Sarah Tyson’s Where Are the Women? provides a detailed exploration of the exclusion of women from the history of European and Anglophone philosophy, and the various ways in which scholars have tried to reclaim space for women philosophers in and around that tradition. The ways in which this exclusion has taken place appear to me to fall into two broad categories: absence and silencing. However, Tyson does not discuss differences between these two forms of exclusion, or how they help to produce her concern that many reclamation strategies lead to permissive prohibition.1 In what follows, I will analyze how absence and silencing operate in the examples that Tyson discusses and the reclamation strategies she critiques, and I will argue that Tyson’s concern with permissive prohibition can be productively understood as a worry about how these strategies enable practices of silencing.
By absence, I mean to refer to places in the history of philosophy where there are no women, or where philosophers claim there were none. This is where reclamation plays its most obvious role, trying to find women that have been forgotten or written out of the canon. These absences create voids in the literature where philosophers have often claimed no women are to be found.

Silencing, on the other hand, I use to indicate places in the history of philosophy where women were present, but are not heard as women or as they intended to be heard. These are not just silences, but places where women have been silenced.2 Langton describes two ways in which the powerful silence the powerless. One is where the powerless are prevented from speaking (Langton 1993, 299). This is closely related to the idea of absence described above. The second, however, allows the powerless to speak freely, and be present. However, it stops that speech “from counting as the action it was intended to be” (Langton 1993, 299). Dotson highlights two specific practices to elaborate that second kind of silencing. In the first, testimonial quieting, an audience “fails to identify the speaker as a knower” (Dotson 2011, 242). The second, testimonial smothering, occurs when the speaker perceives their audience “as unwilling or unable to gain the appropriate uptake of proffered testimony” (Dotson 2011, 244).3 All of these aspects of silencing can be seen in the examples of exclusion that Tyson describes. For the sake of space, I will focus on the two.

Diotima, the Manitean priestess in Plato’s Symposium, is a case Tyson comes back to throughout the book. As Tyson emphasizes, within the dialogue, Diotima “is not there” (98), not physically present. She is even further removed by the fact her teachings are being recounted years after they were given, and they have been passed through several tellers before arriving on the page (xxii). Today, many philosophers in the European and Anglophone tradition treat her as fiction, making her doubly absent by removing her from history as well as the text.
However, Diotima also seems to be a paradigm of the ways in which philosophers of the European and Anglophone tradition enact practices of silencing. Tyson describes several ways in which scholars have tried to discount Diotima’s philosophical authority by claiming that even if she was a real, historical person she existed “only as a vehicle for male ventriloquism” (xxv). This fits Dotson’s description of testimonial quieting, as even a historically present Diotima is rendered incapable of being a knower independent of the famous, canonical men around her.

Sojourner Truth provides another case of exclusion, which is in many ways the inverse of Diotima’s. There is no doubt that Truth was present at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, on May 29, 1851 (174). She is in no way absent from history. In fact, Tyson argues that “far from being silenced . . . Truth’s speech [is] well known” (174). However, I want to push back against this characterization, and argue that Tyson’s analysis actually shows that Truth too is silenced through testimonial quieting. For although Truth’s presence is never in doubt, her voice is. The most famous phrase attributed to her does not even contain her own words, but is instead the result of “a white woman’s use of Truth’s speech” (194). This usurpation of Truth’s presence in history without her real words carries with it the implication that Truth’s own words weren’t good enough, that they had to be amended by an educated white woman in order to have an impact and to be heard. The testimony received from Truth through historical record is not the action that Truth intended when she gave that speech at Akron, and so she is silenced.

In both of these historical cases, absence and silencing interact in complex ways. However, it is clear that the two kinds of exclusion play very different challenges to contemporary attempts at reclamation of women’s role in the history of European and Anglophone philosophy. It is also clear that different kinds of reclamation projects have focused more on one kind of exclusion than another. In what remains of this commentary, I will argue that Tyson’s concerns about the first three kinds of reclamation projects that she identifies originate in a worry that by focusing on absence, we risk enacting practices of silencing.

The first reclamation strategy, enfranchisement, is most clearly aimed at making absent women present in the history of philosophy. However, Tyson argues that “enfranchising women into a canon that all but denies women’s philosophical writing and doing so by using the criteria through which that writing has been excluded risk failing to promote robust engagement with women’s work” (19). This clearly shows that in making absent women present, those who take an enfranchising approach risk silencing the women that they make present in the history of European and Anglophone philosophy.

