Toward the critique of symbolicism: Nancy Fraser on psychoanalytic feminism and deconstructivist feminism

NANCY FRASER SOBRE O FEMINISMO PSICANALÍTICO E O FEMINISMO DESCONSTRUTIVISTA

Abstract

Nancy Fraser argues, drawing on the young Marx, that the task of social critique is to promote the self-clarification of the desires and struggles of our age. Although this definition is central to her work, Fraser only discusses what she means by it in a few texts. In this paper, my aim is to contribute to elucidate its meaning, albeit through an indirect strategy. Mobilizing some papers written between the 1980s and the early 1990s, I present her critiques of symbolicism. First, the symbolicism of what she calls psychoanalytic feminism or Lacanism, represented here mainly by the work of Julia Kristeva. Then, the symbolicism of what she calls deconstructivist feminism, represented here mainly by the work of Drucilla Cornell. In both cases, as I will try to show, the core of Fraser’s argument is that, although distinct, the theories of discourse developed by these authors place great emphasis on the symbolic and the dynamics of its subversion or transformation, which they seek to understand through an analysis of ahistorical constants: the psychic life or the logic of deconstruction. In so doing, she claims, they move away from the kind of historical analysis required by social critique, as the self-clarification of the desires and struggles of our age. An escape from the world that Fraser seeks to reject, highlighting the relationship between social critique and the diagnosis of the times.