The Department of Gender Studies
2013-2014 Public Lecture Series
presents
Kathrin Thiele
A Different Difference – Difference Diffracted: Some Remarks on a Feminist (Post)humanist Ethics
5:30 p.m., Wednesday, 29 January 2014, Gellner Room
A different difference, providing us with an alternative model to binary, oppositional and antagonistic stratifications, is not only an ongoing ethico-political urgency in an increasingly differentiated and unequally globalized world. Envisioning a different difference so that processes of othering and exclusion, and the appropriation of difference into sameness are counteracted represents also one of the core motivations of feminist research and activism as such. In this lecture I read together the quantum-queer difference as diffraction that physicist-philosopher Karen Barad has developed in her ‘ethics of mattering’ and the ‘feminine different difference’ that artist-philosopher Bracha L. Ettinger explicates in her theory-practice of the matrixial border space. I inquire into the ethos of diffraction as primary relatedness-in-difference and discuss the potential of such different difference or difference diffracted for a feminist (post)humanist ethics.
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Dr. Kathrin Thiele is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies in the Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University. Her expertise lies in 20th century Continental Philosophy and in Feminisms of sexual difference, with current focus on contemporary feminist and queer theory, (New) Materialist Feminisms and Post-humanisms. She is currently working on a research project entitled ‘Differing Differences’: Relational Ontologies in Feminist Philosophy, Science, and Art’. Her book publications are The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (Berlin 2008), HAPPY DAYS: Lebenswissen nach Cavell (hrsg. mit K. Trüstedt, München 2009), Biopolitische Konstellationen (hrsg. mit M. Muhle, Berlin 2010). Her work appears also in academic journals such as Deleuze Studies, Parallax, and Women: A Cultural Review.