In this paper we discuss how Australian feminism has contributed to a better understanding of women’s economic position within Australian society. Through this analysis we seek to shed some light on the current implementation of the ‘women in business’ policy in Australia. We trace the development of this position from the early beginnings of unionism and wage centralisation through to the social change movements of the 1960s and 1970s. We then examine how the neo-liberal turn of the 1990s manifested itself (...) in a move from a focus on numerical representation of women, through Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies and initiatives, to one that concentrated on an individualist approach to women in business. We conclude that feminism has had its most significant impact at the level of public policy. However, recent epistemological turns in Australian feminism appear to have resulted in less attention being paid to materialist concerns, and furthermore have not been able to resolve the sameness/difference divide that continues to haunt feminist philosophy. (shrink)

(Eng. Trans.: “A Bodily story of Culture - on the 'Umwelt' relation” in The Human. An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology).

This article draws on the social theory of Theodor W. Adorno in order to critique the discourse of ‘color-blindness’ and articulate an alternative individualist ideal of racial justice. I begin by noting that Adorno’s criticism of law in Negative Dialectics anticipates arguments against color-blindness advanced in critical race theory. I then explicate Adorno’s understanding of law in relation to his broader account of social domination. Race can be situated within this account through the concept of ‘second nature’. The notion of (...) racial second nature elucidates the contradiction within color-blindness between formal equality and substantive inequality. As an alternative to the color-blind norm, I posit Adorno’s utopian ideal of emancipated individuality as an appropriate aspiration for racial justice. This ideal enables the jurisgenerative transformation of liberal rights concepts, which have at once enabled and constrained the struggle for racial equity. (shrink)

Examining Marcel Duchamp’s final installation Etant donnés: 1º la chute d’eau, 2º le gaz d’éclairage or Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The Illuminating Gas (1946-66) has proven to be problematic for historians and theorists. Theories involving this assemblage typically incorporate the work into existing conceptions of Duchampian work and therefore do not consider the implication of the work in comparison to Duchamp’s artistic work as a whole, specifically in relation to his consistent engagement with issues of sexuality and fantasy. My (...) paper examines Duchamp’s staging of a series of fantasy constructions, which are compared with Freud’s stages in “A Child is Being Beaten,” specifically in relation to an understanding of fantasy developed by Zizek, as well as Laplanche and Pontalis. (shrink)

One current line of argument against the legalization of same-sex marriage, advocated primarily by the New Natural Lawyers, is that marriage is a pre-political institution that has, as an essential element, a bodily union requirement. They argue that same-sex couples cannot realize bodily union in their sexual activities and thus cannot meet the structural requirements of marriage. Accordingly, they argue that the same-sex marriage debate must be framed as a debate about what marriage is, and not, as it was in (...) the anti-miscegenation precedents, about who can get married. I argue that their position, which promulgates a set of pernicious stereotypes about same-sex couples, is, first of all, internally inconsistent. According to their own metaphysical principles about bodily union, they provide no rational basis for the claim that same-sex couples cannot realize bodily union and thus that same-sex couples cannot be married. Second, I argue for a deflationary account of the significance of bodily union. While same-sex couples, like heterosexual couples, can realize bodily union, this sort of union has no moral significance and thus cannot be the factor that distinguishes marriages from other sorts of relationships. Finally, I suggest that they have no basis for their claims about the inferiority of same-sex relationships. (shrink)

This dissertation exposes the status of eros in the works of Levinas, Irigaray, and, Nancy. I begin by evaluating Levinass phenomenological analyses of eros in Time and the Other and Totality and Infinity. In order to fully appreciate this, however, I must necessarily also provide a summary overview of the central theme which guides Levinass work: the Other. This leads Levinas to develop ethics as first philosophy, which in turn implies that the reduction of the Other to the same is (...) the unethical gesture par excellence. Levinas formulates eros as the equivocal par excellence; a profane relation with the radical alterity of the feminine. Eros, for Levinas, inevitably lapses back to the economy of the same, and hence he looks to paternal fecundity to understand a relation with alterity untainted by erotic sensuality. Moreover, I identify the themes in Levinass work which guide this dissertation: the plurality of being, the tactility of erotic caressing, transcendence in eros, sexual difference, the affair between love and death, revisiting Platos Symposium, and, the erotic relationship with alterity. Having exposed these themes, and pre-empting a feminist critique of Levinas, I move on to the work of Luce Irigaray. After contextualising Irigarays feminist project, I expose and evaluate her critical reading of Levinas, particularly in her essay The Fecundity of the Caress. For Irigaray, Levinas mistakenly assumes a universal masculine subject, which in turn denies the feminine (and thus empirical women) a chance to be subjects. The fact that Levinas considers eros profane suggests, for Irigaray, that Levinass phenomenology of eros is haunted by a patriarchal bias evinced in the way he turns to paternity to salvage eros from a damnable carnality. Irigaray, in contrast, asserts eros as a relationship between the two real poles of sexual alterity.

Eros thus holds potential as a just relation between the sexes. However, I find that Irigarays insistence on the biological markers of sexual difference becomes somewhat too idealistic. When compared with one another, Irigaray and Levinas arrive at an impasse which is solved by turning to the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Nancy insists that love (including eros) cannot be thought as anything but an indefinite multiplicity. Nancys thought on love reflects his formulation of being-singular-plural, an ontology which asserts being-with is axiomatic in all philosophical investigations. In Shattered Love, Nancy deconstructs dialectics in order to show that love does not operate in a dialectical fashion. Both Levinass and Irigarays accounts of eros are exposed as dialectical. Nancy, in contrast, formulates love and sex/gender as the exposure of a subject to the relation with the other. Moreover, by examining Nancys thought on the body, eros can be derived as subtending all relations between sexed bodies. Thus Nancy figures eros as neither ideal nor profane, nor does he restrict eros to an ideal relation between the masculine and the feminine. However, Nancys opaque philosophy is not without fault. Although Nancy offers an interesting way in which to think eros, certain avenues of thought remain unexplored.

© 2012 University of Pretoria. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of Pretoria. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the University of Pretoria

Please cite as follows:

Kourie, M 2012, _The status of love in philosophy : an examination of the role of love (eros) in the work (or works) of selected French thinkers_, MA dissertation, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, viewed _yymmdd_ < http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-11162012-145249 / >

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