Luce Irigaray

In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.

This Sex which is Not One

A radically subversive critique brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own. -- "Women's Review of Books"

Speculum of the Other Woman

Irigaray offers the clearest available introduction to her own work. Focusing on power, women, gender and patriarchal mythologies, she lays out what for her has become the central problem for women in the modern world.

Je, Tu, Nous

Published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Luce Irigaray links the interrogation of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with a pre-Socratic investigation of the elements. Irigaray undertakes to interrogate Nietzche, the grandfather of poststructuralist philosophy, from the point of view of water. According to Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears most. She uses this element in her narrative because for her there is a complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid. Irigaray's method is to engage in an amorous dialogue with the male philosopher. In this dialogue, she ruptures conventional discourse and writes in a lyrical style that defies distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy.

Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche

Michael Marder

Two Philosophical Perspectives

Through Vegetal Being

The Way of Love asks the question: How can we love each other? Here Luce Irigaray, one of the world's foremost philosophers, presents an extraordinary exploration of desire and the human heart. If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. We still lack words, gestures, ways of doing or thinking to approach one another as humans, to enter into dialogue, to build a world where we can live together.

Way of Love

Camille Collins

Sylvere Lotringer

Why Different?

Elemental Passions (European Thought)

To Speak is Never Neutral' presents a vital selection of the range of Luce Irigaray's writings, revealing the origin and development of many ideas central to her thought. The earliest essays included here reveal Irigaray's debt to structural linguistics and deconstruction drawn from her initial studies in the language of schizophrenia. The later essays present Irigaray's highly original explorations of psychoanalysis and language. Seminal essays published here include The Rape of the Letter, Sex as Sign, the Setting in Psychoanalysis, The Poverty of Psychoanalysis, The Language of Man, The Limits of Transference and In Science, Is the Subject Sexed.

To Speak is Never Neutral

Luce Irigaray reflects on three critical concerns of our time: the cultivation of energy in its many forms, the integration of Asian and Western traditions, and the reenvisioning of religious figures for the contemporary world. A philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, Irigaray draws deeply on her personal experience in addressing these questions.

Beyond East and West

A New Culture of Energy

Irigaray approaches the question of sexual difference by looking at the ways in which thought and language--whether in philosophy, science, or psychoanalysis--are gendered.

An Ethics of Sexual Difference

French philosopher Luce Irigaray has become one of the twentieth century's most influential feminist thinkers. Among her many writings are three books (with a projected fourth) in which she challenges the Western tradition's construals of human beings' relations to the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—and to nature. In answer to Heidegger's undoing of Western metaphysics as a "forgetting of Being," Irigaray seeks in this work to begin to think out the Being of sexedness and the sexedness of Being. This volume is the first English translation of L'oubli de l'air chez Martin Heidegger (1983). In this complex, lyrical, meditative engagement with the later work of the eminent German philosopher, Irigaray critiques Heidegger's emphasis on the element of earth as the ground of life and speech and his "oblivion" or forgetting of air. With the other volumes (Elemental Passions and Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche, published elsewhere) in Irigaray's "elemental" series, The Forgetting of Air offers a fundamental rereading of basic tenets in Western metaphysics. And with its emphasis on dwelling and human habitation, it will be important reading not only in the humanities but also in architecture and the environmental sciences.

The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger

In "Democracy Begins with Two" Luce Irigaray calls for a radical reconsideration of the so-called democratic bases of Western culture. In a series of essays covering the earlier 1990s she argues the urgent need for our society to grant full recognition to both the genders which contribute to its functioning. If we are to look on ourselves as fully democratic this recognition must take the form of specific civil rights guaranteeing women a separate civil identity of their own, equivalent to, though not simply the same as, that enjoyed by men. Ranging across topics as diverse as happiness, the family, the construction of the European Union, the transition from natural to civil existence and love, Irigaray exploits her resources as a writer - philosophical, linguistic, psychoanalytical, poetical -to their rhetorical limits. She interweaves her personal experience of an emotional and politico-professional partnership with her re-reading of History, past and present.

