Feminist Immanent Critique: An Encounter Between Butler, Oksala, and Deleuze

The guiding problem of the thesis is how to reconcile immanence with feminism through the development of the idea of feminist immanent critique. Beginning with Judith Butler's account of the constitution of gender through institutions, and the possibilities of its immanent subversion through a-subjective parodic politics, it is shown that this approach to the problem needs to be augmented by Johanna Oksala's investigation of the way in which the gap between experience and language serves to challenge conceptual schema that organise our experience of the world. However, it is argued that both Butler and Oksala end up reinstating a dogmatic image of the critical subject, although in different manners, thereby forestalling the search for a fully realised response to the problem of feminist immanent critique. Given the return of a dogmatic image of the critical subject, I turn to the most rigorous account of immanence in contemporary philosophy through a reconstruction of key aspects of the work of Gilles Deleuze, one that places ethics at the centre of his thought. It will be shown that the development of immanence with Deleuze provides an account of the subject that does not rely upon dogmatism or abstract from situated forms of social criticism but rather invites such engagement in ways that generate a fruitful encounter with feminism. As the argument is drawn together, it is concluded that feminist immanent critique is a positive conception of critique that requires careful consideration of the ways in which the subject is continually constituted, undone and reconstituted, without reinstating a dogmatic image of the critical subject. Feminist immanent critique embraces an asubjective and, therefore, demoralised version of becoming without losing ethical responsiveness to the present, to ourselves, and to others. That said, it is a positive conception of critique that does not reintroduce transcendence by surreptitiously relying upon a presentist view of time and, as such, it frees becoming from a sense of pre-given direction or telos.