Defense Date

3-2-2018

Graduation Date

Spring 5-11-2018

Availability

One-year Embargo

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

Department

Philosophy

School

McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

Committee Chair

Daniel Selcer

Committee Member

Tom Eyers

Committee Member

Claire Colebrook

Keywords

Deleuze, Lacan, Sexual Difference, Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis, Continental Philosophy, Gender Studies, Sexuation

Abstract

In The Logic of Sexuation in Deleuze and Lacan, I argue for an account of sexual difference that responds to a tension in feminist philosophy, namely, the problem of the ontological status of the sexed body. In so doing, I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan. I argue that, rather than being antithetical, the two can be productively read together, in particular with regard to this very question. Ultimately basing my reading in the Deleuzian passive syntheses and dynamic geneses of Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as in Lacan’s twentieth Seminar on sexuation with respect to the phallic function, I argue that we should see sexual difference as a kind of generative void that propels the subject forward in its perpetual processes of becoming. Thus we get a materialist but non-reductive account of sexual difference or sexuation as a kind of back-turning relation of thought and the body in a constitutively incomplete interplay.

Language

English

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