Abstract
Luce Irigaray’s work explores the debt owed to the maternal body and the obscured or derelict figure of the maternal in the Western philosophical tradition. Her writing is deeply concerned with the status of the maternal and with the effort to revalue the maternal at a symbolic level in Western metaphysics and culture. One of the major contributions of her philosophy is its emphasis on the central, yet denigrated, unthought or disregarded bodily dimensions of maternity. Throughout her philosophical oeuvre, Irigaray seeks ways to transform the Western tradition in light of its debt to a forgotten maternal order. Her critical stance towards maternity as women’s destiny in patriarchal cultures and the lack of affirmative genealogies of the maternal in Western philosophy leads her to explore alternatives to the current figure of the mother whose presence threatens to repress or suffocate her children, and who must then be rejected by her sons or daughters.
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Fannin, M. (2019). What a Child Can Teach Us. In: Irigaray, L., O'Brien, M., Hadjioannou, C. (eds) Towards a New Human Being. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03392-7_2
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