The State of Speech by Connolly Joy

Author:Connolly, Joy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY OF THE SELF

That rhetoric treats the body as the very stuff of virtue holds obvious implications for beliefs about gender and its role in the construction of the self in social practice. In a seminal text of feminist epistemology, Evelyn Fox Keller argues that a longstanding association between men and mind, women and nature, plagues Western thought, a “deeply rooted popular mythology” that cases reason and mind as male and feeling and the body as female. “In this division of emotional and intellectual labor, women have been the guarantors and protectors of the personal, the emotional, the particular, whereas science—the province par excellence of the impersonal, the rational, and the general—has been the preserve of men.”65 This is not true of Ciceronian rhetorical discourse, which resists philosophy’s tendencies to dualism, to split subjectivity into two different, mutually exclusive but emphatically unequal domains. On the contrary, when he rewrites the values and practices of the properly masculine man in terms that do not perfectly cohere with conventional mores of Roman republican masculinity, Cicero problematizes the cultural and intellectual imperative toward gender determinacy.

This establishes Cicero as a historical ally for theoretical work on the self done by feminist thinkers who posit subjectivity as process, by which the self is shaped by the forces of cultural ideology at the twin levels of belief system and practice. Feminists theorize a self that is liberated from the external disciplines of traditional power structures but at the same time true to the acts of internal discipline that are produced from personal and political belief. Feminist theory continues to call for new approaches to thinking the self, new visions of subjectivity, and in particular concepts of selfhood that allow for conscious self-development and empowerment without reenacting the repressive disciplines of the past. Such new theory of subjectivity will first of all avoid the philosophical impasse posed by what Cicero calls “absurd”dichotomies (de Orat. 3.60–61): conceptualizations of the subject that divide it into the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body. A new theory of the self requires a notion of embodied subjectivity, which will reconfigure the mental and the physical, the biological and the psychological, underscoring the interactivity of each. Second, it will refuse models of selfhood based in ideals of singularity and consistency, using instead multiplicity and flexibility as its templates. Third, the self will be viewed as attuned (not enslaved) to constantly shiftingsocial, political, geographic, and cultural inscriptions: although society does not master the self, the self cannot float free from society and its practices.

Let me summarize. I began with Plato’s critique of sophistic teaching and democratic knowledge in the Gorgias, pointing out that his ideal discourse (logos) is detached from the shifting contingencies of custom, religion, and even law.66 This is the line of argument that Cicero signals he is trying to unseat in de Oratore, though Cicero tends to flatten Plato’s critique in his attempt to clear the ground. At the beginning of the third and last book, we remember

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