Sexed Transcendentals: Reading Giorgio Agamben through the Supplement of Sexual Difference (original) (raw)

SUMMARY Dialectics of Sexual Difference

This book introduces the philosophy of Luce Irigaray (1930) and sketches her position within the philosophical tradition. Luce Irigaray is a representative of the feminist critique of philosophy from the seventies and eighties. Her attention to the examination of the gender neutrality of philosophy is special for it encompasses critique on a metaphysical level. She not only questions the structures of philosophical discourse, but carefully reconstructs them, thereby developing an alternative, namely a philosophy of sexual difference. In this book I investigate Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition. The alliance in the eighties between poststructuralism and feminism, along with criticism within feminism of the notion of a female subject, forms the background for interpreting Irigaray's work. Because Irigaray aims at developing possibilities for female subjectivity (the early works) and gendered identity for both sexes (the later works) conflict with the poststructuralist and feminist tradition seems inevitable. The goals of her project raise questions concenring Irigaray's often supposed poststrycturalism and pave the way for my interpretation of her philosophical position. investigates Irigaray's strategy of analyzing the masculine philosophical tradition, namely mimesis, and presents an overview over her entire project. It concentrates on her later works, in which she develops a dialectics of sexual difference.

About a new Realism of the sexual Difference as Pattern of Dissidence and Transformation

Questioning the Oneness of Philosophy. 4th. Workshop of the Project Experimentation and Dissidence, Eds. José Miranda Justo, Paulo Alexandre Lima y Fernando M. F. Silva, Centre for Philosophy at the University of Lisbon, Lisboa 2018, pp. 171-186. ISBN. 978-989-8553-48-5., 2018

The official history of philosophy has been thought and formulated by men in accordance with a substantialist dualism, commanded by the phallo-onto-theo-logic transcendence of the perfect and immaterial Act. The emergence of feminist thinking has disrupted that hegemonic paradigm deconstructing its theoretical assumptions, and rehabilitating a new pattern based on the immanence of a dynamic and self-differing ma(t)ter. In the context of contemporary feminist philosophy, the current paper aims at reconsidering the sexual difference of female identity out of phallogocentric dualism or transgender nominalism as a new pattern of being and thinking.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Sex and Gender

"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature."(Beauvoir 1989, 267) This talk will introduce some of the recent philosophical work concerning sex, gender, and the relations between these two concepts. Not only is this work interesting, it also provides a good example of what exactly contemporary philosophers do, and how this differs from the way that scholars in other disciplines (sociology, medicine, history, economics, etc.) might study these same topics. To begin with, it will help to get a rough idea of what idea we will be talking about.

The Multiple Readings of Irigaray's Concept of Sexual Difference

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.

Sex and the limits of discourse

from Howarth, D., Norval, A., and Stavrakakis, Y. (eds) (2000) Discourse Theory and Political Analysis, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000