Colebrook, Claire. “Feminism and Autonomy: The Crisis of the Self-Authoring Subject.” Body and Society, 1997. Vol. 3(2): 21-41.
While the failure of autonomy in Romanticism took many forms, the short-circuiting of Enlightenment self-legitimation was always marked by the return of a repressed exteriority; the intrusion of Nature, others, the past, memory, spirit, divinity or embodiment all represented the subject’s inability to exhaustively account for its own being. … Freud’s theory of the death drive, in which all difference is overcome in a return to a state of quiescence, can be read as the epitome of this strain in Romanticism, in whch the desire to overcome all exteriority or otherness results in the self’s extinction. … Against this Romantic desire for self-authorship (and its lamented failure), Shelley’s novel, and the later interventions of Emannuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray, argue that it is separation, belatedness and facticity of one’s being which constitute ethics (23).
Autonomy in Kant
Because the finate self can only experience the phenomenal, or apparent, world there can be no experiencable ground for ethics.
Reason cannot know any foundation which lies outside its phenomenal finitude. The attempt to posit such a foundation (such as the Platonic Idea of the good) can only lead reason astray, for such a foundation could, in essence, never be known by experience. … Reason can only know that which is given to experience, and experience offers not ethical laws. … reson cannot provide any normative or concrete ethical goals … Reason is regulative.
Deleuze and Irigaray
What Irigaray’s reading of the philosophical tradition reveals is that the ideal of rational autonomy is not a general metaphysical premise but the way of being a specifically embodied subject.