Pushing Dualisms and Differences: From ‘Equality versus Difference’ to ‘Nonmimetic Sharing’ and ‘Staying with the Trouble’

Abstract

Critically revisiting the ‘equality versus difference’ dualism that is inscribed in the feminist canon of the last decades is an important task for feminist ethico-political discussions today. The theoretico-political tension between claims of equality and difference still troubles feminist discussions and thus needs to be addressed by contemporary research. Yet, moving beyond the persisting antagonism cannot be done by either moving outside the problematic relation or by choosing one term over the other. It is, as Joan W. Scott noted, impossible to choose between equality and difference, so that other ways of tackling the problem are needed. This article suggests a new line of flight for feminist politics in respect to this founding paradox from a feminist new materialist/posthuman(ist) perspective. Via an affirmative reading of Irigaray's cosmopolitical concern of Sharing the World (2008) and a critical investigation into the structuring ‘anthropological limit’ (Derrida) of her sexual difference thinking, the author pushes the dualistic framework of equality versus difference towards a thought of ‘nonmimetic sharing’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. In her argument, she turns to the differential worldings of Grosz's ‘differing’, Barad's ‘quantum’ and Haraway's ‘terran’ in order to open up ethico-political alternatives to engage difference(s) differently. The article ultimately argues that by affirming all multifaceted (im)material worlding entanglements, significant new insights can be gained for both theorizing differentiality as ethico-onto-epistemological ‘becoming-with’ and for practising this world of/as difference(s) in a more ‘response-able’ manner.

Keywords:

• ethico-onto-epistemology
• Irigaray
• Haraway
• Barad
• Grosz
• sharing
• post-humanism
• cosmo(po)logy

Notes

1 I thus want to stress that Scott's historical reflections on ‘equality versus difference’ are meant as a deconstruction of this oppositional scenario—.

2 I will use this double formula throughout the article in order to signal both the difficulty of correct ‘labelling’ and my specific focus on a critical investigation into what Jacques Derrida has called ‘the anthropological limit’ in/of philosophy (see Derrida 2008).

3 Diesseits is to be understood as the immanent version of jenseits (‘beyond’), and this wording is of conceptual significance to the argument made in this article. It is the untranslatable ‘other’ of jenseits, encompassing both the dimensions of ‘on this side of’ and ‘before’. My specific take on the ethico-political dimensions of the feminist statement of a ‘different difference’, is inspired by the feminist works of (Braidotti 2006; Ettinger 2006; Grosz 2004; Haraway 1997, 2008), who, in their works, draw on sexual difference feminisms and queer theory, the legacy of Marxist materialist feminisms, psychoanalysis, critical race studies and postcolonial studies, and twentieth-century continental philosophy.

4 My use of ‘speculative’ follows Sehgal (forthcoming). She frames her discussion of speculation within the context of Haraway (1988) and Stengers (2011). In the spirit of this speculative level, I will also speak of the ‘cosmo(po)logical’ and not simply the ‘cosmopolitical’ impact of Irigaray's philosophizing.

5 Here, I follow Grosz's interpretation of Irigaray, in which the ontological force of sexual difference is her most central claim. For a differentiated account of ‘Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism’, see Grosz (1995: 45–57.), and for an emphasis on ‘the ontological force’, see Grosz (2005) and Butler et al. (1998).

6 Grosz's move towards Deleuzian thought horizons results from her non-Hegelian (phenomenological) and non-Lacanian (psychoanalytical) interpretation of Irigaray's oeuvre, which she pursues throughout her work. For a discussion between the two feminist thinkers, see Irigaray (2008a: 123–137.).

7 We can already put this in relation to Barad's ‘agential cuts’, in regard to which she states that: ‘our intra-actions contribute to the differential mattering of the world’ (Barad 2007: 178).

8 This central claim can, of course, be found throughout Irigaray's whole philosophical work—see, for example, Speculum of the Other Woman and An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Irigaray 1985a, 1993).

9 For a similar evaluation directly concerning Irigaray's Sharing the World, see Still (2012).

10 On the central issue of Irigaray and Hegelian dialectics, see also Catherine Malabou and Ewa Ziarek's recent dialogue (Malabou and Ziarek 2012).

11 ‘Mimicry’ is known as Irigaray's strategy for engaging with the philosophical ‘masters’, which are reread by her ‘through the Looking Glass’ (see Burke 1981). It is introduced most explicitly in This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray 1985b).

12 ‘To recognize the existence of another subjectivity implies recognizing that it belongs to, and constitutes, a world of its own, which cannot be substituted for mine; that the subjectivity of the other is irreducible to my subjectivity’ (Irigaray 2008b: 1). The reference to Levinas is also fruitful, given the proximity between the two philosophers with respect to the priority and radical otherness of the o/Other. For Irigaray's (critical) readings of Levinas, see Irigaray (1991, 1993). For the metaphor of ‘pushing dualisms’, see also van der Tuin (2011).

13 Here, I am implicitly referring to (and rearticulating) Derrida's ‘“Eating Well”’ (Derrida 1994).

14 Haraway's long-standing commitment to the undoing of reductive dualisms, dichotomies and bifurcations is not to be overlooked here. Already in her early entry on ‘Gender’ written for the Marxistisches Wörterbuch in the early 1980s, she emphasizes ‘a need for a theory of “difference” whose geometries, paradigms, and logics break out of binaries, dialectics, and nature/culture models of any kind’ (Haraway 1991: 129). A definition of Haraway's most recent terrapolitics reads as follows: ‘Terrapolis is a n-dimensional volume in naturecultures … Terrapolis is of and for humus, the stuff of guman, an old earthy Indo-European word for workers of the soil, not the stuff of homo, that figure of the bright and airy sacred image of the same’ (Haraway 2012: 4–5).