Luce Irigaray

How do permanent artworks installed in public places shape the relations that take place around them? Drawing upon the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray I claim that two public artworks, Richard Serra’s Tilted Spheres (2002-2004) and a bronze casting of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman (1999) work to open up embodied being and to creatively transform reality. Serra’s work reveals an important aspect of public space, that of the space/time of the anonymous body, as well as the ways in which (...) a shared and hence relational embodied perception is necessary for dwelling. Bourgeois’ Maman reveals possibilities for helping us to think out what it might mean to share the same world even as we dwell in different worlds, in a space/time that we cultivate as our own. (shrink)

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The essays in this volume seek to resituate the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray both historically and in light of the demands of contemporary feminist theory by examining unexplored aspects of their thought. Authors also highlight the commonalties in thought between the two philosophers, articulating points of dialogue in logic, ethics, and politics.

I begin with the assumption that a philosophically significant tension exists today in feminist philosophy of religion between those subjects who seek to become divine and those who seek their identity in mutual recognition. My critical engagement with the ambiguous assertions of Luce Irigaray seeks to demonstrate, one the one hand, that a woman needs to recognize her own identity but, on the other hand, that each subject whether male or female must struggle in relation to the other in order (...) to maintain realism about life and death. No one can avoid the recognition that we are each given life but each of us also dies. In addition, I raise a more general, philosophical problem for analytic philosophers who attempt to read Continental philosophy of religion: how should philosophers interpret deliberately ambiguous assertions? For example, what does Irigaray mean in asserting. 'Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign'? To find an answer, I turn to the distinctively French readings of the Hegelian struggle for recognition which have preoccupied Continental philosophers especially since the first half of the last century. I explore the struggle for mutual recognition between womrn and men who must face the reality of life and death in order to avoid the projection of their fear of mortality onto the other sex. This includes a critical look at Irigaray's account of subjectivity and divinity. I turn to the French philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff in order to shift the focus from divinity to intersubjectivity. I conclude that taking seriously the struggle for mutual recognition between subjects forces contemporary philosophers of religion to be realist in their living and dying. With this in mind, the lesson from the Continent for philosophy of religion is that we must not stop yearning for recognition. Indeed, we must event risk our autonomy/divinity in seeking to recognize intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Traditional accounts of the feminist history of philosophy have viewed reason as associated with masculinity and subsequent debates have been framed by this assumption. Yet recent debates in deconstruction have shown that gender has never been a stable matter. In the history of philosophy 'female' and 'woman' are full of ambiguity. What does deconstruction have to offer feminist criticism of the history of philosophy? _Yielding Gender_ explores this question by examining three crucial areas; the issue of gender as 'troubled'; deconstruction; (...) and feminist criticism of the history of philosophy. The first part of the book discusses the work of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and contemporary French feminist philosophy including key figures such as Luce Irigiray. Particular attention is given to the possibilities offered by deconstruction for understanding the history of philosophy. The second part considers and then challenges feminist interpretations of some key figures in the history of philosophy. Penelope Deutscher sketches how Rousseau, St. Augustine and Simone de Beauvoir have described gender and argues that their readings of gender are in fact empowered by gender's own contradiction and instability rather than limited by it. (shrink)

_A compelling understanding of equality and difference in public life._.

Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille’s most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for understanding (...) the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation. Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst. (shrink)

Increasingly, feminist theorists, such as Alison Martin and Ellen T. Armour, are attending to the numerous religious allusions within texts by Luce Irigaray. Engaging with this scholarship, this paper focuses on the problematic of evil that is elaborated within Irigarayan texts. Mobilizing the work of Catherine Malabou, the paper argues that Malabou's methodology of reading, which she identifies as "plastic," illuminates the logic at work within Irigaray's deployment of sacred stories.

Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray’s philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray’s philosophy where she engages with Hegel’s dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of (...) love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray’s radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference—for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished. (shrink)

A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over Intolerance , the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph with The Birth of a Nation . Ishtar sits above Babylon’s royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so gigantic a scale that is diminishes the size of the goddess. Perhaps to establish Ishtar’s larger-than-life proportions, Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the movie . The director is the same size as the (...) sculptured grown man who sucks at Ishtar’s breast; both males are dwarfed by the goddess’ dimensions.Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will show us how. Michael Rogin is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville , and “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. (shrink)

L'égalité générale, c'est-à-dire l'égalité de tous envers tous, même si elle est préjugée favorablement, est difficilement réalisable à cause de notre pensée qui organise les différences en dichotomies et en oppositions hiérarchisées. Quand on examine des discours écrits par des femmes cherchant à définir la différence de la femme, on aperçoit de manière patente cette difficulté à nommer la différence. En comparant un texte de E. Harding, psychanalyste jungienne et un texte de M. Montrelay, psychanalyste lacanienne, on constate que malgré (...) des provenances théoriques et historiques éloignées, le féminin n'est dit qu'en référence au masculin. Avec notre mode de pensée , le désir d'égalité générale s'avère vélléitaire. Seul un discours éclaté qui donne lieu aux différences permettrait une mentalité égalitaire.Equality, when it is understood as equality for all, even though it is judged favorably in general, is hardly realisable because of the structure of our thinking that organizes the differences in dichotomies and in hierarchical oppositions. When we examine the discourses written by women that tend to define a difference of the woman, we realize the difficulty to name this difference. When we compare a text written by E. Harding, a jungian psychanalyst and another written by M. Montrelay, a lacanian psychanalyst, we observe that despite their distant theorical and historical sources, the feminine is said in reference to the masculine. By our way of thinking , the desire for a generalized equality becomes erratic. Only a fragmented discourse, that gives place to the differences could permit an equality in the mentalities. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 2, Page 69-93, June 2012.

Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray's philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray's philosophy where she engages with Hegel's dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of (...) love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray's radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference—for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished. (shrink)

Title: Remaking Love: The Feminization of SexPublisher: AnchorISBN: 0385184999Author: Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria JacobsTitle: A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's LiberationPublisher: Warner BooksISBN: 0446391220Author: Sylvia Hewlett.

A politics of women's writing, then, if it is not to fall back on a biologically based theory of sexual difference, must address itself, as Luce Irigary has done in "Pouvoir du discours, subordination du feminin," to the position of mastery held not only by scientific discourse , not only by philosophy, "the discourse of discourses," but by the logic of discourse itself. Rather than attempting to identify a specific practice, in other words, such a feminist politics would attempt to (...) relocate sexual difference at the level of the text by undoing the repression of the "feminine" in all systems of representation for which the other must be reduced to the economy of the Same .Mary Jacobus is an associate professor of English and of women's studies at Cornell University. She is the author of a book on Wordsworth as well as the editor of a collection of feminist criticism, Women Writing and Writing about Women. Currently she is at work on a study of Thomas Hardy and a collection of essays on Romantic poetry and prose. (shrink)

The contemporary American philosopher David Velleman recently noted, “Love is a moral emotion precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality.”1 Although their kindred spirits are manifest, it is the tension between love and morality that at first glance is striking. Love seems to be supremely personal, unique to one individual and directed at another for highly contingent and possibly mysterious reasons. Even if Kantian or Utilitarian fantasies of objective morality are dismissed, the common (...) alternatives that put emphasis on community values or obligation to the Other are still distant from an affect directed…. (shrink)

After World War II, a change of the “sexual economy” was beginning in the most highly developed industrial societies, the islands of prosperity with “mixed economic systems” (P. Mattick). In the thirties, indeed even in the fifties, bourgeois-capitalist society was still considered by both opponents and defenders to be one in which the sexual needs of its acculturated members are limited, prohibited and penalized as much as possible, with sexuality banned from publicity (except as a scandal or a crime). The (...) “sex-wave” however, brought a return of the repressed. Since then “sex” is not only recognized but propagated as a “central life interest.”. (shrink)

To take up only the most beautiful, as yet to be made manifest in the realm of time and space, there are angels. These messengers who never remain enclosed in a place, who are also never immobile .... Endlessly reopening the enclosure of the universe, of universes, identities, the unfolding of actions, of history.The angel is that which unceasingly passes through the envelope(s) or container(s), goes from one side to the other, reworking every deadline, changing every decision, thwarting all repetition (...) ... they come' to herald the arrival of a new birth, a new morning. (Irigaray, ESD, 15)In the absence of civil laws positively defining their real rights and duties, the only criteria women have to refer to are subjective ones....But as long as there are no laws or rules which all women-and all men-may refer to and invoke when making their decisions, there can be no democracy, however attractive the immediate allegiance of a collectivity to a proposition may be. (Irigaray, ILTY, 1-2). (shrink)

It is widely accepted that Judith Butler’s work represents a fundamental departure from that of Luce Irigaray. However, in a 2001 essay, Butler suggests that Irigaray’s work plays a formative role in her own, and that the problematization of the biological and cultural distinction that Irigaray’s notion of sexual difference accomplishes must be rethought and multiplied rather than simply rejected. In this essay, I place the notion of precarity in the work of Butler alongside that of sexual difference in Irigaray, (...) to show how together they seek to address violence to certain bodies through an approach that is at once ecological and political. I show that Butler’s concept of precarity has deep, largely unappreciated, roots in the work of Irigaray. Butler explores precarity as bodily multiplicity in ways that pluralize Irigaray’s own ethics and politics of difference. Butler is, in other words, rewriting sexual difference as precarity. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray's project elaborates an original concept of sexual difference. While this concept is widely discussed in feminist philosophy, there are multiple readings of sexual difference and some of these are contradictory. This essay surveys the various readings of sexual difference in English. Foci include the debate over the status of essentialism, ontology, and the controversy over the primacy of sexual difference, including discussion of whether her oeuvre marginalizes differences of race and sexuality. I conclude by arguing that her thinking (...) of difference is open to the future and non-totalisable in principle. This means that, difference, the concept at the heart of her thinking of sexual difference, cannot be primarily oriented toward engendering sexual difference because it is necessarily open to engendering relations that cannot be predicted. (shrink)

Luce Irigaray argues that the way to overcome the culture of narcissism in the Western tradition is to recognize sexuate difference and to refigure subjectivity as sexuate. This article is an attempt to unpack how Irigaray's philosophical refiguring of love as an intermediary works in this process of reimagining subjectivity as sexuate. If we trace the moments in Irigaray's philosophy where she engages with Hegel's dialectic, and rethinks this dialectical process via the question of sexual difference and a refiguring of (...) love, a clearer reading of her work as groundbreaking and ultimately refiguring our ontological structures becomes possible. Consequently, if we do not understand Irigaray's radical reformulation of love, we will miss her larger ontological project and fail to properly appreciate her comments on other types of difference—for example, differences of race, tradition, religion. This article argues that as we begin to appreciate the ways in which Irigaray refigures both love and thought as the intermediary, an intermediary that fundamentally disrupts phallocentric binary logic, we can begin to imagine how refiguring the most intimate human experience of love can lead us toward the realization of an ethical political community in which difference in all forms is nourished. (shrink)