The “Cause” of Sex; or, the Discontent of Liberal Theory

If there is one discontent that can be said to have helped shape intellectual thought in this century, it is a general discontent with the liberal tradition as it has thus far developed: a fear that it is somehow responsible for enabling such political perversions as fascism and totalitarianism, that it is insufficiently responsive to questions of social welfare and overly dependent upon a sometimes brutal system of retributive justice. The discontent of which I shall speak, however, is the one that has plagued liberal theory from the outset: its incapacity to recognize the political relevance of sexual difference. From almost its inception, liberal theory has been plagued by a feminist critique that charges it with failing to recognize the sexual inequality inherent in its own conception of universal rights. As has been repeatedly noted, liberal theory gave women the grounds upon which to demand rights for themselves, to ask that this “universalist” conception of rights apply to them as well. On the other hand, by asserting that women deserved access to these rights as much as men, feminists contested the very logic upon which this system of “universal rights” had been conceived—namely, the concept of the “abstract individual.” By asking for rights on behalf of women, feminists unavoidably made sex a political issue. Suddenly the question of rights was also a question of sex and, whether a feminist adopted a position of equality or difference, the fact remained that she was making an argument for the relevance of sexuality in a discourse that had declared such issues of subjective particularity to be outside its domain. Feminism thus put sex on the political table and, in so doing, introduced the problem of particularity into a political discourse seemingly founded on its potential eradicability. In what follows I don't necessarily want to dispute Lacan's thesis that it was Marx who was the first to invent the symptom. However, I do want to note a) that it was libe