A Philosophical Investigation of Rape

The Making and Unmaking of the Feminine Self

Louise du Toit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135854997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a critical feminist perspective on the widely debated topic of transitional justice and forgiveness. Louise Du Toit examines the phenomenon of rape with a feminist philosophical discourse concerning women's or 'feminine' subjectivity and selfhood. She demonstrates how the hierarchical dichotomy of male active versus female passive sexuality – which obscures the true nature of rape – is embedded in the dominant western symbolic frame. Through a Hegelian and phenomenological reading of first-person accounts by rape victims, she excavates an understanding of rape that also starts to open up a way out of the denial and destruction of female sexual subjectivity.

1 Rape, Forgiveness and Reconciliation

INTRODUCTION

This first chapter explores the meaning of rape in the context of the political transition in South Africa. After increasingly brutal state repression and a near civil war during the 1980s, the new, democratic South Africa was born in 1994 out of extended negotiations between particularly, the African National Congress (ANC) and the National Party (NP). As part of the political settlement, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was created through the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (no. 34 of 1995) for dealing with the difficult moral dimensions of the transition. Aspects of the TRC’s task included addressing the trauma of the struggle, repairing trust, restoring humanity (and humaneness, often referred to as ubuntu), building a moral basis for creating a society with new values, as well as legitimizing the new dispensation. My reading of the transitional process takes as its point of departure the perspective of the victims of ‘struggle rape’ but gradually extends to South African women in general.

The theoretical frame for this reading is presented in the first section of this chapter, entitled ‘The Borderline Feminine’, where I argue that ‘the feminine’ is neither fully included, nor fully excluded by the western symbolic order, but it rather serves as a demarcation of this order. For this discussion, I draw in particular on some of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s insights in his essay, ‘One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles’ (1989). I link his understanding of the demarcating or delineating function of the feminine, to the effective erasure of rape as a political issue in and through the TRC process. I show in other words that rape as an instance of sexual and sexualizing assault, functions as a way of grounding and maintaining the political space as a masculine space, defining that space through its violent differentiation and separation from what is construed as the private, sexual, ‘feminine’ space. Rape is thus a political instrument, dividing those with public power from those without, but on such a basic level that it does not appear as political, within the political, at all. The TRC’s relative neglect of rape victims corresponds with this broader picture, with the effect that the transition becomes characterized by an effective erasure of sexual difference as a political issue and by a reinstatement of the newly established political sphere as a masculine space.

Next, in the section called ‘On the Impossibility of Forgiving Rape’, I interrogate Jacques Derrida’s passing remark about the rape victims of the struggle in South Africa, in the context of his essay, ‘On Forgiveness’, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (2002). In particular, I explore the hidden or implied link between, on the one hand, Derrida’s concepts of ‘real’ (in the sense of ideal) or ‘impossible’ forgiveness, that is, the forgiveness of the unforgivable, and on the other hand, the figure of the feminine, very specifically that of the struggle rape victim. By explicating this link implied by his text, I show how the silenced / sacrificed feminine victim is structurally necessary for national reconciliation to be achieved, for the possibility of the birth of a new ‘nation’, but how, at the same time, that dependence must be erased or negated.

Using this interpretive framework, I proceed in the third section, ‘Forgiveness Is a Woman’, to show that for the TRC to have given the struggle rape victims a place to stand and a voice that could be received (heard, and listened to), would have been to threaten the process of creating a new nonracial brotherhood, that is, a new polis. I use here Derrida’s own critical insight into Aristotle’s exclusion of women from the polis on the basis of brotherhood models of friendship and democracy (1997: 311), but I also critique Derrida’s failure to note in his thinking about the TRC that the female victims are neither simply nor simplistically excluded from the process, but that their borderline position is rather a precondition for the process to take place at all. Pure forgiveness is quasi-transcendental and can never actually occur, but is in its symbolic function nevertheless crucial for actual processes of compromised or nonideal forgiveness to keep on taking place. Similarly, the figure of the feminine also becomes in Derrida’s work such a quasi-transcendental concept whose liminal presence and nonactualization are prerequisites and moral imperatives for the existence of the polis as such. In this sense the figure of the feminine in Derrida’s work ‘dwells’ in the same idealized domain as the concepts of justice, the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, friendship and democracy to come. There is certainly something attractive about this picture for feminists, but the question I want to raise is the question about the price women pay for this quasi-transcendental symbolic status of the feminine.

