Text page
A Requiem to Sexual Difference; A Response to Luciana Parisi's ‘Event and Evolution.'
A response essay that uses Parisi to reopen the problem of sexual difference once bodies, events, and technics are treated as process rather than essence.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages are crucial because they show how the section's most demanding philosophical line works. Event and evolution are treated as processual relays through which bodies, sensation, and difference are continually composed.
The pages operate by refusing a simple split between matter and abstraction. Technical processes and lived embodiment are forced into the same frame, which changes how difference itself can be described.
That matters because this is where the section most clearly exceeds scene history and becomes a serious metaphysics of technical subjectivity. It is also where later xenofeminist arguments inherit some of their most difficult material.
How to read this text
Read for how event is made to precede stable identity. Once that shift is clear, the account of bodies and difference becomes much easier to follow.
Track where process is treated as both material and conceptual. That crossing is the core of the page's force.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
A REQUIEM TO SEXUAL DIFFERENCE: A RESPONSE TO LUCIANA PARISI’S “EVENT AND EVOLUTION” Jami Weinstein abstract: Aside from constructing a compelling case for how rereading evolution from a neomaterialist and radical empiricist perspective undermines an enduring binary of sexual difference, Luciana Parisi underscores a tension in the work of Elizabeth Grosz, known both for her novel, feminist, neomaterialist study of Darwin- ian evolution and her staunch support of sexual difference.
Definition · paragraph 11
I, too, share Parisi’s concern and conclusion that “for sexual difference to be thought in evolution, it cannot remain an eternal form of sex but must go through a radical becoming, a cut from a form of sex that is as complete as stratified sex” (156), as this binary form of sex is not enduring but an accidental evolutionary event.
Definition · paragraph 14
As she describes it, “sex and sexual differences are events” and “technocultural, ethico-aesthetic, sociopolitical assemblages” and that “these events are not simply linked to historical/epistemological contingen- cies determined by scientific thought but are, above all, linked to the infinite potentialities of matter to become and form anew as indicated by evolution- ary theories” (147).
Mechanism · paragraph 1
Theory sex produces vibrations and disso- nance, which reproduce or chart lines of flight toward theories like Parisi’s. These vibrations compose the requiem both honoring and retaining the virtual legacy of sexual difference into the future.sjp_27 165..187 Any respondent charged with the task of addressing Luciana Parisi’s paper, “Event and Evolution,” would find herself faced with an
History · paragraph 1
These vibrations compose the requiem both honoring and retaining the virtual legacy of sexual difference into the future.sjp_27 165..187 Any respondent charged with the task of addressing Luciana Parisi’s paper, “Event and Evolution,” would find herself faced with an embarrassment of riches.
Appears in sections
Cyberfeminism, Xenofeminism, and Technical Subjects Primary section
Sadie Plant, Amy Ireland, and the technical, gendered, and synthetic subject positions running through the archive.