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Full Description
The first English-language study of Aristotle's natural philosophy from a continental perspective, the Feminine Symptom takes as its starting point the problem of female offspring. If form is transmitted by the male and the female provides only matter, how is a female child produced? Aristotle answers that there must be some fault or misstep in the process.
This inexplicable but necessary coincidence—sumptoma in Greek—defines the feminine symptom. Departing from the standard associations of male-activity-form and female-passivity-matter, Bianchi traces the operation of chance and spontaneity throughout Aristotle's biology, physics, cosmology, and metaphysics and argues that it is not passive but aleatory matter— unpredictable, ungovernable, and acting against nature and teleology—that he continually allies with the feminine.
Aristotle's pervasive disparagement of the female as a mild form of monstrosity thus works to shore up his polemic against the aleatory and to consolidate patriarchal teleology in the face of atomism and Empedocleanism.
Bianchi concludes by connecting her analysis to recent biological and materialist political thinking, and makes the case for a new, antiessentialist politics of aleatory feminism.
Contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: Aristotelian Causation, Reproduction, and Accident and Chance The four causes, logos, and sex and gender - Conceiving of a girl - The aleatory causes: accident, tuche, automaton Chapter 2: Necessity and Automaton: Aleatory Matter and the Feminine Symptom Aristotle's typologies of necessity - Necessity in Aristotle's biology - Reproduction and automaton - Automaton in Aristotle - Genesis Automatos - The feminine symptom Chapter 3: The Errant Feminine in Plato's Timaeus The cosmogony of the Timaeus - The feminine figurations of the ekmageion - Being, becoming, and persuasion - Refiguring the receptacle as chora - Feminist engagements with chora - Receptacle/chora and motion Chapter 4: The Physics of Sexual Difference in Aristotle and Irigaray Place: topologies of sexual difference - Irigaray's physics of sexual difference, and Aristotle's - Place and the feminine symptom Chapter 5: Motion and Gender in the Aristotelian Cosmos The motion of the heavens - The prime mover - Falling to Earth: the sun's enklisis as feminine symptom - The simple bodies or elements - The motion of animals - The definition of motion in terms of dunamis and entelecheia Chapter 6: Sexual difference in Potentiality and Actuality Dunamis and matter - Sexual difference and the definition of dunamis - Passive dunamis and the feminine symptom - Dunamis and sexual reproduction: the problem of heredity - Dunamis and adunamia: the specter of castration - Energeia/entelecheia: being at (in)completion Coda: Matters Arising: From the Aleatory Feminine to Aleatory Feminism Bibliography Index
