Introduction: Problematising sexual difference

While excavating sexual difference in language and thinking, the essay serves two functions. One of them is to critique the traditional thought for superficially linking the meaning of sexuality with biological gender. The biological bodily sexual identity of human beings is not a pointer to their psychical sexual behaviour. Many men who anatomically appear to be males are psychically females. Likewise, in several cases, those who are anatomically women are psychically males. With the help of psychoanalytic gender theories, it exposes the arbitrary nature of sex/gender identities and explains how language serves a significant function in the constitution of sexual difference in humans as men and women. The other purpose of the essay is to show that sexual difference is not merely a biological phenomenon, rather, it exists in human linguistic expressions and thoughts as well. The feminine experience of the world articulated in language differs from the masculine conception of truth. The essay analyses the process of formation of sexual difference in language and thinking, which happens regardless of the biological sexual identities of those who express those thoughts.

It departs from the traditional characterisation of masculine thinking as man’s thinking and feminine thinking as woman’s mental activities. Masculine linguistic expressions can originate from women writers and feminine language from men. This investigation exposes the process of the emergence of sexual difference in the human psyche, language and thinking. To do that, this study anchors primarily on the reflections of Jacques Lacan, Friedrich Nietzsche and Ferdinand Saussure. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used as the theoretical source to explain the role of language in forming masculine and feminine identities. Nietzsche’s prioritisation of the value of natural existence, sensuality, and beauty over the abstract truths of masculine metaphysics enables us to explain how feminine experience differs from the masculine conception of truth. Saussure’s linguistic theory, which challenged the masculine representative function of language, will justify the essay’s argument that bodily ‘affects’ are significant sources of production of linguistic significations, metaphors, and imageries, which enables us to inscribe the feminine experience of the world.

Philosophers and scientists seem to think that human thinking is a sex-neutral activity. Though there are biological differences among humans, their consciousness is believed to be unaffected by any gender. Rationality is considered the essence of the human’ self”. The ‘self’ is viewed as transcendental, sex-neutral, and unaffected by spatial-temporal differences.

Psychoanalytic researches explain that the biological sexual identities of men and women are often at odds with their psychic sexual characteristics (Fink, 1995). Jacques Derrida informs us that language plays a significant role in creating sexual difference in thinking (Derrida, 1987). Derrida and psychoanalysis intersect in revealing the instability and complexity of language, identity, and subjectivity (Earlie, 2021).Footnote 1 Some linguistic expressions contain masculine characteristics irrespective of who the speaker is. Masculine language expressions can sometimes happen from women writers as well. Likewise, male thinkers sometimes produce feminine writings (Cixous and Clement, 1986).Footnote 2 Psychoanalysis challenges.the traditional way of conceiving sexual identities as a thing entirely dependent on biological essentialism. Lacanian psychoanalysis has already shown how biological sexual difference is arbitrary and unreal (Fink, 1995). Helene Cixous says that sexual difference cannot be delineated based on the anatomical structure of the bodies (Sellers, 1991: 56). Language creates sexual traits of an individual. The reinterpretation of Saussure’s linguistic theory by the poststructuralists like Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida was revelatory in this regard to understand sexual difference in thinking.

Besides the thoughts of Lacan, Nietzsche, and Saussure, the valuable observations made by psychoanalytic feminists such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helene Cixous on the meaning of sexual difference are also methodological resources of this essay. All these three feminists draw the rich resources of Lacan, Nietzsche, and Saussure for their critique of sexual difference. Lacanian psychoanalysis is a significant source that throws light on the role of language in forming sexual difference. The psychic source of sexual difference is impossible to explain with the methods available in traditional philosophy that work on conceptual thinking that operates merely with rational speculation. For understanding psychic traits of sexuality, psychoanalysis, which discusses unconscious mental processes, is the source available to contemporary thinkers. Nietzsche’s philosophy also articulates the feminine experience of reality while he proposed to conceive truth as ‘woman’ (Nietzsche, 1989: 1). Delineation of the feminine experience of the world done in his aphoristic writings differs radically from the conceptual representation of the world in traditional metaphysical philosophy. Likewise, the structuralism of Ferdinand Saussure has enabled writers to explore different possibilities in language to express psychic experiences that were previously unavailable to philosophy (Saussure, 1959).

Nevertheless, conventional philosophical writings use the representational mode of language for their thinking process. The representational function of language rests on the correspondence theory of truth, for which the meaning of a proposition is determined by its correspondence with things in the outside world. Structural linguistics of Saussure in the twentieth century reminded us that there are no pre-existing truths for the things of the world to represent in language. Truths and things, it says, are constructions of language. Such a revelation of structuralism enabled the poststructuralists to seek possibilities to articulate the multiplicities in experiences that were not recognized previously as truths. This paved the way for the expression of multiplicities in thinking and writing, as seen in the works of some of the contemporary thinkers, which would not have been possible without the revelation made by Saussure.

This essay demonstrates the possibility of forming a sexually different mode of thinking from that of the masculine mode of thinking. A sexually different mode of thought can be either a feminine or queer mode of articulation.Footnote 3 This difference in thinking has not been previously recognised in earlier philosophical traditions. Almost all philosophers believe that sexual difference is relevant only in the biological realm. Biological sexual difference is determined based on the physical characteristics of humans, such as differences in terms of muscles, reproductive organs, and other anatomical structures. Operation of sexual difference works beyond these biological bodily differences, which was not recognised by metaphysics. Metaphysical tradition conceived human consciousness as a universal phenomenon possessed by everybody, irrespective of differences in people’s age, culture, sex, gender, geographical location, and history. The classical explanation of this uniformity of human consciousness is provided by the Platonic metaphysics, for which the human’ form’, the essence, is the same for all (Plato, 1997). By denying spatiotemporal truths to be unreal, Plato conceived human reality as an absolute consciousness that existed transcendentally, uncontaminated by empirical experiences.

Adriana Cavarero exposes the abstract way identities of human beings are posited in metaphysical philosophies generally and Plato in particular, which reduced the multiplicities and singularities of each one, where she says that woman’s experiences are the most affected. She exposes the gendered bias of traditional philosophers, who pose themselves as neutral dispensers of truth. She suggests that Plato often depicts women as passive objects rather than as fully realised consciousness with their agency and perspectives (Cavarero, 1995).

Though philosophers do not accept the difference between men and women at the level of consciousness, they differentiate them sexually. The general tendency of the philosophers was to assign two sets of psychical characteristics to them in a stereotypical way without conducting any in-depth examination. According to them, the man’s characteristics are hierarchically opposed to the woman’s. While man is projected as a rational being, the woman is seen as a being driven by passions and emotions. Most of them say that the man is moral and the woman is immoral; the man is courageous, the woman is weak; the man is logical; the woman is emotional. The woman is portrayed as a deficient being, existing as the negative pole of man. Thus, The traditional metaphysical philosophy built on reason shall be considered a masculine enterprise.

