Henri Bergson's philosophy presents the relationship between life and matter in both dualistic and monistic terms. Life is duration, a rhythm of incalculable novelty that approaches pure creative activity. In stark contrast, matter is identified with the determinism of homogeneous space. After Time and Free Will, Bergson concedes some share of duration to matter. In this context, his dualism can be understood as a methodological step towards the articulation of a monistic metaphysics of duration. This article suggests that the distinction (...) between life and matter is also motivated by an unconscious imperative to establish a sexed hierarchy. Bergson repeatedly presents life as seminal, while matter is figured in terms of passivity. (shrink)

Today, phallocentrism is perpetuated by a flourishing medical construction that focuses exclusively on penile erections as the essence of men's sexual function and satisfaction. This article describes how this medicalization is promoted by urologists, medical industries, mass media, and various entrepreneurs. Many men and women provide a ready audience for this construction because of masculine ideology and gender socialization. While there may be some advantages to this construction, there are major disadvantages to men in terms of the inevitable failure (...) of the promised perfectible erection and the perpetuation of a falsely universalized and biologized vision of sexual experience. Any sexual interests of women in other than phallocentric sexual scripting are denied. (shrink)

Mythical stories are, according to Luce Irigaray, one source where the matrix of repression, desire and correction of the female body is made visible. The Book of Revelation is one of the parts of the Bible told in a typical mythical language framework. It is also one of the most infamous biblical books because of its misogynist approach and repeated use of female stereotypes such as the whore and the pure bride. The purpose of this article is not to deny (...) the validity of this feminist critique, but to open up the meaning of the story of Revelation from an Irigarayan perspective as also to include possibilities of a counter-story where phallocentrism is challenged and finally altered into a new era where women, as well as other previously objectified categories, are aware of themselves as subjects in their own right. (shrink)

Critical reception of Marcel Duchamp since the 1970s has tended to elevate him into the very figure of the Artist he sought to attack. One aspect of this domestication has involved neglecting Duchamp’s fin de siècle ‘eroticism’ with its sexual innuendos and double-entendres. Yet this very readymade vulgarity allows us to recover a Duchamp still capable of disrupting the genres of Art and the gendered Artist, by revealing a theory embedded in his work which continually reverses and displaces phallocentrism (...) in a game consisting of the confusion of genders and genres. We argue that Duchamp’s disruption of the discursive typologies of the genre of art can be profitably read through this apparently trivial sexualized wordplay, particularly in the transgender passage into Rrose Sélavy. Reading this aspect of Duchamp after, i.e. within and against, Lacan demonstrates how Duchamp’s singular regime of signs governed by equivocity and indetermination subverts the ‘phallic function’ of the signifier. (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, (...) and setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on "diffraction." This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or "new materialist.". (shrink)

This article provides an affirmative feminist reading of the philosophy of Henri Bergson by reading it through the work of Karen Barad. Adopting such a diffractive reading strategy enables feminist philosophy to move beyond discarding Bergson for his apparent phallocentrism. Feminist philosophy finds itself double bound when it critiques a philosophy for being phallocentric, because the setup of a master narrative comes into being with the critique. By negating a gender-blind or sexist philosophy, feminist philosophy only reaffirms its parameters, (...) and setting up a master narrative costs feminist philosophy its feminism. I thus propose and practice a different methodological starting point, one that capitalizes on “diffraction.” This article experiments with the affirmative phase in feminist philosophy prophesied by Elizabeth Grosz, among others. Working along the lines of the diffractive method, the article at the same time proposes a new reading of Bergson (as well as of Barad), a new, different metaphysics indeed, which can be specified as onto-epistemological or “new materialist.”. (shrink)

Given that Nick Land is one of the central influences on certain strands of accelerationism, xenofeminism, and inhumanism, it is important to understand how he himself first developed and deployed the concepts of acceleration, the feminine, and the inhuman, which others would go on to appropriate for their own purposes. This article will trace the four feminine figures throughout Land's philosophical trajectory, which he sees as agents for accelerating the transcendental critique of both anthropocentrism and phallocentrism: the slave turned (...) lesbian; the sister; the sexborg; and the Sphinx. Having elucidated the importance of these figures for Land's thought, this article will conclude by drawing upon the younger Land's feminist resources to immanently critique the disappearance of women from his more recent neoreactionary philosophy in favor of concessions to patriarchal traditionalists. (shrink)

