Desire beyond Identity

""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