Remembering the Forgetting:

Feminist Philosophy and the Retrieval of the Repressed

I have asked myself about the forgetting which seals the origin of our tradition.
Luce Irigaray To be Two

In a field of philosophy so alive to the significance of situated knowledge, it is
perhaps perverse to set out searching for essence at least understood in its
Platonic hypostasized form. For, if we can say that feminist philosophy is anything in
particular, it would be in common with many purported objects - not really a thing
at all, so much as a process. This paper will begin therefore, by exploring one way of
thinking this process, and the knowledge that it yields, as an ongoing act of
remembering or retrieval; an act dedicated to the excavation, and observation, of
that which is excluded and interred when the account of our being in the world is
told by only half those beings.

The patriarchal origin and practice of the tradition are irrefutable. But as such, it
contains a priceless fossil record of the lacunae of mens thinking, and the socio-
material appropriation of women that has both informed and impelled such
exclusion. We read to remember what has been forgotten. Accompanied by Irigaray,
or Okin, Haraway or Gilligan, we sift the sediment of assumption, and examine how
apparent self-evidence arises from a thinkers position in time and space, the way
the matter and writing of their bodies opened or closed what they could conceive.

Understood this way, feminist philosophy involves a necessary epistemic
commitment, a challenge to the traditions conviction that it deals only in pure,
immutable truths that hold in each and every possible world. The dense structure of
lived experience permeates thought, and experience is lived by conscious-bodies
with interests positioned in place and history. For some, the heirs of the assumption
that truth must be an ahistorical singularity or it is naught, this is simply nihilism.
But it is not. It is only a Platonic inheritance so deeply imbibed as to be almost
invisible that leads us to suppose that contextually determinate meaning is not
meaning at all.

And here we arrive at the ontological commitment that though frequently
disavowed inevitably underpins any epistemological practice. Feminist philosophy
thinks in time and space of the time and space of thinking. We do this in order to
recover what was, and remains, forgotten when we think ourselves as beings
without a world. This act of forgetting is not accidental, though, like all successful
acts of repression, it may itself be forgotten. It is, rather, a deliberate disavowal of
the matrix of material, social, cultural and historical relations on which our
existence as living beings depend; an act of intellectual occlusion which closely
correlates with the present and historical appropriation of the material and
reproductive labour of women. The making visible of this constant work of
producing and reproducing the world, of (at)tending to the structure and fabric of
relation, is then, both the method and content of feminist philosophy as
remembering, and, beyond that, a profound political imperative. And while, at this
point in history, it seems we still confront implacable resistance to retrieving what
is forgotten, we must go on, now, for ourselves, and, as beings-in-time, for the future.