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Leo Strauss and the Challenges of Sex

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Leo Strauss and the Challenges of Sex (EN)
Bauer, Edgar
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Peer-reviewed Article (EN)
2024-05-22
Although Leo Strauss (1899-1973) considered the binary distribution of sexuality a cornerstone of his political philosophy, a close reading of his essays reveals his awareness that traces of an androgynous conception of sexuality had survived in the foundational texts of the Hebrew and Greek tradition. The challenge posed by this contrarian view of sexual difference to Strauss’ anthropological premises remained without systematic consequences for his overall philosophical project. Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that Strauss conspicuously overlooked the groundbreaking challenge that defrocked monk and philosophical martyr Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) posed to binary sexuality. For the first time in European intellectual history, Bruno dissolved the man/woman hiatus for the sake of positing gradual, individual differentials within the male/female polarity. As regards his contemporaries, it is noteworthy that Strauss passed away the year before a young Jewish woman named Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) published her initial book titled Woman Hating, a radical advocacy of feminism culminating in a theory of universal androgyny. It is safe to assume that Strauss, if given a chance, would have discarded the challenge posed by Dworkin’s Heraclitean design to lay out a sexual ontology that does away with the arbitrary fixities of patriarchy and welcomes the disruptive presence of androgynes. (EN)
hermaphroditism (EN)
Nature (EN)
androgyny (EN)
memory (EN)
Creation (EN)
historicism (EN)
sexuality (EN)
Enlightenment (EN)
heterosexuality/homosexuality (EN)
sexual difference (EN)
sexual continuum (EN)
feminism/antifeminism (EN)
bisexuality (EN)
writing and the writer (EN)
Judaism (EN)
political philosophy (EN)
individuality (EN)
man/woman binary (EN)
ontology (EN)
patriarchy (EN)
sex/gender (EN)
English
Τμήμα Διοικητικής Επιστήμης και Τεχνολογίας, Πανεπιστήμιο Δυτικής Μακεδονίας (EN)
2459-413X
2732-7507
dianoesis; Vol. 12 (2022): Issue 12 – Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy, Natural Right, History; 29-108 (EN)
Copyright (c) 2024 dianoesis (EN)
University of West Attica
Dia-noesis – A Journal of Philosophy 
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