The ArgumentThis essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of fear to men, and that of envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may still (...) provide food for thought.Then, four critiques of Freud which have been articulated by prominent feminist psychoanalysts – Karen Horney, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Jessica Benjamin – are presented, as well as the alternative visions of sexual identities which these thinkers have developed. The basic metaphors or economies guiding these visions of sexual difference are appraised in terms of their breadth and depth, with particular reference to their ability to acknowledge and integrate the presence of fear and envy as passions which are evoked but also repressed in the face of sexual difference.From this angle, the contributions of Nancy Chodorow and Luce Irigaray are found to be more limited than those of Karen Horney and Jessica Benjamin, since the former two theorists allocate fear primarily or exclusively to men, as Freud has done, while they remain completely silent on envy. Differences in the scope or reach of the four feminist approaches are explained as a result of the theorists' differing perceptions of the social, political, and cultural position of women in patriarchal society. (shrink)

In this essay I follow one argument strand from Linda Singer's Erotic Welfare. How can we have a forward-looking and affirmative ideal of sexual freedom when the AIDS panic has altered the sexual landscape and instigated new justifications for oppressive sexual disciplines? How can we be sexual subjects when processes of commodification and disciplinary practices have constrained sexual expression while proliferating sexual fetishes? These are some of the questions this book formulates, without answering.

While ethics has become accepted as an important field of inquiry within Anglo-American critical and feminist theory, the same thing cannot be said about ‘love’. I argue that ‘love’ needs to be taken as a serious, valid and crucial subject for academic study, and that feminist theory should have a special investment in the topic. Phenomenological theories of pain and psychoanalytic theories of melancholy can provide a negative definition of love by describing situations where love has lost its objects. These (...) theories help to map connections amongst pain, love, and language, and demonstrate how language — and for Julia Kristeva, how especially literary language — can play an important role in mediating these states. I propose that ‘love’ names not only a particular qualitative relation between a self and an Other, but also a process of altering oneself that involves the creation of an unusual and seemingly contradictory spacing or distance. Luce Irigaray’s work helps us conceive of this concept as an embodied one through her concept of proximate distance. I suggest a ‘poethics of love’ as a theory/methodology that could allow us to continue to think through these complex issues in a way that ties ethical, political and aesthetic concerns together. (shrink)

This thesis draws on poststructuralism/postmodernism to present a feminist investigation into the human body, its modes of (self)identification, and its insertion into systems of bioethics. I argue that, contrary to conventional paradigms, the boundaries not only of the subject, but of the body too, cannot be secured. In exploring and contesting the closure and disembodiment of the ethical subject, I propose instead an incalculable, but nonetheless fully embodied, diversity of provisional subject positions. My aim is to valorise women and situate (...) them within a reconceived ethics which takes account of the embodied feminine. My project entails an analysis and deconstruction of the binaries of those dominant strands of postEnlightenment thought that shape epistemology, ontology, and ethics, which in turn set the parameters of modern bioethics. More importantly, it goes on to reclaim a radical sexual difference beyond the binary, in which the female is no longer the other of the male. My enquiry, then, is strongly influenced by the discursive approach offered by both Foucault and Derrida in differential ways, but I counter their indifference to feminist concerns by qualifying their insights in the light of strategies developed by Irigaray and Spivak, among others. The main method of investigation has been through library research of primary and secondary sources in mainstream and feminist philosophy, and in bioethics. In addition, archival work in both textual and iconographic collections was carried out at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. The contribution made by this thesis is to go beyond modernist feminisms - which would simply revise and add women into existing paradigms - to radically displace and overflow the mechanisms by which women are devalued. And in developing a postmodern critique around some issues in bioethics, I have suggested a new ethics of the body which precedes the operation of moral codes. (shrink)

This paper explores the symbolic implications of Luce Irigaray's images of the female body, particularly the two lips and the mucous. It suggests that Irigaray's work reveals some of the problems attendant on "positive images of women.".

