Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 337-340.

Through a curated selection of essays written over four decades by one of Australia’s leading philosophers, this collection demonstrates the impact of Continental philosophy on philosophical thought in Australia.

Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault's thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. Foucault's Futures brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to provide new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

Professor Deutscher studies Beauvoir's philosophy on "otherness" not just through her famous views on gender (in her celebrated 1949 work The...

Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? _Yielding Gender_ explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; (...) and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it. (shrink)

Sexual difference as a basis of equality : an introduction to Irigarayan politics -- Irigaray on language : from the speech of dementia to the problem of sexual indifference -- Rethinking the politics of recognition : the declaration of Irigarayan sexuate rights -- Irigarayan performativity : is this a question of can saying it make it so? -- Sexuate genre : ethics and politics for improper selves -- Anticipating sexual difference : mediation, love, and divinity -- Interrogating an unasked question (...) : is there sexual difference? -- The impossible friend : traversing the heterosocial, the homosocial, and the successes of failure -- Sexed discourse and the language of the philosophers : to be two -- Effacement redoubled? : between the Orient and the Occident. (shrink)

The work of the distinguished philosopher Sarah Kofman has, since her tragic death in 1994, become a focus for many scholars interested in contemporary French philosophy. The first critical collection on her thought to appear in English, Enigmas evaluates Kofman's most important contributions to philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, feminism, and literary theory. These insightful essays range from analyses of Kofman's first book, L'Enfance de l'art, to her last, L'Imposture de la beauté. This unique volume represents the major themes in Kofman's scholarship: (...) literature and aesthetics; philosophy and metaphor; women, feminism, and psychoanalysis; and Jews and German nationalism. Selected essays explore and diagnose Kofman's personal struggles as they are reflected in her writing. (shrink)

Developing a reading of some of Beauvoir and Sartre's most influential writings in philosophy, Max Deutscher explores contemporary philosophy in the light of the phenomenological tradition within which Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex occurred as striking events operating on the border of the modern and the 'post-modern'. Deutscher traces the shifts of genre that produce their gendered philosophies, and responds in terms of contemporary experience to the mood and the arguments of their works. Drawing upon the (...) writings of two contemporary critics in particular - Michele Le Dœuff and Luce Irigaray - Deutscher reworks this part of philosophy's history in order to advance thinking in contemporary philosophy, generate renewed philosophical reflection on consciousness, freedom and one's relation to others, and to return a look still cast in our direction from an earlier time. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Jahrbuch für Wissenschaft und Ethik Jahrgang: 20 Heft: 1 Seiten: 341-354.

This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point of proximity is the use both make of figures of maternity and birth in (...) these conceptualizations. This comparison not only illuminates the differing philosophical commitments of Derrida and Esposito but also offers a means of challenging the fate of sexual difference in the work of Esposito. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's argument that women need a feminine divine is placed in the context of her analyses of the interconnection between man's appropriation of woman as his “negative alter ego” and his identification with the impossible ego ideal represented by the figure of God. As an alternative, the “feminine divine” is conceived as a realm with which women would be continuous. It would allow mediation between humans, and interrupt cannibalizing appropriations of the other.

This paper addresses the appropriation of theories of evolution by nineteenth-century feminists, focusing on the critical response to Darwin's The Descent of Man by Eliza Burt Gamble and Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social evolutionism. For Gilman, evolutionism was a revolutionary resource for feminism, one of its greatest hopes. Gamble and Blackwell revisit Darwin's data with the aim of locating, amidst his ostensive conclusions to the contrary, his implicit "defense" of either the equality or the superiority of women. (...) This article identifies the reasons for, and limitations of, this enthusiasm. To some extent, the basis of this feminism is provided by its keen perception of disparities between what a text does, and what it says it is doing. But these feminists did not think through the implications for their own rhetoric about race hierarchy. Darwin's trope of the "savage" would return in the work of some of these feminists, occasionally displaced or rejected, but usually reiterated, and sometimes integral to the feminism in question. (shrink)

This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as “How do texts play against the means they supply themselves?” and “How are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?” Deutscher asks what institutional means are available to understand this work as innovative philosophy, and to what extent these projects can (...) usefully be analyzed as the gestures of women in philosophy. (shrink)

Beauvoir argued that both femininity and old age were “the other.” So did she understand their relationship to be analogical? This chapter answers in the negative. Understanding the relationship between femininity and aging in non‐analogical terms, Beauvoir also offers an alternative means of understanding their intersectionality. This variant can be found in the oscillating motion which emerges, according to Beauvoir's accounts, between the constitutions and the deconstitutions of femininity and aging.

It is argued that 'p but I do not believe that p' seems close to a contradiction because if the speaker is correct in all that s/he says then what s/he says is false. Similarly,what is wrong with 'p, but I have no opinion whether p' is that, whether 'p' or 'not-p', if the speaker believes it, s/he cannot be completely correct. The argument assumes that 'I believe that' is not a mere parenthesis as in 'p, I believe', and that (...) to say 'I believe that p' is not only to claim a certain mentality, but to claim to be correct or mistaken depending upon whether 'p' is true or false. (shrink)

This article compares the status of sexual and cultural difference in Luce Irigaray's earliest work and her most recent publication Between East and West (2002), in which Irigaray argues that a culture of sexual difference would facilitate improved structural relations between those of different cultures, races and traditions. Many commentators have argued that Irigaray's recent, more simple formulations on legal reform must be understood in the context of the early, very complex Irigarayan concept of sexual difference. But what about Irigaray's (...) recent formulations concerning cultural difference? Are we to understand these as based on an `aporia' of recognition, as are her formulations on sexual difference? The article argues against such an interpretation, and considers problems arising from the disjunction between Irigaray's treatment of sexual and cultural difference. (shrink)

How might we locate originality as emerging from within the “discrete” work of commentary? Because many women have engaged with philosophy informs that preclude their work from being seen as properly “original,” this question is a feminist issue. Via the work of selected contemporary French women philosophers, the author shows how commentary can reconfigure the philosophical tradition in innovative ways, as well as in ways that change what counts as philosophical innovation.