The masculine nature of traditional philosophy does not rest on the biological male sexual identity of the philosopher. Instead, it has something to do with the structure and nature of thinking. Understanding truth in conceptual mode through applying abstract reasoning is considered a masculine approach to reality. Metaphysical positing of the truth of objects through abstract reasoning always creates a transcendental order above the bodily existence of those objects. Aristotle claimed that the ability to think abstractly is a peculiar quality of a man, which a woman lacks. Aristotle associated the male sex with reason and the female sex with body or emotion (Aristotle, 1998). Jean Jacques Rousseau associated women with emotion and men with reason and logic (Rousseau, 1979). Kant positioned men as more capable of rational thought and moral reasoning than women. He believed that women were more inclined towards feeling and intuition, which he considered inferior to rationality (Kant, 2006). Thus, philosophical tradition has a significant role in creating hierarchically constituted sexual relations. The attitude to associate man with reason and woman with emotion has continued throughout the history of metaphysics till the beginning of the post-metaphysical phase of philosophy in the nineteenth century. The post-metaphysical turn began with the thinking of Nietzsche, Husserl, Freud, and Saussure, which was instrumental in getting acceptance for the relevance of non-conceptual forms of truth in life and thought. Unlike the truth produced through abstract reasoning of the traditional philosophers, truth derived through concrete particular experiences of phenomena was non-conceptual.

While philosophers and scientists conceive human consciousness to be a sex-neutral, pure transcendental subjectivity, they recognize sexual difference only in the domain of biology. Viewing humanity as a uniform consciousness is too narrow a generalisation, which neglects the differences and singularities each one has. Poststructuralist thinkers criticise this transcendental human consciousness as a ‘phallogocentric’Footnote 4 projection of metaphysics. Lacan, Derrida, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva utilise the rich source of Saussure’s linguistics and psychoanalysis to determine differences between humans regarding sex and gender. Lacan, who suggested that the “unconscious is structured like a language” (Lacan,1998:20), uses Saussure’s structural linguistics to lay the foundation for his thought on self-formation. Lacan has explicated the arbitrary nature of sexual difference and has shown that biological and psychical sexual identities are social constructs produced discursively. However, the philosophical foundation for thinking about feminine difference is traced back to the writings of Nietzsche, who, deviating from metaphysical thinking, had produced a this-worldly philosophy that celebrates sensuality, body, and worldly beauty. His position was against the traditional philosophy’s downgrading of woman, body, senses, and worldly beauty as valueless. In opposition to the conventional philosophy’s devaluation of these realities, I characterise Nietzsche’s privileging of them as a stance favouring the feminine experience of truth.

The lens provided by Lacanian psychoanalysis enables this study to look at Nietzsche and Saussure differently from the traditional way these thinkers have been cast. Traditional interpreters understood Nietzsche merely as a philosopher of concepts like the will-to-power, ‘overman’, and eternal recurrence. Sexual difference he brought in thinking was not acknowledged until Derrida’s work Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1986) was published. Derrida perceives Nietzsche’s writing style as an expression of a feminine experience of the world. Nietzsche’s replacement of the philosophical notions of ‘being’ with ‘becoming’, soul with body, logic with beauty, and transcendental abstract concepts with empirical concrete experiences have created a turn towards a non-masculine way of thinking. His articulation of experiences produced by natural phenomena such as mountains, oceans, dance, and music in philosophy were expressions of the Dionysian frenzy that destabilises the rigid masculine self–identity. Traditional philosophy conceives the truth of a mountain, rain, or a tree based on their universal abstract essence that exists transcendental to these objects. Its perception of the truth of objects as their abstract conceptual essence is a masculine mode of truth. Geometry functions in that manner when it studies the truth of a mountain in terms of its triangular structure. Unlike this, the description of concrete experience evoked by a mountain, as seen in phenomenological writers, casts their truth non-conceptually. Experience of truth as multiplicity is always expressed in a non-conceptual format. Multiplicities cannot be delineated, captured and articulated in a representational language mode. Nietzsche was a philosopher who tried to articulate such experiential pluralities of the beautiful phenomenal world in a language different from the conceptual mode of the language of the metaphysicians. The following passage is evidence for it:

“The figs are falling from the trees, they are fine and sweet; and as they fall, their red skin splits. I am a north wind to ripe figs. Thus like figs, do these teachings fall to you, my friends: now drink their juice and eat their sweet flesh! It is autumn all around and clear sky and afternoon.” (Nietzsche, 1984: 109)

Libidinal wells of the body are stirred when it is affected by the flows and hues of the surrounding world. It creates an occasion for the emergence of plural, non-conceptual significations in a person. Abstract reasoning departs there, and language allows libidinal, imaginative aesthetic playfulness. This is the starting point of a sexually different philosophical thought as seen in Nietzsche’s texts. Sexual difference in philosophy thus has to be sought in the very characteristic of truth articulated in its thought process. The truth, which emerges from the affectedness of a person by worldly things such as mountains, trees, oceans, lakes, animals, and other human individuals, lies far different from the truth produced by the abstract conceptual understanding of worldly things by metaphysical thinkers. Derrida finds Nietzsche’s writings as a feminine experience of truth due to their non-metaphysical origin in the world, life and the body (Derrida, 1986). If Aristotle’s characterisation of the affective elements of life as feminine is acceptable to us, then Derrida’s evaluation of those philosophies that depict such truths to be feminine can be fully justified.

The accepted view of language as a device for representing a pre-existing truth has to be disposed of for the expression of feminine, non-conceptual truths. Support for this view comes for the first time in thought through Saussure’s structural linguistic theory, which says that there are no pre-existing concepts or truths to be represented by language. Saussure’s structuralism which created a radical rupture in the human view of the perception of truth has reminded us that what we consider as truths of the world is an arbitrary construction in language. Saussure’s exposure to the arbitrary nature of language enables writers to use language in a non-conceptual, non-representative way for articulating experiences of multiplicity produced by the affectedness of the body by surroundings. That is the point where Nietzsche and Saussure converge.Footnote 5 Nietzsche has shown the nature of feminine truth, and Saussure’s linguistic theory provides legitimacy for its expression in language. Without Saussure’s reflections, contemporary feminine thinkers would not even be able to think of articulating feminine sexual difference in language.