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not allow for sufficient attention to be given to the question of non-normative heterosexualities. This paper develops a feminist critique of normative sexuality, focusing on alternative readings of sex and/or gender offered by Beauvoir and Irigaray. Despite their differences, both accounts contribute significantly to dismantling the lure of normative sexuality in heterosexual relations-a dismantling necessary to the construction of a feminist social and political order.

This article traces the "dialogue" between the work of the philosophers Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas. It attempts to construct a more nuanced discussion than has been given to date of Irigaray's critique of Levinas, particularly as formulated in "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas" (Irigaray 1991). It suggests that the concepts of the feminine and of voluptuosity articulated by Levinas have more to contribute to Irigaray's project of an ethics of sexual difference than she herself sometimes appears to think.

If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the operation of this (im)moral landscape and offer the possibility of alternative (...) post-modern social spaces that might produce and respect Otherness. In this sense Lefebvre's work is an incipient 'difference ethics'. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray''s Être deux (1997) synthesises her linguistic research with an interpretation of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Lévinas. The linguistic research focuses on consistency both of an individual subject''s discourse, and of the overall research findings (rather than the presence of inconsistency in those findings) to reinforce Irigaray''s argument that there is a relationship between sexual difference and sexed language use. Previously in her work, Irigaray''s philosophical and linguistic research were held more distinct. Être deux speculates on the extent to which (...) a discursive analysis of the texts of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and Lévinas might support the concept of a masculine relationship to language. While it is certainly the case that some degree of what Irigaray deems masculinity can be located in their texts, this analysis occurs through an unnecessary de-emphasis of the discursive complexity of these texts, a complexity Irigaray has been at pains to demonstrate in the methodological orientation of her earlier work on the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The nature and value of autonomy has long been debated in diverse philosophical traditions, including moral and political philosophy. Although the notion dates back to ancient Greek philosophy, it was during the Age of Enlightenment that autonomy drew much attention. Thus, as may be known, moral philosophers tended to emphasize self-regulation, particularly one’s own will to abide by universal moral laws, as the term “autonomy” originates from the Greek words “self” (auto) and “rule” (nomos). In parallel, modern epistemologists supposedly espoused (...) the idea of intellectual autonomy as self-reliance. In this classical view, an intellectually autonomous explorer of knowledge must not depend on a belief that is obtained from another’s testimony, until one can justify it to oneself. However, accompanying the growing focus on the importance of social dimensions of acquiring knowledge and understanding, recent epistemologists have doubted the classical view and have since reconsidered intellectual autonomy from distinct approaches such as social and virtue epistemology. This paper propounds an interpersonal-epistemic approach to intellectual autonomy. First, it is argued that thinking through questioning both individually and with other epistemic peers is an interpersonal-epistemic practice. Second, it is demonstrated that with particular cognitive features inherent within us, an intellectually autonomous person must think through questioning in necessary situations. This interpersonal account of intellectual autonomy can conceptually enrich intellectual autonomy by considering its relationship with not only responsibility but also with vulnerability. Specifically, regarding responsibility, an intellectually autonomous person must be responsible for his or her own actions throughout questioning processes. Regarding vulnerability, our intellectual autonomy lies in retaining autonomy with vulnerability in the plastic control of the questioning processes. (shrink)

In this paper, we introduce an enactive account of loving as participatory sense-making inspired by the “I love to you” of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. Emancipating from the fusionist concept of romantic love, which understands love as unity, we conceptualise loving as an existential engagement in a dialectic of encounter, in continuous processes of becoming-in-relation. In these processes, desire acquires a certain prominence as the need to know (the other, the relation, oneself) more. We build on Irigaray’s account of (...) love to present a phenomenology of loving interactions and then our enactive account. Finally, we draw some implications for ethics. These concern language, difference, vulnerability, desire, and self-transformation. (shrink)

