Noelle McAfee - Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray (review) - Hypatia 16:2 Hypatia 16.2 (2001) 100-103 Book Review Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray. By Patricia J. Huntington. New York: SUNY Press, 1998. There has never been a natural alliance between Martin Heidegger and feminism, especially given what Patricia Huntington calls Heidegger's "powerful embrace of the masculine ethos" of National Socialism (xvii). So Huntington's book, Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition: Kristeva, Heidegger, Irigaray, may seem to make unnatural allies of feminist concerns and this most manly philosopher. But as soon as one recognizes that, for Huntington, the main concern of feminism is to develop a liberationist social theory that requires a self-aware agent, one can begin to see the feminist uses of Heidegger's theory. There are fundamentally two parties in Ecstatic Subjects:
(1) the feminist, poststructuralist theorists of twentieth century continental philosophy and (2) Martin Heidegger.