In the fourth and final section I discuss ‘Women’s Symbolic and Political Homelessness’, in which I consider the marginal position of women vis-à-vis the new South African dispensation in terms of symbolic homelessness and political dereliction. I explore how rape and other strategies for sexualizing and privatizing women’s agency lead to a situation where women and their bodies represent for men ‘home’ and ‘home-coming’, even while it ensures that women themselves remain homeless. Women’s ‘first homes’, that is their bodies, are no longer safe places, due to the threat of rape. Also in their homes, South African women feel ill at ease. Most rapes take place within the victims’ own homes—whether the rapists are husbands, fathers, lovers, acquaintances or robbers. In my feminist reading of women’s homelessness in the new South Africa, as well as for a way out of this dilemma, I draw on the work of Iris Marion Young, Adriana Cavarero and Jeanette Winterson. I conclude the chapter with an exploration of possibilities for women’s homecoming which would steer clear of the notions that involve metaphysical safeguards, fixedness and final groundings. Winterson’s metaphor of ‘hanging in space supported by nothing at all’ (1998: 61), which points in the direction of a sense of self and security which is finally metaphysically ungrounded, but not for that reason nonexistent or imaginary, is useful in this respect. I only introduce the question about women’s becoming and homecoming in this chapter, but it becomes a leitmotiv in the remainder of the book.

THE BORDERLINE FEMININE

The almost national suicidal levels of violence committed against women and girls in South Africa must be understood against the background of a TRC process in which the issue of rape was repressed, even as women were given a prominent place in the process and performance of public forgiveness. The new nation could be built on the basis of hundreds of women publicly forgiving on behalf of others but not of themselves. The typical scenario during the hearings was that women were asked to forgive gross human rights violations perpetrated against their male family members—sons, fathers, husbands, brothers: those easily recognizable as political agents involved in the liberation struggle (or its repression). However, because women were almost never asked to forgive on behalf of themselves, and never asked to forgive rape as a political attempt to erase female sexual difference, the new political space, the new state, was (once again) built on the erasure of women as women. Perhaps this is how one should interpret the following passage spoken by ‘Winnie Mandela’, a character in Njabulo Ndebele’s novel, The Cry of Winnie Mandela (2003: 112–113):

I give you my heaven as possibly the single element of consistency in my political life: my distrust of reconciliation. In this I proclaim a new life in South Africa, against those who proclaim a truce between old lives (…) I will not be an instrument for validating the politics of reconciliation. For me, reconciliation demands my annihilation.

Winnie Mandela, estranged wife of Nelson Mandela, is fictionally here portrayed as distrusting reconciliation understood as ‘a truce between old lives’ (p. 112); she speaks for all women when she proclaims and calls for another, a more radically new life in this country. As a woman, she resists being ‘an instrument for validating the politics of reconciliation’ (p. 113) and insists that reconciliation will demand her annihilation.

In the reading offered here, therefore, what was widely perceived as an innocent oversight by the TRC, namely its failure to take seriously women rape victims as first-order victims, is rather interpreted as being constitutive of the ‘new’ patriarchal politico-symbolic order as patriarchal. Through its failure to create the vocabulary and the imaginative space within which rape could be properly addressed as a political issue in its own right—amongst other things by modeling victimhood and political agency on masculine presumptions—the TRC unfortunately set the tone for a ‘new’ South Africa in which sexual difference could not be acknowledged, nor be allowed to make a difference. In other words, it entrenched a single-sex model of politics, that is, one in which masculine agency and victimhood, as well as masculine-biased concerns and vocabularies still pose as the universal. Thereby the particularities and specificities of women’s being and becoming¹ were, and still are, effectively erased from the shared socio-symbolic order.

In doing so, the TRC followed the dominant model of the west, even though it was innovative in other respects such as in its insistence on focusing on restorative rather than retributive justice (cf. Bell, 2002: 86ff). The argument is well taken from various feminist sources² that ‘the feminine’ and women³ occupy an uneasy, borderline type of position within traditional western metaphysics⁴, of which currently dominant liberal political theories (including those underlying South Africa’s progressive Constitution) are an important off-shoot. Continental philosophers and others⁵ consequently have arrived at the insight that feminist politics cannot be satisfied with mere demands for women’s inclusion in existing philosophical and political frameworks, agendas and so on. This is the case because these frameworks and economies have already ‘included’ women or the feminine in their ground structure, but in an ambivalent, ironic or exceptional way.

