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.

Drucilla Cornell's Legacies of Dignity: Between Women and Generations proposes a feminist ethics of self-representation that asks what exclusions are necessary to autobiography's constructions of identity. Focusing on the ways in which alterity, particularly linked with figures of the mother, are silenced, it advances a mourning that is transformational. I question Cornell's use of a Kantian concept of dignity and suggest that Irigaray's engagement with Levinas offers another way of conceptualizing the problematic.

Drucilla Cornell's Legacies of Dignity: Between Women and Generations proposes a feminist ethics of self-representation that asks what exclusions are necessary to autobiography's constructions of identity. Focusing on the ways in which alterity, particularly linked with figures of the mother, are silenced, it advances a mourning that is transformational. I question Cornell's use of a Kantian concept of dignity and suggest that Irigaray's engagement with Levinas offers another way of conceptualizing the problematic.

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)

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)

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)

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989a) and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989).

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (1993). Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.

In this essay I explore the dynamic between Luce Irigaray and Maurice Merleau-Ponty as it unfolds in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Irigaray's strategy of mimesis is a powerful feminist tool, both philosophically and politically. Regarding textual engagement as analogous for relations between self and other beyond the text, I deliver a cautionary message: mimetic strategy is powerful but runs the risk of silencing the voice of the other.

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.

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

: This article takes up the call of feminist thinkers to reconsider the importance of the utopian. I offer a view of the utopian that is situated, critical, and relevant to transformative politics, a view that is structured by embodiment. To this end, I consider some epistemological and ontological connections of situated utopian thinking that enable us to think the utopian differently. Finally, I argue that this view of the utopian can be found in the political efforts of "integrative feminisms.".

: Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relationship 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)

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)

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)

Increasingly, feminist theorists, such as Alison Martin and Ellen T. Armour, are attending to the numerous religious allusions within texts by Luce Irigaray. Engaging with this scholarship, this paper focuses on the problematic of evil that is elaborated within Irigarayan texts. Mobilizing the work of Catherine Malabou, the paper argues that Malabou's methodology of reading, which she identifies as "plastic," illuminates the logic at work within Irigaray's deployment of sacred stories.

This article argues that the act of conceptualizing a female divine, whether by so-called low-brow Goddess Spiritualists or high-brow French philosophers, rather than being a mere spiritual exercise, has enormous political significance for feminisms. In particular, I demonstrate that Irigaray's concept of the sensible transcendental, by refiguring a god which is both male and female, transcendent and immanent, theorizes a potential dissolution of the binary logic which forms the basis of western philosophy. The second half of the article looks at (...) the complex role of the angel in Irigaray's theory of the divine in order to demonstrate that, as a result of having misinterpreted the angel's position, critics have failed to recognize the significance and relevance of Irigaray's sensible transcendental for feminist politics. (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.

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 argue that Irigaray's linguistic research is not merely supplementary to her theoretical writing, but, in its depiction of sexed linguistic "styles," illuminates Irigaray's call for a new syntax. I show the effect of this research on her analysis of the unconscious meaning of interrogative expressions. I address the question of Irigaray's standing as a social scientist and argue that attention to her method reveals her positive program in this domain.

I argue that Irigaray's linguistic research is not merely supplementary to her theoretical writing, but, in its depiction of sexed linguistic “styles,” illuminates Irigaray's call for a new syntax. I show the effect of this research on her analysis of the unconscious meaning of interrogative expressions. 1 address the question of Irigaray's standing as a social scientist and argue that attention to her method reveals her positive program in this domain.

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)

Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that ?A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes?. The idea for this dialogue comes from a conversation that Michael Peters and Morwenna Griffiths had at the Philosophy of Education of Great Britain annual meeting at the University of Oxford, 2011. It was sparked by an account of an assessment of a piece of work where one of the external examiners unexpectedly exclaimed ?I knew Jean-Paul Sartre?, trying to trump the discussion. This (...) conversation is a dialogue about comedy and humor as a basis for philosophy, education and pedagogy that provides an introduction to recent works and a context for ongoing research. The concluding section provides further reflection on some of the main themes, drawing attention to the significance of humor in dialogues within philosophy and education, and suggesting that it has a particular role in resisting managerialism at all levels of educational institutions. (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)

Drawing on feminist philosophical accounts of reproduction and initial data acquired through research with migrant mothers in London, this article argues that the role and place of reproduction remains under-theorized within scholarly accounts of women's role in migration processes. Working with an expanded concept of reproduction that includes not only childbirth and motherhood, but also the work of reproducing heritage, culture and structures of belonging, it argues that feminist migration scholars can draw on valuable theoretical resources in order to tell (...) more complicated stories about the place of reproduction in migration, and challenge the often problematic gendered distinctions between travelling and staying put, change and repetition that continue to underpin some of the narrative structures operative in migration studies. (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)

Is history a category of reason, or is reason a category of history? These opposing questions have divided the structuralist from the materialist-but neither question is wrong. Analysis of the logic of oppositions challenges feminism, in particular, to find a logic-and a poetics-in which to render its values without historical or theoretical naiveté. I explore the question of the timing of feminism through Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray.

