Camilla Pitton

This article rethinks the political project of transforming sexual desire and the norms that regulate it, aiming to reduce oppression and marginalization in intimate life. In the wake of recent feminist revivals of this project, such as Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex (2021), I analyze the limitations of two dominant frameworks: ‘disciplinary’ models, which overestimate our capacity to regulate desire, and ‘liberatory’ models, which assume the existence of an authentic, pre-political core of desire that can be freed from power. I argue that both models are flawed, promoting respectively the illusion of total control and prelapsarian fantasies. To move beyond them, I turn to Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of natural history, which challenges the fixity of desire without assuming its infinite malleability. Specifically, drawing on Adorno and his interpreters, I show the natural history provides a framework for conceptualizing agency and transformation that neither negates the constraints shaping desire nor forecloses the possibility of its active reconfiguration. This approach, I suggest, offers a critical foundation for feminist efforts to rethink and reshape desire.

This article assesses Nietzsche’s engagement with the sublime in Dawn to shed light on an aspect thereof that has so far been overlooked: Nietzsche’s deployment of the sublime as a philosophical framework for coming to terms with epistemic limits and transcendental errors. By engaging with the sublime both descriptively and methodologically, Nietzsche promotes an awareness of cognitive limits that fosters, instead of impeding, the pursuit of knowledge and the accomplishment of philosophical endeavors. While complicating the minimal existing literature on the topic, this article highlights Nietzsche’s philosophically unique use of the sublime in navigating a characteristically post-Kantian epistemic issue (the awareness of epistemic partiality and inadequacy) and in mitigating an illusory faith in reason.

The emphasis Malabou places on both the erasure and possible reappropriation of the clitoris, which she requalifies as an “organ of thought” (13), warrants considering broader questions concerning negativity, relationality, and power. We raise two related questions, which we further explore at the end of this review. First, what does Malabou's analysis of the negative and its relationship to thought and femininity imply about the ontological category of relationality in toto? If the relation between negativity and the feminine is central to thought, as Malabou seems to suggest, then this implies that negativity also has a prominent role in structuring relations in general. Second, how can the clitoris be disassociated from the negative without being turned into a new “positive,” or into a symbol grounded on a too familiar logic of othering? Arguably, this is the most pressing question for feminist philosophy in an age when gender and sexuality are under constant scrutiny inside and outside of the academe.

The attempt to rearticulate traditional conceptions of nature can be both a useful strategy and a stumbling block when it comes to feminist examinations of continuity between the objectification of women’s bodies and the domination of nature. This paper contributes to existing debates by providing a critique of what I term the “duality view” of nature: a view stipulating that nature is primarily characterised by a stable sexual duality, and advancing that the objectification of women’s bodies arises because the specificity of “femaleness” is ignored and duality is therefore neglected. I focus, specifically, on Alison Stone’s interpretation of Luce Irigaray, insofar as the account emerging from Stone’s interpretation clearly outlines the principles that most versions of the duality view should endorse. I problematise this account by showing that it becomes inconsistent with the critique of objectification which grounds it in the first place. I conclude by advancing that, overall, a view insisting on a natural sexual duality because of normative reasons conflicts with the feminist considerations at its basis. I also suggest that while the present analysis is primarily condemnatory, it can contribute to the development of feminist philosophies of nature by fleshing out avoidable pitfalls.