The second reclamation strategy, alternative history, shows a more complex relationship between absence and silencing. Part of the intent of this approach is to show how women’s absence from the dominant history of European and Anglophone philosophy has created resources outside of that tradition that can be drawn on instead (19). However, Tyson’s concern is that in focusing on these alternatives, scholars who take this strategy risk silencing those women who were not completely excluded from the dominant tradition (25), or women who do not fit a unified conception of the feminine (28). In arguing for the positive effects of keeping women absent from the dominant European and Anglophone philosophical tradition, these strategies risk silencing those women who considered themselves part of that dominant tradition (20) or those whose thinking was produced by the interactions between the two (31).

The third strategy, corrective history, argues that the absence of women from the history of European and Anglophone philosophy has caused that dominant tradition to fail by its own critical standards (31). To remedy this failure, not just women but a feminist voice must be included in the dominant tradition (32). This approach demands the presence of both women and women’s perspectives in philosophy. However, Tyson’s critique raises the concern that this strategy too could result in silencing. She argues that this model “insufficiently questions why European and Anglophone philosophy is in need of correction” (39). As a result, even after undergoing such corrections, the dominant European and Anglophone philosophical tradition could remain fertile ground for silencing, and particularly testimonial smothering.

The final reclamation strategy, transformation, is the one that Tyson sees as having the most potential to reclaim without excluding, and avoiding permissive prohibition. Since these strategies interrogate the origins of philosophy as it is currently understood and the norms that come with that understanding, they are less likely to reenact conditions of silencing. However, even with these strategies there is no guarantee. In connecting Tyson’s analysis with Langton and Dotson’s concepts of silencing, I have attempted to make the case for one source of resources to help identify where practices of silencing risk appearing, and how to counter them.

Works Cited

Dotson, Kristie. 2011. “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing.” Hypatia 26(2): 237–57.

Langton, Rae. 1993. “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22(4): 293–330.

Tyson, Sarah. 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia University Press.

In Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better, Sarah Tyson argues that including works by women in the archive of philosophy not only makes philosophy more representative of human thinking through history but more importantly allows for change in the way in which philosophy thinks of itself. Throughout the book, Diotima reappears as a character in Plato who has been interpreted and reinterpreted, and whose significance as an important feminine figure and even whose status as real has been disputed. By examining various important feminist interpretations of Diotima, Tyson provides a through-line connecting diverging views on the question of feminist reclamation.

Tyson identifies her own approach to the expansion of the philosophical archive as a transformative reclamation, which identifies and seeks to redress the ways in which European and Anglophone philosophy has “substantiated itself as a discipline” (xxix), arguing that women’s exclusion from the archive of philosophy so closely informs the way in which reclamation of these thinkers can be theorized that it cannot proceed independently of an account of these foundational practices.

Tyson examines the work of important figures associated with the transformative approach, including Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigaray, and Michele Le Doeuff. The focus on symbolic formations of philosophical reason, rather than social or political or even psychological aspects of the way in which reason has been historically conceived, is a common thread in these thinkers’ work. Because of its focus on the symbolic, transformative reclamation holds the potential to continually change our understanding of the nature of philosophy. Simply broadening the scope of an already masculine philosophical tradition to include women, or correcting its errors without questioning the ideals and categories that gave rise to the exclusion in the first place, would, by contrast, actually strengthen symbolic formations predicated on women’s exclusion (38).

Transformative reclamation acknowledges not only the notion that the ideals with which philosophy established itself have been flawed, but also that we fundamentally do not and cannot know in advance what the result of contact between philosophy and diverse other perspectives will be. The philosophical reception of Diotima provides an illuminating case in point. Tyson covers at least twelve interpretations of Diotima’s appearance in Plato’s Symposium. This repetition is important because the Symposium is a work which, like most of Plato’s dialogues, does not end conclusively. Arguably even Plato’s ambiguous use of characters and situations performs the open-ended nature of philosophy that feminist transformative reclamation advocates. Why does Diotima, a woman and a priestess, appear at such a pivotal moment in the dialogue and teach even Socrates that his views on love are wrong? Where are the other women in Plato’s dialogues? Is Diotima a fictional character in Plato’s view? Does Socrates take her seriously? None of the answers to these questions are clear, yet her central importance in the dialogue and its unique status in Plato’s works is undeniable. The way in which any given thinker interprets Diotima provides a barometer of their approach to or rejection of feminist reclamation.

