Penelope Deutscher
Biographic Data
| ID | 265799 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Penelope Deutscher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Penelope |
| FAMILY NAME | Deutscher |
| SIGNATURE | DEUTSCHER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2232-7229 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 61 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 61 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 52 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Revocability’s “Not Rights”
The Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson is widely understood to be responsible for the revoking of reproductive rights in the United States in 2022. This essay asks how to respond to events construed as rights-loss, through closer attention to their “productive” effects, their stimulation of retroactive and anticipatory meanings and occlusions, and the complex, multiple, and contradictory governmental techniques of power with which they bind.…
Introduction
[no abstract]
Mais s'il y en a
Cassin has resisted being 'assigned an essence' as a woman philosopher but played extensively with the sedimented resonances of this designation. This article asks how Barbara Cassin's interest in providing 'enough of the truth' been extended to sexual difference and gender. What is the effect of understanding these as matters of translation and (un)translatability
Revocability, Exception, Disqualification
The Dobbs decision revoking the constitutional legality of abortion in the United States was widely characterized as a use of raw power. That gives rise to the questions: What kind of power is in question? How does the post-Dobbs moment encapsulate a number of hinges between formations of power characterized in post-Foucauldian theory? How is fluency in the combinations of power at work in the Dobbs decision and aftermath enhanced by a vocabulary…
Plurigenealogies
How does the publication of Confessions of the Flesh impact feminist critique of Foucault's History of Sexuality project? The paper addresses this question in two ways: by asking how reflection on continuities and ruptures has, and can, be productive for feminist critique; and by revisiting the role of women in all four volumes. The terms of their inclusion have been considered an omission, particularly because the project omits same‐sex eros bet…
The Birth of Geneapolitics
Qualifying Disqualification and Its Inversions
Auto-repugnancy
Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later
Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approa…
Critical Theory in Critical Times
Foucault's Futures
Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault’s thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. Foucault’s Futures brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to provide new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.
Critical Theory in Critical Times
Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later
On the Whole We Don't
Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist…
Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later - the Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics
Lynne Huffer's Are the Lips a Grave? Averting and Accentuating the Genealogical
A response to Lynne Huffer's Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, this article considers Huffer's critical reaction to characterizations of feminism as dominated by a more moral tenor repudiated by queer theory. Huffer argues that a stronger distinction should be maintained between the moral and the ethical. The failure to maintain this distinction has led to a mistaken repudiation of both the moral and the ethical. Rather than jettisoning…
Reproduction précaire
Cet article soutient que les femmes, considérées du point de vue de leur capacité à agir en matière de reproduction, peuvent être appréhendées comme des incarnations de la vie précaire en plusieurs sens. Elles peuvent d’abord être considérées comme spécialement responsables de formes de vie jugées précaires (comme l’embryon, le fœtus, le nouveau-né, l’enfant). Ensuite, quand leur capacité d’agir en matière de reproduction est contestée (en partic…
The Membrane and the Diaphragm
This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point o…
Sacred Fecundity
Giorgio Agamben's work would seem to be one of the contemporary philosophical projects that has been least hospitable to a feminist reading—least hospitable to posing questions about gender and sexual difference using its resources. But in recent years, a cluster of feminist responses to Agamben has emerged.1 Welcome as they are, they are as interesting for their ambiguity, their differences (thus perhaps their tacit disagreement) about the chara…
Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I
This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I ( HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four 'strategic ensembles' of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality ( HS1: 104) also c…
Manière du départ
Claude Imbert's responses to Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss characteristically interpret their work as philosophical departures and emigrations. Less interested in definitively abandoned conceptual models, Imbert focuses on incomplete, 'vexed', 'active' leaving: a text which is 'out of synchronicity with its own philosophical time'; which is 'in advance of oneself'; or uses a philosophical mode whose limitations and fracture points are …
Reproductive Politics, Biopolitics and Auto-immunity
The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
Studies of Simone de Beauvoir have mostly concentrated on her literature, her life, and her famous 1949 work, The Second Sex, and the continued emphasis has been on Beauvoir's views on gender. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir places her theory of women's 'otherness' in the context of a number of contemporary theories on a similar subject. While gender takes its place among these, Professor Deutscher counterbalances its grip on our memory of B…
The philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir
Many studies of Simone de Beauvoir have concentrated on her literature, her life, and her famous 1949 work The Second Sex. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir places Beauvoir's theory of women's "otherness" in the context of a number of contemporary theories of ambiguity. Professor Deutscher reconsiders the resources on which Beauvoir drew and the innovation involved in their transformation to her purposes." "The focus given Beauvoir's philosoph…
Recastings
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 atte…
Critical Theory in Critical Times
The Inversion of Exceptionality
Since it has not to date arisen as a question, is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women's bodies in the politicization of life? The woman about whom a ruling is passed forbidding an abortion is sometimes figured as a potentially murderous competing sovereign whose self-interest would thwart the intervening motivations of the state concerned with the interests of a threshold life. She is attributed with a p…
The Membrane and the Diaphragm
This paper considers two among the several points of intersection in the work of Roberto Esposito and Jacques Derrida. First, and most obviously: in the context of conceptualizing community, and more broadly, Esposito and Derrida have elaborated concepts of immunity and auto-immunity to refer to auto-destructive modes of defense which profoundly threaten what – seemingly – ought to have been safeguarded through their mechanism. The second point o…
Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I
This paper interrogates the status of the Malthusian couple and the policing and government of reproduction in the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Volume I ( HS1), and the associated Collège de France lectures. Presented by Foucault as one of the four 'strategic ensembles' of the 18th century through which knowledge and power became centered on sex, what Foucault calls the socialization of procreative sexuality ( HS1: 104) also c…
Repetition Facility
The Descent of Man and the Evolution of Woman
Between East and West and the Politics of 'Cultural Ingénuité
This article compares the status of sexual and cultural difference in Luce Irigaray's earliest work and her most recent publication Between East and West (2002), in which Irigaray argues that a culture of sexual difference would facilitate improved structural relations between those of different cultures, races and traditions. Many commentators have argued that Irigaray's recent, more simple formulations on legal reform must be understood in the …
The Descent of Man and the Evolution of Woman
This paper addresses the appropriation of theories of evolution by nineteenth-century feminists, focusing on the critical response to Darwin's The Descent of Man by Eliza Burt Gamble (The Evolution of Woman, 1893) and Antoinette Brown Blackwell (The Sexes Throughout Nature, 1875) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's social evolutionism. For Gilman, evolutionism was a revolutionary resource for feminism, one of its greatest hopes. Gamble and Blackwell r…
Pardon
Etude du projet d'identification depersonnalisante developpe par S. Kofman dans son oeuvre consacree a la critique des figures phallocentriques que sont Comte, Kant, Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hoffman et Derrida. Soulignant l'impossibilite paradoxale d'un differend entre S. Kofman et ses septs amis, l'A. interroge le type de sympathie que Kofman entretient avec ses ennemis. Examinant la politique de la difference et la politique de l'amitie chez…
French Feminist Philosophers on Law and Public Policy
On the Whole We Don't
Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist…
Lynne Huffer's Are the Lips a Grave? Averting and Accentuating the Genealogical
A response to Lynne Huffer's Mad for Foucault and Are the Lips a Grave?, this article considers Huffer's critical reaction to characterizations of feminism as dominated by a more moral tenor repudiated by queer theory. Huffer argues that a stronger distinction should be maintained between the moral and the ethical. The failure to maintain this distinction has led to a mistaken repudiation of both the moral and the ethical. Rather than jettisoning…
Recastings
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 atte…
French Women Philosophers
Edited by Christina Howells. London — New York, Routledge, 1994. 453 pp. Pb £19.99. With twenty-eight contributors covering the areas of ethics, alterity, psychoanalysis, epistemology, legal and political theory, Christina Howells has put together an anthology of remarkable range and size. It eclipses the competing anthologies (Moi's French Feminist Thought and Oliver and Walsh's Contemporary French Feminism) by including major undertranslated (f…
Enemies and Reciprocities
Enemies and Reciprocities Penelope Deutscher (bio) At a round table on Emily Grosholz' new collection, The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir at the Maison Française in New York,1 the issue of race stereotypes in her work was raised by audience members. The debate was animated and some speakers sprung to Beauvoir's defense: she wasn't the worst of her contemporaries, it was the times, she was a committed activist, a good amount of her work is indebted …
Introduction to De la Résistance
Françoise Proust explains that where Foucault established a cartography of power, she is interested in elaborating an “analytic of resistance.” This, she elaborates, would be “the transcendental of every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power, to the state of things, to history; resistance to destruction, to death, to war; resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare life.”
