To assert the absolute autonomy of social construction, to deny its dependence on the residue of the material and nonidentical, would, paradoxically, lead to another form of free-fl oating idealism. In the context of Adorno’s work we could say that feminist critiques of the essentialism/social construction binary have to “acknowledge the insolubility of an empirical, nonidentical moment” within social mediation, “a moment that doctrines of the absolute subject, idealist systems of identity, are not permitted to acknowledge as indissoluble” (17).
Ultimately, the reinterpretation of the essentialism/social construction binary in the context of use/exchange value relativizes and contests the fi xity of this opposition. First of all, both of these terms emerge from and to a large extent reproduce the historical process of the commodification of bodies. Furthermore, it is only through the mutual negation of their untruth that these opposites can demonstrate their partial insight. Thus, the falsity of antiessentialism lies in the “absolutization” of the autonomy of construction, in the denial of the persistence of the material and nonidentical even in the most abstract social form of mediation.
Nonetheless, it reveals the truth of the historical fact that in capitalism there is nothing, including bodies themselves, that is not mediated by social production and economic exchange. On the other hand, the obvious untruth of essentialism lies in its confusion of the limits of mediation with immediacy, as if it were possible to transcend production and exchange and find a positive value in bodies themselves. The essentialist argument forgets the fact that the limits of social construction can be indicated only by exposing its internal contradictions, and “not through recourse to something transcendent” (Adorno, Hegel 27). Yet, through this falsity, the recurrent suspicions of essentialism inadvertently bear witness to the remainder of damaged materiality, exteriority, and otherness, which, although reduced to social waste, nonetheless constitute nonsublatable limits of construction/social labor.
By misreading this remainder as essentialism and by disregarding the damaging abstraction of social form, the social construction argument remains in complicity with the metaphysics of production, which asserts the “absolute” autonomy of labor and “tolerates nothing outside itself”. 94-95
The reinterpretation of the essentialism/social construction binary in the context of commodification shows that the domination is perpetuated not only by the concealment of social mediation behind the appearances of immediacy but also by the abstraction of social value from all remnants of materiality, becoming, concrete labor, and the vulnerability of bodies.
Feminist criticism has addressed very well the problem of immediacy, by reconstructing again and again the obfuscated process of mediation and by demonstrating that what is posited as an intrinsic signification of the body is in fact produced by social domination. Yet, this reconstruction of the social mediation of embodiment neither diagnoses the full extent of bodily injuries nor poses a sufficient challenge to essentialism, which is why the problem of essentialism keeps reappearing in feminist theory.
What still has to be contested is the specific mode of social mediation characteristic of commodity fetishism, namely, the abstraction and the autonomy of social form, which, reproduced under the rubric of “social construction,” disavows the traumatic limits of signification and reduces every trace of nonsublatable alterity into social nonexistence.