Sartre and Androgyny

Author: (English) Maryam Fraser
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-06-01
Features: This book provides a new concept of identity and subjectivity in the context of recent post-structuralist and homosexual debates. The author points out that efforts to analyze, even "deconstruct," identity and the self still rely on some core Western concepts of identity, such as personality, boundedness, autonomy, self-realization, and narration, etc. It is precisely through the exploration of various creative ways of the self and the gendered sensibility attributed to Simone de Beauvoir that the analysis of this book achieves a broader significance beyond Beauvoir's individual. This book is an enlightening read for anyone concerned with the self, identity, gendered sensibility, and desire, and it also holds significant importance for contemporary feminist theory. The book will primarily adopt Deleuze's analysis of Foucault (1988). Deleuze claims that Foucault's works changed the "meaning of thinking" (Deleuze, 1988, p. 120); Foucault, in turn, claims that "this century will be considered as Deleuze's" (Foucault, 1977, p. 165), which further strengthens the conceptual connection between these two thinkers. Rosi Braidotti notes: "Philosophy becomes creative, active, and critical because of the connection between Foucault and Deleuze" (Braidotti, 1991, p. 67), and without reference to Deleuze, Foucault's works would be absolutely incomplete, because Deleuze "follows Foucault more than anyone else and continues in multiple ways a Foucaultian enterprise far beyond the goals of its founder" (Braidotti, 1991, p. 66). This book affirms Braidotti's assertion; I will demonstrate that while Foucault's works provide a useful self-technique analysis, his own concept of the self, i.e., a self-aesthetics, ultimately fails to account for the "bisexual sensibility" proposed in this book.