Engaging with historical women’s texts in the transformative sense of reclamation seeks to redress their absence in the archive by asking the question, what would philosophy have looked like if women’s reflection and writing had not been silenced? (121). What possibilities were lost in this omission? Employing a method called uchronic history, which involves imaginatively creating alternative histories in which women’s writings were not excluded from the philosophy of history, le Doeuff reengages the archive of philosophy. The u is the u of Utopia, and the chronic suggests an idealized vision of time, one in which the goal is not wholeness and completeness, but rather an experience of radical lack (114), which refuses to hierarchize or decide in advance what counts as philosophy. Thinking imaginatively in this way opens up excluded realms of thinking, allowing us to consider what they may offer us now (126), and focusing on the activity of philosophy rather than the figures we call philosophers (145). Le Doeuff’s third way between, on the one hand, a declaration that historical women who did not understand themselves as such in fact are philosophers, or, on the other, the conclusion that there were no women philosophers prior to the twentieth century, conceives philosophy’s aim as dynamic, shifting thinking from one state to another (120).

Following this lead, but adding a critical voice, Tyson draws on Penelope Deutscher and Saidiya Hartman to expose the effect of the violent history of colonialism and slavery and anti-black racism on philosophy, and it is to these exclusions that she turns in the final chapter, where she reads the Declaration of Sentiments, delivered at Seneca Falls in 1848, alongside Sojourner Truth’s speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. Although these two texts do not directly address each other, Tyson engages them uchronically in a dialogue. Her aim is to show Truth’s “incisive challenge to the women’s movement as a white supremacist project” (175), but also to point to problematic statements in the Declaration, when, for example, women’s lack of rights are contrasted to the right accorded to “the most ignorant men—both natives and foreigners” (179). The hierarchizing appeals that imply contempt for the status of both slaves and native Americans manifest the problematic ground upon which the declaration rests.

I wondered that in choosing to focus on the symbolic formations of philosophical reason, Tyson did not at all consider the psychoanalytic account of a possible feminist transformation and renewal of the symbolic order, a project that is essential for Irigaray and that forms at least a part of le Doeuff’s interrogation of philosophy. It seems to me that a psychoanalytic account of important women’s texts, such as Tracy McNulty’s analysis of Teresa of Avila in Wrestling with the Angel, is also eminently transformative in its approach since it follows the idea that women seek inscription within the symbolic while simultaneously working to transform it. Feminist psychoanalytic accounts argue that it is not possible or even desirable to discard the symbolic constraints that make human interaction communicable and lawful, but that it is nonetheless possible to open this space up to desires that it initially fails to represent. I think the distinction between right or freedom, on the one hand, and desire, on the other, is important. While rights or freedoms, such as the right to vote or freedom of expression, are already firmly delineated and form part of an established masculine symbolic order, desires are flexible, alterable, potentially creative, or subversive, and thus more suited to an envisioning of radical social change.

It also seems to me that the choice of how to expand the archive is potentially contentious. I wonder if Tyson would be sympathetic to the desire to bring some criteria to bear upon the choice of texts, without definitively excluding any from the outset. For example, Sojourner Truth’s speech is important, as Sarah shows, because it makes evident white feminists’ unreflective assumptions as to the homogeneity of the group to whom it referred. As such it deepened and troubled what was already a potentially contentious and important debate. The text challenges what Kristie Dotson critiques as philosophy’s assumption of “common, univocally relevant justifying norms” that are required in philosophical circles “in order to establish the positive, philosophical status” of one’s work (Dotson 2012, 9). We might call this challenge the criterion of weight, the expectation that a text should in some way critically intervene into a question or debate, or query assumptions and presuppositions that are taken for granted tacit in putting forth a philosophical or political argument.

Second, the text should be open to dialogue, putting forward an idea, question, or critique with the aim of disseminating it and opening it up to more conversation, drawing together members of a dispersed community. As Sylvia Wynter points out, there are often geographical reasons that are anything but arbitrary, why intellectuals and artists, especially of formerly colonized nations, are isolated from each other, creating obstacles for dissenting perspectives to form a community of resistance. This might be called the criterion of intellectual controversy. This criterion seems significant, especially given the historical exclusion of women from the public realm of intellectual friendship.

Third, the text’s style or genre should add to its meaning. Amir Jaima argues, with reference to literature as philosophy, that the form of discourse is literally part of the content. The way a work is written is as important as the argument it makes. Beauty, on this argument, is not something with which we passively linger in a disinterested manner, but rather it is an activity, one that “arrest[s] and dislodge[s] us from our daily routines” (Jaima 2019, 20). The text in question does not strictly speaking have to be in the form of a written series of pages, but could appear in the form of a film, an artwork, a graphic novel, a piece of music, a podcast, or a series of letters. This would be the criterion of form. Perhaps an offshoot of my query as to whether or not this is a criterion would be the assertion that in the end it doesn’t matter whether Diotima was a real or fictional character.

