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.

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)

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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)

There is a tradition of philosophy—a conception we can easily under-stand as a limit of a tendency of our own thinking—that philosophy consists only of argument. The rest of the vast prepon-derance of words in philosophical texts is simply embroidery. ‘Naturally’, it will be conceded, actual philosophy books contain more or less of verbal pictures, words and phrases whose purpose is to evoke images, and many stories—examples, hard cases for definitions, and 4 anecdotes. These, it will be said, ‘are only (...) the embellishments, the relief from work, the appetizers or the post-prandial delicacies.’. (shrink)

Long after we have abandoned belief in a Cosmic Law Giver, still we cling to the word ‘law’ in science. It is in this same way that we cannot let go of the substantializing and pluralizing ‘universal’, even though its literal sense indicates a kind of turning, a ‘one-turning’, rather than a kind of thing . Yet ‘the problem of Universals’ is supposed to have become, again, a ‘compulsory examination question’ for philosophers. Let us reveal how this tradition begins for (...) us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Foucault for Psychoanalysis”Monique David-Ménard’s Kind of BluePenelope DeutscherFoucault for psychoanalysis? This is a paradoxical question. Foucault also produced a critique of psychoanalysis, aiming to show that sexuality was not an a-temporal reality, nor a truth eventually discovered by Freud. It was a discursive formation, one among others.—Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle, 172.To the philosophers..A practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of philosophy, Monique David-Ménard extends a singular proposition (...) to philosophers. She is not the first philosopher to engage the assumptions of psychoanalysis, but hers is a particularly idiosyncratic suggestion for how to think with the analyst’s clinical work, intimate and alien. She has proposed we do so in the company of Gilles Deleuze,1 and most recently, in Eloge des hasards dans la vie sexuelle (2011) has extended her invitation to think with the clinic through an ingenious reading of Michel Foucault.As Eloge opens, David-Ménard’s reading of Foucault is far from the scene. Early in the work, we are asked to think with a practice, seemingly in a different register. An analyst finds herself accused of being an obstacle, of opposing the analysand’s wishes in life. In this context, we are asked to think about the blue of a painting in the room where the analysand waits (David-Ménard 2011, 34). [End Page 111]Given the criticisms of psychoanalysis elaborated in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, one might have expected these philosophers to be considered in Eloge in that stead.2 Or, one could imagine Foucault playing a role because of his genealogical analysis of the formation of the Oedipus complex.3Two years after the publication of Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus, Foucault had, in Abnormal, characterized the desiring space of the family as stimulated in a capillary network of individualizing normalization (Foucault 2003, 257), linked by medicalized and expert concern of which parents became the auxiliaries. They are charged, and charge themselves, with the goals of family health, of preservative and defensive good parenting, and with the conduct of the child’s conduct. Foucault describes the pre-twentieth century emergence of lay and expert preoccupation with the dangers of childhood masturbation. This produces an environment whose intensive scrutiny involves a close “folding of... parents’ bodies over... children’s bodies” (ibid., 265) in a saturated, hermetic environment stimulating oedipalized desire. This means one can offer a genealogical account of the conditions of formation of the latter. These include a responsibilization of parents, who control for the presence of abnormal sex, advised by new experts (lay, medical, pseudo-scientific) in collective crusades for health and life. Thus there is differentiation through minor gradations of abnormality. Even the specificity of the architectural spaces in which scrutiny is directed plays a role in the hollowing out of the child’s putatively interior psychic-sexual life, the intense object of “palpating” interest (Foucault 1978, 45) in new apparatuses of knowledge-power (Foucault 2003, 327).Because he presents this as the context in which the “nuclear and substantial family was gradually constituted” (Foucault 2003, 264), along with its oedipal configurations of desire, Foucault emphasizes the contingency of both. Psychoanalysis would be, from his perspective, willfully indifferent to these or other possibilities for genealogical analysis of the apparatus of power, knowledge, and the body, of the repeating configurations of desire that are its special domain of expertise,4 and the emergent forms of authority associated with the analyst, described in History of Madness (Foucault 2009) and in Psychiatric Power (Foucault 2006).Perhaps we’d expect to see David-Ménard, the psychoanalyst, addressing these accounts, but they are neither repudiated in Eloge, nor extensively discussed. Far from rejecting a genealogical analysis of psychoanalysis, she promotes its promise. But this is so in a particular sense.Necessity and repetitionA particular patient might fear being “mad like her mother.” She might fear being denied, trapped, or annihilated (David-Ménard 2011, 33). She might [End Page 112] consider herself somehow denied a lover. She might seem to be denying herself a lover. There’s a degree of necessity in all these variants. Perhaps these... (shrink)

The article aims to show that there are everyday analogues to husserl's 'transcendental' subjectivity, And that this 'transcendence' can be understood as a limit of these varieties of detachment. Evidence is cited that his 'transcendental ego' is the body itself, In its capacity to transcend its conditions. Within this 'naturalized' interpretation of transcendental subjectivity we can see its practical and philosophical importance to our objectivity. His notion of a 'life-World' is a prophylactic against the monomaniac holding of physicalistic or other (...) theories, And his emphasis on and evocation of subjectivity is a reminder of the distinctness of other subjectivities. (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.

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.

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)

"hintikka's conception of epistemic logic" is a critical comment on hintikka's defence of his philosophical method ("epistemic logic and the methods of philosophical analysis", "a.J.P." no.1, 1968). There is a discussion of the symbolization and analysis of "a knows that p", "a knows that he knows that p", And the notions of virtual equivalence and virtual implication. The conclusion drawn is that whereas hintikka thought his critics misunderstood his method, In fact they were attacking his employment of it.

Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist Veena Das's work on sexual violence, this paper considers the surprising use by a number of contemporary post-Foucauldian (...) theorists of the resources made available by philosopher Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein as an alternative for the analysis of everyday violence. Having discussed a further tenor of criticism of Foucault – suggestions that the articulation of biopolitics and its forms of indirect murder as a general phenomenon fail to describe the prior or framing conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others to becoming disposable life – the paper reconstructs a new lexicon of terms devised by Das which would be more adequate to such analysis. In fact, the paper argues that Foucault is just as available for such reconfiguration as other theorists to whom Das responds differently. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)