There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge? The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams (...) argues that, despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. The Emptiness of the Image shows how the very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations. (shrink)

What kind of rhetoric frames French reproductive policy debate? Who does such policies exclude? Through an examination of the “American import” of gender studies, along with an analysis of France’s Catholic heritage and secular politics, I argue that an unwavering belief in sexual difference as the foundation of French society defines the productive reproductive citizen. Sylviane Agacinski is perhaps the most vocal public philosopher who has framed the terms of reproductive policy debate in France, building an oppositional platform (...) to reproductive technology around anthropological assertions of sexual difference. This paper engages with Agacinski to examine rhetorical claims of sexual difference and how such claims delayed passage of France’s revised bioethics legislation that extends access of assisted reproductive technology (ART) to “all women.” Though the “PMA pour toutes” [ART for all women] legislation was eventually passed, such rhetoric motivated the explicit exclusion of all trans person from its extension, thus hardly permitting ART to all women. (shrink)

This collection consists of lectures given at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. They were delivered under the provisions of the Jan Tin- bergen Chair, ...

This chapter develops an argument for the ontological significance of sexual difference through Irigaray’s account of “the negative.” Reading Irigaray with Hegel’s logical analysis of finitude as a negative self-reference, or in terms of the dependence of identity on difference, I consider how this ontological negativity functions in two senses: first, in terms of a generational negativity, whereby sexuate beings rely on this difference as their own copulative condition of possibility; and second, in terms of a (...) more general negative self-relation to sexuate others as incarnated in the determinate limits of one’s own sexuate body. Against skeptical challenges to the reality of these two senses of ontological negativity, this chapter thus develops an account of sexual difference in terms of the irreducible reference to otherness in oneself, subverting the idea that there could be sexuate identity without difference. (shrink)

Sara HeinSmaa rediscovers neglected passages of Le Duexi_me Sexe in her quest to follow Simone de Beauvoir's line of thinking. She finds the masterpiece to be grounded in the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which (...) you seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

The author analyzes the origin and meaning of the expression ‘Ethics of Sexual Difference’ (ESD), contextualising it in the paradigm ‘thought of Sexual Difference’, in which the potentiality and aporias arising from the debate within the feminist movement are highlighted. Possible interpretations of these ethics, developed in the Italian philosophical context, are illustrated and evaluated. The author proposes a critical comparison with other models, for example, the queer theories, and attempts to show how the ‘Thought of (...) Sexual Difference’ (TSD) opens itself to destabilization produced by the emergence of new subjects (gay and lesbian, transgender, intersex) and their corresponding scientific knowledge. The author therefore proposes an update to the plural, ‘Ethics of Sexual Differences’ (ESDs), listing the possible methodological and content assumptions (including the development of a relational model in all scientific disciplines) and the disciplinary implications (also in the psychoanalytic field) of an ethics so defined. A reference is made to the discussion of socalled "gender ideology", in which the protagonists have often showed a certain difficulty in implementing an ESDs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which (...) you seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 2, Page 69-93, June 2012.

A metaphysical strand of C. S. Peirce’s American pragmatism resonates deeply in potential alliance with “incorporeal feminism”: a transcontinental philosophy with origins in Luce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference. A psychoanalyst trained by Lacan himself, Irigaray analyzes the unconscious of various philosophical systems, revealing dualism as an underlying phallic structure. In the dualism between idealism and materialism, she explains, the terms become sexually coded: idealism, paternal-masculine; materialism, maternal-feminine. Incorporeal feminism does not merely invert the roles, but radically reimagines (...) the relation between them, postulating the ideal as a maternal condition of possibility for birthing the material into existence; not separate substances but the inseparable activity of materiality making itself. For Peirce, ideas act; and though he was by no means a feminist, his metaphysics lend at least three insights to incorporeal feminism: an alternative to dualism in the trichotomic categories “firstness, secondness, and thirdness”; an evolutionary cosmology where the material universe is a gestating embryo within a womb; and an objective idealism: a model for addressing the dilemma of when sexual difference begins. Within “firstness,” sexual difference is ideal; an incorporeal activity pre-existing and latently imbuing materiality to varying degrees, ultimately expressing itself in certain life-forms as bodily differences. (shrink)

In feminist analyses of HIV/aids and heterosexuality it is often suggested that the constitution of sexual difference and gender concerns the specific image of heterosexual women's bodies. Such understandings of power and embodiment are especially at play in analyses of safer-(hetero)sex advertisements where the object of the condom is considered to represent a diseased female body. But while the object of the condom in AIDS heterosexual culture is generally understood to concern a female `other' and in addition a (...) disappearing male body, in this article I call into question this understanding of the condom. Specifically, through an analysis of AIDS research findings on safer heterosex practise, I suggest that the object of the condom concerns not sexed female bodies but a heterosexual masculine self-identity. (shrink)