Democracy Begins Between Two

Le langage des déments

Whilst he broaches the theme of the difference between the sexes, Hegel does not go deep enough into the question of their mutual desire as a crucial stage in our becoming truly human. He ignores the dialectical process regarding sensitivity and sensuousness. And yet this is needed to make spiritual the relation between two human subjectivities differently determined by nature and to ensure the connection between body and spirit, nature and culture, private life and public life. This leads Hegel to fragment human subjectivity into yearnings for art, religion and philosophy thereby losing the unity attained through the cultivation of a longing for the absolute born of a desire for one another as different. Furthermore, our epoch of history is different from the Hegelian one and demands that we consider additional aspects of human subjectivity. This is essential if we are to overcome the nihilism inherent in our traditional metaphysics without falling into a worse nihilism due to a lack of rigorous thinking common today. The increasing power of technique and technologies as well as the task of building a world culture are two other challenges we face. Our sexuate belonging provides us with a universal living determination of our subjectivity – now a dual subjectivity - and also with a natural energy potential which allows us to use technical resources without becoming dependent on them.

Outline of a Dialectics of Sensitivity

Sharing the Fire

Mary Green

Luce Irigaray is one of the world's most important and influential contemporary theorists and this book presents a collection of essays exploring the full range of her work from an international team of academics in many different fields.

Teaching

Stephen Pluháček

Conversations is an important collection of interviews in which Luce Irigaray discusses the full range of her work and ideas with leading academics in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Feminist Theory and Critical Theory. Covering all the key topics that have been central to her work in the last thirty years, such as feminism, spirituality, difference, politics, education, and 'being two', this book offers essential insights into Irigaray's career as one of the world's most important contemporary thinkers. Topics and theorists approached include: philosophy, universality and difference, motherhood and gendered subjectivities, cultivation of desire and love, the other and others, globalization and ethics, politics and human rights, spirituality and religion, and, of course, being and becoming woman.

Conversations

In questo libro, cruciale per capire il suo percorso, Luce Irigaray interroga l’opera dei presocratici che sta alla radice della nostra cultura. Ricordandoci la storia di Ulisse e Antigone, dimostra come, fin dall’inizio, la tradizione occidentale rappresenti un esilio per l’umanità. Per emergere dall’origine materna, l’uomo ha elaborato un discorso di padronanza e ha costruito un mondo proprio che a poco a poco si è allontanato dalla vita, dalla sua coltivazione e condivisione. Tornare alla cultura greca delle origini è necessario per recuperare la nostra appartenenza naturale e imparare a coltivarla umanamente nel rispetto delle nostre differenze. Invece di un’astratta logica, occorre un linguaggio capace di esprimere un’energia vivente e di trasformare i nostri istinti in desideri condivisibili. L’arte diviene allora una mediazione indispensabile per un’altra evoluzione dell’umanità.

All’inizio, lei era

Sexes et genres à travers les langues est un travail scientifique accessible. Treize personnes y présentent et y commentent, avec des mots souvent peu techniques, les réponses de femmes et d’hommes à de petites questions posées sur le langage – en français, en anglais, en italien. La plupart y découvriront avec étonnement, amusement parfois, que les propos féminins et masculins sont très différents. Les rêves égalitaires concernant la différence sexuelle ou les arguments relatifs aux langues dites sans genre grammatical – tel l’anglais – ne résistent pas à un peu d’enquête. Hommes et femmes, ne parlent pas pareil, et les langues n’en parlent pas de la même manière. La possibilité de mieux se dire, dialoguer, échanger doit-elle venir d’une neutralisation des différences existantes ou d’un enrichissement encore futur des discours et des langues ? Plus de liberté et plus de conscience sexuelles permettent d’espérer la création de nouvelles valeurs plutôt que la simple réduction des marques sexuées. Et le désir de communiquer et de traduire d’une langue à l’autre devrait nous enrichir plus que nous appauvrir culturellement.

Luce Irigaray

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