Against Yin-Yang

Forcing some uneasy encounters between the universalizing feminism of Irigaray, Lacan’s concept of sexuation, the communism of Badiou and Žižek, and Daoism, this article argues that feminism is not a kind of identity politics but an entirely necessary accompaniment to any radical, that is, planetary, project of emancipation. The ancient Chinese dialectic of yin-yang, however, as implicitly discernible in Irigaray, has a complementary and harmonious conception of the sexual binary. Instead, it is the more abstract and paradoxical versions of Daoist ontology that could inspire the kind of subversive universalism capable of overthrowing patriarchal world-capitalism, which is, as we know, currently as much US- as China-made.