Resistance, Flight, Creation - by Dorothea Olkowski (Paperback)

About the Book

Thirteen women at the forefront of philosophy locate new feminist points of view within the discipline by rigorously engaging works of contemporary French philosophy. In so doing, they both transform the standard practices of the field and carve out...

Book Synopsis

Thirteen women at the forefront of philosophy locate new feminist points of view within the discipline by rigorously engaging works of contemporary French philosophy. In so doing, they both transform the standard practices of the field and carve out new territory. These writers amplify the work of feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Sarah Kofman in ways that are both stylistically and substantively creative. They also appropriate for radical feminist use the works of male philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre.The essays illustrate the manner in which feminist philosophers bypass traditional methodology in favor of a disciplinary freedom characterized by fluid methodologies--best exemplified in Beauvoir's work--and by the employment of imaginative forms, including the autobiographical and the poetic. The modes of inquiry used here range variously from psychoanalysis and existentialism to deconstruction, post-structuralism, and newly resurgent phenomenology. This volume also contains a comprehensive bibliography of feminist thinkers who are enacting French philosophy in English, German, and French.

From the Back Cover

Thirteen women at the forefront of philosophy locate new feminist points of view within the discipline by rigorously engaging works of contemporary French philosophy. In so doing, they transform the standard practices of the field and carve out new territory. These writers amplify the work of feminist philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Sarah Kofman in ways that are both stylistically and substantively creative. They also integrate for radical feminist use the works of male philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The essays illustrate the manner in which feminist philosophers bypass traditional methodology in favor of a disciplinary freedom characterized by fluid methodologies -- best exemplified in Beauvoir's work -- and by the employment of imaginative forms, including the autobiographical and the poetic. The modes of inquiry used range from psychoanalysis and existentialism to deconstruction, post-structuralism, and newly resurgent phenomenology. The collection also contains a comprehensive bibliography of feminist thinkers who are enacting French philosophy in English, German, and French.

Review Quotes

"If this is, as it claims to be, a volume of feminist enactments of French philosophy, then the word French has a justifiably and admirably broad sense, for French philosophy includes Heidegger, Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Sigmund Freud"The 'fathers' of a French feminism that was anything but dutiful. . . . This volume provides a valuable sense and reorientation of some of the key questions for feminist criticism today. The essays do not just interpret already canonized French philosophers for feminism; nor do they apply feminist questions to philosophy. Problems of essentialism, embodiment, aesthetics, and justice are negotiated from a series of competing but mutually provocative perspectives."--Claire Colebrook, Hypatia, vol. 20, no. 1, Winter 2005

"The collection is diverse and often lively, with certain essays in particular providing a compelling and interesting read. . . . The book concludes with a lengthy bibliography of essays and texts that can be described as feminist enactments of French philosophy, a compilation that should provide a useful research tool for further work on this important topic."--Elaine P. Miller, International Studies in Philosophy, 2003

About the Author

Dorothea Olkowski is Co-Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She is the author of Gilles Deleuze and The Ruin of Representation and coeditor of Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, and an additional forthcoming collection on Maurice Merleau-Ponty.