What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all? Radical French libertines experimented clandestinely with this idea during the Enlightenment. In explicit novels, dialogues, poems, and engravings, they wrenched pleasure free from religion and morality, from politics, aesthetics, anatomy, and finally reason itself, and imagined how such a world would be desirable, legitimate, rapturous--and potentially horrific. Laying out the logic and willful illogic of radical libertinage, this book ties the (...) Enlightenment engagement with sexual license to the expansion of print, empiricism, the revival of skepticism, the fashionable arts and lifestyles of the Ancien Régime, and the rise and decline of absolutism. It examines the consequences of imagining sexual pleasure as sovereign power and a law-unto-itself across a range of topics, including sodomy, the science of sexual difference, political philosophy, aesthetics, and race. It also examines the roots of radical claims for pleasure in earlier licentious satire and their echoes in appeals for sexual liberation in the 1960s and beyond. (shrink)

There has been much attention devoted in the last decade and especially in the last few years to Maximus the Confessor?s beliefs concerning sexual difference and its removal. The most important text on this topic is Ambiguum 41. There has been mixed reception of this text, with some scholars advocating that Maximus believes that sexual difference was absent from original human nature and will return to such a state in the eschaton; and other scholars believing that (...) this should be read as a metaphorical absence. This article re-evaluates the text in question and argues that the former position should be maintained. It goes some way to bring together current scholarship on the text and to answers questions that arise from the opposing reading. (shrink)

The paper argues that the philosophical starting point of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex is the phenomenological understanding of the living body, developed by Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It shows that Beauvoir's notion of philosophy stems from the phenomenological interpretation of Cartesianism which emphasizes the role of evidence, self-criticism, and dialogue.

This article focuses on the affective potential of anticipation, in its ready endorsement of the unknown, as a formative lens for theorising feminist temporalities. I draw from earlier readings of Luce Irigaray’s conceptual paradigm of sexual difference to examine how its articulation of a feminist future that is inherently unknowable might contribute to recent debates on the temporalities of feminist thought. The article presents two broadly intersecting lines of argument. I first emphasise the continued centrality of sexual (...) difference in its anticipatory imperative for thinking feminism but – or perhaps, especially – through a contradictory retrieval of the term that re-narrates its contemporary significance. In other words, it is precisely the retroactive position that sexual difference occupies that exacts a critical reorientation of existing modes of feminist temporalities; it moreover does so as a theoretical construct that altogether circumvents our understanding of feminism as a progress narrative. Secondly, I build upon Drucilla Cornell’s contentions in Beyond Accommodation that the unknown futurity inaugurated by the trajectories of sexual difference demands a dimension of inquiry that is inevitably aesthetic (1991). I identify a possibility of literature’s reinvigoration in emergence narratives of feminist theorising, particularly in a certain ethical capacity precipitated by its affective experience of enchantment, which mirrors the ‘wonder’ that sexual difference incites. If we are to continue to use literature as a conducive space of feminist analysis, then it is the forward-looking perpetuation of feminist narratives that must also be rethought for their investment in the multiple contingencies of anticipation. (shrink)

Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference [Vers une phénoménologie de la différence sexuelle], de Sara Heinämaa, publié en 2003, se donne pour tâche d’exhumer « la » philosophie de la différence sexuelle de Beauvoir, telle qu’on la trouve dans le Deuxième Sexe, mais aussi dans Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté et dans La force de l’âge, ainsi que dans la recension que fait Beauvoir en 1945 de la Phénoménologie de la perception de Merleau-Ponty pour la revue Les temps (...) modernes. L’objectif est... (shrink)

In this introduction, we consider how this volume demonstrates not only that the question of sexual difference can be asked with Irigaray but that her project necessitates engaging the question if we are to take seriously her diagnosis of sexual difference as “one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” We consider how Irigaray's questioning of sexual difference implicates a dialectic of natural and cultural determinations, challenging reductive and essentialist (...) readings of her project. In the process, we trace how the contributors of this volume think sexual difference with Irigaray, revealing the value of her thought for addressing contemporary debates about sex, gender, and race. (shrink)