In 1996, when the TRC’s hearings were already underway, and when it became clear that women were doing most of the public forgiving on behalf of male relatives who were framed as the real victims of apartheid, the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at the University of the Witwatersrand made a submission to the TRC on their perceived ‘lack of sensitivity to gender issues’. In this submission, the marginality of women to the process was pointed out, and there was a concern that women were not taken seriously as victims as they were seldom asked to forgive on behalf of themselves. This is an example of a liberal plea for inclusion into a supposedly sex-neutral process which was perceived to have (simplistically and innocently) excluded women from its operations. Because the problem was framed as a ‘neglect’ or ‘lack of sensitivity’, rather than acknowledged as a structural necessity for a process of masculine reconciliation, the strange position of women in all of this could not be fully appreciated. Responding to this liberal plea, the TRC then held what they called ‘Special Women’s Hearings’ or ‘Gender Hearings’, which were conducted separately from the main hearings and also separately reported on, grouped together with the special hearings of children and military conscripts.

This exercise in ‘inclusion’ illustrates why, instead of trying to establish whether women are included or excluded under a certain logic or paradigm, it makes more sense to view women’s ambivalent position vis-à-vis any particular paradigm as constitutive of that paradigm itself, and thus to interrogate their borderline position in more depth. By making women into a ‘special’ case and dealing with their victimhood on the side, the whole question about the masculinity of the political sphere and about the real meaning of rape in the struggle was circumvented. The potentially disruptive presence of women taken seriously as victims and insisting on a sexual differentiation of the political sphere itself, would have been too risky, and therefore those issues were contained outside (on the border of) the main process of reconciliation, which was itself dependent on women’s simultaneous presence (as forgivers) and absence (as serious victims and political agents). It remains a superficial gesture to ask whether women are included in a particular symbolic order when women and the ‘feminine’ serve to guarantee, uphold and symbolize, to represent the very borders, boundaries and logic of that order or universe. With regard to the western political paradigm, women constitute the border as such—their bodies, spaces and subjectivities define the limits of the thinkable, the rational, of the political. In a memorable passage Jean-Francois Lyotard (1989: 114) visualizes the same point thus:

Everything is in place for the imperialism of men: an empty centre where the Voice is heard (God’s, the People’s—the difference is not important, just the Capital letters), the circle of homosexual⁶ warriors in dialogue around the centre, the feminine (women, children, foreigners, slaves) banished outside the confines of the corpus socians and attributed only those properties that this corpus will have nothing to do with: savagery, sensitivity, matter and the kitchen, impulsion, hysteria, silence, maenadic dances, lying, diabolical beauty, ornamentation, lasciviousness, witchcraft and weakness.

For Lyotard, the ‘masculine corpus attributes active principles to itself’ (114) and in fact ‘cannot resist wanting to seize’ (115) the ‘passive’ object whose ‘apparent humanity is always elusive’ (115) because ‘the Voice at the Virile Centre speaks only of … the Empire’s limits (which are women) and we [men, the dominant sex] have to struggle ceaselessly with their exteriority’ (115). We meet here thus a strange reversal of roles at the heart of patriarchal logic: the marginal or silenced feminine can be seen at work in the very heart (centre) of the corpus socians. This leads Lyotard (1989: 115) to ask:

If so, then is not such an object unconsciously endowed with what we call activity? And does not the power to scheme accorded this object betray the secret reversal of our role by theirs? (Is not there a desire on the part of western man to be sodomized by woman?) Is not the outside of the man’s theatre the most important, even for men? Doesn’t he discover his ‘origin’ there? And isn’t it necessary that this origin be woman: isn’t the mother the originary woman? That is, the way the exterior sex is represented in theory: as ground, itself ungrounded, in which meaning is generated? The senseless Being?

These paragraphs by Lyotard neatly pose the dilemma of ‘women in politics’ in the west: women are the ungrounded ground but must remain on the fringes of the Empire⁷ from where they nevertheless play a key (instigating or inspiring, but always an indirect, mediating and mediated) role. If the homosexual warriors form the visible and audible centre of western civilization—the politeia—and from there claim for themselves authority over society as a whole, then the women’s circle or the circle of women’s bodies forms its outskirts—their bodies are its outer limits, its frontiers, and as such they form part of the ‘inside’ as well as the ‘outside’, the ‘beyond’, or even the ‘before’—they are the object that seems human but is not. Women must still become, be transformed and civilized into ‘the human’ or universalised masculine. Defined by the order of homosexual warriors as its opposite, ‘the feminine’ is nevertheless also its central concern, in so far as the latter represents the borders of its empire. Therefore, the conditions of its own possibility are central, even if often in silenced or repressed ways. And yet, even when at the heart of the empire’s concerns, woman is the ‘object’, ‘endowed’ with activity, that is, trapped within a male fantasy and imagination, without a voice of her own.

