Recastings: On Alison Stone'sLuce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Abstract

Following criticisms of Alison Stone's treatment of Judith Butler on nature and embodiment, this article argues that Stone has reconfigured Butler so as to accommodate Stone's interpretation of Irigaray. The project can be used to draw attention to forms of prior reconfiguration that may occur when differing theoretical frameworks are brought into dialogue with each other. The need for such forms of implicit, prior reconfiguration helps draw attention to the differences and relationships between different frameworks and the only apparently similar terms and concepts embedded in them. In the light of a staged encounter between Butler and Irigaray, Stone widens the conceptual space within Butler's project, into which she drops an alternative, reconfiguring understanding of Butler's work as requiring an absent concept: original, multiple, self-differentiating nature. She argues that the concept has the potential to serve as a useful intervention into the work of Butler and, among others, Schelling. Although this potential is not directly addressed by Stone, the reading serves as an occasion to reflect on a number of interpretative questions concerning not only the tacit work that occurs in one author's reconfiguration of another but also the varied methodologies that may be appropriate to the interpretation of Luce Irigaray's work in particular.