Teleology and its symptoms: Sexual difference in the Aristotelian cosmos.

摘要

The notion of telos, the end, or the "for the sake of which" things are done or events occur, is a famously intractable keystone in the architecture of Western metaphysics. Simultaneously substantial and ethical, the Aristotelian telos dominates and provides the justification for a rigorously hierarchical cosmological system encompassing the physical world, the biological world, and the human world of ethics and politics. In this dissertation, I investigate how sexual difference is manifested in and helps to constitute the physical and natural universe for Aristotle, and at the same time informs and underpins Aristotelian metaphysics. The body of the dissertation therefore consists in close readings, employing a feminist hermeneutic informed by Luce Irigaray, Jacques Derrida, and Martin Heidegger, of Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals, as well as a chapter on the receptacle/chora of Plato's Timaeus. I examine various figures and phenomena in the Aristotelian cosmos, such as chance, necessity, the female offspring, spontaneous generation, heredity, proper place, practical telos, motion in its many manifestations, the prime mover, the sun's ecliptic, passive dunamis, and rational dunamis, disclosing their aporetic and gendered dimensions which I read through the notion of the feminine symptom. Rather than paradigmatically passive and being-acted-upon, the feminine in Aristotle's cosmos is disclosed as bearing a strange sort of agency that obstructs and deviates, and whose restless motions can be neither predicted nor controlled. The feminine symptoms of Aristotle's teleological system return insistently to haunt it, quite at odds with his explicit statements on the supine passivity of matter and femininity. This reading further offers the possibility that the masculine notion of telos may prove a more malleable and receptive concept than heretofore imagined, and may even be salvaged for contemporary political theory. It is in the labile and chiasmatic moments in the Aristotelian text where the opposed forces of disruptive chance and teleological necessity, and of materiality and figurality, cross over into one another and render their constitutive opposition impossible, that the possibility is opened up for thinking teleology otherwise.