This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I ( HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four ‘strategic ensembles’ of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality ( HS1: 104) also constitutes a largely invisible hinge between the trajectories in HS1: (...) biopolitics (vector of governmentality, management, administration and intensification of life) and sex (vector through which the repressive hypothesis is rejected). Particularly because it is one of the least discussed figures in Foucauldian commentary, my argument is that a reading of HS1 through the prism of its Malthusian couple produces unexpected results. A text that can be interpreted from the perspective of (a) its debate with psychoanalysis, or (b) its potential debate with those for whom sexual rights belong to a sexual subject, or (c) its status as a watershed text for biopolitical theory, enters into a fourth dialogue with the history of reproduction as politicized and biopoliticized, a problematic to date taken up most directly by Ann Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire. This allows for a revisiting of the complex relationship between the vectors of ‘sex’ and ‘life’ in HS1. Although reproductive sex, and reproductive life, are not the themes of the strongest importance in HS1, they serve as the invisible hinge at the interface of biopolitics and sex in HS1. Considering the status of reproductive life from this perspective becomes a departure point for reconsidering the reproductive woman, in her historical role as part of the problematized Malthusian couple and at the intersection of biopolitics and thanatopolitics. (shrink)

Spivak translates Derrida’s “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” as “there is nothing outside the text.” By considering how the aphorism works within his study of Rousseau on sexual and textual supplements, and by reviewing related expressions in French, a mistranslation is revealed. This is not a simple error, however. The distortion is generated by Derrida’s own broader context. We must not only distinguish signification from reference but also place the aphorism within Derrida’s allusion, in the first part of Of (...) Grammatology, to an all-embracing arche-writing. The paper ends in thus opening out the discussion of a textual “inside” or “outside.”. (shrink)

The article focuses on the support to the position of Hannah Arendt that taste and feelings have roles in having sensible judgment. It mentions the pleasure that are derived from judgment such as aesthetic judgment and judging what is right. It states that Arendt argues that judgment should be used to defeat moral epithets.

An avid reader of Nietzsche, the German radical feminist Helene Stöcker referred in 1893 to the Verfrühung of the modern woman, her prematurity. She used references to Mill, Bebel, Darwin, Galton, and Nietzsche among others to develop a concept of women's untimely modernity. This paper considers how a number of concepts of time, transformation, biological futurity, and putative agency over nature became, for Stöcker, the basis for a feminist claim to autonomy, agency, and reproductive rights. The paper goes on to (...) ask how some of these concepts and their context could also have provided the implicit resources to resist their conversion by Stöcker. (shrink)

Pt. I. Appearances of thought. 1. Appearances. 2. Thinking. 3. Recall -- Pt. II. Thinking with others. 4. By metaphor. 5. Conversing. 6. Absence -- Pt. III. Willing myths. 7. Being willing. 8. Resolving will. 9. Commandment -- Pt. IV. Judgment. 10. Process and judgment. 11. Working magic. 12. Willing thought.

This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an 'other' to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization to be opened up to women. Yet (...) Taylor Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called "perfect equality" drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes. (shrink)

Arendt is a philosopher despite herself, and this paper uses the resources of her <<The Life of the Mind>> to develop her comparison of thinking as a 'departure' from the world with the fore-doomed attempt by Orpheus to bring from underground into the light of day. The paper investigates how thinking, though we 'lose' it in the speech and writing that makes it public, still can have the delicate power that Arendt attributes to it.

How does the publication of Confessions of the Flesh impact feminist critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality project? The paper addresses this question in two ways: by asking how reflection on continuities and ruptures has, and can, be productive for feminist critique; and by revisiting the role of women in all four volumes. The terms of their inclusion have been considered an omission, particularly because the project omits same-sex eros between women. Where women appear, they are framed as spouses, or (...) as subordinated to some form of authority. And yet, insofar as the project contains more than one genealogical dimension, Foucault's “marriages” also belong to proximate plurigenealogies. In Confession's focus on the conditions for a juridical and divided self's subjectivation by will and desire, even the limited parameters within which women appear in the project incite the following question. What are the implications of Confessions of the Flesh's juridical self for genealogies of female subjectivation? (shrink)

In Of Grammatology, Derrida gave his attention to a number of philosophies of language for which writing is attributed the status of a supplemental form, with speech considered a more original form of language and the proper object of the linguist's science. A number of Derrida's remarks pointed out that the very defense of democracy, or human rights, even where they excluded children, women, workers, and colonized peoples, also provided the resources for subsequent claims by these groups for inclusion. Feminisms (...) bear witness to the historical auto‐immunity of the denial of women's rights. Historically, women's rights claims will also have their own auto‐immune logics, in their identifications with nationalist logics, in their alignment with an image of progress often disseminated at the expense of other cultures or classes, in an ethnocentrism or race blindness to which feminism has often been prone. (shrink)