Desire beyond Identity: Irigaray and the Ethics of Embodiment

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.