The Lacanian feminism represented by Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Helene Cixous, who contributed more to the thinking on sexual difference, claim that the so far existing discourses in philosophy, science, and culture have only represented the masculine perception of the truth of the world. Irigaray writes that “the sexes are now defined only as they are determined in and through language, whose laws, it must not be forgotten, have been prescribed by male subjects for centuries” (Irigaray, 1985: 87). The feminine perspective of reality has not manifested in them. By feminine perspective, they do not mean a woman’s viewpoint as a biological being.Footnote 6 Instead, the feminine represents the worldly, bodily, and plural experiences of truth, which are discarded to the domain of otherness by traditional thought.

Psychoanalytic feminist theory provided a more precise view of sexual difference in thinking. In deviation from the traditional equality theories on gender, it looks at equality of gender with suspicion because it only merges women with men, thereby denying sexual difference. Psychoanalytic feminism thus takes up the issue of sexual difference for a more subtle investigation and examination. Luce Irigaray stated that at every age, there is some central problem that needs to be addressed by philosophy. “Sexual difference is probably that issue in our age which could be our salvation if we thought it through” (Irigaray, 2004: 7). It is not about a mere sexual difference between man and woman she speaks about, but rather about sexual difference in thinking, language, and every relation we conduct to the world. She added that “a revolution in thought and ethics is needed if the work of sexual difference is to take place. We need to reinterpret everything concerning the relations between the subject and discourse, the subject and the world, the subject and the cosmic” (Ibid: 8). The discourses of psychoanalytic feminism developed powerful tools to understand more about sexual difference and its play in the formation of human gendered identities as well as human thought.

For psychoanalytic feminists also, the sexual identities of men and women are not stable. Gender and sexual identities do not spring from human biology or body anatomy. They are rather ‘discursively’ constructed by various cultural tools such as language, discourses, and bodily disciplining. Human consciousness for them as male and female is a cultural construct added upon the biological sex/genitalia in childhood. Men and women are not pre-existing realities. Judith Butler has shown us how the biological sex of humans has also been produced by cultureFootnote 7(Butler, 1999). The symbolic structureFootnote 8 of the society woven with language promotes the gendered existence of human beings (Kristeva, 1984). The biological sex of human beings does not lead to psychic sex of them. Cixous writes that “there are some men who do not repress their femininity, some women who, more or less strongly, inscribe their masculinity. The difference is not distributed, of course, on the basis of socially determined “sexes”“ (Cixous and Clement, 1986:81). She has pointed out that both men and women can have access to feminine writing style, which is characterised by fluidity, metamorphosis, receptivity, inventiveness, and elasticity (Cixous,1976). These writers take up the task of expressing plurality in language; for them, Nietzsche is the thinker who has shown the way. In Nietzsche’s works, we see what a sexually different thought in philosophy shall look like.

Sexual difference in Lacanian psychoanalysis

Lacan has reformulated the meaning of woman differently. For him, the biological/anatomical structure of a woman does not guarantee her psychic status as a woman. For Lacanian tradition, the woman, in the true sense, is a site of otherness,Footnote 9 which consists of desires, imaginations, multifarious sexual experiences, and libidinal drives. Initially, all human beings were of this nature. Out of it, a ‘self-consciousness’ as the human essence is carved, created, and constructed with a linguistic structure that humans assimilate as they grow and land in socio-symbolic order. Saussure explains the fundamental characteristics of such a linguistic structure, which Lacan has incorporated into his theory to explain the nature of the human unconscious.

It says that human consciousness is not a pre-existing subjectivity. At birth, only multifarious drives of the body work as the mental process (Lacan, 2001). A self-conscious human subjectivity is formed only later in the child by the child’s interaction with the world and other human beings. It is from the necessity of interacting with others that the child assimilates the language used by the members of the society in which the child is brought up. In the Lacanian perception, a child’s self-identity is formed only by entering language into the unconscious (ibid). “For Lacan, the subject is a subject of (to) language” (Sellers, 1991:46) and “is created in language” (ibid). Language structures the chaotic flowing unconscious desires, and condenses them into language, thereby displacing their surge through symbolisation.Footnote 10 Thus “the subject is a material construction which depends for its identity on the negation and exclusion of the forms of otherness” (Pearson, 1993:44). With the entry of language, all the meanings, values, customs, ethos, perspectives, and attitudes that prevailed in society are entered into the child, displacing the libidinal drives. The self thus formed is considered a masculine self due to the masculine structure of language. In Lacan’s observation, the linguistic structure of all modern societies is masculine. (Lacan, 2001).

How could the masculine nature of the language be explained? Human language acquires a masculine nature due to the symbolic use of the words of a language. The primary units of language are words, which are signs. A word or sign does not represent a particular object but only a class of objects or a category formed out of the generalisation of objects based on some of their common properties. Man, woman, horse, tree, justice, and bird are examples that explain how words function as representatives of certain categories. It is similar to the logocentric nature of language presented by Derrida (Derrida, 1997). Such a word formation is the outcome of approaching the truth of objects based on abstraction and generalisation, which is considered a masculine attitude to phenomena. This activity constitutes logical reasoning, the quality Aristotle considered specific to men that is lacking in women (op. cit.)Footnote 11. This is the way the propositional form of linguistic expressions works in logic. Through this activity, the world’s objects are measured, studied, ordered, and organised and thus, phenomena are brought under human control.

Domination over things and utilising them for various human advantages is the intention behind this drive. By this activity, man exercises their power over nature and objects. The woman who lacks this ability, they say, only perceives objects’ external appearance as revealed to the sense organs. This is one reason for considering a woman as an inferior being swayed away by appearances. Appearance reveals only phantasms of objects, which do not yield to articulation in language. If the human self is structured with language, such a self would always be a masculine self. From structuralism, we learn that various cultural phenomena like mores, beliefs, conventions, norms, and attitudes of humans are also formed by linguistic signifiers. As meanings in society are constituted by linguistic signifiers which reflect only the man’s perspective, language, human ‘self’, and culture born by it would have a masculine structure.

The woman here is the unconstructed and un-constructible site of experience that evades all attempts to capture and pin down. It is not exactly the biological woman mentioned here as the unconstructed; instead, it is the feminine otherness, which is more of a site of experience. On the other hand, the category of the gendered woman, though anatomically seems different from man, may not be psychically different from him (Fink, 1995). Since her ‘self-identity’ is also formed by language assimilation, she possesses more or less a masculine structure. This fact made Lacan conceive both man and woman as two subject positions adopted by people in relation to the phallic symbolic order produced by language, and consequently commented that ‘woman does not exist’ (Grosz, 1998: 140) in such an order.

