Engaging With Irigaray

The authors of these essays--including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

By assessing Luce Irigaray's contribution to the fields of philosophy, literary theory and feminism, this collection of essays reconsiders Irigaray's position in Western thought and explores her relationship to other philosophers.

Offers essays demonstrating the critical relevance of Irigaray’s thought of sexual difference for addressing contemporary ethical and social issues. Engaging the World explores Luce Irigaray’s writings on sexual difference, deploying the resources of her work to rethink philosophical concepts and commitments and expose new possibilities of vitality in relationship to nature, others, and to one’s self. The contributors present a range of perspectives from multiple disciplines such as philosophy, literature, education, evolutionary theory, sound technology, science and technology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. They place Irigaray in conversation with thinkers as diverse as Charles Darwin, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilles Deleuze, René Decartes, and Avital Ronell. While every essay challenges Irigaray’s thought in some way, each one also reveals the transformative effects of her thought across multiple domains of contemporary life.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

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.

Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women's and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy's traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray's criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray's "solutions" for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray's relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray's relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film.

Luce Irigaray is one of the most influential philosophers and theorists in the field of feminist thought, and her work is considered both revolutionary and controversial. This volume offers the first critical assessment of the relation of her early critical and poetic writings to her later political and practical philosophy. Contributors examine how the question of sexual difference has unfolded in a wealth of different directions in Irigaray's later work, focusing on the areas of nature and technology, social and political theory and praxis, ethics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology. They also address whether there has been a radical conceptual "turn" in Irigaray's thought by exploring the idea of a "turn" as a return to themes that have concerned her all along. The essays contend that Irigaray's writings should be read, criticized, or promoted within the context of her overall philosophical project.

The work of French Philosopher Luce Irigaray has exerted a profound influence on feminist thinking of recent decades and provides a far-reaching challenge to western philosophy's entrenched patriarchal norms. This book guides the reader through Irigaray's critical and creative transformation of western thought. Through detailed analysis of her most important text, Speculum of the Other Woman, Rachel Jones carefully examines Irigaray's transformative readings of such icons of the western tradition as Plato, Descartes, Kant and Hegel. She shows that these readings underpin Irigaray's claim that western philosophy has been dependent on the forgetting of both sexual difference and of our singular beginnings in birth. In response, Irigaray seeks to recover a positive account of sexual difference which would release woman from her traditional position as the 'other' of the subject and allow her to speak as a subject in her own right. In a sensitive reading of Irigaray's work, Jones shows why this distinctively feminist project necessarily involves the transformation of the fundamental terms of western metaphysics. By foregrounding Irigaray's approach to questions of otherness and alterity, she concludes that, for Irigaray, cultivating an ethics of sexuate difference is the condition of ethical relations in general. Lucidly and persuasively written, this book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars seeking to understand Irigaray's original contribution to philosophical and feminist thought.