Cyborg revolutions: Towards a postfeminist ethics with Angela Carter, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray and Donna Haraway

This study argues for the elaboration of a revolution in feminist ethics. It sets the seemingly antithetical work of poststructuralist theorists Luce Irigaray and Michel Foucault into an intertextual dialogue through the mediation of Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg. These theories are embodied in the narrative fictions of novelist Angela Carter—especially in her novel Nights at the Circus—and Carter emerges as a theorist in her own right.;Poststructuralist ethics focuses on the ethical subject's relation to the self and to the other. I stress that ethics needs be understood as relationship—between this self and other. Irigaray's ethics of sexual difference outlines a revolution in ethics which calls for the transformation of these relations. She maintains that relations need to be mediated, but not according to the present symbol of the male phallus.;Irigaray focuses on women's attainment of full subjecthood and on placing the space of mediation in the female body. I argue that Foucault's very different ethics, based in an aestheticization of existence, provides a crucial supplement to Irigaray's ethics. Rejecting a psychoanalytic framework, he deconstructs the male subject position and attempts to redefine the space between, still based on the male body, but outside the economy of the phallus.;I identify Foucault's Panopticon as the figure that defines the ethical-political space of the modern world. It is the spatial, visual and moral technology that mediates our relations. Invoking the myths of Plato's Cave, Antigone's Cave, Ariadne's Labyrinth, along with Carter's Nights, I place the Panopticon in a history of moral technologies, past and present. I insist that this technology needs to be viewed as a gendered one that produces gendered subjects. Arguing that feminism needs to be reinfused with a sense of revolution, I suggest a deconstructed notion of revolution that maintains its roots in the Enlightenment's ideal of freedom but takes into account poststructuralist theories of power and its relation to aesthetics. I also deconstruct the opposition in poststructuralist feminism between Haraway's Foucauldian-influenced cyborg feminism and Irigaraian's mother-daughter feminism. I propose a revolutionized concept of cyborg feminism that includes a deconstructed mother-daughter relationship.