Emma R. Jones

In this paper, I suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of anonymity in the Phenomenology of Perception bears a strong resemblance to Luce Irigaray’s discussions of the elemental. I argue that reading these two accounts together helps to counter some of the critiques waged by feminists against the language of anonymity, because anonymity—like the elemental—does not in fact function as a positive substratum that would shore up sameness and prevent the rupture of difference. Instead, anonymity names the way in which the subject is always already disrupted by its encounter with and belonging-to the natural world.

This article argues that Luce Irigaray’s ontology of sexuate difference must be understood as a relational ontology, while situating this interpretation within a broader context of debates about social constructionism, essentialism, and identity. I explore how Irigaray’s inheritance of Heideggerian thought and her development of a relational ontology allows her to circumvent some of the problems created by the frequent tendency in feminist theory to focus on defining what women “are.” By proposing that Being gives itself to us as relation—simultaneously announcing difference while calling upon us to develop a more ethical relationship between subjects—I argue that Irigaray goes beyond both Heideggerian thinking and more positivistic nature/culture debates that rely on Cartesian dualism for their framing. I also further develop my own concept of “relational limit” to illustrate how a relational ontology of difference can help us to respond to modern challenges raised by identity politics.

Today, the world seems rancorously preoccupied with identity to the exclusion of all else: nationalist and isolationist discourses abound based on identitarian claims to certain values, ways of life, and geographies. On the other hand, liberal and cosmopolitan discourses oppose the rise of nationalism but also focus on identity. Against this political backdrop, I argue, Luce Irigaray’s latest volume To Be Born provides us with the groundwork for a vital new alternative to identity politics. In this text, Irigaray traces the ways that desire and sexuate belonging are currently subsumed to Western metaphysical discourses that, I suggest, contribute to our current obsession with identity. Crucially, she also outlines the possibility of another path: a re-birth in and of desire that could return us to the source of our human becoming, but one that is only possible in living relation to the other who is different from us. In this way, Irigaray provides an ontological and ethical framework to radically shift our focus away from all issues of identity to the paradigm of relation, which gives birth to a transmutation of desire that can become love.

In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben's critique of Heidegger's understanding of animality, using Clarice Lispector's novel The Passion According to G.H. as an illustration. I argue that the present (living) moment itself separates the human from the animal for Heidegger, because, as Agamben notes, Heidegger subsumes this moment under the notion of "animal captivation" and thus fails to think the spontaneity of "bare life." But while Agamben goes on to argue that the creation of the human/animal binary is the primary move of the "anthropological machine," I argue that the man/woman dichotomy is equally basic and equally destructive

I offer a comparison between Plato’s discussion of χώρα in the Timaeus at 48A–53C and Aristotle’s discussion of τόπος in Physics Book IV, arguing that the two accounts have more in common than has been suggested by Continental scholars. Τόπος and χώρα both signal what I call the impasse of place as the question of that which cannot be reduced to either the sensible or the intelligible, and which (un)grounds such categories. Identifying this impasse reveals Plato’s and Aristotle’s accounts of “place” as strikingly dissimilar from the Newtonian category of Absolute Space; and it also suggests new ways of thinking the relationships between bodies, motion, place and nature.