This volume, one in the Re-Reading the Canon series, collects together fourteen essays which put forward self-consciously feminist interpretations of the writings of Descartes. Of the fourteen, nine have been published previously, including those of Susan Bordo, Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigary, James A. Winders, Ruth Perry, Erica Harth, Leslie Heywood, Mario Moussa (with Susan Bordo) and Karl Stern. The collection includes new essays by Stanley Clarke, Adrianna M. Paliyenko, Thomas Wartenburg, Eileen O’Neill and Mario Sáenz.

In this review there are two issues I would like to address: the way in which these essays are feminist, and the sense in which they are interpretations of Descartes.

Insofar as these essays all purport to be feminist interpretations of Descartes, we readers might well ask: what makes an interpretation a feminist one? One thing this collection shows us is that there is no one answer to this question: there are a variety of perspectives which can all be called feminist. The collection is divided into four parts which loosely reflect this variety.

The first part consists of essays which employ a psychoanalytic framework or consider the ‘gender inflected’ metaphors inherent in Descartes’ dualism. In doing so, they aim to call into question the objective validity of Descartes’ metaphysics. The last essay of this group, Clarke’s, investigates whether Descartes might have the resources available to him to surmount the criticisms resulting from privileging a perspective other than the metaphysical one.

The second group of essays again picks up a particular psychoanalytic perspective and considers the place of gender in the dialogue in place between Descartes and postmodern thinkers, including Irigaray herself, Foucault, Derrida and Lacan. This group of essays is titled “Gender (and Other) Trouble in the Meditations“, so it is odd that Irigaray’s very interesting appropriation of Descartes’ treatment of wonder in the Passions of the Soul is included here. Irigaray wants to claim that the passion of wonder informs the relation of between One and Other, and in particular between men and women, and as such suggests a way of bridging what seems like the abyss between the two.

The third group of essays takes up an analytical historical perspective, noting the great influence of Descartes on the women thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in particular the way in which Descartes’ skeptical method and his egalitarianism about the faculty reason — a faculty distributed equally among all human beings — had liberatory implications for women of his own period and can still do so today. Eileen O’Neill’s essay asks the important philosophical historical question of why today we hear so little about the women philosophers of this period. Her answer brings in several contributing factors, the practice of anonymous publishing, a mixing of religious and philosophical perspectives which became unfashionable, the adoption of other perspectives that don’t win out, and a resultant pigeon-holing of these women as doing a ‘feminine’ philosophy, something other than philosophy proper. She concludes, rightly, by urging us all to read such writers as du Châtelet, Suchon, Astell, Conway, Scudéry and others in their own right.

The last set of essays are devoted to a consideration of the various ways in which a Cartesian paradigm pervades through contemporary culture. Heywood and Moussa and Bordo exhort us to a continued vigilance, to recognize and exorcise the vestiges of a Cartesian privileging of a transcendental, disembodied self from our ways of thinking. Sáenz has an interesting spin on this, as he still wants to preserve a notion of integral selfhood. But this self, unlike that concept of self he ascribes to Descartes, is one immersed in the social, and so indicative of a non-solipsistic subjectivity.

Equally, the title of the volume suggests that these essays are all interpretations of Descartes’ writings. However, very few of them engage directly with Descartes’ text. (The essays from the historical perspective are the exception here.) Rather they are all engaged with a set of ideas that have come to be identified — for better or for worse reasons — with Descartes’ philosophical position. Thus, most of the authors represented in this volume are engaged in re-reading a canonical reading of Descartes through the lens of gender. It is important to recognize, however, that this canonical Descartes, though he bears some relation to the ‘real’ Descartes, is not necessarily identical with person whose views are represented in the Discourse on Method, Meditations, and Passions of the Soul. Contemporary scholars are very much engaged in re-reading Descartes’ works and showing that he need not in fact be committed to the views he is often taken to hold. Perhaps the most challenging of these re-readings concerns the nature of the Cartesian human being. If Descartes is maligned for anything, it is for his mind-body dualism. For readers often suppose — indeed, it is the canonical reading — that for Descartes not only are mind and body really distinct but also this distinction entails that all thought happens independently of the body. Descartes, however, wants to hold that a human being is something more than a soul put in a body like a sailor is put on a ship. In a human being, mind and body are intertwined such that we have the kind of sensations we do — sensations with the phenomenology of pain, hunger and the like — as well as emotions. And indeed, he works out the details of this account in his last work The Passions of the Soul. That Descartes does have a view about the union of mind and body cuts against the current of the view often identified as Cartesian. But that this view — that we could think perfectly well were we not to have a body at all — need not be Descartes’ own does not detract from the fact that the allegedly Cartesian view is out there in circulation. What feminist critics have done is brought the lens of gender to bear on this particular view, and they have shown how, from certain points of view, this position is a highly problematic one.

As an end note, I want to complain about the number (and severity) of the typos in this volume. There are so many, and they are often of such an obvious nature, that it is distracting.

You can buy this book from Barnes & Noble.com: FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF RENE DESCARTES