But does the imposition of criteria from the outset interfere with the spirit of the project? Should the quest for expansion remain as open-ended as the kind of philosophy that it advocates? I ask finally, then, is expanding the archive a constant goal, or does it have limits? Are there reasons to hold reservations about a text’s philosophical status? Texts that express an overt prejudice, that are convinced in advance that they are correct and will not broker questioning or critique, that show no respect for thinking, and that disrespect or advocate harm to others seem likely candidates. At the same time, I wonder if there would be a resistance to setting any limits in advance, and I’d like to discuss why this would be the case if so.

Works Cited

Dotson, Kristie. 2012. “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3(1): 3–29.

Jaima, Amir. 2019. “Literature Is Philosophy: On the Literary Methodological Considerations That Would Improve the Practice and Culture of Philosophy.” Pluralist 14(2): 13–29.

Koerner, Lisbet. 1993. “Goethe’s Botany: Lessons from a Feminine Science,” Isis 84(3): 470–95.

McAlpin, Mary. 2005. “Goethe’s Number One Fan: A Neo-Feminist Reading of Bettina Brentano von Arnim.” Comparative Literature 57(4).

McNulty, Tracy. 2014. Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tyson, Sarah. 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 1996. “We Must Learn to Sit Down and Talk about a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism.” In The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, edited by Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh, 309–10. New York: Routledge.

Sarah Tyson’s book Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018) offers many rewarding possibilities for feminist thinking. The book engages with the thought of powerful thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Michèle Le Doeuff, and Genevieve Lloyd (and so many others) with the goal of providing a complex critical framework through which to engage in transformative feminist reclamations. In addition to the comprehensive treatment of feminist scholarship, Tyson provides novel and provocative readings of Diotima, Sojourner Truth, and The Declaration of Sentiments. The bulk of the book is concerned with the complicated and thorny discussions between feminists about various reclamation strategies in the history of European and Anglophone philosophy. This history has, over its long, fraught journey, participated in the erasure and prohibition of women’s participation. It has, in part, become what it is through the erasure and prohibition of women. To varying degrees of success, the numerous reclamation strategies discussed by Tyson are meant to remedy these exclusions and to provide us with insight into an important concern in past and present feminisms.

Tyson consistently reminds the reader that the historical archives that we turn to, to mine possible sites of reclamation, may themselves be shaped by these very exclusions. Vigilant readers and scholars must therefore constantly highlight the limitations of the projects in which they engage so as to not repeat the kinds of prohibitions they mean to ameliorate. Feminist reclamation is not, therefore, a matter of finding missing files (a most unlikely possibility) but of challenging the very notion of the archive (or perhaps, canon) itself.

Tyson carefully argues that critical reclamation reopens readings and interpretations of figures and texts that have been historically fixed in meaning. Unearthing possibilities obscured by time and myopia, readers are encouraged to reread historical texts, as well as to envision different possibilities of current social and political arrangements. The method, therefore, has the overall effect of reconfiguring the past, as well as of seeing the present in a new light. One of the most powerful tools employed by Tyson is Le Doeuff’s uchronic reading method, which, Tyson explains, “helps us bring into focus many aspects of our current social and political structures that perpetuate and depend upon the subordinate treatment of women. Indeed, one of the strengths of the method is that even short forays of the imagination are critically fruitful” (186). The uchronic method championed by Tyson’s utilization of Le Doeuff is one wherein we ask questions about what would the world be like if certain voices had been heard? Tyson reminds readers that this technique is one in which the reader should both use imaginative expansion to appreciate what could have been the case and what might have been a different contemporary outcome had women’s voices been heard in the past, as well as being critical of the hierarchies that remain unchallenged in the works under study.

