Gender Hierarchy, Equality, and the Possibility of Democracy

My argument will have three steps.

First, I will argue that Hannah Arendt's understanding of the polis perpetuates the hierarchy between the genders so as to make her own ideal of politics impossible and further gives us a conception of politics inseparable from the subordination of women.

Second, I will show how psychoanalysis in general, and the theory of Jacques Lacan in particular, are crucial in explaining the reproduction of the gender hierarchy so that we can understand that the dilemma inherent in Arendt's understanding of politics is not a coincidence or superficial to her central argument.

Third, I will suggest that Derrida's deconstructive intervention into Lacan not only opens a space for a redefinition of gender, but does so in such a way as to provide a different concept of participatory democracy and of civic friendship uncontaminated by the erasure of woman.

I begin with a summation of Arendt's conception of law and politics. Here is her description of the view of law accepted by the Greeks:

To them, the laws, like the wall around the city, were not results of action but products of making. Before men began to act, a definite space had to be secured

1. * This piece is dedicated to Molly J. Molzer. I would like to thank Don Moss for his commitment and excellent editorial suggestions. I would also like to thank Deborah Garfield, my research assistant, for her engagement and work on this essay.

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and a structure built where all subsequent actions could take place, the space being the public realm of the polis and its structure the law; legislator and architect belonged in the same category. But these tangible entities themselves were not the content of politics (not Athens, but Athenians, were the polis), and they did not command the same loyalty we know from the Roman type of patriotism. (1958, 194-95)

In terms of Arendt's own earlier distinction between action and making, legislation and law-making were defined as poeisis, not praxis. Legislation and law-making w