Lesley Caust

The Irreducible Other: the Second Sex Meets This Sex Which is Not One: Women, Subjectivity, and Ethics in Beauvoir and Irigaray Lesley Caust

This book suggests that Beauvoir and Irigaray can find a meeting place. Conversation is possible. Irigaray challenges Beauvoir's ontology and ethics. This involves a questioning of epistemology and metaphysics as well. Yet Beauvoir and Irigaray sought to include women as subjects. Beauvoir was on the verge of a new ontology, alluded to sexed subjectivity but reproduced sexual sameness. Irigaray posits a new ontology, considers the debt to the mother, sexuate rights and a feminine symbolic and divine. But their philosophies seem to be incommensurate. The men in their lives provide a partial connection. Sartre and Levi-Strauss invite us to explore existentialism and structuralism. Freud and Lacan enable us to reconsider psychoanalysis and sexual specificity. Levinas brings us into a stronger relationship with phenomenology and ethics. This book seeks to find the places and the spaces to forge authentic relationships with the other sex valuing sexual difference. There are possibilities for generous listening and speaking. The ethical challenges and existential conundrums of today force us to try harder to create positive possibilities.