Rethinking Sexual Difference with Bergson's Creative Evolution

Rebecca Hill (RMIT University), Rebecca Hill

PHILOSOPHIES OF DIFFERENCE: Seminar #2

Wednesday, 16th March, 6:00-7:30pm

Room 9.3.4A, Building 9, cnr Bowen & Franklin Sts.

Rethinking Sexual Difference with Bergson’s Creative Evolution

Rebecca Hill (RMIT University)

Abstract:

Drawing on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, this paper elaborates a figuration of sexual difference as different tendencies in the evolution of life on Earth. While Bergson’s philosophy is not feminist, his durational account of evolution articulates a cluster of concepts that offer significant insight into the effort to theorize sexual difference both in human beings and in many forms of life on Earth. I argue that Bergson’s concepts of duration, the élan vital, the virtual, the actual and the process of actualization can be taken up as a way to figure sexual differentiation as a fundamental tendency in the evolution of life on Earth without construing sexual difference hierarchically and without rendering sexual difference as a static universal. In the context of thinking the sexuate status of humanity, a Bergsonian conceptualization of sexual difference as an evolving tendency, which generates actualizations of sexed specificity, overcomes a normative position in which woman and man are conceived in terms of fixed attributes that are proper to each sex. Feminist thinking should affirm the diverging actualizations of sexed specificity and embrace the tremendous variety of articulations of female, male and intersexuality within the human species and within the human individual without hierarchizing certain actualizations over others and without claiming that there is a ‘normal’ way to be a specific sex.

Bio: 

Rebecca Hill is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT. She is the author of The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle and Bergson (Fordham UP, 2012). Rebecca is currently working on time in Deleuze.

*Free admission. No registration required. Wheelchair accessible (entry at rear)*

About PoD:

The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) are a Melbourne-based group of scholars working in continental philosophy and interested in problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western thought. We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy. The first PoD seminar series will consist of weekly seminars beginning in March 2016. We especially welcome participation and contribution from women, people of colour, and other minority groups.

For further information email: [email protected] 

Follow: http://www.facebook.com/philosophiesofdifference