I moreover discern in Lyotard’s description the notion of woman as a border to be conceived in at least two senses: (a) woman as man’s origin, as ungrounded ground in which meaning is generated; and (b) woman as man’s destiny—the outer limits of his existence, as that which calls him to (self-)transcendence, which draws him out of himself. Put in more technical language, women constitute both a transcendent (abstract and idealized) and a transcendental (presupposed and necessary) border or horizon for the masculine symbolic order. Women(‘s bodies) are thus not only on the margins in that they are equivocally perched both on the outside and on the peripheral inside of the masculine orders; that they are in fact also at the heart of these orders may be precisely by virtue of their complete absence from the Virile Centre. Through their representation of masculine sheltering and transcendence—both men’s (coming into) being (or birth and sustenance) and men’s becoming—women (i.e., as ‘the feminine’) open up a space or a field of tension, a narrative frame, for masculine existence⁸.

ON THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FORGIVING RAPE

It is within this theoretical framework that Jacques Derrida’s comment on rape victims of the struggle becomes interesting and calls for analysis. His essay, ‘On Forgiveness’ (2002) combines my concerns with women’s subjectivity within contemporary philosophical discourse, rape and the South African politics of transition and forgiveness. The essay refers to the (non-)forgiveness⁹ of a certain (unnamed) woman testifying before the TRC (Derrida, 2002: 43). Although her sex is not deemed relevant in the body of Derrida’s main text or with regard to his main argument, he adds to his description of her, translated as ‘woman victim, wife of the victim’, an interesting endnote in which he draws attention to sexual differences, treating such differences as quite literally a marginal issue, but one which deserves commentary nevertheless. He refers in this regard to Antjie Krog’s description, in Country of My Skull (1998: 177ff), of the situation of militant women who were tortured through rape, ‘and then accused of being not militants but whores’ (Derrida, 2002: 60). ‘They’, says Derrida, ‘could not testify about this before the commission, or even in their family, without baring themselves, without showing their scars or without exposing themselves one more time, by their very testimony, to another violence’. He goes on to say: ‘The “question of forgiveness” cannot even be posed publicly to these women, some of whom now occupy high positions in the State’ (60). There are many things left unsaid and implied or assumed in this short but significant aside from Derrida. I find Derrida’s engagement with sexual difference encouraging; nevertheless I find his relegation of the topic to an endnote ultimately regrettable, as well as irresponsible, in ways that I will delineate.

Derrida’s text raises (but does not answer) many important questions. First, why could these women not testify about their rapes before the TRC (publicly), ‘or even in their family’, (thus privately)? Does Derrida simply refer here to the well-known fact that rape victims find it difficult to speak (openly) about the assault, feeling a sense of shame or stigmatization? If it is only this, then why does he first say these women could not talk in public (or even in private) about rape and then say that the question of forgiveness cannot be posed publicly to these women, adding that many of them are now in positions of power? What relevance has the public–private distinction here, if he immediately overcomes the distinction by saying that ‘even in their family’ these women cannot talk? In what exactly does the impossibility lie? Is it impossible because they are public figures or despite them having political power? And what is the logic of this impossibility?

Note that he does not say that these women cannot forgive. That is implied, but his claim is far more radical: the question of forgiveness cannot be posed to them—publicly, but presumably not even privately (in ‘the family’). Does Derrida regard the public ‘baring’, the ‘exposing’ and the ‘showing’ of their ‘scars’ as integral to their testimony, and does he see this kind of exposing testimony as integral or indispensable to the question of forgiveness? And most important: why should such a testimony (about man on woman rape) necessarily translate into ‘another violence’ and a second (or continued) violation of the victim when all the other testimonies—even where men testified about being ‘sodomised’¹⁰—are seen not as a violation but rather as a kind of liberation and acknowledgement of the victim? Derrida does not seem to regard all testimonies as further violations, so why rape?

Why is it impossible even to raise the question of forgiveness with regard to these women but not with regard to all other victims of pre-1994 violence? And: does the situation of these women differ from those of all other rape victims in South Africa—those who were and continue to be raped, allegedly ‘outside’ of ‘political’ concerns in a purely ‘nonpolitical’, ‘private’ or ‘criminal’ sense? Does the political context of these militant women’s rapes render the rapes more, or rather less, forgivable? It should be remembered that the TR...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Rape, Forgiveness and Reconciliation
• 2 The Impossibility of Rape
• 3 The Possibility of Rape
• 4 Enigmatic Woman Facilitates Man’s Becoming
• 5 What if the Object Started to Speak?
• 6 Towards Female Subjectivity
• Notes
• Bibliography