Desire beyond Identity: Irigaray and the Ethics of Embodiment

by Wesley N. Barker

Overview

Critically adapts the notion of desire in Luce Irigaray's philosophy to rethink the role of embodiment in sociopolitical and philosophical discourses today.

Arguing for a radical return to desire in Luce Irigaray's thought, this book decisively intervenes in impasses around questions of identity that continue to confound contemporary discourse and politics. By prioritizing the disruptive potential of desire rather than sexual difference, Wesley N. Barker extends Irigaray's relational theory of becoming into new territory, opening generative, often surprising pathways for conversation with philosophies of race, queer theory, political theology, decolonial theory, and posthuman thought. As a source for reimagining materiality, desire is pulled free of a phallocentric, white, colonial framework and mobilized toward a philosophy of living capable of addressing the twenty-first century's multifaceted crises of identity, representation, and embodiment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798855801446
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Series:	SUNY series in Gender Theory
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.11(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Wesley N. Barker is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Mercer University in the College of Professional Advancement.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Desire beyond Identity

1. The Anatomy of Desire: Toward a Morphology of Lips

2. The "Matter" of Lips: Incarnating the Transcendence of Desire

3. Queer Lips, Queer Wombs, and the Temporality of Desire

4. Decolonizing Desire: Reading Spivak's Postcolonial Echo and the Problem of Resistance

5. Desire beyond (Non)Being: Toward a Black Feminist Labial Logic

6. Horizons of Touch: Desire and a Reimagined Anthropos

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Desire beyond Identity is an accomplished, diacritical, and innovative engagement with Irigaray's most important concepts: desire, sexual difference (sexuate), ethics, materiality, and ontology. Through careful interpretation and incisive theorizing, Wesley N. Barker avoids the reduction of sexual difference to metaphysical biocentrism by offering 'prediscursive materiality' as a site of philosophical imagination—difference beyond identity and desire beyond metaphysics. This expansive and capacious study successfully demonstrates the significance of Irigaray's thought to diverse fields of inquiry, including queer theory, postcolonialism, and Afropessimism." — Calvin L. Warren, author of Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation

"A pathbreaking and exhilarating intervention into the project of rethinking the human. By approaching Irigaray's philosophy of sexuate difference through the indeterminacy of eros, Desire beyond Identity not only offers an original and highly compelling interpretation of Irigaray. It also develops a distinctive ontology of 'othered' desire as a world-changing force whose ethical and political implications are explored through extended engagements with queer feminisms, decolonial thought, Afropessimism, and philosophies of race. Refusing the violence of sameness and displacing identity from the theorization of subjectivity, this book helps us reach towards as yet unthought incarnations of humanity." — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy

From the Publisher