A critique to the past, a new writing for the future: carole pateman, luce irigaray and patriarcalism

Abstract

This paper seeks to expose the subtlety of the difference between the old and the new, between the archaic and the modern, in order to question the emancipatory character of modern politics. The existence and the conjecture of a sexual contract in the various forms of social contract theory is the context where Carole Pateman develops her work to expose the subversive way women have been estimated since early modernity. What is questioned, however, is the fact that Pateman’s critic, even though successfully rejecting contract theory, does not overcome the discursive structure of natural law tradition. Such critical insufficiency will motivate, from Luce Irigaray, that one puts to the test the phallogocentric model of philosophy and psychoanalysis itself, which will rewrite themselves when women rethink the history of thought through a feminist normativity.