Between immutability and incoherence: the hermeneutical concept of the subject

The question of subjectivity remains a central but contested issue in contemporary feminism. Recently, however, there have been signs that new areas of common ground are emerging across the theoretical spectrum. There has been a growing willingness to seek a more comprehensive accommodation of competing perspectival premises and themes, and calls from a number of quarters for a new attempt to think unity and diversity together. In this paper, I suggest that philosophical hermeneutics offers a more productive starting point for these concerns than does 'postmodern philosophy'. I suggest that Paul Ricoeur's conception of narrative identity more fruitfully deals with postmodernism's 'central values' of heterogeneity, multiplicity and difference, and that his notion of the 'conflict of interpretations' productively addresses the epistemological concerns they raise. The narrative can reconcile identity with diversity, variability, discontinuity and instability; the idea of the 'conflict of interpretations' draws out the productive consequences of the impossibility of a definitive arbitration between rival perspectives.