Books by Rebecca Hill
Journal Articles by Rebecca Hill
Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy, 2022
This article strives to connect Henri Bergson’s intuition of duration as the basis for thinking ... more This article strives to connect Henri Bergson’s intuition of duration as the basis for thinking the universe as an enduring Whole in Creative Evolution with the teaching of feeling articulated by the Australian Indigenous elder Bill Neidjie in his book, Story About Feeling.1 This is a difficult relation to engender because these two thinkers belong to vastly different traditions and each thinker elaborates a conceptual world that is irreducible to the world of the other. The reasons that I wish to connect their thinking are political and ethical as well as philosophical. For all of the differences between Neidjie and Bergson, both thinkers elaborate rigorous methods for thinking as participation in the rhythms of life. Each thinker in his own way, teaches that participation in the rhythms of life is participation in the love of the world, the love of becoming, the love of the places in which we live and that we are. These teachings are crucially important in an age increasingly pervaded by nihilism, regression into xenophobic fantasies and wall building.
Overland , 2022
Behrouz Boochani’s novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and his collaborative film with Arash... more Behrouz Boochani’s novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and his collaborative film with Arash Sarvesanti, Chauka Please Tell Us the Time (2019) are vivid and poetic descriptions of Australia’s offshore immigration detention industry. Much more than descriptions of this murderous system, these works constitute artistic and philosophical resistance to the system—a system that Boochani calls Manus Prison Theory. These works of art transgress the system through their open and respectful representations of the living milieus of Manus Island as they exist, beyond the colonial grip of the Australian regime of immigration detention. The relationship between Chauka birds, the jungle of Manus and human beings in this novel and film are revealing of Boochani’s philosophy of life—Chauka birds, the Manus jungle and human beings are not objectified in Boochani’s art; they are subjects and they resist and exceed Manus Prison Theory.
Sydney Review of Books, 2022
This essay focuses on Irigaray’s appropriation of Lévi-Strauss to describe western patriarchy and... more This essay focuses on Irigaray’s appropriation of Lévi-Strauss to describe western patriarchy and the implications of her philosophy of sexual difference for rethinking western kinship. Irigaray’s postulation of non-hierarchical sexual difference does not abolish the dominant western model of kinship. It does, however, profoundly modify its structuration so that the exchange of women would no longer be possible. In short, Irigaray argues for an irreducible interval between masculine and feminine subjects, which would allow each sex to enter alliances with another sex and to remain as a specific sexuate subject. I argue that an attentive reading of Irigaray also reveals the interval as a foundational threshold for queer and trans subjects in relation to themselves and in relationships with others.
philosophia, 2020
Review of Astrida Neimanis' book Bodies for Water. It was published in philosophia in 2020.
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2017
Elizabeth Grosz is the author of ten books and an influential contributor
to the elaboration of t... more Elizabeth Grosz is the author of ten books and an influential contributor
to the elaboration of the philosophy of difference and feminist thinking on sexual difference. Rebecca Hill, one of the co-editors of this special issue, invited Grosz to speak further about some central concepts and themes in her two most recent books, Becoming Undone and The Incorporeal and the article ‘Irigaray, the Untimely, and the Constitution of an Onto-Ethics’. The interview was conducted in November 2016.
Australian Feminist Law Journal, 2017
Drawing on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and sexual difference feminism, this article elabor... more Drawing on Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and sexual difference feminism, this article elaborates a figuration of sexual difference as different tendencies in the evolution of life on Earth. While Bergson’s philosophy is not feminist, his durational account of evolution articulates a cluster of concepts that offer significant insight into the effort to theorize sexual difference both in human beings and in many forms of life on Earth. I argue that Bergson’s concepts of duration, the élan vital, the virtual, the actual and the process of actualization can be taken up as a way to figure sexual differentiation as a fundamental tendency in the evolution of life without construing sexual difference hierarchically and without rendering sexual difference as a static universal. In the context of thinking the sexuate status of humanity, a Bergsonian conceptualization of sexual difference as evolving tendencies, which generates actualizations of sexed specificity, overcomes a normative position in which woman and man are conceived in terms of fixed attributes that are proper to each sex. Feminist thinking should affirm the diverging actualizations of sexed specificity and embrace the tremendous variety of articulations of female, male and intersexuality within the human species and within the human individual without hierarchizing certain actualizations over others and without claiming that there is a proper way to be a specific sex.
