We contest each other's memory claims all the time. I am concerned with how the contesting of memory claims and narratives may be an integral part of many abusive situations. I use the writings of Otto Weininger and the False Memory Syndrome Foundation to explore a particular strategy of discrediting women as rememberers, making them more vulnerable to sexual harm. This strategy relies on the presentation of women as unable to maintain a stable enough sense of self or identity to be trustworthy testifiers to their own harm.

The paper argues that psychoanalysis and deconstruction offer more to feminist theory than contestation. The common feminist criticisms of the work of Lacan and Derrida are not as compelling as may be thought. Among the possibilities for feminist theory using psychoanalysis and deconstruction is the scrutiny of theory as theory—and this will inevitably include scrutinizing feminist theory itself.

This paper examines the ways in which Luce Irigaray and Jean‐François Lyotard critique western metaphysics by drawing on notions of birth and infancy. It shows how both thinkers position birth as an event of beginning that can be reaffirmed in every act of initiation and recommencement. Irigaray's reading of Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium is positioned as a key text for this project alongside a number of essays by Lyotard in which he explores the potency of infancy as the condition of philosophy itself. Despite this potency, however, Lyotard suggests that metaphysics is haunted by a melancholia that is inseparable from the limits of thought. I argue that Irigaray is able both to explain why western metaphysics is constitutively melancholic and to offer a shift in perspective that means we are not inevitably condemned to melancholia. The paper concludes that while Lyotard's account of infancy challenges the terms of western metaphysics from within, Irigaray's reassessment of our beginnings in birth offers the possibility of an alternative metaphysical horizon.

This article seeks to demonstrate the importance of the philosophical work of Mary O'Brien. It does so by showing how O'Brien's work counters Heidegger's strict differentiation between the ancient Greek metaphysics of presence and modern technological thinking. O'Brien's ideas indicate two critical lacunae in Heidegger's interpretation of the ancient Greeks: the latter's attempt to secure paternity and their overlooking of birth as a form of unconcealment. According to O'Brien, the way in which we understand and experience human reproduction influences both our sense of self and our sense of continuity. According to Heidegger, the way in which things are brought forth or unconcealed is fundamental to our being‐in‐the‐world. Neither O'Brien nor Heidegger lived to see the current advancements in reproductive technology, but both would consider them significant and meaningful beyond their social, political, and even ethical implications. Furthermore, recent reproductive technology draws attention to birth as revealing—although as increasingly Enframed. Rapid changes in reproduction may reveal Enframing as Enframing, and also show that technology is not something that we can simply master. But for this to occur, we must take into account the radical critique and rethinking of Heidegger's philosophy implied by O'Brien's thought.

Contemplating the techniques of white nationalism used to refuse Black ontology and deny Black belonging to the humanity of Canadian nationhood, this article considers how art imaginatively visualizes rebellion against the racist logics that regulate such denials. Exploring the function of hyperbole, this article examines the ways the willfully heightened strangeness of the extraterrestrial Afro-Astronaut and Black Muslim monster depicted in performance and visual art trouble racial matrixes through the dissonance provoked by the Other's unfamiliar display of excess.

Notorious for advancing a strict dichotomy between the masculine “demiurgic father” and the feminine “nurse/receptacle of becoming” as the “natural” origin of the cosmos, Plato's Timaeus has become a site for feminist interrogation. Most critics easily deem the text a masculine fantasy that projects feminine impotence and obligatory heterosexuality, reinforcing patriarchal power structures that are blindly reproduced in their historical reception. Consequently, this article analyzes the Neoplatonic replication of this framework, but with special attention given to Proclus's challenges to this gendered and sexual context. In this late, sometimes forgotten figure, we find, rather surprisingly, a Platonist who neither sequesters the feminine to the domain of the passive receptacle nor charges her simply with being a bastard image of the masculine. Rather, for Proclus, the feminine becomes the site of lived, erotic power that produces and sustains the value of authentic otherness. Furthermore, Proclus offers a challenge to the naturalness of the sex binary, suggesting a radical queerness as the basis of all identity. Overall, we shall see how classical patriarchal thinkers may, despite themselves, offer subversive models that might present readers with possibilities for troubling the sexual prejudices of ancient metaphysical schemas.

I welcome the opportunity to respond to Kelly Oliver's critique of my paper published earlier in this journal for at least three reasons: out of respect for the tradition of intellectual exchange to which Oliver's invitation tacitly appeals; because the issues are of quite general importance, even far beyond feminist theory; and out of fidelity to the goals of contemporary feminist theory, central to which I take to be the unravelling of classical dichotomies. This commitment inspires me to protest the current tendency among some feminist critics to tacitly reinforce (often under the name of “deconstruction”) the very dichotomy between objectivism and relativism which I and others have sought to undermine. Here, as always, the tell-tale marks of such oppositional reconstructions are to be found in the collapse and obliteration of distinctions internal to the categories under questions.

What elements lie at the core of patriarchal consciousness and give it its particular expressions? Beneath the hatred of women, at its source, is a profound, dissociating fear: the fear of non-being, the Absence beyond Death. In an effort to escape death and non-being, the patriarchs have constructed a conception of existence which is split in two, with eternal life, God, meaning and spirit on one side and bodily death on the other. The masculist association of women with bodies, nature and the birthing-dying cycle places us clearly on the side of death, in the realm of being which is and necessarily must be despised and controlled. Alienation from the rhythms of life, giving rise to a crisis of meaning; the denial of death, which leads paradoxically to an adoration of death; and a hysterical ambivalence to sex and sensuality all coalesce and find concrete expression in the personal and institutionalized hatred of Woman.

This essay outlines how Western culture, and in particular the practice of architecture, has failed to develop a nuanced and ethical approach to alterity. It examines Maurice Merleau-Ponty's conception of the flesh as a process of continual self-interrogation through perceptual acts that intertwine communality and difference, establishing a shared world through interlocution, and explores how the work of Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray augment each other to deepen our understanding of alterity. It then examines architectural design as an intercorporeal and intersubjective act that creatively refigures sedimented spatial and social habits. Using the example of an architectural design studio, it demonstrates how designers can critically confront nuances of alterity through investigating the corporeal and social depths of architecture.

Editor's note: with this essay, Hypatia inaugurates a new column. We welcome musings on the state of the profession, the life of the independent scholar, political activism, teaching, publishing, or other topics of interest to feminist philosophers. We particularly invite submissions that pick up conversational threads begun by earlier contributions to the column, so that Musings becomes a forum for talking to one another. If you have an idea for the column, please tell us about it.