Lacanian psychoanalysis explains that the social categories of man and woman are mere psychic positions produced in humans after language adoption. The sexuality of humans, thus, is determined by the way they relate to the symbolic order constituted by language. Those who internalise the social structure of language into the unconscious adopt a masculine position because linguistic signs are formed and interpreted basically from a masculine point of view. All male and female children must acquire the pre-linguistic structure for their survival in society. They internalise language as they start living in society as independent individuals. As a result, irrespective of their biological sexual difference, all humans exhibit more or less a masculine structure due to the masculine nature of language. This made Lacan say that ‘woman does not exist in the symbolic order’ (Lacan, 1999: 7). “By saying that ‘woman does not exist’, Lacan is not claiming that there is no female subject, but rather that the very act of entering language is inherently phallic” (Morris, 2020:19).

It means that womankind, though anatomically appearing to be female, is psychically built on a masculine structure. Dani Cavallaro makes it clear in her statement that “Sexual difference is not biologically ingrained in the body from birth, but is produced by the subject’s entry into the symbolic order since it is language that is responsible for placing individuals into particular cultural structures by designating them as “woman” or “men” (Cavallaro. 2003: 30). Sexual difference for humans is thus the result of socio-linguistic influence.

While coming to his later works, particularly Encore, the source of Lacan’s explanation of sexual difference shifts from its earlier domain of imaginary and symbolic to that of Real register. There, he distinguishes the world of reality constituted by trade, commerce, and everyday activities from the Real order, which is beyond the determination of language (Barnard, 2002:4). Lacan explains the Real as an experience of rapture and ecstasy brought about mainly in the subject’s love relations with the other person, without any interest in his selfish pleasure. Encore explains this experience of Real as ‘other jouissance’ that is different from phallic jouissance expressed in sexual intercourse and selfish pleasures. According to this later position of Lacan, the feminine is the experience of other jouissance, which he earlier thought was an impossible realm to achieve. What Lacan calls masculine structure and feminine structure, thus, do not have to do with one’s biological organs but rather with the kind of jouissance that one can obtain (Fink, 2002: 36). Ragland, in tune with Bernad and Fruce Fink, suggests that notwithstanding the biological sexual identity, masculine characteristic originates in people when they identify themselves with the symbolic linguistic order and its social conventions. She conceives the feminine nature as the outcome of the experience of jouissance in the Real order. Masculine and feminine identifications, therefore, are not equitable with biological sex (Ragland, 2004: x).

Integrating all humans into the socio-symbolic order bars the possibility of affirming their sexual differences. For psychoanalysis, libidinal drives and instincts are brought into play only when the human body is affected by concrete, particular objects in their embodied state. It was available for humans during their pre-linguistic existence as children, before their integration into the symbolic order. Society compels the grownups to adopt the language structure that prevents them from expressing libidinal experiences. These libidinal experiences constitute the feminine domain of human consciousness.Footnote 12 Libidinal experiences must understood as feminine for two reasons. One reason is that they are not representable in masculine logical discourses. Another one is that they are discarded by male-dominated society as the opposite pole of rationality, logic, morality, and conceptual thinking. As a result, all discourses of humankind, including philosophy, turn out to be masculine.

Nietzsche’s inscription of sexual difference

Nietzsche is the first figure to deviate from masculine thought of metaphysical tradition. I will not claim that Nietzsche’s works do not contain any bias against women. Some of his pronouncements in his writings are observed to be highly objectionable to women. Nietzsche is notorious for his anti-feminism. We have to distinguish the feminine attitude of his philosophy from his anti-feminism. His anti-feminism is the outcome of his dissatisfaction with women’s deviation from their feminine nature, which comes from their desire to embrace masculine ways of living. Some of the arguments in his texts may contradict what we explain here. Though there are critics who accused Nietzsche of being a misogynist for his anti-woman comments, a subtle understanding of his thoughts will reveal him to be a pro-feminine philosopher.Footnote 13 Nietzsche’s preference for natural existence, the beauty of the world, and sensuality over abstract truth must be seen as a feminine attitude, which was a deviation from the masculine mode of philosophising.

Distancing from masculine conceptual thinking, Nietzsche captures the pluralistic experience produced by phenomena. His works do not present any single, systematic, and concluded philosophy. He perceives the tendency of metaphysics to consider the truth of objects in the realm of abstract ‘essences’ as a wrong stance. Essence, for him, is a fabrication. For him, objects have no definite truth beyond their appearance. He gives a higher value to ‘appearance’ in life. He ridiculed the truth seeker, the metaphysician, for explaining the world’s truth through logical axioms.

On the contrary, he sees truth as a mere interpretation of phenomena. He says, ‘there are no facts but only interpretations’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 267). For Nietzsche, the world is false and an appearance, and there is no truth to find (Nietzsche, 1968:1067). The magical spell of appearance of the world, which he associates with woman, is what one ought to seek (Nietzsche, 1974: 271–72). Behind appearance, there is only flux, which Nietzsche calls ‘becoming’. Philosophers, however, produce a world of being that consists of stable essences to control the flux. They posit a higher order of truths over flux, which Nietzsche identifies as “imposition upon becoming the character of being” (Nietzsche, 1968: 330). If the apparition of truth posited on phenomena is removed, appearance alone will remain. Like truths, morality is also, for him, a mere interpretation of the philosopher. For Nietzsche, untruth is the condition of this world. He says that “without accepting the fictions of logic,…without a constant falsification of the world by means of numbers, man could not live” (Nietzsche, 1989: 12). It is human weakness, the deficiency of the will to power, that makes them posit higher truths over the life and world. Nietzsche thinks that magnifying the ‘power of the falsehood’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 292), is what is actually needed, as seen in his project of aesthetic affirmation of life (ibid: 419–53).

In opposition to abstract transcendental truths of metaphysics, Nietzsche’s philosophy promotes a desire for nature, appearance, sense, body, animality, natural living, and sensuality. Since traditional philosophy casts appearance, beauty, desires, body, and sensuality as feminine and associates them with woman’s character, his affirmation of them reflects a feminine perspective of life. In the philosophical tradition, the woman is the image of irrationality, sense, and sensuality. While man is considered a rational self, the woman is presented as a ‘being’ guided by passions and appearances. That is why the patriarchal society keeps women out of the public sphere, religion, and cultural institutions. They consider the woman as the seductress who lures a man away from reason like Adam lured Eve and corrupted him. The dogmatic philosophers always keep sense experiences, beauty, and women out of their lives to develop their spiritual power. Nietzsche believes that such an ascetic denial of life, body, and worldly beauty results in nihilism. Nihilism is the tendency to reject our material world, the senses, the body, and women in favour of other-worldly existence and higher metaphysical truths.

