Femininity

In his book It’s Not about the Gift: From Givenness to Loving, Steinbock advances a new phenomenological analysis of the gift. In this analysis, the gift is not about what is being given, but about the event of a loving relation between two subjects. In this interpersonal relation the gift emerges as each beloved withdraws themselves in order to reveal the other as they are by being loved in humility. In this paper, I undertake to express two main challenges for Steinbock’s account of the gift. The first concerns Steinbock’s attempt to disengage the phenomenon of surprise from the possibility of the gift. The second involves his neglecting the body. This neglect raises serious questions on the kind of love during which the gift is supposed to emerge. In the epilogue, instead of a conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the gift that have not been given much attention in the philosophical discussion of the gift.

Today, we encounter a question that has rarely been treated as a serious or provocative issue: women and sexuality as a philosophical problem. This theme now acts as a critical marker—an axis that divides entire fields of thought into a before and after. The beginning of this epistemic shift can be traced back to a Freudian question: What does a woman really want? In this article, we follow this question through the lens of Lacanian theory, in which he introduces the concept of sexuation and illuminates the foggy, ambiguous terrain of femininity through the formulation of the hysterical discourse. Moving beyond a purely hysterical approach to womanhood, the French psychoanalyst carved a path for the re-inscription of her historically ambivalent and fragmented image. For Lacan, woman is a symptom—an embodiment of the fundamental contradiction and rupture within the symbolic order. The Woman does not exist; rather, la femme is a rebel who struggles to exist