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This book suggests that Beauvoir and Irigaray can
find a meeting place. Conversation is possible.
Irigaray challenges Beauvoir´s ontology and ethics.
This involves a questioning of epistemology and
metaphysics as well. Yet Beauvoir and Irigaray
sought to include women as subjects. Beauvoir was on
the verge of a new ontology, alluded to sexed
subjectivity but reproduced sexual sameness.
Irigaray posits a new ontology, considers the debt
to the mother, sexuate rights and a feminine
symbolic and divine. But their philosophies seem to
be incommensurate. The men in their lives provide a
partial connection. Sartre and Levi-Strauss invite
us to explore existentialism and structuralism.
Freud and Lacan enable us to reconsider
psychoanalysis and sexual specificity. Levinas
brings us into a stronger relationship with
phenomenology and ethics. This book seeks to find
the places and the spaces to forge authentic
relationships with the other sex valuing sexual
difference. There are possibilities for generous
listening and speaking. The ethical challenges and
existential conundrums of today force us to try
harder to create positive possibilities.

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Lesley Caust was awarded her PhD in Philosophy from Monash
University in 2007. An article, ´Community, Autonomy
and Justice: the gender politics of identity and relationship´
was published in ´The History of European Ideas´ Journal, 1993.
She gave papers on education, emotional intelligence and film in
Glasgow and Oxford, July, 2008.

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