Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy - Taschenbuch

As in Gyn/Ecology (1979) Daly delights here in word-play - the title itself is double-edged. "For it Names not only the 'thrust of the argument' that assails women and nature on all levels. . . but also the way out - the vigor, eagerness, and intense longing that launches Wild women on Journeys beyond the State of Lechery." On Daly's journey, there's considerable fun and refashioned philosophy as she enthusiastically guides us past patriarchal obstacles (foregrounds) toward her three realms of Archespheres, Pyrospheres, and Metamorphospheres. Tightly-argued, it's not: rather, "In keeping with the tradition of Methodicide, this book is a work of studied errata. . . ." It is based primarily on women's experiences, and secondarily on texts from Aristotle to Arendt. And it is bitingly perceptive, as when Daly reviews the male flight from lust into asceticism, calling up examples from St. Jerome to T. E. Lawrence. Or when she warns against false mothers held up as pseudo-archetypes - including the Papal Great Mother John Paul Two ("Championing many of the values of the vacuous eighties, such as imprisonment in the family, fetal rights, and discreet christian genocide. . .) and the "fetal" embassy hostages (". . . a media-staged Odyssey, re-enacting the myth of separation and return. . ."). The answer to such "sado-sublimination" is feminism, conceived as a verb and distinct from "pseudofeminism," taken to be a reified state, which some women then consider themselves to have "moved beyond." "But if one understands feminism to mean the radical, ontological process of Realizing female Elemental potency, one does not move 'beyond' it. One moves with it." Drawing on Arendt, Daly discusses the evil of banality and rites of appeasement - taking into account what women, as the touchable caste, share with the untouchable caste (including the translation of injustice into justice, coercion into choice, the association of loathing, disgust, and pollution). To break out, women need rename and reclaim the classic virtues (prudence as right reason, courage as heartfelt, passionate strength). They need to trade "tidy demons" for "tidal muses"; they need to enter the third realm, the Metamorphospheres, where they may engage in Be-Longing, Be-Friending, and Be-Witching. "The code-breaking of a Metamorphosing woman enables her to protect the trunk, roots, branches of the Tree of her Life. . . . It enables her to find and create her own Code." Worth the decoding - especially for those looking for fresh insights into patriarchal society and inspiration as to feminist alternatives. (Kirkus Reviews)