Nietzsche was a great critic of nihilism. He observes that most philosophers remained unmarried because they were haters of sensuality and worldly beauty (Nietzsche, 1969: 106–107). When man negates worldly life, he finds woman an affirmer of earthly life. The woman as the figure of life affirmation and plurality is more acceptable to Nietzsche than the nihilistic man. When man hates worldly life, woman only affirms life (Vasseleu, 1993). To eternally affirm the world and say ‘yes and amen’ to life (Nietzsche, 1984: 244–45), the woman who is the figure of life and desire must be affirmed.

For Nietzsche, ‘woman’ shall be the model for philosophical thinking. Nietzsche depicts woman as untruth. He says the woman is unconcerned about truth: “she does not want truth: what truth to a woman? …..her great art is a lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty” (Nietzsche, 1989: 163). He says her great art is appearance, dissimulation, simulacra, and untruth. Therefore, the affirming woman does not need truth; she affirms herself without man and his logocentrism (Oliver, 2023:38). As the figure of untruth, appearance, animality, body, nature, and worldly beauty, Nietzsche affirms the feminine existence over and above the man of reason.

Isadora Petry, in this regard, writes that woman is untruth. There is no essence for women. Like psychoanalytical theory, she perceives a woman as a being who is castrated and unable to gain a subject position through fully adapting the symbolic order (Petry, 2023). Therefore, woman’s essence is a fabrication by male philosophers who are inexpert in winning women (Nietzsche, 1989:1). They do not realise that a woman has no essence. Distance is their magic. “It is the male philosopher who believes in “woman” and “truth” alike, the male philosopher who, according to both Nietzsche and Derrida, proves credulous, dogmatic, and mistaken” (Krell, 1986:10). Logocentrism is defeated by them. A woman is unable to be captured by the representational language of metaphysics.

However, this untruth about the woman is not to be seen as negativity and a thing to be looked down upon. For Nietzsche, the untruth that the woman and art represent is more powerful and valuable for life than truth. This untruth is what men also should seek. A woman who desires the art of grace and playfulness, which man has lost, still gives hope for a better world in the future. Human potential to overcome nihilism rests with women.

Actually, for Nietzsche, man is also an untruth. Man as a ‘rational subjectivity’ is a mere construction by various metaphysical discourses of the Cartesian-enlightenment tradition. Religious and moral discourses also played a significant role in producing modern ‘man’ and his characteristics. Thus, this truth seeker man’s history does not go beyond the past four hundred years. Man as a distinct and autonomous subjectivity is an invention produced by modernist discourses as part of the emergence of a new power and control system. Nietzsche insists that humanity harnesses its potential to go beyond its current state and become ‘overman,’ a type of being that accepts becoming, sensuality, the plurality of truths, and natural existence. While challenging the traditional phallocentric models of self-identities, Nietzsche’s notion of ‘overman’ can be seen as representing a more fluid and inclusive understanding of subjectivity that transcends rigid gender roles. The idea of ‘overman’ carries a possibility for a new mode of existence that incorporates both masculine and feminine characteristics, thus challenging traditional binary differentiation between genders. It proposes “a new model of human nature, in the form of an androgynous mix of masculine and feminine traits, namely the creator type” (Hatab, 2023: 26).

Nietzsche opposed higher truths such as morality, reason, soul, law, essence, and logic, and his stance was against the imposition of another world above body and life. He said there are no facts but only interpretations (Nietzsche, 1968: 267). Thus, the so-called real world, truth, meaning, concepts, axioms of science, and logic are structures produced through interpretations of chaos. Nietzsche equates chaos with becoming. Being is produced by the schematisation and structuring of this chaos. Metaphysics, religion, and natural science are masculine attempts to contain this chaos to create a stable world where people can live with security and without fear of destruction. It is the expression of man’s ‘will to power’. However, by this act, man imposes a higher order of changeless truths over and above the perpetually changing nature and life. That is considered as a life-denying and nature-denying nihilistic activity.

He divinised sensuality and worldly beauty against the nihilism and asceticism of the philosophers. Thereby, he promoted a feminine perspective of the world through philosophy. Nietzsche’s criticism of religion, metaphysics, logic, truth, and morality was a criticism against all transcendental stances that depreciated the value of worldly life. By this criticism, he intended to bring back the sense, appearance, and beauty of this world, which philosophers hitherto negated. For Nietzsche, life is seductive like a woman (Nietzsche, 1974: 272). While man negates life, the woman is the figure of life affirmation. He compares life with a woman; for him, the magic and power of life come from its feminine character. He writes that the world “is covered by a veil interwoven with gold, a veil of beautiful possibilities, sparkling with promise, resistance, bashfulness, mockery, pity, and seduction. Yes, life is a woman” (ibid).Footnote 14

But the man of philosophy abhors these possibilities in order to achieve transcendence and spiritual power. Nietzsche writes that “as long as there are philosophers on earth and wherever there have been philosophers, from India to England, there unquestionably exists a peculiar philosophers’ irritation at and rancour against sensuality….There also exists a peculiar philosophers’ prejudice and affection in favour of the whole ascetic ideal” (Nietzsche, 1969: 106). The moral interpretation of existence is the outcome of this attitude of the philosophers. It asks humans to be cautious about the dangers of the sensual life and insists they not deviate from the path of reason and truth. Nevertheless, Nietzsche feels that such truths put an end to productive and creative aspects of life.

The meaning of nihilism is the construction and imposition of higher truths above life and the world. Therefore, Nietzsche’s criticism of nihilism indirectly criticises the patriarchal structure (Bergoffen, 1989). Though he does not identify the building up of metaphysical truths above nature and life as a patriarchal order, due to its laws that ban sense, sensuality, and bodily experiences, its structure is patriarchal. Construction of a world of ‘being’ must be seen as a masculine project due to its intention to contain sense, sensuality, nature, body, becoming, and pleasures, which are associated with a woman’s nature by traditional philosophy. Therefore, though Nietzsche holds an anti-feminist stance, his philosophy attempts to inscribe a feminine world perspective.Footnote 15

For the first time, he exemplified what it means to be sexual difference in thought and writing. A longing for feminine experiences works behind all these criticisms of Nietzsche against metaphysics and Christianity. Deleuze observes that writing comes from the need to ‘become a woman’, ‘become an animal’, and ‘become a child’ (Deleuze, 1997: 225–230). The desire to ‘become a woman’ can be seen as the root of Nietzsche’s stance against all sorts of asceticism propagated by Christianity, metaphysics, and modern science. Women do not exist in the proper sense of that term because both men and women adopt a masculine position in the socio-symbolic order. If at all a woman exists, she exists only in the signifying process. While practising plurality of styles in philosophical writing, Nietzsche attempts to create the ‘woman’ through signifying. Irigaray finds in Nietzsche’s prose a new kind of philosophical language (Oppel, 1993: 92). Nietzsche, the philosopher who magnified the untruth of life, is producing such an enigmatic feminine writing that consists of plural significations. Thus, Nietzsche shall be considered the inscriber of a feminine language and a feminine truth in philosophy (Ainley, 1988: 116–129).

