In the essay ‘Sexual Differing’ from their book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin develop their new materialist take on sexual difference through their rereading of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I propose to read this essay as deploying the ‘analytical tool’ of ‘jumping generations’ articulated in the homonymous paper by van der Tuin as signature of the ‘new materialist’ ‘third wave’ of feminist theory. By pointing to the immediate textual context of the passages from The Second Sex quoted in ‘Sexual Differing’, to the philosophical underpinning of Beauvoir's work, and to the historical context of its reception, I argue that while the tool of ‘jumping generations’, as put to use in ‘Sexual Differing’, might produce unexpected outcomes, it also risks confining to dusty feminist archives segments of feminist philosophy that might still be relevant for thinking gendered oppression and liberation today: Beauvoir's understanding of the social ontogenesis of freedom, the collective and egalitarian nature of political transformation and the genealogy of materialist feminist thought theoretically and historically linked to Beauvoir and The Second Sex. The issue is not merely one of historical and theoretical accuracy, but of enabling a capacious materialist analysis of gendered oppression and liberation. I conclude by pointing at how Dolphijn and van der Tuin's approach expressly discards understandings of history and scholarship that it nevertheless necessarily performs, and propose that this can be taken as a starting point to rethink sexual differing in terms of a political and ethical commitment beyond its originary metaphysical new materialist articulation. This is where, I propose, the above-mentioned conceptual resources linked to The Second Sex and muted by ‘Sexual Differing’ could prove fruitful, and timely.

中文翻译：

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不可思议的概念，看不见的谱系：重读《第二性》的新唯物主义重读

在《新唯物主义：访谈和制图》一书中的“性差异”一文中，里克·多尔菲因和艾里斯·范德图恩通过重读西蒙娜·德·波伏娃的《第二性》，发展了他们对性别差异的新唯物主义看法。我建议将这篇文章解读为部署了范德图因的同名论文中所阐述的“跨代”的“分析工具”，作为“新唯物主义”“第三波”女权主义理论的签名。通过指向“性的不同”中引用的第二性中的段落的直接文本背景，波伏娃作品的哲学基础，以及其接受的历史背景，我认为，虽然“跳跃世代”的工具，在“性差异”中使用，可能会产生意想不到的结果，它也有可能被局限在尘土飞扬的女权主义档案中 女权主义哲学中可能仍然与今天思考性别压迫和解放相关的部分：波伏娃对自由的社会本体发生的理解、政治转型的集体和平等本质以及理论上的唯物主义女权主义思想的谱系历史上与波伏娃和第二性有关。这个问题不仅是历史和理论的准确性，而且是对性别压迫和解放进行广泛的唯物主义分析。最后，我指出 Dolphijn 和 van der Tuin 的方法如何明确地摒弃对历史和学术的理解，但它仍然必须执行，并建议可以将此作为一个起点，从政治和伦理承诺的角度重新思考性别差异，超越其原始的形而上学新唯物主义表达。在这里，我建议，上述与第二性相关并被“性差异”静音的概念资源可以证明是富有成效的，也是及时的。