Katherine C. Sheehan (Southwestern Law School) has posted Caring for Deconstruction (Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, Vol. 12, 2000) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
In her 1997 book “Caring for Justice”, Robin West issues a call for a “justice of care”. In the same work, however, West attacks what she calls “postmodernism,” largely because she views it as a threat to her “essentialist” position—the idea that women share essential qualities with each other. However, neither West’s call for the mitigation of general justice with particularized care nor her more general project of enriching the law’s understanding of women’s lives depends on this essentialism. West’s refusal to attend to a wide variety of work lumped together as “postmodernism” undermines the strength of her case for a justice of care in at least two important ways. First, West has blinded herself to remarkably similar and important work done in the area of responsibility, ethics and politics by the late Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s recent explorations of the tensions between the political necessity for general rules of law and ethical responsibility owed to the singular other both enrich the justice/care debate and highlight opportunities for further theoretical development. Attention to this work can only help West in thinking through the issues she has raised. Second, West’s essentialism, premised on the notion that individuals share essential qualities by virtue of their gender, is itself inconsistent with her demand that justice respect each litigant in his or her particularity.
Part II of this Article explores the surprisingly close parallels between Derrida’s and West’s views of justice. Although their notions of justice as asymmetrical relationships based in responsibility are strikingly similar, Derrida and West arrive at their ideas from quite different directions which suggest different practical possibilities and problems. Part III situates Derrida’s writing on justice within the body of his work, in the process attempting to clear away some of the more troublesome misconceptions that have attached themselves to deconstruction in the US. Part IV critiques West’s feminist essentialism and its incompatibility with her idea of caring justice. The article concludes by comparing the implications of Derrida’s and West’s ideas and suggest directions for further research.
And a bit more from the text:
As Drucilla Cornell has pointed out, West’s aim to “reveal Woman for what she really is” depends for its success on a language that does not and cannot exist,“a pure medium that transposes sense by bringing it to conceptual form.”
And a bit more:
West often finds herself defending her essentialism against friendly feminist criticism, but never succeeds in doing so adequately. In a defense against anticipated objections in the Introduction to Caring for Justice, for example, West confuses sameness with difference. West refers to the work of Carol Gilligan for the proposition that women are different from men, then challenges “those who assert the ‘no difference’ hypothesis”149 to assume the burden of proof. The critical problem with West’s essentialism, however, is that it posits sameness among women, not that it argues for difference between women and men.
I must admit that I am totally baffled by the reference to “a pure medium that transposes sense by bringing it to conceptual form.” Language is a medium, but what are the criteria for a "pure medium." And why does West’s argument rest on purity. As for sameness and difference, West is most certainly not confused. If there are two sets, X and Y, and set X differs from set Y, then the members of set X must share characteristics that enable the difference. Or to put it somewhat differently, the idea of sameness is entailed by the grammer of sameness and difference, using grammer in the Wittgensteinian sense.
Given the subject matter, this paper is quite readable and it does a good job of demystifying Derrida.