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Sexual Difference, Animal Difference: Derrida and Difference “Worthy of Its Name”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Kelly Oliver
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Abstract

I challenge the age-old binary opposition between human and animal, not as philosophers sometimes do by claiming that humans are also animals, or that animals are capable of suffering or intelligence, but rather by questioning the very category of “the animal” itself. This category groups a nearly infinite variety of living beings into one concept measured in terms of humans—animals are those creatures that are not human. In addition, I argue that the binary opposition between human and animal is intimately linked to the binary opposition between man and woman. Furthermore, I suggest that thinking through animal differences or differences among various living creatures opens up the possibility of thinking beyond the dualist notion of sexual difference and enables thinking toward a multiplicity of sexual differences.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Spring 2009 , pp. 54 - 76
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Kelly Oliver

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