Saussure: Beyond representational function of language

The linguistic base of masculine thinking exposed by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridian deconstruction rests on the structuralist theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Subsequent thinkers and writers could not have recognised the linguistic origin of the sexual difference without the help of Saussure’s theory. It led to the understanding that human consciousness is embedded in language. From a structuralist perspective, human nature, character, behaviour, and actions are determined by the pre-existing social structure of language, which every child is imbibed from their cultural tradition. Linguistic structure existed before the birth of a child into a community. What Saussure calls La langueFootnote 16 is the inner structure of language, which consists of meanings, moral regulations, social laws, cultural taboos, and directions for behaviour (Saussure, 1959: 13–15). The child internalises it during his early interactions with his surroundings. As a pre-given and fixed linguistic structure, La langue existed in all communities that prescribe laws and social functions to the individual. It acts as the psyche of each individual. People belonging to each tradition of the world have their way of constituting these meanings with linguistic signs that later sediment into langue. Particular actions and utterances of the people, what Saussure calls ‘parole’, are just outward expressions of the already existing langue. La langue within the psyche functions as the human ‘self’ or consciousness.

Lacan has reformulated Saussure’s linguistics to explain the function of the ‘unconscious’ that institutes sexual differences in humans based on language. Lacan’s explanation of self-formation based on Saussure’s linguistics undermined the metaphysical projection of self as a transcendental consciousness. For Lacan, there is no pre-existing self at the time of the birth of a child. A self-identity for the child, he says, is linguistically developed as the child grows and interacts with the outside world. According to Lacan, the individual enters the symbolic order through language acquisition, and with this order, the self and its identity are constructed. The intervention of the patriarchal structure of the symbolic order in the child’s life creates repression of unconscious bodily drivesFootnote 17. Identities as man and woman are also formed along with self-formation. Lacanian tradition discards the essentialism of metaphysics in explaining human consciousness and sexual identities.

Saussure’s linguistics sheds light on the dynamics of the formation of human consciousness and the world’s truth. Saussure enables us to understand how language creates the sexualities of humans and the truth of the world. What we consider as objects and their truths are not pre-existing ones. They are also constituted in language. It posed a threat to traditional thinking anchored on the representational theory of language. Representational theory considers language as a device humans invented to communicate with each other. It also takes language as a vehicle to carry meaning from one person to another. However, Saussure says, “it is a system of signs in which the only essential thing is the union of meanings and sound-images, and in which both parts of the sign are psychological” (Saussure, ibid: 15).

Saussure informs us that a linguistic sign does not represent any corresponding reality in the actual world. We cannot understand the essential truth of things except our perception of them as signs. In sense perception, humans metaphorically organise things instead of gras** the actual nature of things. Our access to the things of the world depends entirely on language (ibid: 65–66). We have no other means to connect to them. In other words, we do not see any objects in the world; we only see and understand them as signs. The actual world is a continuum or chaos of perpetual change. Humans must organise, structure, and order the chaos to build a stable life and culture. The human attempt to manage the chaotic world creates language. Signifiers (sound images) are formed in the human attempt to organise the continuum of sound in distinctive ways, and their signifieds (meanings) are formed when dividing the continuum of matter in arbitrary ways. For instance, how the Germans structure the continuum of visual images differs from how Indians structure the continuum of visions in the Hindi language.

Differences in the perception of colours in various cultural traditions are another pointer to the arbitrariness of signs. There are twelve primary colours in some cultural traditions; in others, there are only seven. Likewise, what people consider good and bad varies in each linguistic tradition. Also, signifiers such as man, woman, masculine, and feminine are arbitrary, formed through classifications and generalisations of human appearance by applying certain human criteria. With the arrival of Saussure’s linguistics, the metaphysician’s claim about the existence of trans-cultural and trans-historical existence of meanings is challenged. Truths and meaning, thus, are diverse interpretations by human beings with the aid of language.

Why is the truth of the world and its meaning produced with the aid of language considered masculine? Since the world is in a state of ‘becoming’, it does not contain any underlying truths or meaning. To make life secure in a chaotic world, humans create an apparition of stability by creating stable things with enduring meanings. They do it by scheming and structuring the chaos. This structuring is the actual function served by language. Meaning results from creating signs by arbitrarily classifying objects into discrete categories based on their similarities. In this attempt to develop concepts, multiple dimensions and differences of things are reduced to form uniformity. Human consciousness results from internalising laws and social taboos created in language. They disallow the free flow of libidinal drives of the body/unconscious. By language, man builds culture by imposing a form of uniformity over multiplicities. Man thus conquers nature, thereby controlling it in his favour. While sha** phenomena in the human moulds, man exercises power over nature; hence, it is a masculine activity. Here, truth is not a representation of pre-existing meanings but the outcome of interpretation. Truth is produced where there are no truths or meanings.

Categorising the animal world into mammals, reptiles, vertebrates, birds, and insects is arbitrary. Man does it to manage the organic world. Several new signs emerge as people engage with the outside world. New perspectives and interpretations also originate alongside that. A sign denotes a class of objects created by generalising the objects’ character, thereby eliminating their individuality and multiple dimensions. This activity of generalisation enables man to rule over other things. It can be seen as an imposition of a masculine perspective on the world. The uniqueness of each member is also lost when different species are grouped under specific categories.

Conceptual thinking is just one way to understand the world. The truth of the world can be understood in other ways as well. For instance, a spider or a butterfly can be perceived as a phenomenon that delights a person who is immersed in the experience of their beauty, texture, and movements. There, instead of classifying them as insects, they are known for their uniqueness and singularity. This perception differs from the masculine drive to conceptualise entities through abstract reasoning. Production of ‘logos’ is masculine, whereas experiencing objects through sensations and ‘affects’ given by objects also shall be considered knowledge, though it differs from an abstract understanding of their logos. Such type of knowing objects radically differs from the male-centric perception of the objects.

What is the nature of a feminine language?

As men and women in our civilisation live more or less masculine lives, sexual difference is not manifested in human thinking. However, it does not mean that feminine experiences are void or impossible to exist. It only means that the feminine as a sight of plurality and multiplicity has not been easily represented in logocentric language. As seen in the previous section, if at all women exist in the proper sense, it will only be in the signifying process.