Luce Irigaray's project elaborates an original concept of sexual difference. While this concept i... more Luce Irigaray's project elaborates an original concept of sexual difference. While this concept is widely discussed in feminist philosophy, there are multiple readings of sexual difference and some of these are contradictory. This essay surveys the various readings of sexual difference in English. Foci include the debate over the status of essentialism, ontology, and the controversy over the primacy of sexual difference, including discussion of whether her oeuvre marginalizes differences of race and sexuality. I conclude by arguing that her thinking of difference is open to the future and non-totalisable in principle. This means that, difference, the concept at the heart of her thinking of sexual difference, cannot be primarily oriented toward engendering sexual difference because it is necessarily open to engendering relations that cannot be predicted.
Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentric subject’s implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “... more Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentric subject’s implicit dependence on the maternal-feminine “outside” is compelling. Her postulation of nonhierarchical sexual difference gives the
relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject’s worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject’s sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus.
Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference
constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll’s thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray’s concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson.
Book Chapters by Rebecca Hill
What is Sexual Difference?, 2023
Chapter 15 of the edited collection What is Sexual Difference? edited by Mary Rawlinson and James... more Chapter 15 of the edited collection What is Sexual Difference? edited by Mary Rawlinson and James Sares.
Reads Irigaray's thinking of place and interval in relation to the teaching of feeling with Country elaborated by Bujitj clan elder Bill Neidjie. Both writers think against extractivism and global technicity
Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love.Ed Gail Schwab. SUNY Press, 2020
Antiquities Beyond Humanism, 2019
[Introduction]
This chapter affirms a thinking of time as difference. It does not claim to figure... more [Introduction]
This chapter affirms a thinking of time as difference. It does not claim to figure time as such, because whatever time is, time remains essentially in excess of figuration. Instead this chapter elaborates instances of the effort to think time as difference in Aristotle, Bergson and Irigaray. I suggest that each of these philosophers affirms fundamentally elusive nature of time while also articulating valuable ideas for thinking time as difference. Given that time remains beyond presentation, these ideas remain necessarily figural.
This chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s critical description of the maternal-feminine and the profound... more This chapter reads Luce Irigaray’s critical description of the maternal-feminine and the profoundly vulnerable nature of man’s limits in phallocentrism with Avital Ronell’s analysis of the maternal cartography of the battlefield and the home front in the Gulf War prosecuted by the United States against Iraq in 1992 (Ronell, 1994). For Ronell, perhaps all wars and all forms of paranoid aggression are motivated by a desire to control the space of the maternal body. To overcome paranoid aggression, Ronell calls for a relinquishment of the concept of proper place and an effort to generate an atopical community where the other is genuinely anticipated. In contrast, I draw on Irigaray and Aristotle to argue that the effort to escape the violent conflation of the maternal with space requires a concept of place. Place must be affirmed as the interval (Irigaray, 1993; Aristotle, 1983). This claim is by no means alien to Ronell’s position. Where the space of maternal cartography is construed as present to thought, quantifiable in the phallocentric logic of warfare, national defence and the insecure positing of the subject, the threshold of the interval is a place of open potentiality, a place in which the other is to come.
Co-Edited Book by Rebecca Hill
Philosophies of Difference engages with the concept of difference in relation to a number of fund... more Philosophies of Difference engages with the concept of difference in relation to a number of fundamental philosophical and political problems. Insisting on the inseparability of ontology, ethics and politics, the essays and interview in this volume offer original and timely approaches to thinking nature, sexuate difference, racism, and decoloniality. The collection draws on a range of sources, including Latin American Indigenous ontologies and philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Mills, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.
