The Geschlecht Complex: Addressing Untranslatable Aspects of Gender, Genre, and Ontology

The notion of Geschlecht—denoting gender, genre, kinship, kind, species, and more—exemplifies the most pertinent questions of the transnational and transdisciplinary structures of contemporary humanities: What happens when texts, things, and concepts are transferred or displaced from one language, tradition, or form to another? What is readily transposed, what is resistant to move, and what emerges as new?
Drawing on Barbara Cassin’s philosophy of untranslatability, scholars contributing to The Geschlecht Complex examine old queries into the ontological powers of naming in connection with concerns central to contemporary humanistic thought. Combining detailed case studies of concrete “category problems” in literature, philosophy, theatre, media, cinema, and performing arts with excerpts from canonical texts—by notable, field-defining thinkers such as Derrida, Malabou, Nancy, and Irigaray—the volume presents “the Geschlecht complex” as a fulcrum for any interpretive endeavor, as an invaluable mode of thought for the present and inevitable complexities of theorizing in the 21st century.