It reminds us of the importance of re-inventing and delivering feminine experiences through language. However, the present use of language and signifying process available to us is limited to conveying logically legible discourses. Therefore, to deliver the feminine experience of truth, a different kind of signifying in language has to be invented. If humans want to express multiplicities that constitute the feminine experiences, they have to reformulate the existing language structure.

The plural experiences of phenomena can only be expressed through another signification process different from the representational function of language. Psychoanalytic feminism says this is a possibility for both men and women. Since man’s identity as a masculine self is a linguistic construct, a change in the structure of language is necessary for coming out of his rigid masculine self. This is a requirement for both sexes. Irigaray emphasised this point while suggesting that finding sexual difference is the means to human liberation, which includes the liberation of both men and women (op. cit.).

Three questions pop up at this juncture. They are: How sexual difference can be expressed in language? What will be the nature of thought distinct from the masculine mode? How feminine difference can be expressed in philosophical thought? To get answers to these questions, a thorough revaluation of the existing usage of language in philosophical writings is necessary. The prevailing logocentric language internalised by humans is not helpful for this purpose. In it, masculine truths can only be expressed. However, the same language also consists of a very complex and ever-changing ‘signifying process’, a characteristic that is emphasised in Lacan’s writings. He disagrees with Saussure and representational theorists who think signifiers have a one-on-one correspondence with their signified and the things they represent. Lacan modifies Saussure’s theory of signs by incorporating linguistic activity into the unconscious. For Lacan, the meaning of linguistic sign becomes indeterminate. Lacan points out the signifier’s supremacy and maintains that meaning is indeterminable because the signified constantly sinks beneath the signified.

Lacan maintains that the meanings of words and sentences are perpetually shifted, and their meanings vary depending on the signified the speaker chooses. As per the choice of the speaker, signified slides under the signifier. This is a deviation from Saussure’s theory, which considers meaning as the outcome of the difference between linguistic signs. Saussure believed that the signifier and signified had a stable one-to-one correspondence. Lacan rejected this idea and maintained that signifier and signified may never be combined in the same way (Chen, 2019).

It informs us of the inherent potential of language to signify ‘otherness’. It would be the only means to express the non-masculine, feminine truth of the world. For Lacan, though the meaning of every linguistic sign is pre-fixed by society, its meaning is also determined by its relation with other signs. Saussure has shown that “in language, there are only differences, without positive terms” (Saussure, 1959: 120). Develo** Saussure’s thesis that meaning is a result of the differences between signifiers, Derrida demonstrates how, in this process of signification, the meaning of signifiers goes beyond the intended linguistic formulation (Sellers, 1991: 20–22). Derrida demonstrates the potential of language in disseminating meaning beyond the determinations of signs. The meaning of signs, therefore, can be altered, pluralised and employed to signify multiplicities of human experience while using them in various contexts of writing.

Hence, a sentence consisting of several signs can produce plural meanings due to the differential relation between the signs in it and one another. Those same signs will have different meanings when employed in other linguistic contexts. Knowing this fully well, Derrida and Kristeva demonstrate how the meaning of a sign perpetually shifted in a chain of signifying processes in the acts of ‘writing’. Derrida argues that language is inherently unstable and that meaning is never fully present or stable but is always deferred. Like psychoanalysis, Derrida also says language shapes conscious thought, behaviour and identities (Earlie, 2021). While Derrida explains this play of signs as the ‘trace’, which carries meaning to ad infinitumFootnote 18 (Derrida, 1978: 280), for Kristeva, it is the semiotic process of language that puts the stable subjectivity of a person in trial (Kristeva: 1984). This process in language is powerful enough to rupture the masculine ‘self’ that prevents the libidinal play of unconscious desires.

While interpreting Nietzsche, Derrida says that even though such a linguistic process cannot be equated to the woman being, it is an ‘operation of the feminine’ happening in language (Derrida, 1986: 107). It can be considered a ‘feminine operation’ because of two reasons. Firstly, its source is in the affectedness of the body by beautiful phenomena of the world, which is desired basically by the womanFootnote 19. Secondly, it stands on the other pole of logically ordered discourses discarded by philosophy as untruths. Nietzsche has shown how this untruth represented by the woman is more valuable than truth. Derrida observes that Nietzsche’s writing is “such an inscription, even if we do not venture so far as to call it the feminine itself, is indeed the feminine operation” (Derrida, 1986: 57).

Irigaray perceives the presence of a new kind of philosophical language in Nietzsche. About Nietzsche, she says, “through language, through the deconstruction of language, another one could be invented” (Oppel, 1993: 92). Irigaray’s insistence on seeking the possibilities to develop a feminine bodily ‘symbolic’ in language (Whitford, 1991: 97–110) in this context comes as a call to change the existing socio-symbolic order that does not allow the manifestation of sexual difference. The affectedness of the body is the source of the feminine signifying process. When it is affected by beautiful experiences of the world, unconscious libidinal energies are released into the body. Sigmund Freud’s description that instinctual drives govern a human being shows how a person can exist beyond the rigid linguistic structure of the socio-symbolic. This insight Freud provides helps Kristeva and Irigaray move away from Lacan’s linguistic determinism. A language permeated with unconscious drives would be a different language, which Kristeva perceives as a desire in the language (Sellers, 1991: 48–52)

There may have been writings that expressed bodily experiences. But they were mainly confined to a few literary works. Such writings, says Irigaray, must also be developed in philosophy, science, and social sciences.Footnote 20 Though feminine language, for Irigaray, is a woman’s prerogative, many instances reveal that feminine significations are produced in all bodies, irrespective of their anatomical sex identities as man and woman (op. cit.). Irigaray includes Nietzsche’s writings in that category. She observes that ‘Nietzsche places the discourses of philosophical tradition on trial by passing to another type of language. (Oppel, 1993: 92).

Develo** new idioms, images, metaphors, and new usage of ‘signs’ is necessary to form a ‘feminine symbolic’ function in language. Like Irigaray, Kristeva and Cixous also perceive language as the key to change, and they urge human beings to write their unconscious knowledge and desires. Unconscious, she suggests, carries a rich treasure house for transformation through alternative ways of expression (Sellers,1991: 57).

However, since the very structure of the sign received by individuals from society is masculine, how can they create ‘feminine symbolic’ expressions with those signs? What would be the source of a ‘feminine symbolic’ expression? The source of it would be two. The affectedness of the body by beautiful objects of nature would be its one source. The libidinal drives of the unconscious that persist dormant in the body shall be its other source. Libidinal drives exert pressure on the individual even after they yield to the symbolisation process. The libidinal drives are stimulated when the body is affected by external objects. As a result, intensities are produced in the body. These intensities are the source of the formation of new signs and significations.

