The Other Woman. Towards a diffractive rereading of the oeuvres of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray.

Abstract

This thesis examines the Oedipalized reception history, or the Oedipal feminist stories that have been told about the oeuvres of feminist philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray. Due to a combination of the existence of an Oedipal generational dialectics in feminism, the Anglo-American construction of the category of ‘French feminism,’ and the many mistranslations and misinterpretations of these oeuvres, (mostly) Anglo-American fixating narratives have been told about these feminist philosophies, which, in their turn, have led to a problematic and stifling dichotomy of Irigarayian versus Beauvoirian feminism and philosophy. This thesis project, which has to be located in the domains of feminist philosophy and theory, works towards another, more feminist, an-Oedipal and diffractive rereading of these two oeuvres, in order to make these philosophies fruitful for each other, and for feminist theory and politics.