Tyson’s work encourages readers to shift perspectives on the past and to critically imagine different present and future realities; additionally it entreats them to reconsider what counts as philosophy. She writes, “We can think differently—live philosophy in new ways—through treating the work of disregarded historical thinkers as philosophical” (206). Tyson is therefore acutely attuned to mourning what is lost (as well as what was never heard). She reminds us that “the uchronic exercise helps us to lament the opportunities that were lost with women’s voices, [and] reflection on the uchronic exercise helps us to lament the failure of those voices to articulate a more completely transformed world” (189). As Tyson’s own feminist reclamationist readings of thinkers such as Truth and Diotima, and historical documents such as the Declaration of Sentiments form such a central part of the book, I turn to two questions that emerge from this critical and transformative strategy. The first question surrounds the way in which the uchronic method functions in the play between “facts” and “fictions” broadly construed. Simply put, my question is this: how much freedom are we to take in transformative reclamation? I admire the tactic of imagining a world where an idea might have taken hold, or taken hold differently, and I think it is productive for feminism. Tyson is right to remind us that we are not likely going to “find” lost writings by women to reclaim, and therefore it is important to read creatively and imaginatively—sometimes even with very scant “factual” evidence at our disposal. But what are the hazards of this method? While reclamation must be ever-vigilant against exclusion even as it seeks inclusion, can imagining how things might have been different—if only we had another history where Simone de Beauvoir would have had other resources by women, or, if only Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 social contract would have been taken seriously—go too far? Can we, that is, simply spin into pure conjecture and thereby produce a different kind of exclusion—one wherein the very voices we want to hear become pure fantasy? This question, in part, came out of my reading of María del Rosario Acosta López’s paper “One Hundred Years of Forgotteness: Aesth-Ethics of Mourning in Latin America.” This essay discusses the history of occlusion and fictional preservation of the 1928 Columbian Banana Massacre (matanza de las banaeras). In a manner that shares aspects of the annihilation of voices of women in the history of philosophy, this event—where workers at the United Fruit Company were murdered at the hands of the Columbian army—has been systematically expunged from official Columbian history. However, it is preserved in powerful fictional form in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. While there is scant historical evidence of this massacre, any Colombian reading the fictional account would know exactly to what it refers. While the imaginative fictionalizing of the account could be said to further its erasure by making it all into just a story, Acosta López argues convincingly that given the violent erasures practiced by coloniality, truth needs to be heard not only through its factual accounting, but importantly through its narrative traces.1 While this is not an example of uchronic reading, it is not unrelated to what Tyson is doing and I think can add important possibilities to how much and how far imaginary reinvisioning can and should go. Acosta López’s use of memory through fiction offers what I think is an important component to this strategy.

To return to my question then, how much fictionalizing is to be involved (allowed?) into our recreations?2 For example, Tyson’s own speculative engagement with Diotima gave me pause at times. At the risk of putting too fine of a point on it, what if Diotima really isn’t . . . real? In many senses, the fictional handmaid from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is more real than Diotima, whose historical status will be endlessly debated with no definitive conclusion. Perhaps, they both share a kind of fictionalized realness that produces concrete effects but in philosophically different ways. Tyson, of course, is aware of this potential criticism and essentially rejects it as missing the point (147–49). However, I am interested in the ethical boundaries of the uchronic questioning advocated by Tyson. Perhaps due to how important the questions of fact and fiction are to my own philosophical interests, I wonder about the limitations of blurring the lines between fiction and reality.3 Is there such a thing as going too far in overreading with transformative feminist reclamation?

Second: I think that Tyson does a fine job of walking the thin line between challenging the very idea of a philosophical archive (as it is built upon and defined by the exclusion of women and other marginalized groups) and advocating that it should be expanded in creative ways to include women and thereby to make “philosophy better.” But what would Tyson say to someone who was to assert that the whole idea of archive is rotten to the core and we should just jettison it and find a new way to talk about philosophy and feminism? While I do not advocate for this position myself, it is not uncommon to hear colleagues in various subfields of philosophy making arguments to simply dismantle the whole academic structure. What is, then, the difference between the archive and, say, the canon? Should one be preserved and one be destroyed?

Works Cited

López, M. d. 2019. “One Hundred Years of Forgotteness: Aesth-Ethics of Mourning in Latin America.” Philosophical Readings 11(3): 131–39.

Tyson, S. 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia University Press.

In Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018), Sarah Tyson makes a much-needed and successful argument for not only the inclusion of women in European and Anglophone philosophy, but for specific frameworks to set right that which the makers of history have refused the philosophical world. She argues for and charts the history of “reclaiming” women philosophers and their philosophical thought. Tyson breaks that reclamation framework down into four subcategories, arguing that only the last can remedy the long history of women overlooked by philosophy: enfranchisement, alternative history, corrective history, and transformation.

In Tyson’s own words: “That strategy, transformative reclamation, can transform philosophical and feminist practice through engaging historical women’s philosophical authority” (143). By thinking with and simultaneously critiquing women philosophers, transformative reclamation makes room for the speculative reconceptualization of history and of the present, opening paths towards newly conceived futures. I happily report that Tyson’s argument can be applied widely to treat the ways that various groups are repressed, what Tyson would call “the history of massive exclusion” (172)—such that, while this is a book of and about philosophy, it is certainly not only a book of and about philosophy.

And so, how does Tyson suggest that we practice “transformative reclamation”? At the risk of reducing Tyson’s complexity, methods for “transformative reclamation” include, but are not limited to:

• examining the work women philosophers for evidence not only of what they have contributed to thought, but for the ways that they have reinforced their own and other women’s censorship;
• self-critique;
• disrupting reading practices or “[jamming] the machinery” of discourse by primarily paying attention to “the blanks and silences in discourse” (88–90);
• practicing uchronic accountings of history; and,
• perhaps most importantly to my discussion of Tyson’s work: love.

