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.

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)

For Nietzsche, a phenomenon, a belief, a mode of knowledge, or of subjectivity, confronts us with the possibility of creating, rather than presupposing, the criteria for its evaluation. In his Untimely Meditations, he widened the parameters of criticizability in just this way, proposing that history might be evaluated from the criterion of whether it is good or bad for life. Nietzsche provokes us to ask what the right question is to bring to history. Stepping back to formulate a response might (...) allow us to appreciate the difference between interrogating the accuracy of historical accounts and assessing their effects. (shrink)

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.

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

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

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

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)

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 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)

Achieving judgment -- In sensible judgment -- Sentencing -- Dissenting -- Making judgments -- Judging as right -- Living on the premises -- Inferring, judging, arguing -- Questioning critique -- Sting of reason -- Critique's mystique -- Enigma absolute -- Moving establishment -- Being nomadic -- Chasing after modernity -- When to forget.

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)

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.

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)

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)

"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.

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)

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 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)

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 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)