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Mary C. Rawlinson is professor emerita of philosophy at Stony Brook University and senior research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University College London. Her books include, most recently, The Betrayal of Substance: Death, Literature, and Sexual Difference in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Columbia, 2021), and she is the cofounder of the Luce Irigaray Circle. James Sares is affiliated faculty in philosophy at Emerson College and holds a PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. He is the recipient of the 2018 Karen Burke Memorial Prize, awarded by the Irigaray Circle.
What is Sexual Difference? thinks with and against Luce Irigaray in a new and invigorating way. Posing the fundamental question as to what sexual difference is opens up a range of possibilities for reading Irigaray beyond the oppositional attitudes of the essentialism question. Essays from a diversity of perspectives consider Irigaray in relation to colonialism, race, ecological questions, and gender identity. The inclusion of essays that read Irigaray in the context of trans philosophy and the critique of cissexism are an especially welcome contribution. -- Elaine P. Miller, author of <i>Head Cases: Julia Kristeva on Philosophy and Art in Depressed Times</i> This is a timely and impressive re-examination of Luce Irigaray's influential ontological philosophy. By explicitly placing Irigaray's thinking within our pressing contemporary concerns with new, and returning, political, social, and environmental crises, the volume examines how 'sexual difference' constructs lived experience for/by/with diverse communities in affirmative, transversal, and specific ways. Its four sections address the capacity of writing about colonial, racial, sexual, or migrational issues through sexual difference, in order to suggest affirmative and ethical relations or subjectivities. As such, Irigaray's thinking may help enable us to re-think what it means to live together, at times and in places, so deeply constituted by societal, political, and environmental inequity and uncertainty. -- Peg Rawes, author of <i>Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity</i> This rich collection shows that Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference remains fruitful and important. Engaging with ontology, essentialism, the sex/gender distinction, trans identities, colonialism, critical race theory, nature and ecology, and new materialisms, the authors interpret and take forward the idea of sexual difference creatively. They bring out many generative resonances between Irigaray's work and contemporary critical thought. -- Alison Stone, author of <i>Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference</i> The text that you hold, What is Sexual Difference?, beautifully captures the constitutive dynamism, dialectical and conceptual generativity, and deep openness that is reflective of the ongoing work of Luce Irigaray. The engaging and critically fecund voices and discursive framings within the text precisely reflect the phenomenon of wonder as postponement vis-à-vis the meaning of sexual difference. The text embodies a conceptual excess that resists closure regarding the work of Irigaray but does not sacrifice the necessity to think with her. Indeed, it is this process of thinking with Irigaray that disrupts autarchic myths of univocal meaning, and interpretive hegemony regarding her work. It is clear to me that the spirit and passion of Irigarayan wonder (as a mode of mourning) imbues this text. In this way, Rawlinson and Sares have fashioned a polyvocal philosophical site that refuses (as it should) to suit us totally and functions as a critically engaging textual advent. -- George Yancy, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