Antoinette Fouque cofounded the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes in France in 1968 and spearheaded its celebrated Psychanalyse et Politique, a research group that informed the cultural and intellectual heart of French feminism. Rather than reject Freud's discoveries on the pretext of their phallocentrism, Fouque sought to enrich his thought by more clearly defining the difference between the sexes and affirming the existence of a female libido. By recognizing women's contribution to humanity, Fouque hoped "uterus envy," which she saw (...) as the mainspring of misogyny, could finally give way to gratitude and by associating procreation with women's liberation she advanced the goal of a parity-based society in which men and women could write a new human contract. The essays, lectures, and dialogues in this volume finally allow English-speaking readers to access the breadth of Fouque's creativity and activism. Touching on issues in history and biography, politics and psychoanalysis, Fouque recounts her experiences running the first women's publishing house in Europe; supporting women under threat, such as Aung San Suu Kyi, Taslima Nasrin, and Nawal El Saadaoui; and serving as deputy in the European Parliament. Her theoretical explorations discuss the ongoing development of _feminology_, a field she initiated, and, while she celebrates the progress women have made over the past four decades, she also warns against the trends of counterliberation: the feminization of poverty, the persistence of sexual violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 298-302 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Cheryl Glenn. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. Pp. xii + 235. $19.95 paperback; $49.95 hardback. The past decade has produced a number of collections on women and rhetoric, women in rhetoric, and feminist approaches (...) to rhetoric. Reviewers of these collections have commended their contributions as pioneering works [End Page 298] in a new field while calling for book-length studies offering sustained appraisals of individual women figures and theoretical bases for approaching individual women and rhetorical issues, which must be approached differently if women and feminist issues are to be incorporated into the study of rhetoric. Ethos and audience, intention and identification, agonistic argumentation and collective narrative modes of argumentation--each of these takes on new shadings and nuances when women's practices are examined, and when various feminist theories are employed to assess those practices.Glenn's study is a welcome newcomer, a sustained analysis of rhetorical issues across periods, an analysis developed by spotlighting a series of women figures. Very deliberately, Glenn includes "heroic" figures such as Aspasia and Elizabeth I alongside their "lesser" sisters: the marginalized, until now unheard, and often uneducated women who developed rhetorics within severe restraints. The exposition illuminates a number of points in current feminist theory that are shaping rhetorical studies. Some may fault the selections in Glenn's study, and the inevitable omissions, and some may object that focusing on women's silence is yet another victim narrative. Careful readers, however, will find that the discussion of silence in women's rhetoric deftly reverses the traditional negative connotations: "Silence is perhaps the most undervalued and under-understood traditionally feminine rhetorical site" (175). Silence need not be read simply as "passivity. Silence may take many forms and serve many functions" (176), including "enlightened presence" (177).In "Cartographies of Silence" (The Dream of the Common Language, New York: Norton, 1978), Adrienne Rich writes, Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life Do not confuse it with any kind of absence. (17) Rhetoric Retold begins and concludes by "mapping the silences" of women's presence in the history of rhetoric, and in the very conception of rhetoric. Like Rich, Glenn defines the subtle complexities of silence and absence: silence can indeed be a plan, rigorously executed. We should not confuse it with any kind of absence. Until recently, most histories of rhetoric have not given much attention to women as individual figures or as practitioners [End Page 299] of distinct rhetorical genres. Quite to the contrary, many histories have simply asserted, without proof or evidence, that women have always been forbidden to study or practice rhetoric. Strong assertions of absence belie the truth intimated by Democritus's rebuke: "A woman must not practice argument. This is dreadful. To be ruled by a woman is the ultimate outrage for a man" (Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983, 103). Glenn's double starting point is the question, who left them out, and why? Their absence from our histories has been one among many sources of their silence. The historiographical discussion happily avoids simple charges of phallocentrism and misogyny and instead looks at how entire systems of culture, within different periods, constructed women's roles and voices. Deep background detail within each historical section provides a welcome context for thinking through complex questions of what is rhetorical among the many women's discourses presented for consideration.Although Glenn's study does not dwell on this point, some of the fault for the omission of women from histories of rhetoric, and evidence of the rigorous deliberateness of that omission, can be found in the robust maleness of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical philology, and the neoclassical educational systems it underwrote. The quip in Pope's "Epistle 2: To a Lady" of The Moral Essay, "Nothing so true as once you [Martha... (shrink)

