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In her 2007 monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad introduces her reader to a world of movement and flux, where bodies ceaselessly participate in their own material configuration, where bodily integrity and identity is entangled in the dynamic materialisation of its social and political significance, and where processes of understanding and meaning making are bound up in ‘an ongoing performance of the world in its differential dance of intelligibility and unintelligibility’ (2007: 149). Through her reading of Niels Bohr's ‘philosophy-physics’, Barad introduces us to a quantum universe that poses some counterintuitive challenges to the modernist worldview which understands matter to be determinate and measurable, or that may quietly preserve something of matter's evidence against culture's symbolic dexterity. In advancing her agential realist account, Baradmoves beyond anthropocentric constraints to conceive of the world in its ‘extraordinary liveliness’ (2007: 91), an enlarged and productive scene of agency engaged in an ongoing performance of its own intelligibility, articulating itself differently. With the suggestion that agency is extended beyond the framework that assigns it to the intentions and accountability of the human subject, Barad offers a powerful rethinking of the politics and ethics of identity in her claim that the ethical call is ‘embodied in the very worlding of the world’ (2007: 160). In this paper I undertake a close reading of Barad's argument to consider its implications for how we might conceive a corporeal ethics that accounts for the production of inequalities and exclusions within the very becoming of the world, and becoming embodied. In the process, I argue that through asomatechnical unfolding of matter, the experimental apparatus, and concept, Barad prompts some challenging considerations for feminist approaches to what ‘the ethical’ constitutes or should achieve.

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay "Divine Women" to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited. THINKING COMMUNITYIn recent decades, feminist scholarship has engaged robustly with what it perceives to be the problematic nature of thought, reason, and knowledge-production, taking up questions of subjectivity and identity quite forcibly through its critique of these categories in an attempt to rethink the thinking subject as an embodied subject. Taking its cue from Luce Irigaray's foregrounding of female specificity, and deeply influenced by her formative work on sexual difference, a generation of feminists has sought to successfully undermine the principles of disembodied, rational subjectivity modeled on Ren e Descartes's cogito, the subject wholly constituted by thought in its irreducible self-presence. As one of Irigaray's most forceful arguments has demonstrated,