Tyson calls for us to change our relationships to discourse by undermining the existing power dynamic of discourse—as readers, historians, philosophers, and as people that exist in a world that we attempt to understand and alter. She challenges us to refuse the subjugation to which discourse would have us relent. She suggests that we defy discourse’s power as the inevitable order. She suggests that we approach discourse as if it can and will be changed—to challenge if not change the power dynamic prescribed through discourse by applying the methodologies listed above and, more fundamentally, by first imagining this destabilization as successful. In the same way that she confronts the work of the philosophers at the center of her study, she asks us to imagine the frameworks, histories, and organizing principles that exclude women from the record of philosophical thought as malleable—wax made soft in the hands of her readers. She tasks us to return to the silences and fissures, the accidental and criminal exclusions, those untold histories, to search for new voices and imagine as if those late-reclaimed voices had always been there.

Tyson’s work empowers the philosophers she cites, Diotima, Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigaray, Michèle Le Doeuff, Sojourner Truth, along with their critics, Tyson, herself, and those of us reading her work. In other words, she lays out the foundation and then also positions her readers to undermine discourse by reminding them of their own potentially plastic relationship with the power of discourse. Again, the bird’s-eye view reveals the extensive possibility of her exciting model beyond philosophy and, additionally, a call to action that Tyson subtly insists upon through Where Are the Women?

To this end, in the ultimate chapter of the book and with love, Tyson identifies Sojourner Truth as a philosopher. She considers Truth’s “fluid text,” the variety of versions of Truth’s 1851 speech in Akron, and the history and motivations for the multiple versions of a speech written in hands other than Truth’s. I wish to push the readers of Tyson’s book to utilize the very models that Tyson provides as a way to speculate, even further, on the next steps towards understanding Truth’s speech.

It is no mistake that Tyson uses Diotima through several chapters of this book and then concludes with a chapter on Sojourner Truth. Diotima serves as an ancient example of a woman or feminine figure whose voice influenced the very people who ventriloquized her. Thus, Diotima shares quite a bit with Truth, as each woman was ventriloquized by historical figures who and institutions that insisted on and benefited from her reduction if not elision. Moreover, the histories of each rely on legend, first and foremost—which is why it ultimately doesn’t matter (or does it?) if Diotima is a historical figure or not, or if Truth literally said “arn’t I a woman?” Tyson disabuses us of any concerns about Diotima’s historical presence—while, simultaneously, interrogating those moments in philosophical history when Diotima’s critics insisted on her as fiction. Additionally, she reminds us that Truth deliberately used her legendary status to gain exposure so that she might further her political agenda. The connections between these figures moves me to ask Tyson’s text some additional questions.

Tyson wrestles with Irigaray’s fictional account of Diotima’s speech, which acts as an appeal to love. Or, perhaps better said: to inspire readers to a love along with Diotima. Irigaray (and Tyson) arrives to this as an extension of Diotima’s discussion with Plato on the subject of Eros. In Tyson’s own words, Irigaray asserts that in Diotima’s speech:

“Sorcerer Love” does not ask us to trust this instance of discourse because it is a woman reading a woman, reclaiming her from her embedding in a man’s text. Rather, she asks us to perfect ourselves in wisdom by being the readers of her reading. She asks us to consider this activity as philosophy. . . . That is to say, we do not just read for the theme of love, but our reading can be an enactment of love. (95–96)

As contradictory as it may seem, and in the very vein of Irigaray’s call for mimicry, Tyson’s text suggests two things that I’d like to pose, here: (1) that we might benefit from a philosopher who thinks along with Truth and reimagines Truth’s speech in the very same way that Irigaray imagines Diotima: through the lens of love; and/or (2) that we might ask that same philosopher to utilize Truth’s core theoretical lens as the frame through which she imagines Truth’s speech and fictionalizes it for her own reading audience. I contend that Tyson, herself, has already approached parts of each of these potential projects. She has approached Truth with love. She identifies Truth’s philosophical intervention as the moment in Truth’s speech when she says: “I am a woman’s rights.”

Having already engaged with Nell Painter’s fundamental assertion that Truth was metonymically the black woman for her contemporary moment and thereafter for the mid-nineteenth century, Tyson shifts her focus to Truth’s own potential assertion of metonymy. Add to this Tyson’s engagement with the materiality of discourse (and of the body, à la Irigaray and as hinted through her engagement with Hortense J. Spillers), Where Are the Women? asks us to also consider the material relationship between Truth’s body and a woman’s rights—not to mention the gesture to Truth’s arm that serves the speech’s legend.