Irigaray’s engagement with Aristotelian physics provides a specific diagnosis of women’s ontological and ethical situation under Western metaphysics: Women provide place and containership to men, but have no place of their own, rendering them uncontained and abyssal. She calls for a reconfiguration of this topological imaginary as a precondition for an ethics of sexual difference. This paper returns to Aristotelian cosmological texts to further investigate the topologies of sexual difference suggested there. In an analysis both psychoanalytic (...) and phenomenological, the paper rigorously traces a teleological and oedipal narrative implicit in the structure of the Aristotelian cosmos, in which desire for the mother is superseded by love for the father. Further, the paper argues that this narrative is complicated by certain other elements in the Aristotelian text—aporias involving the notion of boundary and the relationship between space and time, the fallenness of the feminine, and the ineliminably aleatory qualities of matter. The paper concludes that such elements may provide material for disrupting this teleology of gender, opening onto not merely an ethics of sexual difference, but providing space and place for a proliferation of non-normative, queer, transgender and intersex modes of sexed and gendered subjectivity. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Aristotle's account of sexual difference in Generation of Animals, arguing that Aristotle conceives of the production of males as the result of a successful teleological process, while he sees the production of females as due to material forces that defeat the norms of nature. My suggestion is that Aristotle endorses what I call the "degrees of perfection" model. I challenge Devin Henry's attempt to argue that Aristotle explains sex determination exclusively with reference to (...) material necessity (in particular, levels of "vital heat" in the male semen), for Aristotle's notion of "sufficient" or "deficient" vital heat is itself teleological. If, as Aristotle is aware, male and female embryos appear with approximately equal frequency in most species, how, in light of Physics II, can he conceive of the former as in accordance with nature, and the latter as somehow contrary to nature? My proposal is that Aristotle's notion of what happens usually (ως επì τò πoλυ) is bifurcated: the usual need not be more frequent. (shrink)

Alison Stone offers a feminist defence of the idea that sexual difference is natural, providing a new interpretation of the later philosophy of Luce Irigaray. She defends Irigaray's unique form of essentialism and her rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture, showing how Irigaray's ideas can be reconciled with Judith Butler's performative conception of gender, through rethinking sexual difference in relation to German Romantic philosophies of nature. This is the first sustained attempt to connect feminist (...) conceptions of embodiment to German idealist and Romantic accounts of nature. Not merely an interpretation of Irigaray, this book also presents an original feminist perspective on nature and the body. It will encourage debate on the relations between sexual difference, essentialism, and embodiment. (shrink)

This chapter provides an account of sexual ontology, grounded in and responsive to Irigaray’s philosophy, that focuses on the question of possibility. I first consider possibility in terms of the ontological negativity of sexuate beings, whereby one sex or sexuate morphology does not exhaust all that that kind of being is or can be. Second, I consider how sexual difference, as a relational structure of being, engenders possibilities for sexuate beings to develop as irreducible individuals. With particular (...) focus on the human being and the looming question of transhumanist technologies, I argue that these principles develop a sexual ontology that recognizes determinate limits between sexes while allowing for varied and creative expressions of sexuate life. (shrink)

2013 marks 10 years since the Sexual Offences Act 2003 was passed. That Act made significant changes to the law of rape which appear now to have made very little difference to reporting, prosecution or conviction rates. This article argues that the Act has failed against its own measures because it remains enmeshed within a conceptual framework of sexual indifference in which woman continues to be constructed as man’s other. This construction both constricts the frame in which (...) women’s sexuality can be thought and distorts the harm of rape for women. It also continues woman’s historic alienation from her own nature and denies her entitlement to a becoming in line with her own sexuate identity. Using Luce Irigaray’s critical and constructive frameworks, the article seeks to imagine how law might ‘cognise’ sexual difference and thus take the preliminary steps to a juridical environment in which women can more adequately understand and articulate the harm of rape. (shrink)

By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference, I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social (...) reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics. (shrink)

: By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since (...) the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics. (shrink)

This article engages with Adriana Cavarero's framing of sexual difference, specifically in terms of how this displaces “bodies that queer”. For Cavarero, the narratable self is inescapably relational and characterized by vulnerability, which is how ethics arises in the form of a decision between caring and wounding. At the same time, Cavarero's deconstructive method of appropriating stereotypes restricts the scope of sexual difference to dimorphism. In examining the implications of this, I build on the work of (...) Michel Foucault and Judith Butler by looking to the intersexed life of Adélaïde Herculine Barbin, whose suicide in 1868 at the age of twenty‐nine was precipitated not through malice or cruelty, but through concerted care. This mode of care is anchored in the apparent self‐evidence of how we see and how we think with and through narratives that sediment in orders of power/knowledge. While agreeing with Cavarero's critique of the autonomous “I,” the article nevertheless argues for authorial audacity—the courage to name oneself—as a way of subverting asymmetrical power relations, including those that make it possible to inadvertently generate suffering through care. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's project elaborates an original concept of sexual difference. While this concept is widely discussed in feminist philosophy, there are multiple readings of sexual difference and some of these are contradictory. This essay surveys the various readings of sexual difference in English. Foci include the debate over the status of essentialism, ontology, and the controversy over the primacy of sexual difference, including discussion of whether her oeuvre marginalizes differences of race and (...) sexuality. I conclude by arguing that her thinking of difference is open to the future and non-totalisable in principle. This means that, difference, the concept at the heart of her thinking of sexual difference, cannot be primarily oriented toward engendering sexual difference because it is necessarily open to engendering relations that cannot be predicted. (shrink)

