School of Social and Political Science

Description

Opening Hegel's Autological Cirle: Irigaray and the Metaphysics of Sexual Difference.

It is better to have possibilities for the future than to be already totally determined by the past.

Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two

In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel aims at nothing less than the articulation of all the possible shapes of knowledge and all the possible forms of experience. The endpoint of the project, he argues, will be that “knowledge need no longer go beyond itself because nothing is other to it.” In “absolute knowing,” difference is mastered in a universal logic, and time is “annulled,” as everything that could come to be already will have been thought in advance. Becoming terminates in the self-enclosed circle of the absolute.

Writing against Hegel, Luce Irigaray exposes the irreducibility of sexual difference, a difference that “cannot be overcome.” Human nature is not one, and no single philosophical narrative of human experience will be adequate to it. The thought of sexual difference, she argues, requires a revolution in the fundamental concepts of philosophy: time and space, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the concept and language, immanence and transcendence. This revolution will restore a relation to the other as other and free becoming from the logic of the same. Sexual difference is the “problem of our time” because it offers the possibility of a “more livable future” not based on the mastery of difference. Professor Rawlinson's paper lays out the results of Irigaray’s revolutionary thought of sexual difference for philosophy and politics.

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Professor Rawlinson is a Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London and Emerita Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University in New York. Rawlinson’s publications include The Betrayal of Substance: death, literature, and sexual difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia University Press, 2021), Just Life: bioethics and the future of sexual difference (Columbia University Press, 2016), Engaging the World: Thinking After Irigaray (SUNY, 2016), Thinking with Irigaray (SUNY, 2011), and Derrida and Feminism (Routledge, 1997). Her next book Liminal Justice investigates the idea of justice in crime fiction. Rawlinson was the founding editor of IJFAB: International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (2006-2016) and Co-founder and Director of The Irigaray Circle (2007-2017).

The Luce Irigaray Deep Dive is a Gender.ED (University of Edinburgh) initiative, run in conjunction with CRITIQUE.