ABSTRACT
There is a fundamental alliance between my understanding of ethical feminism and a program of critical social investigation advocated in the earlier years of the Frankfurt School. Like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, I would insist that such a program of critical and social research integrate psychoanalysis. My recrafting is that within the context of feminism it must include an account of the dearth of symbolizations for the feminine within sexual difference, and why that dearth of symbolization must itself be explored as a crucial aspect of social research. In her characterization of my position as based on the use of psychoanalysis as foundational, Fraser misunderstands the "critical" role I attribute to my own appropriation of Lacan. Fraser fails to understand how unconscious motivation and the construction of social fantasy must be the basis of any critical social research program, one that would, of course, need to include historical investigation into the meaning of woman and women and how women have struggled to change their lot. Even the most technical tools of investigation of social reality, such as regression analysis, demand a careful account of how the variables at stake have been evaluated. This evaluation demands that we fully come to terms with unconscious motivation and social fantasy diverged by cultural contexts. Furthermore, there is nothing foundationalist or universalistic about this program of critical social research, particularly in my insistence that gender is best understood as an encoded system of stratified differentiation, incompatible with the historical shift in modernity to functional differentiation; that is, a historical analysis. In fact, my own understanding of critical social research is in deep sympathy with the ethical demand for sensitivity to cultural difference and historical diversity. Ironically, the lack of emphasis on unconscious motivation and social fantasy in empirical research can itself be analyzed as an aspect of a questionable Eurocentric assumption about the "nature" of social reality.4 But in spite of my insistence on the centrality of a program of critical social research, the political and ethical aspirations of feminism cannot be reduced to such a program.
