Abstract Feminists have interpreted Rousseau's attitudes to women as characteristic of a patriarchal ideology in which passion, nature and love are associated with the feminine and repressed in favour of masculine reason, culture and justice. Yet this reading does not cohere with Rousseau's adulation of nature, nor with the repression of writing and culture in favour of natural speech which Derrida finds in his texts. This paper uses Rousseau's accounts of his personal experiences to resolve this conflict and to develop (...) a more complex understanding of Rousseau's attitudes to women. The reading emphasizes that Rousseau operated with a triadic picture in which reason, the passions of the heart and the passions of the body are distinguished. The discussion of Derrida's reading of Rousseau gives rise to some reflections on the relationship of speech and writing to subjectivity, autonomy and women's oppression. (shrink)

In the chapter entitled ‘Philosophy and the Meaning of Life’ in Robert Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations there is an admonitory passage with many applications. ‘It is a puzzle,’ says Nozick, ‘how so many people, including intellectuals and academics devote enormous energy to work in which nothing of themselves or their important goals shines forth, not even in the way their work is presented. If they were struck down, their children upon growing up and examining their work would never know why they (...) had done it, would never know who it was that did it. They work that way and sometimes live that way, too’. (shrink)