: This paper argues that the slogans "A Woman's Right to Choose" and "The Personal is the Political" typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.

This paper argues that the slogans “A Woman's Right to Choose” and “The Personal is the Political” typify different traditions within feminist thinking; one emphasizing rights and equality, the other the unconscious and the personal. The author responds to both traditions by bringing together mind and body, and reason and emotion, via the figure of the copula. The copula expresses an alternative model of identity which indicates that value can be produced only in relation.Let us say that the problem is (...) violence. At its most naive: how can the sexual relation, which is supposedly full of love, be violent?I mean the sexual relation in its resonances and ambiguity—to indicate the relation between the sexes, and the relation between lovers. In no way can the relation be confined to love, either heterosexual or homosexual, since it is often a contest. It cannot be reduced solely to a social relation, because in one of its aspects it addresses the most intimate subjectivity.In a certain feminist lifestyle advocacy, those women who are in same sex relations avoid sexual violence by avoiding men, and those who are in heterosexual relationships strive to find the “right kind”—that is, relationships of respectful and supportive love—rejecting all signs of aggression, from sexist disparagement and emotional cruelty to sexual humiliation and physical assault, as “abuse.”Strangely, this dichotomy does not explain the proximity of passion and aggression, whether in love between men and women or in same-sex relationships between feminist women. As rational counsel, it resists the important sense in which the erotic is, and is even valued as, the excess of the rational. And as an analysis of the oppression of women it defeats itself, for to insist on masculinity as violence itself, and/or on the sexual relation as properly governed by reason, seems to miss the point of both love and feminism.Stranger still, feminisms, which set out to address and redress the oppression of women, have become rivalrous themselves. Are these aggressions a legacy of the intellectual world they must take place in. Have we overlooked an aspect of the relation between sisters? Feminism has not addressed the question of aggression in feminism as anything more than contamination.Perhaps, after all, the thing that feminism has not yet successfully addressed is love. The “battle between the sexes” has not rendered the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. As a species of theory, feminism has relished the rigor of distinction and has not found it easy to tolerate the proximity of opposites.And yet, in evoking the body, some feminisms approach closer to this difficulty. It remains to take up the relation between the body and the concept more thoroughly, in order to find out whether sexual difference could ever be philosophical. (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 article reconsiders the issue of Luce Irigaray's proximity to Jacques Derrida on the question of woman. I use Derrida's reading of Nietzsche in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1979) and Irigaray's reading of Heidegger in L'Oubli de l'air (1983) to argue that reading them as supplements to one another is more accurate and more productive for feminism than separating one from the other. I conclude by laying out the benefits for feminism that such a reading would offer.

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)

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)

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.

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)

This thesis examines some of the contested meanings of what it is to be a self, person and individual. The law of obligations sets the context for this examination. One of the important aspects of contemporary feminist philosophy has been its move beyond highlighting inconsistencies in political and legal theory, in which theoretical frameworks can be shown to rely upon an ambiguous treatment of women. The feminist theorists whose work is considered use these theoretical weaknesses as a point of departure (...) to propose different conceptual frameworks. I start by analysing contemporary work on the self from within both philosophy of science and feminist metaphysics to draw out common approaches from these diverse positions. These themes are then discussed in the context of the law. I then critically examine the concept of legal personhood in the work of Drucilla Cornell and her proposals for the amendment of tort law. This is juxtaposed with an analysis of the practical operation of tort law by adapting François Ewald's work on risk and insurance to English law. I concentrate on women's ambiguous position with regard to both risk and to the image of the individual that is the subject of Ewald's critique. This is followed by an examination of the changing position of women with regard to 'possessive individualism', 'self-ownership' or 'property in the person' in relation to contract law and social contract theory. There are a number of different social contracts discussed in the thesis: Cornell's reworking of John Rawls and the stories of Thomas Hobbes and of Carole Pateman. The final 'social contract' to be discussed is that of 'new contractualism', the employment of contract as a technique of government. I argue that Pateman's critique of possessive individualism continues to be relevant at a time when the breadwinner/housewife model has broken down. (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 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)