The contributors think embodiment and life by bringing continental philosophy into generative dialogue with fields including plant studies, animal studies, decoloniality, feminist theory, philosophy of race, and law. Affirming the importance of interdisciplinarity, Philosophies of Difference contributes to a creative and critical intervention into established norms, limits, and categories. Invoking a conception of difference as both constitutive and generative, this collection offers new and important insights into how a rethinking of difference may ground new and more ethical modes of being and being-with. Philosophies of Difference unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of relationality, and for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in Australian Feminist Law Journal.
Public Philosophy by Rebecca Hill
Arts Cabinet, 2023
This essay is a response to the generous invitation of Svetlana Sequeira Costa to write a piece t... more This essay is a response to the generous invitation of Svetlana Sequeira Costa to write a piece that relates my thinking on the concept of the interval to the artists’ contributions that make up the Ways Into Knowing Editorial.
The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) are a Melbourne-based group of scholars that working i... more The Philosophies of Difference group (PoD) are a Melbourne-based group of scholars that working in continental philosophy and interested in problems that have been marginal to the dominant traditions of Western thought.
We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, critical Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy.
PoD hosts a mix of face to face and free public lectures and online seminars.
To join our mailing list at: philosophiesofdifference@gmail.com
Follow us: https://www.facebook.com/Philosophiesofdifference
PoD was founded by Ryan Gustafsson, Helen Ngo and Rebecca Hill in 2016. Since 2020, PoD has been in partnership with RMIT's non/fiction Lab
https://www.rmit.edu.au/research/centres-collaborations/nonfictionlab
The Philosopher's Zone, 2020
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Books by Rebecca Hill
Journal Articles by Rebecca Hill
to the elaboration of the philosophy of difference and feminist thinking on sexual difference. Rebecca Hill, one of the co-editors of this special issue, invited Grosz to speak further about some central concepts and themes in her two most recent books, Becoming Undone and The Incorporeal and the article ‘Irigaray, the Untimely, and the Constitution of an Onto-Ethics’. The interview was conducted in November 2016.
relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject’s worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject’s sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus.
Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference
constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll’s thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray’s concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson.
Book Chapters by Rebecca Hill
Reads Irigaray's thinking of place and interval in relation to the teaching of feeling with Country elaborated by Bujitj clan elder Bill Neidjie. Both writers think against extractivism and global technicity
This chapter affirms a thinking of time as difference. It does not claim to figure time as such, because whatever time is, time remains essentially in excess of figuration. Instead this chapter elaborates instances of the effort to think time as difference in Aristotle, Bergson and Irigaray. I suggest that each of these philosophers affirms fundamentally elusive nature of time while also articulating valuable ideas for thinking time as difference. Given that time remains beyond presentation, these ideas remain necessarily figural.
Co-Edited Book by Rebecca Hill
The contributors think embodiment and life by bringing continental philosophy into generative dialogue with fields including plant studies, animal studies, decoloniality, feminist theory, philosophy of race, and law. Affirming the importance of interdisciplinarity, Philosophies of Difference contributes to a creative and critical intervention into established norms, limits, and categories. Invoking a conception of difference as both constitutive and generative, this collection offers new and important insights into how a rethinking of difference may ground new and more ethical modes of being and being-with. Philosophies of Difference unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of relationality, and for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in Australian Feminist Law Journal.
Public Philosophy by Rebecca Hill
We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, critical Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy.
PoD hosts a mix of face to face and free public lectures and online seminars.
