant’s and Shakespeare’s en-gendering judgment is that of a free self, but it is also an “I” which speaks through a ‘canon,’ through ‘plays’ (syntheses of appearances and cultural categories). The self’s gender becomes fixed by the funnelling process of its own judgment-formation.
The problem is that of properly framing the tale. Kiss me K…. whose tongue is in my mouth? Whose tale is it I tell?
I discuss all this as theme, judgments/characters, and totality, thereby performing an adaptation of Kant’s theatre analogy of reason. Totality is always more than its theme sets out, because the performativity of en-gendering judgments/characters exceeds enlightenment schematization. Judgment is performatively engendered and therefore necessarily trans-gendering. By analysing paralogism in both Kant and the play, we begin to see why the structure of judgment itself cannot but engender a further, pluralistic enlightenment revolution.
