ABSTRACT
So far, I have systematically investigated the position of ‘the feminine’ within the dominant symbolic order of the west, focusing mainly on the philosophical tradition. My aim in doing this was to account for what I identifi ed in Chapter 1 as the inability of rape victims to feature in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) process as agents who could accuse and whose forgiveness could be asked publicly as part of the transition to a more just and democratic political system in South Africa. In Chapters 2 and 3 the basic problem was broadened with an analysis of the meaning of rape within this symbolic order, and its tendency to become invisible or ‘impossible’, where rape is understood as the explicit, violent erasure of female sexual subjectivity. In Chapter 4 I argued that the disappearance or erasure of rape from the dominant symbolic must be understood in conjunction with the erasure of women’s subjectivity and thus of sexual difference and differentiation within the order as such. I discussed the position of ‘the feminine’ within the work of a series of late modern continental philosophers which broadly displays what I have called ‘a feminine turn’. I showed how there remains a strong tendency even in this part of the tradition which explicitly uses ‘the feminine’ as a positive value, to treat the feminine as either a function of masculine becoming, or as the foil against which the drama of masculine becoming-subject unfolds. Very seldom is the question raised about the material and symbolic conditions of women’s own becoming-subject within the dominant order.
