Can imitation emancipate

The article undertakes a review of contemporary feminist theory regarding its relationship to the question of the use of the given: whether existing models of femininity can be a resource for subversive imitation in the process of emancipation, or should they be rejected as ideological constructs. These strategies lead up to a broader philosophical opposition between historicism and immanentism (Michel Foucault and the field of cultural studies) on the one hand, and theories that put their stakes on the subject and the event (Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek) on the other. The author analyzes the trajectory of the development of the first strategy in the feminist theory of the third wave in its opposition to the revolutionary-minded radical feminism of the second wave, and comes to the conclusion about the fundamentally melancholic affectation of Foucauldian feminism of Judith Butler and the like.

From the Butlerian parodic repetition, the author moves to a more positive idea of mimesis in the theory of sexual difference by Luce Irigaray and her followers Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, and then criticizes the latter from the point of view of the late Irigaray and her concept of real sexual difference. The article argues that Irigaray is not a post-structuralist philosopher of plurality, and that her early concept of mimesis should be understood in conjunction with her later ideas about creating feminine ideals that could allow real sexual difference to unfold culturally. Ultimately, the question of the emancipatory use of the given is resolved by synthesizing Irigaray’s ideas with Jacques Lacan’s theory of sublimation. Imitation is understood as being able to elevate existing objects, practices and images to the rank of sublime, and thus create a rupture in the given, inventing new signifiers in art, love and politics.