This article argues that a positive engagement between Bourdieu’s sociology of practice and contemporary feminist theory would be mutually profitable. It compares Bourdieu’s account of the social construction of the human subject through practice with Butler’s account of subjectivity as performance. While the one, through the concept of habitus, tends towards an ‘overdetermined’ view of subjectivity in which subjective dispositions are too tightly tied to the social practices in which they were forged, the other pays insufficient attention to the social (...) conditions of performative subversion. The second half of the paper looks at feminist studies of the relationship between class and gender which have drawn fruitfully on Bourdieu’s work, particularly on his concept of ‘cultural capital’, such as those of Moi and Skeggs. (shrink)

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)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's argument that women need a feminine divine is placed in the context of her analyses of the interconnection between man's appropriation of woman as his “negative alter ego” and his identification with the impossible ego ideal represented by the figure of God. As an alternative, the “feminine divine” is conceived as a realm with which women would be continuous. It would allow mediation between humans, and interrupt cannibalizing appropriations of the other.

This essay examines Irigaray's analysis of politics and the political implications of her critique of sacrificial orders that repress difference/matter. I suggest that her descriptions of a fluid “feminine” can be read as an alternative symbolic not dependent on repression. This idea is politically promising in opening a possibility for justice and a nonantagonistic intersubjectivity. I conclude by assessing Irigaray's concrete proposals for sexuate rights and a civil identity for women.

Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relation’ ship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a (...) structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law. (shrink)

This essay undertakes a reexamination of the notion of the receptacle/chōra in Plato's Timaeus, asking what its value may be to feminists seeking to understand the topology of the feminine in Western philosophy. As the source of cosmic motion as well as a restless figurality, labile and polyvocal, the receptacle/chōra offers a fecund zone of destabilization that allows for an immanent critique of ancient metaphysics. Engaging with Derridean, Irigarayan, and Kristevan analyses, Bianchi explores whether receptacle/chōra can exceed its reduction to (...) the maternal-feminine, and remain answerable to contemporary theoretical concerns. (shrink)

With its implicit vilification of materiality, the notion of objectification has failed to produce a coherent and effective ethical analysis of heterosexual sex work. The concept of derivatization, grounded in an Irigarayan model of embodied intersubjectivity, is more effective. However, queer sex work poses new and different ethical challenges. This paper argues that although queer sex work can entail both objectification and derivatization, the former is not ethically objectionable, and the latter, although the cause for some justified ethical concern, must (...) be analyzed within the context of structural sexual injustice. (shrink)

This article draws upon the work of contemporary French feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray in developing a post‐structuralist analysis of travel within the autobiographies of the second wave feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Travel and the experience of wonder at the otherness of the world figure as important self shaping experiences within the four volumes of Beauvoir's life narrative. Travel has a metonymic relation to the passage of Beauvoir's life, in which the existential extremes of anguish and ecstasy are played out (...) in a quest for self knowledge. Through a close reading of Beauvoir's writing I analyse the different formations of desire that structure the experience of wonder in relation to the otherness of the world and death. I also draw upon debates within feminist philosophy about the nature of subjectivity and knowledge that were, in Beauvoir's time, ordered around an Hegelian opposition between immanence and transcendence. I take up Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental to explore another way of conceptualising the feminine subject's desire to know and value the world differently. (shrink)

The dominant male discourse as expressed in the law of sexuality constructs the male subject. In each area — rape, incest and prostitution, it creates and extends the power which underpins the sexuality of the male subject to facilitate the non-consensual taking of women in rape and incest and the buying of them on the subject's own terms in prostitution.Further, the law constructs the female as Other not as freely consenting subject but as Other for the male subject in the (...) space of unreason, for the logic of desire.In these constructions, lie the paradox of the law of sexuality. It exists purportedly to defend and protect the “victims” of rape, incest and prostitution but even in so far as it does so, it reasserts, through its constructions, the power of the speaking male subject through and the exclusion of the woman as Other from, the dominant male discourse as it is expressed in and enshrined by that law. (shrink)