This article seeks to open up a discussion of issues relating to the significance of sexual difference, the thinking and politics emerging from it and how it might affect educational philosophy. It briefly examines the initial work of Luce Irigaray, which has become quite influential in parts of the English speaking world, particularly focussing on the idea that there are implications for our educational objectives if gender equality were to be put in question as one of the underlying (...) paradigms with which to measure children's performance. It then looks at the work of some groups of Italian philosophers and educationalists who have not been translated into English and are consequently less well known. Their work has been devoted to exploring Irigaray's challenge to re-think the world from the perspective of sexual difference. In particular, in tune with the theme of this special issue, this article shows how this work puts forward the practice and philosophy of relationship for consideration at different stages of the educational process, focussing particularly on Luisa Muraro's philosophical ‘invention’ of the symbolic order of the mother as a way to bring into the shared world the erased sexual difference that Irigaray had articulated. Muraro's work considers the meaning of the first relationship between mother and infant and suggests that the mother, or the one doing her work, is in fact the first and ongoing educator and transmitter of philosophy, a fact that is only partially recognised in our formal educational structures. The article introduces, finally, the idea that as the historical patterns of mainly women teaching younger children and men teaching older children are shifting, to understand the need for and argue for a more sexuate world, with both sexes participating in the educational process at all stages would allow for the possibility of a new discussion of concepts that are already central to educationalists such as equality, freedom, autonomy, authority, flourishing and the relationship with parents. (shrink)

This dissertation develops a psychoanalytic model of ideology which accounts for the formation of sexual difference. I attempt to distinguish both the origin of sexually differentiated identity and the necessity of a political force at work in founding that origin. With Lacan, I locate the origin in the subjects's psychical accession to the Law of the Father, an accession that is linked to the individual establishment of a relation to the phallus as transcendental signifier. I advance a critique (...) of Lacan through an inquiry into the coming-to-be of the Father's Law as origin, an analysis which is shaped through readings of Althusser, Irigaray, and Derrida. My readings are an attempt to politicize the phallus, or to defend the thesis that 'the psychical is political,' through revealing the dynamics at play in establishing an origin that only ever appears as given. If subject-formation is organized and established around sexual difference through the function of the phallus, then an understanding of this ideological 'contract' reveals subjectivity and sexual difference to be intertwined in the psychic and political development of individuals, a coalition that endures through the lawful 'interpellation' of sexual identity. Conditions of emergence are also, potentially, conditions of transformation because these conditions expose the limits of any order or organization of sexual difference, the limits of its founding principle. If the limits of the phallus are disclosed, if we can reveal the energy that founds the phallus as or at the origin, then we can begin to conceptualize other founding acts. If, in other words, the law of sexual difference functions ideologically, then it is subject to vicissitudes of force. Thus origin can be reclaimed by other significations. In particular, it might be possible to conceptualize an origin that is rooted in a feminine genealogy and that doesn't require the intervention of the Father's Name. Such a genealogy would challenge the economy that maintains patriarchy, and hence its creation might make possible a feminine subjectivity. (shrink)

The practice of relationship itself is seen to be the central vehicle through which human beings learn and understand themselves, others, and the world around them. The politics of sexual difference insists that the flourishing of sexual difference in both women and men, girls and boys, relies, ultimately, on both sexes taking up the challenge to rethink themselves and the world. This chapter explores the emergence of a whole new philosophical idea, brought into being by Luce (...) Irigaray in the context of the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe. It then outlines how this idea was developed in Italy and Spain to restore the work of the mother to the origins of what we understand as education and philosophy, emphasising the need to bring relationship itself as the vehicle for this process onto centre stage and keep it there. (shrink)

Through a re-reading of Antigone, I offer a critique of Hegel's use of the story to illustrate the unity which emerges from the representation of sexual difference in ethical life. Using Hegel's own account of habits, as the mechanism by which the body becomes a sign of the self, I argue that the pretense of social unity assumes the proper construction and representation of one body only. This critique is brought to bear upon contemporary moves towards a post-Hegelian (...) ethics of difference. (shrink)

Just Life reorients ethics and politics around the generativity of mothers and daughters rather than the right to property and the sexual proprieties of the Oedipal drama. Invoking two concrete universals – everyone is born of a woman and everyone needs to eat – Rawlinson rethinks labor and food as relationships that make ethical claims and sustain agency. Just Life counters the capitalization of bodies under biopower with the solidarity of sovereign bodies.

