PhD Oral Exam - Nora Fulton, English

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the two most influential interpretations of “the event” in 20th century philosophy—that of Martin Heidegger and that of Alain Badiou—articulate a pair of views (appropriation and traversal, respectively) which have come to dominate our understanding of transition, or the capacity of sex, gender, and identity to change. Being and Transition tracks the development of these views and the metaphysics of change that ground them, especially as they pertain to the trans subject, or that subject (transgender, transsexual) who undergoes a transition, by enquiring into the way that both Heidegger and Badiou drew their theories of the event from experiences of what they called “transition” in their own thinking. As I show, both the appropriation and the traversal views abandon the idea of radical change that the concept of the event is supposed to open. I apply these views to fields of literature and art wherein radical change remains the question, reading the works of Laura Riding, Catherine Christer Hennix, and others. I advocate for a return to a discourse that can think the ontological claims of the trans subject, which the appropriation and traversal views fail to do. In the process, I outline what I consider to be a new supervention of sexual difference, active but undertheorized in philosophy, trans studies, queer theory, and politics today: a modal difference, or differential relation to change, which renders the split between trans and cis subjectivity a precondition for any thought of sex, gender, and identity.