In this paper I distil a concept of the imaginary with which to make good the claim that our mode of embodied subjectivity is an imaginary embodiment in an imaginary world. The concept of the imaginary employed is not one in which imaginary worlds are contrasted with the real, but one in which imagination is a condition of there being a real for us. The images and forms in terms of which our imagined bodies and worlds are constituted carry, in (...) an interdependent way, cognition and affects. Imagined configurations have a resilience which makes their displacement more than a matter of appealing to considerations of truth or falsity. It involves encounters with alternative imagined configurations which can be recognized as making both cognitive and affective sense. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray classically challenges what she takes to be the masculine foundations of knowledge in Western liberal culture. The present article contends not only that this epistemological challenge implicates a radical feminist politics, but that it is also more helpful in formulating a multicultural feminist theory than is often acknowledged by her readers. This is because her account responds to the false neutrality of liberal feminist approaches to multiculturalism. It does so by supporting, at the socio-political level, transformative genealogical practices (...) that are aimed at fostering women's agency in culturally sensitive ways. However, Irigaray's recent work on multiculturalism does not sustain the necessary continuity between her core epistemological critique and her political claims. In particular, the continuity between her criticism of the West's sexual indifference and the cultural multiplicity of female identity becomes problematic in her recent work. The author finally contends that Irigaray's writings pose difficulties for a multicultural feminism, because they fail to specify the different forms of policy necessary to promote diverse women's equality in the postcolonial contexts on which she recently focuses. (shrink)

The planet seems to be heading into an ecological catastrophe, in which the earth will become uninhabitable for many species, including human beings. At the same time we humans are beset by appalling injustices. The Rio Declaration which addressed both these sets of problems contains conceptual contradictions about ‘development and ‘nature’. This paper addresses the issue of whether it is logically possible to work for both global justice and ecological sustainability. The article proposes a way of responding to the spirit (...) of the Rio Declaration without reinstating its contradictions; considers a posthuman perspective on the issue; and proposes a phenomenological approach to ethics and justice which would include both the human and more-than-human parts of the world. In section the implications for education are drawn out, in terms of ‘learning to mind’. Finally, links are drawn to the Journal theme of translation. (shrink)

An incidental extension of the central domain of argumentation theory with non-classical ways of constructing arguments seems to automatically raise a question that is otherwise rarely posed, namely whether or not it is useful to consider the sex of the arguer. This question is usually posed with regard to argumentation by women in particular. Do women rely more, or differently than men do on non-canonical modes of reasoning stemming from the realm of the emotional, physical and intuitive, instead of the (...) logical? One may simply refer this question to folk-linguistics. One may also take the question seriously, given the findings on women's linguistic behaviour, and for various other reasons that will be explained below.Section 1 sums up the most frequently quoted differences in language use between women and men. This is followed by a non-exhaustive, interdisciplinary review of studies on male/female differences in verbal and written argumentation.Section 2 discusses the role of language and texts in generating and maintaining ideas on gender. These gender messages not only influence the actual argumentation behaviour of women and men, but also the way such behaviour is valued.Section 3 subsequently shows that our ideas on rationality are gendered, and therefore also our ideas on the proper central domain of argumentation theory.Section 4 briefly reflects on why this kind of wrong question about the reasoning of women should sometimes be addressed seriously anyway. (shrink)

By reading the analyses of mysticism found in Beauvoir and Irigaray with and against some medieval women's mystical texts, the paper articulates a possible space for the divine within feminist thought.