Since the very origin of linguistic signs is in human interaction with the world, their approach to the reception and employment of signs is crucial in determining the meaning of signs. We can draw valuable insights about the origin of language from the explanation provided by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari about bodily ‘affects’ in their collaborated works What is Philosophy? and Thousand Plateaus. These works give insights about diverse types of signification processes. When the body is affected by objects during its interaction with nature, instincts, drives, desires and intensities are produced in the body.Footnote 21 During the experience of intensities in the body, there would not be such identities as a man or woman. When one is affected by beautiful phenomena of nature, such as mountains, oceans, and moonlight, one’s sense of selfhood as a man or woman vanishes. It produces new significations, which would be neither masculine nor feminine but an experience of ‘otherness’ where sexual differences become groundless.

These bodily intensities should be turned into new images and metaphors instead of generalising and reducing them to form linguistic signs that serve a mere representational function of language. The intensities produced on the body by the ‘affects’ of phenomena shall be reconfigured into images, sensations, and metaphors (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 163–199). The source of a non-masculine language lies in this process.

The very same bodily intensities also cause the logocentric language of traditional philosophy. However, in forming logos, these intensities are taken to the brain, which classifies these experiences into ‘signs’ (words) of the language. Words are always the outcome of generalisation. At the level of word formation, the intensities are lost, and abstract logos only remain. So, instead of classifying them into discrete ‘signs’ through the application of reason, these intensities have to be preserved in the body as intensities themselves. Bodily ‘affects’ and intensities are the experiences of multiplicity and becoming, which is the source of the feminine linguistic signification. ‘Feminine symbolic’ expressions have to be generated from it. Intensities leave traces on the body as visual and auditory images which later form into signs. Nietzsche understands it as the aesthetic state. Nietzsche reminds us about the power of the aesthetic stateFootnote 22 that “possesses a superabundance of means of communication, together with an extreme receptivity for stimuli and signs. It constitutes the high point of communication and transmission between living creatures – it is the source of languages. This is where languages originate: the languages of tone as well as languages of gestures and glances” (Nietzsche, 1968: 427–28).

Deleuze and Guattari explain how bodily intensities can be preserved as intensities themselves without being converted into linguistic signs. They perceive that intensities can form into ‘blocks of sensations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994:164), leading to the imaginative reactivation of the instinctual libidinal drives that the masculine symbolic order often suppressesFootnote 23. Intensities, says Deleuze, produce their own signification without any mediation of discrete signs of language. He finds the origin of music and paintings in those bodily intensities. Intensities also give rise to the genesis of poetry and literature. The poetic language they generate always challenges representational language’s grammatical and syntactical structure. The poetic language shall not be seen exclusively as verses of poetry. The rhythmic communication involved in every speech act is also poetic.

Conclusion: The twilight zone of representational thought

To conclude, the claims made in this paper can be summed up in the following manner. Recognition of sexual difference in thought is necessary for expressing the plural, libidinal, natural, sensual, and bodily experiences of our lives, which mostly have remained obscure due to the impossibility of bringing them under conceptual categories. Their fluidity, chaotic nature, and multiple tints resist the human attempt to reduce them in concepts. They elude the human grasp to fix according to the familiar modes of representation. The inability to represent them in the logocentric language of philosophy and sciences does not prove their nonexistence. Poststructuralists consider these as the realm of otherness that consists of multifarious desires, affects, and imaginations. In the history of philosophy, the sphere of otherness was castigated into margins as untruth or reduced as the aesthetic realm. Truth, on the other hand, is seen as what is known through conceptual thinking.

Unlike the masculine/conceptual approach that measures objects of the world, the feminine experience emerges when human beings are bodily affected by objects. However, its obscure nature makes philosophical tradition reject them as unreal and unnecessary. But what allows us to characterise it as the feminine truth is its difference from the logocentric truths of the masculine mode.

Concepts are nothing but organisation and categorisation of the stimulations and ‘affects’ produced on the body by the objects of the world. Making symbols out of those ‘affects’ through the formation of linguistic signs is just one response humans make. The other possible response is to turn these effects into fluid forms of signification, as happens in art such as painting, music, and poetry. Painting and music express these bodily intensities directly without recourse to linguistic signs. In poetry, signs undergo a semiotic process, as Kristeva suggests. The signifying process of the works of art can be extended into philosophical writings, as we see in the writings of Nietzsche, Derrida, Irigaray, and Cixous. However, in traditional philosophy and natural sciences, the ‘signs’ arising from bodily intensities are generalised and converted into abstract essences or concepts. This is the metaphysical activity working behind the formation of universal truths. This study sees this as the origin of the masculine symbolising process, which enables man to arrest chaos, thereby controlling nature and its flux. Therefore, the origin of concepts is very much worldly and is grounded in material reality. Philosophical tradition, however, separates them from the phenomenal world and gives them a priori status, positing them as transcendental.

The attempt to overcome this division between conceptual and affective truth began with Nietzsche, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. They have shown the origin of a different mode of truth, which emerges when the objects of the world are directly presented before the human consciousness in their particular concrete form. There is an interpretive origin for such truths rather than reckoning them as an accurate representation of reality. Hermeneutically originated truths stand out differently from those truths articulated in metaphysical tradition due to their affective characteristic. Due to their ephemeral, transient, and plural nature, they surpass the representational attempts of traditional philosophy. This leads philosophy to evaluate them as untruths. Due to their difference from the conceptual truths represented in logical discourses, this study, instead of rejecting them as phantasms, considers them to be feminine truths. Sufficient arguments have been provided in the previous sections of this essay to explain why logocentric truths represented by metaphysics are masculine.

The thoughts of Lacan, Nietzsche, and Saussure were the triggering forces for the formation of a sexually different mode of thought by the later writers. Nietzsche wrote in a language that carried significations beyond the usually expected meanings, setting a model for creating feminine linguistic articulations. Lacan has shown that there is no biological essentiality for sexual difference. He has revealed how man and woman are mere arbitrary constructs in language. If the feminine signifying process of language is extended to philosophical writings, a sexually different thought can be produced, which would be different from the masculine thought. Saussure has created an occasion to break that conceptual mode of language, thereby paving a way to explore the inherent potential within language to articulate the feminine otherness, which is experienced as plural, multiple, and often chaotic. The fullness of human life depends to a large extent on undergoing these experiences, which are intense, plural, and bodily.