Binary Trouble: Preconditions for Non-binary Gender in Works of Heidegger, Derrida and Butler
Binary Trouble: Preconditions for Non-binary Gender in Works of Heidegger, Derrida and Butler

Summary/Abstract: Non-binary gender as an umbrella term refers to any gender beyond the male/female categories. With the progressing LGBT+ movement and future predictions referring to all persons equally „regardless of their chosen gender” (Cave, Klein, 2015), the question of philosophical and societal limits of being non-binary is a fundamental one for understanding the patterns in the current sign system. Binary, as such, is of a philosophical nature and can be interpreted as political; as in the works of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler who both accelerated feminist criticism by analysing how the masculine is privileged in the construction of meaning. Also, for Martin Heidegger binary is a subject of criticism as he tried to establish a new dualistic-thinking humanism in which being comes before metaphysical oppositions. However, in his attempt to define being through its difference to beings, being is dependent on the difference. There is a significant problem with Heidegger's approach to gender and sex. The neutral Dasein is neither of the two sexes but as factual it is a gendered being (Geschlechstwesen). Derrida analyses the pre-differential state as a precondition for uniqueness of each gender, which is separated by space and time of endless difference, and Butler investigates the reinterpretation of meanings of differences and the becoming of gender. The goal of this article is to compare the approaches of these three scholars to find the possibilities, preconditions and limits of non-binary gender. Thus, I read Heidegger and compare his thoughts on sex and gender of Dasein with the perspective of Derrida and Butler, and then I discuss the limits of Butler's approach by using the perspective of Derrida and come to the conclusion on visibility of gender signs and their validity in discourses. Together with Butler, I assume that there is no gender identity but performatively constituted expressions (Butler 1990, 25), whose origin is the own desire for recognition, which is why I don't differentiate between sex/gender/desire. In his lectures on Geschlecht, Derrida describes inter alia the way logocentrism has been genderized on the example of Dasein, a fundamental concept in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger which has opened novel possibilities. Although these three thinkers rarely come together in comparisons, I am of the opinion that analysing them in this sequence is optimal for the reasoning about gender and its limit within the process of structural reorganization of society in the Western culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. I argue that the point of clash of their arguments dwells in the interlinkage of thinking, acting and signifying of a politicized material body. All of them problematize authenticity and repetition. Heidegger provokes the idea of a neutral and bodiless Dasein which can become authentic but where no becoming of gender is possible, Derrida seeks the pre-differential state which enables becoming, and Butler seeks the way in which gender is becoming.

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