There is already a long history of conversation between feminism and deconstruction, feminist theorists and Derrida or Derrideans. That conversation has been by turns fraught and constructive. While some of these interactions have occurred in queer feminism, to date little has been done to stage an engagement between deconstruction and transfeminism. Naysayers might think that transfeminism is too recent and too identitarian a discourse to meaningfully interact with Derrida’s legacy. On the other hand, perhaps Derrida’s work was too embedded in (...) second wave feminism, and in some cases implicit misogyny and transphobia, to meet transfeminism on its own playing field. And yet, I think both suspicions shortchange these discourses. In this article, I stage a conversation between Derrida and two writers working in the area of trans feminism: Paisley Currah and Julia Serano. I explore, in particular, how their conceptions of gender neutrality or gender pluralism are complementary and together change the so-called “question of woman,” from a philosophical and political perspective. (shrink)

Defense of a psychological account of what it is for an artwork to be complete.

Response to Gover (2015) on Trogdon and Livingston (2015) on artwork completion.

Beginning with the prevalent idea that creativity is the ability to make or do things having valuable novelty, the paper explores a variety of axiological and novelty conditions and defends an instrumental success condition. I discuss Robert K. Merton's distinction between 'originality' and 'priority', and Margaret Boden's similar distinction between historical and psychological creativity, as well as Thomas Reid's and Bruce Vermazen's remarks on relations between novelty and value.

Paisley Livingston claims that an artist’s intentions are successfully realized and hence determinate of the meaning of a work if and only if they are compatible and “mesh” with the linguistic and conventional meanings of the text or artefact taken in its target or intended context. I argue that this specific standard of success is not without its difficulties. First, I show how an artist’s intention can sometimes be constitutive of a work’s meaning even if there is no significant (...) meshing between the artist’s intention and his work. Second, I argue against the claim that the artist’s intentions need to be compatible with the linguistic and conventional meanings of a text. Third, I discuss a case that creates a particular puzzle for Livingston since the intentions of the artist concerned are clearly not successfully realized, though they are compatible and mesh with all the relevant data. I conclude my paper by suggesting a solution to this puzzle. (shrink)