The Irreducible Other: The Second Sex Meets This Sex Which is Not One

ISBN-13: 9783639086836 / Angielski / Miękka / 2008 / 228 str.

Lesley Caust

Opis

This book suggests that Beauvoir and Irigaray can find a meeting place. Conversation is possible. Irigaray challenges Beauvoirs ontology and ethics. This involves a questioning of epistemology and metaphysics as well. Yet Beauvoir and Irigaray sought to include women as subjects. Beauvoir was on the verge of a new ontology, alluded to sexed subjectivity but reproduced sexual sameness. Irigaray posits a new ontology, considers the debt to the mother, sexuate rights and a feminine symbolic and divine. But their philosophies seem to be incommensurate. The men in their lives provide a partial connection. Sartre and Levi-Strauss invite us to explore existentialism and structuralism. Freud and Lacan enable us to reconsider psychoanalysis and sexual specificity. Levinas brings us into a stronger relationship with phenomenology and ethics. This book seeks to find the places and the spaces to forge authentic relationships with the other sex valuing sexual difference. There are possibilities for generous listening and speaking. The ethical challenges and existential conundrums of today force us to try harder to create positive possibilities.

O autorze

Lesley Caust was awarded her PhD in Philosophy from Monash
University in 2007. An article, 'Community, Autonomy
and Justice: the gender politics of identity and relationship'
was published in 'The History of European Ideas' Journal, 1993.
She gave papers on education, emotional intelligence and film in
Glasgow and Oxford, July, 2008.