The Feminine Symptom

The first English-language study of Aristotles natural philosophy from a continental perspective, the Feminine Symptom takes as its starting point the problem of female offspring. If form is transmitted by the male and the female provides only matter, how is a female child produced? Aristotle answers that there must be some fault or misstep in the process. This inexplicable but necessary coincidencesumptoma in Greekdefines the feminine symptom. Departing from the standard associations of male-activity-form and female-passivity-matter, Bianchi traces the operation of chance and spontaneity throughout Aristotles biology, physics, cosmology, and metaphysics and argues that it is not passive but aleatory matter unpredictable, ungovernable, and acting against nature and teleologythat he continually allies with the feminine. Aristotles pervasive disparagement of the female as a mild form of monstrosity thus works to shore up his polemic against the aleatory and to consolidate patriarchal teleology in the face of atomism and Empedocleanism. Bianchi concludes by connecting her analysis to recent biological and materialist political thinking, and makes the case for a new, antiessentialist politics of aleatory feminism.