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might (...) allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects. (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, biologists such as Oscar Riddle, Thomas Hunt Morgan, Frank Lillie, and Richard Goldschmidt all puzzled over the question of sexual difference, the distinction between male and female. They all offered competing explanations for the biological cause of this difference, and engaged in a fierce debate over the primacy of their respective theories. Riddle propounded a metabolic theory of sex dating from the late-nineteenth century suggesting that metabolism lay at the heart (...) of sexual difference. Thomas Hunt Morgan insisted on the priority of chromosomes, Frank Lillie emphasized the importance of hormones, while Richard Goldschmidt supported a mixed model involving both chromosomes and hormones. In this paper, I will illustrate how the older metabolic theory of sex was displaced when those who argued for the relatively newer theories of chromosomes and hormones gradually formed an alliance that accommodated each other and excluded the metabolic theory of sex. By doing so, proponents of chromosomes and hormones established their authority over the question of sexual difference as they laid the foundations for the new disciplines of genetics and endocrinology. Their debate raised urgent questions about what constituted sexual difference, and how scientists envisioned the plasticity and controllability of this difference. These theories also had immediate political and cultural consequences at the turn of the twentieth century, especially for the eugenic and feminist movements, both of which were heavily invested in knowledge of sex and its determination, ascertainment, and command. (shrink)

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately (...) linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences. (shrink)

While Merleau-Ponty does not theorize sexual difference at any great length, his concepts of the flesh and the institution of a sense suggest hitherto undeveloped possibilities for articulating sexual difference beyond the male–female binary. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is a “pregnancy of possibilities” which gives rise to masculine and feminine forms through a process of mutual divergence and encroachment. Both sexes bear “the possible of the other,” and neither represents the first or generic form of the human; (...) each sex bears the possibility of the other. By approaching sexual difference in terms of intersubjectively distributed possibilities rather than interlocking forms or types, we may grasp sexual difference in terms of both a developmental process in which bodies become sexed (and sometimes re-sexed) over time, and in terms of a social-historical process in which patterns of relation and exchange between sexed bodies shift over time, altering the very sense of sexual difference. (shrink)

In this monograph on Luce Irigay, Kelly Ives explores the French thinker's ideas on the politics of sexual difference.

In this article I will argue that the feminist theoretical paradigm in approaching the issue of sexual difference should be adjusted. Feminism at present mainly relies on phenomenology of the other and pays much attention to the significant ambiguity of the human body. But I will explain that the phenomenological argument for the sexual asymmetry is invalid. All human beings with gender are bodily conditioned. Gender issues must be integrated into the universal human impulse of liberation which (...) is based on a self-understanding. The gendered self is culturally shaped. An intercultural comparative perspective can allow us to obtain a wider horizon to explore the relationship between a person’s sexually conditioned being and his self-understanding. In my discussion of gender and self, the contrast between China and the West is exemplary. Despite different self-understandings with regard to sex, the pursuit of freedom can be universally noticed. Notwithstanding the sexually embodied existence, human beings in both the West and East have generally theorized and practiced the spiritualization of self in metaphysics and religions. In order to make this point clear I take early Indian Buddhism as an example. My argumentation may seem intercultural and comparative, but fundamentally I am problem-oriented and point to the dimension beyond cultural comparison. (shrink)

This essay argues that despite of the feminist critique of Merleau-Ponty his phenomenology can be positively appropriated to the theory of sexual difference. It focuses on three issues: the first one is closely linked to the Phenomenology of Perception and introduces a concept of "difference as differentiation". The second one is concerned with the intersubjective dimension of sexuality and will be called a "sexual syncretism". Finally, I’m referring to Merleau-Ponty's notion of "chiasm" in his late work (...) The Visible and the Invisible in order to apply it to the theory of sexual difference. At this point, the difference between sexual beings will be conceptualized as "chiasmatic intertwining". In doing so, I hope to show that Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is a helpful resource for philosophical research that is mainly concerned with the questions of sexuality and sexual difference. (shrink)