How has the relationship between postmodernism and woman come to be determined? Just as postmodernism has been read as the welcoming back of ‘the other’ from the violence of identity thinking, so too it has been read as the feminisation of the philosophical. As is clear from my reading of Levinas's work, the ethics of difference is partially figured through the feminine. But what does this figuration reveal for a philosophy we might call, however inadequately, postmodernism? Is this a sign that the deconstruction of identity predicated upon the negation and expulsion of difference is, at once, the deconstruction of masculinity predicated upon the negation and expulsion of the feminine? Is it through such a movement (towards the feminine) that postmodernism is figurable as woman? In this chapter, I suggest that we should not assume that there is something within postmodernism that renders its alliance with the feminine automatic. In other words, the relation between ‘woman’ and postmodernism is not essential, but is determined in specific sites of inscription.

In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Rosi Braidotti discusses the crisis of the discourse of modernity and the Cartesian subject as opening up new possibilities for re-figuring sexual difference or, at least, for making visible the problematic of the relation between women and philosophy (Braidotti 1991: 10). The subject of modernity, she argues, occupies a specifically phallocentric order: the rational subject is masculine and achieves its identity through an expulsion or repression of its physicality.