Mirages of Transition: Derrida and Malabou’s Search for a Heideggerian Sex

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes various attempts on the part of continental philosophers to locate a thinking of sex in the work of Martin Heidegger. Its analysis centers mainly on those attempts made by Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, who read into Heidegger discourses of sexual difference and sex change, respectively. This article shows how such attempts—which challenge the conventional assumption of the absence of such figures in Heidegger’s writings, as well as Heidegger’s own insistence upon the irrelevance of sex as such to the study of fundamental ontology—are in fact concerned less with locating a Heideggerian view on sex and gender, and more with barring the ontological capacity for change from sex and gender as forms of identity, let alone modes of being in general.