What Is Sexual Difference?: Thinking with Irigaray

Published by Columbia University Press 2023

What Is Sexual Difference?

Thinking with Irigaray

Edited by: Mary C. Rawlinson and James Sares

https://doi.org/10.7312/rawl20272

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Luce Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race.

Author / Editor information

Mary C. Rawlinson is professor emerita of philosophy at Stony Brook University and senior research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London. Her books include, most recently, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia, 2021), and she is the cofounder of the Luce Irigaray Circle.

James Sares is affiliated faculty in philosophy at Emerson College and holds a PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. He is the recipient of the 2018 Karen Burke Memorial Prize, awarded by the Irigaray Circle.

Reviews

George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Emory University:
The text that you hold, What is Sexual Difference?, beautifully captures the constitutive dynamism, dialectical and conceptual generativity, and deep openness that is reflective of the ongoing work of Luce Irigaray. The engaging and critically fecund voices and discursive framings within the text precisely reflect the phenomenon of wonder as postponement vis-à-vis the meaning of sexual difference. The text embodies a conceptual excess that resists closure regarding the work of Irigaray but does not sacrifice the necessity to think with her. Indeed, it is this process of thinking with Irigaray that disrupts autarchic myths of univocal meaning, and interpretive hegemony regarding her work. It is clear to me that the spirit and passion of Irigarayan wonder (as a mode of mourning) imbues this text. In this way, Rawlinson and Sares have fashioned a polyvocal philosophical site that refuses (as it should) to suit us totally and functions as a critically engaging textual advent.

Alison Stone, author of Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference:
This rich collection shows that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference remains fruitful and important. Engaging with ontology, essentialism, the sex/gender distinction, trans identities, colonialism, critical race theory, nature and ecology, and new materialisms, the authors interpret and take forward the idea of sexual difference creatively. They bring out many generative resonances between Irigaray's work and contemporary critical thought.

Peg Rawes, author of Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity:
This is a timely and impressive re-examination of Luce Irigaray's influential ontological philosophy. By explicitly placing Irigaray's thinking within our pressing contemporary concerns with new, and returning, political, social, and environmental crises, the volume examines how 'sexual difference' constructs lived experience for/by/with diverse communities in affirmative, transversal, and specific ways. Its four sections address the capacity of writing about colonial, racial, sexual, or migrational issues through sexual difference, in order to suggest affirmative and ethical relations or subjectivities. As such, Irigaray's thinking may help enable us to re-think what it means to live together, at times and in places, so deeply constituted by societal, political, and environmental inequity and uncertainty.

Elaine P. Miller, author of Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times:
What is Sexual Difference? thinks with and against Luce Irigaray in a new and invigorating way. Posing the fundamental question as to what sexual difference is opens up a range of possibilities for reading Irigaray beyond the oppositional attitudes of the essentialism question. Essays from a diversity of perspectives consider Irigaray in relation to colonialism, race, ecological questions, and gender identity. The inclusion of essays that read Irigaray in the context of trans philosophy and the critique of cissexism are an especially welcome contribution.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
FOREWORD Elizabeth Grosz Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
ABBREVIATIONS (WORKS BY IRIGARAY) Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
INTRODUCTION. Irigaray and the Question of Sexual Difference James Sares and Mary C. Rawlinson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART I. The Ontology of Sexual Difference
Chapter One. THE ONTOLOGICAL NEGATIVITY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE James Sares Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
Chapter Two. OPENING HEGEL’S AUTOLOGICAL CIRCLE Irigaray and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference Mary C. Rawlinson Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
Chapter Three. ONE, TWO, MANY? Sexual Difference and the Problem of Universals Stephen D. Seely Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
Chapter Four. RETURNING TO IRIGARAY’S RADICAL MATERIALISM Sexuate Difference, Ontology, and Bodies of Water Laura Roberts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
PART II. Sexual Difference Beyond Sex/Gender
Chapter Five. LIFE ITSELF AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE Nature and Culture Ruthanne Crapo Kim Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
Chapter Six. SEXUATION AS A FRAME FOR HUMAN BECOMING Reading a “Plastic” Essence in Irigaray’s Philosophy Belinda Eslick Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
Chapter Seven. LOOKING BACK AT “THIS SEX WHICH IS NOT ONE” Post- deconstructive New Materialisms and Their (Sexual) Difference Penelope Deutscher Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
PART III. Sexuate Nature and Subjectivity
Chapter Eight. AN UNCONTAINABLE SUBJECT Thinking Feminine Sexuate Subjectivity with Irigaray Jennifer Carter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
Chapter Nine. MALE RE-IMAGININGS From the Ontology of the Anal Toward a Phenomenology of Fluidity Ovidiu Anemţoaicei Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
Chapter Ten. SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AS QUALITATIVE BECOMING Irigaray Beyond Cissexism? Oli Stephano Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Chapter Eleven. AN ONTO-ETHICS OF TRANSSEXUAL DIFFERENCE Mitchell Damian Murtagh Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
PART IV. Placing Sexual Difference
Chapter Twelve. SEXUATE DIFFERENCE IN THE BLACK ATLANTIC Reading Irigaray with Hartman Rachel Jones Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Chapter Thirteen. BLOODSHED Kinship as a Site of Violence in Irigaray and Spillers Sabrina L. Hom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	278
Chapter Fourteen. TOWARD A SEXUATE JURISPRUDENCE AND ON THE “SECOND RAPE” OF LAW Yvette Russell Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293
Chapter Fifteen. PLACE THINKING WITH IRIGARAY AND NEIDJIE Rebecca Hill Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	312
PART V. Back to the Future of Sexual Difference
Chapter Sixteen. READING SPECULUM AGAIN Narrative, Optics, Time Emanuela Bianchi Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	333
Chapter Seventeen. INDEBTEDNESS A Sexuate Malaise Iván Hofman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	356
Chapter Eighteen. MYSTERICS Extinction and Emptiness Lynne Huffer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	372
CONTRIBUTORS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	427
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	433

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Illustrations
- Other: 14 b&w illustrations

eBook

Published: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780231554688