This essay discusses the work of two female theatre-makers, and their strategic use of nudity on stage. The author appropriates signs of indignation in this work in order to re-visit the ‘problem’ of the female form being traditionally associated with bodily immanence rather than transcendence. Both Nic Green's Trilogy (2009–2010) and Ursula Martinez’ My Stories, Your Emails (2010) use the naked female form to proffer statements about the experience of being a woman in the 2000s. Their use of nudity breaks (...) with feminist theories popular in the 1990s, which argued that because the female form could never escape the symbolic logic of phallocentrism, it could never escape sexual objectification, and thus should operate on the margins of mainstream culture, cultivate agency by appropriating the means of production and be removed from view (radical negativity). By identifying as ‘artists’ and by insisting on their right to put their experience centre stage, Green and Martinez break with the anti-humanist theories of the 1990s and proffer a more individualistic strain of feminist performance. The author celebrates this work as a break away from the deadlock offered by theories of radical negativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the opening paragraph from the essay: Throughout his work, Édouard Glissant rigorously describes the process of creolization in the Caribbean and beyond. His later work in particular considers creolization through the planetary terms of Relation, “exploded like a network inscribed within the sufficient totality of the world.” As his philosophical importance rightfully grows, many note the dual risk of overgeneralization and abstraction haunting continued expansion of his geographical and theoretical domain. In light of (...) that danger, this essay examines how questions of the ontological nature of embodiment as raised by feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray ground, both implicitly and explicitly, processes of creolization. Narrowly speaking, such a reading of Glissant suggests the possibility of a richer understanding of creolization as a historically lived process and its emancipatory promise in the present. More generally, the linking of Glissant and Irigaray begins a larger project bringing together theorists of decolonization and sexual difference at the intersection of struggles against phallocentrism and racialization, perhaps nuancing some decolonial critiques of the value of Irigaray’s thought. Thus, the investigation begins with a concrete question of historical interpretation that stages the embodiment of cultural contact. (shrink)

For many years poststructuralist feminists have denounced Simone de Beauvoir as a `universal humanist' who denies sexual difference and inscribes woman in a masculine discourse. Returning to the original exchanges between de Beauvoir and the French feminists of difference, where this dismissive attitude began, it is seen that de Beauvoir circulates in their discourse as representative of a bygone eraan embodiment of all that has been surpassed. Their criticisms of de Beauvoir prove for the most part, glib and disingenuous and (...) not grounded in a careful reading of The Second Sex. In this article the author defends de Beauvoir from their charges of universalism, phallocentrism and being a dupe of Sartre. Her particular form of universal humanism is not `indifferent to difference', but produces historically and socially nuanced insights. De Beauvoir does not valorize a Sartrean rational masculine subject as a model for feminist struggles, rather she theorizes an embodied, relational, situated subject. Furthermore, her theory of Otherness is able to accommodate the psychic register of subjectivity without psychologizing the socioeconomic or political world, a shortcoming of her French poststructuralist opponents. (shrink)

Debates between Anglo-American and Continental feminist theorists of the body appear to have been largely settled as we move into the new millennium. The result has been that a particular Anglo-American perspective (represented by Butler) has gained authoritative ascendency over the continental perspective (represented by Irigaray and Braidotti). This paper draws upon these theorist’s main works as well as a series of interviews and a reading of Freud to raise some key questions about the often unacknowledged complexities of the interplays (...) between patriarchalism and phallocentrism present in a great deal of contemporary international feminist theorizations of the body. This has implications for the types of feminist subjects that can emerge and the political direction of international feministtheorizations of the body into the future. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

: Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

The Post Card is among Derrida's most radical departures from traditional philosophical writing. The book's premise derives from his discovery in the Bodleian Library of the frontispiece of a thirteenth-century book depicting Plato standing behind Socrates who sits writing. This discovery initiates the analysis of how technë determines the history of metaphysics as the presencing of Being, and the deconstruction of the institutional power of psychoanalysis and the link between phallocentrism and certain theories of the signifier and the letter.

Desde el feminismo radical hasta el ecofeminismo, el dominio de la mujer y la explotación de la naturaleza aparecen como resultado de la conformación de estructuras sociales jerárquicas, desde el patriarcado y la gerontocracia. En este contexto, el autor afirma que el ecofeminismo ha intentado abrir un debate sobre el lugar que ocupa la diferencia de género en los procesos de jerarquización social organizados en torno al falocentrismo.