Minkälaista ontologista ajattelua Merleau-Ponty kehitteli myöhäisfilosofiassaan? Tarkastelen seuraavassa Merleau-Pontyn ontologian hahmotelmaa ennen kaikkea keskeneräiseksi jääneen ja postuumisti julkaistun teoksen Le visible et l’invisible muotoilujen pohjalta. Selkeytän Merleau-Pontyn teksteissä tulkinnanvaraiseksi jäänyttä lihan ontologista ulottuvuutta kahden hänen myöhäisfilosofiassaan keskeisen käsitteen, kaksoiskosketuksen ja käännettävyyden, avulla. Lihan rakenteen kuvauksessa käytän apuna Merleau-Pontyn esille nostamia taide-esimerkkejä. Esitykseni mukaan Merleau-Pontyn myöhäisfilosofian muotoilut viittaavat olemisen ajatteluun dynaamisena, aina vasta muotoutumassa olevana kudelmana, joka kykenee ylläpitämään sekä yhteyttä ja samuutta että erottumista. Merleau-Pontyn fenomenologiassa lihan ontologinen ulottuvuus mahdollistaa elettyjen (...) kokemustemme moniselitteisyyden ja keskeneräisyyden. (shrink)

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)

Straipsnyje analizuojama seksualinės skirties sampratos transformacija Luce Irigaray filosofijoje. Straipsnio euristinė schema – esencializmo-konstruktyvizmo kontroversija giminės filosofijoje. Ja remiantis teigiama, kad ankstyvoji Irigaray psichoanalitinė seksualinės skirties samprata ir mimesis kaip moteriškosios subjektyvybės steigties būdas atitinka tik „strateginį esencializmą“, o transformaciniame filosofijos etape, ginčijant Hegelio subjekto paradigmą, Irigaray pateikta natūralistinė seksualinės skirties samprata jau implikuoja ontologinį esencializmą. Taip pat į analizę įtraukiamas Irigaray nenagrinėtas Hegelio giminės tapatybės principas, kuris implictiškai apima lyčių diferenciacijos aspektą. Tuo siekiama ne tik atskleisti Irigaray moteriškosios subjektyvybės (...) sampratą, kuri apima moteriškumo neredukuojamumą į reprodukcijos funkciją, vyriškosios ir moteriškosios subjektyvybių nebendramatiškumą, bet taip pat išryškinti giminės tapatybės ir seksualinės skirties kontroversiją kaip dvi skirtingas subjekto filosofijos paradigmas. (shrink)

The thesis is written in the pursuit of true difference. Its contention is that true difference has been obscured by a model of difference which is dialectical in nature. Western thought has been largely informed by a metaphysic in which difference has been subordinated to the One and the Identical and which can only ever return as the Same. In utilising the writings of Foucault, Deleuze, Deleuze-Nietzsche, Deleuze-Bergson and Bergson, this thesis strives to find for a new image of thought, (...) that can go beyond representation through which true difference can be known. The thesis is framed in the context of the problematic of 'the death of man' as that which Foucault formulates as eternally returning as the Same. Foucault raises the question of Man's disappearance and in doing so also opens up the question of what might come after Man. It will be argued, that what comes after man, that which Nietzsche has named the Overman, is the becoming-woman of man. The aim is to show that becoming-woman, once freed from the representational system, can be thought of as an active, affirmative death through which difference can be thought in-itself as the continual movement of vital life The nature of a Becoming-woman is, in turn, framed in the context of Deleuze's search for difference in-itself and, Bergson's philosophy of nature. It will be argued, in conclusion, that becoming-woman is the rebirth of the eternal return of difference which, in man, reaches into the consciousness of self. (shrink)

Tragedy was considered ‘highly serious, political —and religious’, at its origin in Athens in 427 BCE. In spite of its centuries-old existence the trope still troubles theatre and performance philosophy scholars. As Simon Critchley recently put it: ‘What kind of hedonism is the pleasure we take in tragedy, which depicts not just suffering and death, but the ghostly porosity of the frontier separating the living from the dead?’. This paper makes use of, and critiques Critchley’s scholarship. It explores his notion (...) of tragedy’s porous frontier in relation to the skene, the boundary that bisected the ancient stage and restricted audience vision at critical moments in the drama. The paper links the skene functionally to other such pivotal boundaries or ‘scenes’, to generate an interdisciplinary range of approaches to the precarious experience of having sight and hearing momentarily dislocated from each other. In the process the paper contests Critchley’s Platonic concerns about tragedy’s deceptive and sadistic inflections, to offer an entirely new take on the ancient art form; one which may shed fresh light on Performance Philosophy’s foundational debates concerning the use, or demolition, of boundaries. (shrink)