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework based (...) on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever. (shrink)

: I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

This contribution aims for a “corporeal reconstitution” of Sophie Taeuber’s dance performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and the Galerie Dada in 1916/17. This means that the movements from the static images informing the history of Dada art need to be re-imagined. It implies a rendering perceptible of Taeuber’s trained dancer’s body, its particular movements, and the quality of these movements. Through testimonies of contemporaries, it becomes clear that Taeuber not only dances in a costume or behind a mask but with (...) the mask, the costume and sound poems. The reconstitution of the moving body with the mask thus points at a foregrounding of the masquerade to which she is convicted as a woman. Her mimetic strategy or playful repetition of the masquerade entails a “radically new mode of relating” between human and non-human materiality. Taeuber is not only moving in between puppet and puppeteer, movement and stasis, abstraction and expressivity, performer and mask, presence and absence, but also in between feminine and masculine. The hybrid movements in her mimetic strategy disrupt the binary nature of the oppositional pairs. In dancing the perpetual movement in between dualities, through a patchwork of genres and materials, Taeuber not only playfully rebels against patriarchal discourse, but also against the dehumanizing effects of World War One violently raging through Europe. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray’s writings on Nietzsche’s philosophy belong to the groundbreaking interpretations of his work and they also confirm the continued relevance of his philosophy. Unlike most male-centric philosophers, Nietzsche not only saw that sexual difference was becoming one of the major philosophical issues of our age. He was also keenly aware of how it permeated our philosophical tradition with its dualistic models, which is one reason for Irigaray’s interest in it, as has been widely discussed in feminist/queer philosophical research into (...) her Nietzsche interpretation. Another common denominator of Nietzsche and Irigaray are their philosophies of the body. Interpreters of Irigaray have pointed out how her conception of embodied, sexuate being calls for a new way of philosophical thinking, and Stegmaier interprets the liberation from prejudices we encounter in Nietzsche’s works as a “liberation of philosophy.” How can the liberation of philosophy be understood in the way we practice philosophical thinking? In the following interpretation of Irigaray’s book The Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how it offers a theory and a practice of embodied philosophical thinking, which I will discuss in light of new phenomenological methodologies of embodied thinking. Irigaray’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Marine Lover is both critical and constructive as apparent in her interpretation of Dionysus and Ariadne. On the one hand, this couple represents for her the patriarchal tradition of philosophy that she claims Nietzsche is still stuck in, and on the other hand, it also represents a liberation from resentment and misogyny in relations of the sexes. The notions of listening to oneself and to the other, being touched and tearing, enable such a liberation, both on the level of relations of the sexes and on the level of philosophical dialogues and thinking that Dionysus and Ariadne also represent. The water/ocean in the title of Marine Lover indicates how this is a philosophical text that displays an explicit processing and articulation of feelings, emotions, and affects in philosophical thinking. (shrink)

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a symbolic (...) re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing. (shrink)

The centrality of language for feminist theory and practice is a widely shared tenet. So is the awareness of the difficulty of 'creating' a language in which to express a female subject who cannot have a voice in the given symbolic order. In the Italian context, and working on a daily newspaper, how does one write about the feminist movement? And - which is more difficult - how does one write about feminist theory? The requirements of communication might seem to (...) call for a simplified language, a sort of 'translation' of the terms of the theoretical debate. But where does communication end and betrayal begin? (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory , I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

Sophocles's Antigone continues to attract attention for its portrayal of the themes of moral agency and sexual difference. In this paper I argue that the contradictory factors which constitute Antigone's social identity work against the possibility of assessing her actions as either "virtuous" or not. I challenge readings of the play which suggest either that individual moral agency is sexually neutral or that women's action is necessarily and simply in direct opposition to the interests of the public sphere.