Interview
Michèle Le Dœuff speculates about why the parity movement enjoyed attention and sympathy in France over recent years. She discusses recent developments in “State-handled” feminism, and the resurgence of interest in feminist debate in France. Perhaps patriarchy is an institution more fundamental than the State
The evanescence of masculinity
1992). The evanescence of masculinity: Deferral in Saint Augustine's Confessions and some thoughts on its bearing on the sex/gender debate. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 7, No. 15, pp. 41-56
Sexual/textual subversions
Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Allen and Unwín) Sydney, 1989
The evanescence of masculinity
1992). The evanescence of masculinity: Deferral in Saint Augustine's Confessions and some thoughts on its bearing on the sex/gender debate. Australian Feminist Studies: Vol. 7, No. 15, pp. 41-56
“The Only Diabolical Thing About Women…”
Luce Irigaray's argument that women need a feminine divine is placed in the context of her analyses of the interconnection between man's appropriation of woman as his “negative alter ego” and his identification with the impossible ego ideal represented by the figure of God. As an alternative, the “feminine divine” is conceived as a realm with which women would be continuous. It would allow mediation between humans, and interrupt cannibalizing app…
Operative Différance in Recent Feminist, Queer and Post‐Colonial Theory
French Feminist Philosophers on Law and Public Policy
Luge Irigaray. Translated by Alison Martin. I Love to You
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray)
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies - Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 1998
Love discourses, sexed discourses
Introduction to De la Résistance
Françoise Proust explains that where Foucault established a cartography of power, she is interested in elaborating an “analytic of resistance.” This, she elaborates, would be “the transcendental of every resistance, whatever kind it be: resistance to power, to the state of things, to history; resistance to destruction, to death, to war; resistance to stupidity, to peace, to bare life.”
Another Look
Introduction 1
Introduction to De la R sistance 1
The Line of Resistance 1
Imperfect Discretion
Hypatia - Volume 15, Number 2, Spring 2000
Interview
Michèle Le Dœuff speculates about why the parity movement enjoyed attention and sympathy in France over recent years. She discusses recent developments in “State-handled” feminism, and the resurgence of interest in feminist debate in France. Perhaps patriarchy is an institution more fundamental than the State
Fran oise Dastur by Herself 1
Fran$oise Dastur: I consider myself a reader, essentially. It's important to me to explain this point clearly. The history of philosophy is not a refuge for me. I might practice it, but I don't practice it as a historian. I've always taught in the areas of general philosophy and history of philosophy, at the same time. My teaching has always been characterized by its efforts to practice history of philosophy in a (paradoxically) non-historical fa…
Imperfect Discretion”
How might we locate originality as emerging from within the “discrete” work of commentary? Because many women have engaged with philosophy informs (including commentary) that preclude their work from being seen as properly “original,” this question is a feminist issue. Via the work of selected contemporary French women philosophers, the author shows how commentary can reconfigure the philosophical tradition in innovative ways, as well as in ways …
A Matter of Affect, Passion, and Heart? 1
Feminism Is Back in France—Or Is It
Michèle Le Dœuff discusses the revival of feminism in France, including the phenomenon of state-sponsored feminism, such as government support for “parity”: equal numbers of women and men in government. Le Dœuff analyzes the strategically patchy application of this revival and remains wary about it. Turning to the work of seventeenth-century philosopher Gabrielle Suchon, Le Dœuff considers her concepts of freedom, servitude, and active citizenshi…
Coincidences of Comparison 1
A Matter of Affect, Passion, and Heart” 1
This article compares translation and commentary practices surrounding the texts associated with French feminism with those of contemporary French women philosophers more generally. Many of the latter, discussing the history of philosophy, ask questions such as “How do texts play against the means they supply themselves?” and “How are philosophical forces, and the institutions of commentary, countered, destabilized, deregulated?” Deutscher asks w…
Pardon
Etude du projet d'identification depersonnalisante developpe par S. Kofman dans son oeuvre consacree a la critique des figures phallocentriques que sont Comte, Kant, Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau, Hoffman et Derrida. Soulignant l'impossibilite paradoxale d'un differend entre S. Kofman et ses septs amis, l'A. interroge le type de sympathie que Kofman entretient avec ses ennemis. Examinant la politique de la difference et la politique de l'amitie chez…
Yielding Gender
Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? Yielding Gender explores thi…
That Knowledge is not Sexed
Between East and West and the Politics of 'Cultural Ingénuité
This article compares the status of sexual and cultural difference in Luce Irigaray's earliest work and her most recent publication Between East and West (2002), in which Irigaray argues that a culture of sexual difference would facilitate improved structural relations between those of different cultures, races and traditions. Many commentators have argued that Irigaray's recent, more simple formulations on legal reform must be understood in the …
Philosophy (33 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Epistemology (25 works) · Psychology (23 works) · Gender Studies (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works)