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Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Donovan O. Schaefer
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Abstract

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re‐explain Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory.

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Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , Spring 2014, pp. 371 - 387
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Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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