The Necessary Feminisation of the Hegelian Dialectic

Abstract

By claiming that self-consciousness exists only as recognized, Hegel undermined the paradigm of the autonomous subject. But since in western culture autonomy is paired with masculinity, it follows that what Hegel proposes is in fact a feminisation of our notion of subjectivity. His misogyny, however, prevents him from noticing this, and in his description of the ethical state he reinstates the masculine, self-subsistent subjectivity as the model of the citizen and excludes women from the public sphere, which leads to inconsistencies in his theoretical project. I argue that this is the result of denying women recognition so that men could have the love and care guaranteed in order to uphold their illusion of autonomy, which jeopardizes the idea of the ethical state. In this way, both Hegelian insights and his blind spots provide us with tools for the analysis of contemporary democracies struggling with the inheritance of liberal contract theories and capitalist (ir)rationality.