What if a philosopher picked up from where Tyson leaves us, asking to consider Truth as “a woman’s rights?” What would it mean to look at Truth through the lens of being a woman’s rights, figuratively and literally? Does this mean that the philosopher would, too, have to imagine herself as a woman’s rights? Might this lead the philosopher to imagine herself in David Kazanjian’s words as cited by Tyson: “so forceful that the formal, grammatical distinction between the subject and the predicate breaks down” (201)? Would this further inspire readers, as Tyson herself has done, to reconsider their relationships to the power of grammar, language, and discourse?

And, finally, I must also raise the questions about who this philosopher could and should be (provided that they/she/? should engage in this project, at all). Does it matter if this project is conducted by “a [black] woman reading a [black] woman”? I appreciate that Tyson left this for another philosopher to take on, not only because her project, then, provides an opening for philosophers in her tradition (the tradition of loving feminist philosophers) to take up the mantle, but also because it would require work outside of the scope of Where Are the Women? And yet, it is because of the possibility born from Tyson’s work that we can even speculate.

In this short reply essay, I will argue that successful reclamation strategies of historical women thinkers, in addition to meeting the three criteria Tyson presents in Where Are the Women?, should meet a fourth criterion. Namely, that any reclamation strategy move beyond a hierarchical gendered conceptual binary. For, the hierarchical gendered conceptual binary determines the extent of historical and contemporary women’s access to argumentation. The inability to overcome this binary leads Lloyd and Irigaray, unlike Le Doeuff, to formulate reclamation strategies with critical shortcoming, insofar as each compromises women’s ability to engage in argument. In what follows, I examine each strategy in terms of its treatment of Diotima, Tyson’s paradigm case for reclamation.

In Where Are the Women? Tyson concludes that “transformational reclamation” strategies are most successful. That is, they are more successful than other non-transformational strategies, such as the enfranchisement, alternative history, or corrective models. Transformational strategies look closely at forms of women’s historical exclusion to guide reclamation practices. Such practices engage unrecognized or underappreciated historical women’s works, and, at once, identify and critique the means by which they were silenced, thus improving contemporary women’s ability to do philosophy.

A successful reclamation practice should meet the three following criteria, Tyson holds:

1. A given strategy should respond or take on the critique that it reconstructs history inaccurately.
2. A given strategy should name and recognize historical women’s works.

• Moreover, a given strategy should engage with historical women’s texts imaginatively to see their potential (paraphrased from 142–44).

While these criteria are critical, I hold, they are insufficient for capturing everything essential to a successful reclamation strategy. A fourth consideration is needed: How well does a given strategy negotiate, or more specifically move beyond, rather than adopt the framework of hierarchical gendered conceptual binary?

