James Sares – författare

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary.This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary.This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Time raises certain irresolvable contradictions: the question of its absolute beginning leads us into the paradox of infinite regress versus a 'time before time', and to conceive of the temporal present as either an extension or a simple point fails to explain how time passes now. In this book, James Sares demonstrates - via his readings of Kant and Hegel - the impossibility of time’s robust passage. Sares' approach is both exegetical and critical, developing textual analyses of Kant and Hegel's respective claims concerning the antinomies of time while challenging and extending their work in conversation with contemporary debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of time. Drawing on Hegel’s logic, he rebuts Kant's suggestion that the arguments of his antinomies do not apply to time because of its status as appearance. Yet Hegel, for Sares, fails to clearly articulate the irresolvability of the antimonies or their metaphysical significance. Sares returns to Kant, contra Hegel, to argue for the importance of the antinomies as problems for the very possibility of worldly existence, even for the rational closure of Hegel’s logical system.By showing how time’s robust passage cannot be rationally explained, this work constitutes a novel contribution to the scholarship on Kant, Hegel, and the philosophy of time.

Brings together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary analyses of Luce Irigaray's rethinking of space with respect to sexual difference and the visual arts.A rethinking of space is central to Luce Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference. Topologies of Sexual Difference is the first edited collection to focus on this task through a sustained consideration of both Irigaray's critique of the Western tradition's systematic conflation of femininity and space and her transvaluative topological redeployment of space in theorizing sexual difference. Across thirteen chapters, Irigarayan space is thematized as porous, fluid, continuous, and self-differentiating. Contributors engage with the origins of life, affect, the aesthetics of the maternal and placental, an Irigarayan morphology inclusive of trans embodiment, and—in a rare focus—the expression of sexuate specificity in creative practice. Topologies of Sexual Difference thus demonstrates the fundamental importance of Irigaray's rethinking of space for Western philosophy and the visual arts.