Abstract

Catherine Malabou writes the clitoris from what she would call ‘clitoral thinking’ in work, in progress, in Philosophy and anarchism; and she does so through a link between ‘genre theory’ or American critical theory in their cultural studies and the thought of being (Heidegger) revisited by Deconstruction. From this connection, the difference emerges in a contemporary philosophy that knew how to see the space of a plurality of possible identities towards that will be privileged in the present text as distance. Distance which, in turn, appears as the most updated effect of decentralized and disidentifying political thought as a positioning of the concept of ‘ontological difference’, possible only through the thought of sexual and gender difference. The ‘feminine’ will be approached as a form of thought, and from a distance that the clitoris establishes with the conceptual and political determinations introduced by Western metaphysics. A second link will be more difficult to undo, that between femininity and the woman’s body, even if Malabou searches the distance between them for a political-philosophical place of balance between the extreme difficulty and the extreme urgency of saying the feminine today.