In philosophy, argument is the prime mover. When we philosophize, we present reasons from which we infer logical conclusions, and to which, our dialogical partners respond in kind. Without argument at philosophy’s core, we cannot make sense of objections, resistance, or critique. Furthermore, argument preserves a view’s subtlety. The hierarchal gendered conceptual binary has long associated reason with masculinity and emotion with femininity. Straightforwardly rejecting reason and conceptualization as masculine, as Lloyd and Irigaray’s strategies do, only substantiates women’s role as non-rational. If reasoning and conceptualization is cordoned off as masculine, then engaging argumentatively will be seen as traitorous for feminist thinkers, and women will not be able to philosophize. A successful reclamation strategy must let women engage rationally and conceptually, or, in short, argumentatively. For, without argumentation, there is no philosophy. Lloyd’s reclamation strategy, according to Tyson’s reading, condemns Diotima as contributing to the masculinization of reason. Her reclamation centers on the role of the symbolic gender of concepts, particularly the masculinization of reason via metaphor. Concepts as gendered relate to one another in a binary hierarchy, which she illustrates using the Pythagorean Table, to which, Tyson, in her reading of Lloyd notes, we can easily add “conceptual; material” to the list. Likewise, the “emotion; reason” distinction follows. Thus, masculinity becomes associated with reason and concepts, while the feminine becomes associated with emotions and materiality. The logical conclusion of Lloyd’s strategy, Tyson writes, is that: “Diotima’s speech incorporates the importance of physical passion into the pursuit of wisdom, but it also maintains reason as superior to the physical body. The second move is part of the history of associations that pair masculinity with reason and femininity with the body. Thus, while the first move appears to bring together reason and body, the second move shows that such subsumption reestablishes a hierarchical binary” (72). Diotima contributes to the masculinization of reason, because in discussing love qua love, rather than favor the material, she preferences conceptual or rational procreation. Tyson, via Lloyd, sees this as reifying the kind of gendered conceptual divisions, and hierarchy, extant in the Pythagorean Table. But, how does this facilitate philosophic reclamation? Given its rendering of Diotima, how can this framework serve historical and contemporary women thinkers? If reason is masculine, then reasoning itself becomes taboo. Rather than say, women ought to have equal access to reasoning, and so, equal philosophical authority, Lloyd’s strategy is totalizing. It condemns reasoning uberhaupt. In so doing, it reinstates the initial division of gendered concepts, including its hierarchy, which as Lloyd herself notes, is a key component of historical women’s exclusion from philosophy. Irigaray’s strategy fails, too, because of its reliance on the symbolic hierarchical gendered binary. Reclamation as a practice of love is exemplified via a reclamation of Diotima. Reclamation as a practice of love consists in disruptive close-reading of historical women’s writing, which is repetitive, incessant, and oriented towards dialogue, not discursive production. In fact, Irigaray critiques Diotima for defining love as towards procreation, physical or conceptual. She writes: “When the circulation of dialogue becomes subordinate to the product of its work, the transcendent becomes inaccessible—we are merely mortal with dreams of achieving an immortality total alien from us” (97). On her view, philosophy is not about producing discursive conclusions, but about continually engaging with one another in dialogue. Irigaray attempts to overcome the conceptual gender binary using “love.” She tells us that love is not a set or definitive concept, but a middle, a daimonic-like in-between, which never is, but is always becoming. Theoretical and practical problems follow. Theoretically, Irigaray is attempting a rehabilitation of “love,” which, as a concept, is typically treated as specifically feminine topos. She tells us, love is not a concept; it exists on neither side of the division. It is a liminal negotiation of the two. But, by simply telling us “love” is liminal, rather than definitive, do we read it as such? In my view, rather than a progressing beyond the binary, Irigaray’s strategy reinstates it. How predictable for women’s work to be reclaimed through the feminine terrain of “Love.” Isn’t this precisely the conceptual contouring to avoid? Redoing the love stuff is a way of reenacting the gender binary, not subverting it. Best practice does not employ the tools of oppression for reclamation. A practical problem follows, too. If reclamation is repetitive, incessant reading, which pursues continued dialogue, not conclusive discourse, how will we hear the conclusions historical women argued for, especially those regarding women’s equality? Women thinkers then and now, have points they want to make, but Irigaray’s strategy threatens to suppress them. While we want to engage deeply and discuss continually historical women, if we cannot engage these thinkers as advocates, as wanting to say something, we cannot claim to have actually rehabilitated their philosophic authority. Argument is philosophy’s bread and butter, and argument is not complete without conclusion.

Although Le Doeuff sees Diotima as occupying a permissively prohibited role, she uniquely recognizes Diotima’s transformative reclamatory potential, precisely because her reclamation strategy—uchronic framing—moves beyond the symbolic gendered hierarchy. Uchronic framing allows Tyson to ask her most transformative question: “What if we had, from the beginning of European and Anglophone philosophy, a theory of love and knowledge handed down to us from a woman? What might we do with history like that?” (137). Not only does this question imagine a philosophic tradition, wherein women hold philosophic authority, but, it envisions a philosophic tradition in which authority is not divided along gender lines. Herein, Diotima is pictured as the simultaneous authority on love and knowledge, wherein the two are seen together, rather than in opposition. Uchronic questioning brings the transformative collapse of the symbolic hierarchical gender binary. Uchronia, or ideal time, reclaims historical women’s work by imaging the contemporary intellectual, political, and social differences we would see had they been taken seriously at the time they wrote. In Tyson’s words: “Uchronic history and reclamation together are more than a subjunctive exercise in what might have been” (126). Uchronia is not a simple this is how things are versus this is how things might have been. Rather, in engaging with underrepresented historical women, we observe not only what they argued for, but how they were silenced, in order to correct for the absence of their voices in tandem with the suppressive practices of philosophy today. By envisioning how differently the conceptual gendered hierarchy might look had we taken Diotima seriously, the uchronic method lets us think “love” as a historical and contingent concept, which has been a means of suppressing women’s voices, and as such, must be transcended. In sum, Tyson’s analysis reveals a fourth, though unrecognized, criterion for successful feminist reclamation. The best reclamation strategy will transcend the hierarchical gender binary, and see reason as gender neutral. For, reasoning is the basis of argument, and argument is the basis of philosophy. If reason and conceptualization is understood as masculine, women will never hold full philosophic authority, as is exemplified in the problems that recur in interpreting Diotima’s case.

Works Cited

Tyson, Sarah. 2018. Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better. New York: Columbia.