Abstract

The organization and legitimation of knowledge professed and produced within the Academy has been contested in recent years by Enlightenment critics and groups whose self-understanding resides outside the regulative canons of Euro-centric thought. The self-identified emancipatory discourse of Women's Studies has developed within the Academy and in opposition to "traditional" knowledges. Women's studies through a practice of feminist pedagogy seeks to interrupt the totalizing metanarrative which has been produced in the name of "man" by offering theories of "experience" and "empowerment" designed to serve the interests of women. These key terms and concepts are seen, however, to have totalizing consequences of their own. This thesis examines this problem through the ethical optics provided by Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that only ethics succeeds in interrupting the totalizing tendencies of any production of knowledge. ;Through examination of theories of Women's Studies and feminist pedagogy, the need for an ethical hermeneutic practice becomes apparent. "Experience" is seen to function as if it were transparent and "empowerment" does not yield an ethical limit to ab/uses of power from within itself. An emancipatory interest in knowledge which relies on a uni-directional practice of critique--away from the reader to the text--is in danger of establishing new knowledge enclosures and a hegemonically fortified self. In order to deepen appreciation of what is meant by "experience," Gadamerian and psychoanalytic hermeneutics are explored in their different approaches to the relationship between experience, openness and transformation. Within both strands of hermeneutics, experience of what is other is seen as essential to any process of change. It is, however, only in the work of Levinas that the full ethical import of the relation to the Other or to alterity is explored in depth. Levinas provides a powerful phenomenology of the experience of alterity which interrupts the totalizing tendencies of knowledge and gives back a new and altered meaning to knowledge which aims to be emancipatory. This is then incorporated into reflection upon the project of Women's Studies and the manner in which it has so far categorized otherness.