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

Wem wird geglaubt und wem nicht? Wessen Wissen wird weitergegeben und wessen nicht? Wer hat eine Stimme und wer nicht? Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit befassen sich mit dem breiten Feld der ungerechten oder unfairen Behandlung, die mit Fragen des Wissens, Verstehens und Kommunizierens zusammenhängen, wie z.B. die Möglichkeit, vom Wissen oder von kommunikativen Praktiken ausgeschlossen zu werden oder zum Schweigen gebracht zu werden, aber auch Kontexte, in denen die Bedeutungen mancher systematisch verzerrt oder falsch gehört und falsch dargestellt werden, in (...) denen manchen misstraut wird oder es an epistemischer Handlungsfähigkeit mangelt. In diesem Buch wird eine Übersicht über die breite Debatte epistemischer Ungerechtigkeit, epistemischer Unterdrückung und epistemischer Gewalt gegeben, in dem unterschiedliche Theorien, die sich auf der Schnittstelle von Gerechtigkeitstheorie und epistemischen Fragen befinden, systematisch und kritisch diskutiert sowie theoretische Vorgänger dieser Theorien beleuchtet werden. (shrink)

It is simply no longer acceptable to speak of the goddess Athena from the fifth generation of Olympian/Orphic Greece without reference to her mother Metis. Hesiod, among others, tells us Metis appears as a reincarnation of her first-generation self in the Olympian dynasty as wife of Zeus. She was originally the cosmic egg of all creation in the Orphic Theogony, as recounted by Apollodorus, and Taylor, from whose mucosity, the entire genealogy of the Olympian/Orphic heaven, is spawned. However, from the (...) moment Zeus murdered Metis as she was about to give birth to Athena their daughter, she has lapsed into the fissures of forgetfulness in philosophy, theology, mythology and early psychoanalysis. Indeed, in each field of inquiry, Athena is overwhelmingly deemed ‘unmothered’ and produced as Harrison tells us as a desperate ploy ‘from the brain of Zeus’ through his cunning intellect, for Athena to serve as his ‘mouthpiece’. This paper seeks to do more than simply restore Metis as mother to Athena. It explores the tragedy inherited by her violent removal, for mother/daughter relations, grievability and sustained disavowal of maternal divinity in dominant discourse. (shrink)

I consider educational relationships as found in Rousseau's Émile (and elsewhere in his writing) and the critique of his views in Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Wollstonecraft's critique is a significant one, precisely because of her partial agreement with Rousseau. Like Rousseau, her concern is less to do with particular pedagogical techniques or even approaches, more to do with the full complexity of educational relationships. The educational relationships they consider include those between human beings now and in (...) the future, between teacher and student(s), between students, and between human beings and the rest of the natural world, the more-than-human. Both Rousseau and Wollstonecraft wanted education to produce social justice in the future as well as being a benefit to young people in the present, but while he specified that future, she wanted to create the conditions in which future generations could construct it for themselves, when sex equality was put into practice. Gender relations are key to understanding their differences, as I discuss, with particular emphasis on Wollstonecraft's understanding of our human relationship to the rest of the natural world, the more-than-human. These relationships are seldom recognised as contributing to a more socially just education, so I consider them at a little more length, drawing from observations by Kathleen Jamie and using an example from outdoor education to suggest possible implications for educational practices. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical writing, that is, as (...) a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

This paper re-examines debates surrounding Irigaray’s ‘essentialism’, arguing that these debates have generated a widespread assumption that realist essentialism is philosophically untenable and that Irigaray must therefore be read as a non-realist, merely ‘political’, essentialist. I suggest that this assumption is unhelpful, as Irigaray’s work shows increasing commitment to a realist form of essentialism. Moreover, I argue that political essentialism is internally unstable because it aims to revalue femininity and the body as symbolized, thereby reinforcing the traditional conceptual hierarchy of (...) the symbolic over the corporeal. I reinterpret Irigaray’s own work as moving away from her earlier political essentialist project of revaluing symbolic femininity, towards the realism of her recent thought, which urges us to revalue and transfigure real, sexually differentiated, bodies by pursuing their cultural expression and enhancement. I aim to show that Irigaray’s recent work is philosophically coherent and sophisticated, and that it opens up the possibility of a radical and transformative kind of realist essentialism. (shrink)