Abstract
<jats:p>The concept of sexual difference encompassing the biological, linguistic, and cultural aspects of sex, is a tool for revealing the gendered foundations of the understandings of subject, substance, and representation in Western thought. This book examines the ideas of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray together because they represent two distinct yet complementary approaches that fundamentally question modern Western philosophys grasp of subject, body, and gender. Although both thinkers use different methods and conceptual tools, they hold a transformative position in philosophical history by demonstrating that the universal subject was, in fact, shaped around a masculine image. The first chapter of the book serves as an introduction to feminist approaches that emphasize the importance of equality and difference. In the second chapter, Beauvoirs intellectual relationship with Hegel and Sartre is analyzed through her understanding of freedom and subjectivity. According to Beauvoir, the status of women, who have historically been positioned as the Other, is determined by their condemnation to immanence against the mens transcendent subject. The third chapter evaluates Irigarays psychoanalytic heritage, inherited from Freud and Lacan, in the context of the unrepresentability of the feminine difference. Irigaray argues that Western metaphysics, starting from its critique of being a metaphysics of sameness and substance, fixes both the subject and the other within a singular economy of meaning, thereby excluding the linguistic and cognitive possibilities of the feminine. Consequently, the comparison of these two thinkers, in terms of the search for reciprocity within an asymmetric dialectic and the claim that this dialectic itself is based on a monological signifying structure, offers a philosophical point of critique by considering sexual difference not merely as an indicator of social inequality, but as an ontological openness. Keywords: Sexual Difference; Subjectivity; Substance Metaphysics; Beauvoir; Irigaray; Sameness; Otherness</jats:p>