Online research in philosophy

A personal note : equal or different? -- The neglect of female genealogies -- Religious and civil myths -- Women's discourse and men's discourse -- On the maternal order -- The culture of difference -- Writing as a woman -- "I won't get AIDS" -- Linguistic sexes and genders -- The right to life -- Why define sexed rights? -- "More women than men" -- Your health : what, or who, is it? -- How can we create our beauty? -- (...) How old are you? -- The cost of words -- So when are we to become women? (shrink)

The author interprets idolatry, totemism, sacrilege and taboo through her theory of sexual difference and her study of Eastern spirituality. She argues that the taboo on spirituality in Western culture has cancelled difference, resulting in our current forms of idolatry. Preserving difference, however, would allow the transcendence of the human other to exist. The task of learning to respect difference is central to human spirituality and spiritual progression. The article is a translation of “La transcendance de l’autre” in Autour d’idôlatrie: (...) figures actuelles de pouvoir et de domination, Ed. Bernard Van Meenen, Publications des Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels: 2003. (shrink)

This collection of key writings, selected by Luce Irigaray herself, presents a complete picture of her work to date across the fields of Philosophy, Linguistics ...

In this essay, which is preceded by an interview with the translator, the author revisits her earlier critique of Merleau-Ponty’s privileging of the visible, but also takes further her own thinking by drawing specifically on the issues raised within the context of painting. The focal point of her discussion is Merleau-Ponty’s essay, “Eye and Mind.”.

French theorist 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) 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. (shrink)

In I Love to You , Luce Irigaray moves from the critique of patriarchy to an exploration of the ground for a possible inter-subjectivity between the two sexes. Continuing her rejection of demands for equality, Irigaray poses the question: how can we move to a new era of sexual difference in which women and men establish lasting relations with one another without reducing the other to the status of object? Drawing upon Hegel, Irigaray proposes a dialectic appropriate to each sex (...) as well as a dialectic of their relation. She argues for what she calls "sexed rights" and a right of persons based on the right to life, not the right to property. Using the results of her research into the sexing of language, Irigaray analyzes how women seek communication in discourse with the other--an other, pre-occupied with his abstract or concrete object, who does not respond. She proposes another syntax for communication, one that does not incorporate the other as the object of the subject but allows for an indirect relation. Thus "I love to you" replaces "I love you." In Irigaray's vision of the happiness possible in sexual difference, the love between a man and a woman finds its "reason" not in property or children, but in its own place within the couple. Arguing passionately for a new language of personal relations, I Love to You looks toward a future where nihilism can be overcome by "love in sexual difference.". (shrink)

This collection consists of lectures given at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. They were delivered under the provisions of the Jan Tin- bergen Chair, ...

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.

"Sorcerer Love" is the name that Luce Irigaray gives to the demonic function of love as presented in Plato's Symposium. She argues that Socrates there attributes two incompatible positions to Diotima, who in any case is not present at the banquet. The first is that love is a mid-point or intermediary between lovers which also teaches immortality. The second is that love is a means to the end and duty of procreation, and thus is a mere means to immortality through (...) which the lovers lose one another. Irigaray argues in favor of the first position, a conception of love as demonic intermediary. E.K. (shrink)

The premise of this paper is that the language of science, like language in general, is neither asexual nor neutral. The essay demonstrates the various ways in which the non-neutrality of the subject of science is expressed and proposes that there is a need to analyze the laws that determine the acceptability of language and discourse in order to interpret their connection to a sexed logic. C.B.