To join our mailing list at: philosophiesofdifference@gmail.com
Follow us: https://www.facebook.com/Philosophiesofdifference
PoD was founded by Ryan Gustafsson, Helen Ngo and Rebecca Hill in 2016. Since 2020, PoD has been in partnership with RMIT's non/fiction Lab
https://www.rmit.edu.au/research/centres-collaborations/nonfictionlab
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/derrida-and-the-text/12748986
to the elaboration of the philosophy of difference and feminist thinking on sexual difference. Rebecca Hill, one of the co-editors of this special issue, invited Grosz to speak further about some central concepts and themes in her two most recent books, Becoming Undone and The Incorporeal and the article ‘Irigaray, the Untimely, and the Constitution of an Onto-Ethics’. The interview was conducted in November 2016.
relational world of woman specificity and Irigaray brings the subject’s worldview to earth as merely the relation of the male human to the world. But the focus of her transvaluation remains largely anthropocentric; and she maintains too many aspects of the privilege of the subject’s sovereignty as proper to male subjectivity. I suggest that, we need to extend Irigaray and to think sexual difference beyond the human. Drawing from Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson and Jakob Von Uexküll, I argue that we need to think life beyond the constitution of the organism as the continuous enmeshment of different milieus.
Sexual difference is a force of differentiation that articulates relationships between organisms and organs as crucial aspects of many milieus that make up the Earth. Along with the sexually differentiated aspects of milieus, there are rhythms of difference
constitutive of milieus that are not sexed. The first section of the essay describes Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexual difference between humans. Then I turn to her engagement with the status of nonhuman animals in “Animal Compassion.” I suggest her approach in this essay is too anthropocentric and move to a discussion of Uexküll’s thinking on milieus as a way to extend the concepts of difference and sexual difference into posthuman contexts. The essay concludes by reading Irigaray’s concept of difference with Deleuze and Bergson.
Reads Irigaray's thinking of place and interval in relation to the teaching of feeling with Country elaborated by Bujitj clan elder Bill Neidjie. Both writers think against extractivism and global technicity
This chapter affirms a thinking of time as difference. It does not claim to figure time as such, because whatever time is, time remains essentially in excess of figuration. Instead this chapter elaborates instances of the effort to think time as difference in Aristotle, Bergson and Irigaray. I suggest that each of these philosophers affirms fundamentally elusive nature of time while also articulating valuable ideas for thinking time as difference. Given that time remains beyond presentation, these ideas remain necessarily figural.
The contributors think embodiment and life by bringing continental philosophy into generative dialogue with fields including plant studies, animal studies, decoloniality, feminist theory, philosophy of race, and law. Affirming the importance of interdisciplinarity, Philosophies of Difference contributes to a creative and critical intervention into established norms, limits, and categories. Invoking a conception of difference as both constitutive and generative, this collection offers new and important insights into how a rethinking of difference may ground new and more ethical modes of being and being-with. Philosophies of Difference unearths the constructive possibilities of difference for an ethics of relationality, and for elaborating non-anthropocentric sociality.
The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue in Australian Feminist Law Journal.
We engage with approaches including: critical philosophy of race, decolonial thought, feminist theory, critical Indigenous studies, philosophy of disability, philosophy of nature, queer theory, and trans philosophy.
PoD hosts a mix of face to face and free public lectures and online seminars.
To join our mailing list at: philosophiesofdifference@gmail.com
Follow us: https://www.facebook.com/Philosophiesofdifference
PoD was founded by Ryan Gustafsson, Helen Ngo and Rebecca Hill in 2016. Since 2020, PoD has been in partnership with RMIT's non/fiction Lab
https://www.rmit.edu.au/research/centres-collaborations/nonfictionlab
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/derrida-and-the-text/12748986
The film is composed of responses and readings of Pierre Guyotat's work by a number of Melbourne-based artists and writers. My response to Guyotat's novel _Eden, Eden, Eden_ begins at 17:30 minutes.
https://www.floodprojects.com/eden-eden-eden
Scroll down to the second film on the webpage.
Hemmerdinger Hall, The Silver Center for Arts & Science, New York University