Irigaray's Work Research Articles

Nature, Obligation, and Transcendence: Reading Luce Irigaray with Mary Graham

This paper addresses the relation between Luce Irigaray’s work and politics by asking what it means to read her work locally, in place. The philosophical work of Indigenous scholar, Mary Graham, on the law of obligation, serves to ground such a local reading presenting, simultaneously, a case for a uniquely Australian philosophy. By way of suggesting possible connections between the work of Irigaray and Graham, the paper places Graham’s work on obligation alongside Irigaray’s work on the importance of a symbolic re-distribution of value suggested in her philosophy of horizontal transcendence. Such a reading encourages us to consider what it means to engage work, such as Irigaray’s, in a here and now that differs from the European context of her writing.

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Contemporary Women's Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Растения философов: Интеллектуальный гербарий (Водяная лилия Иригарей (глава 12))

The journal continues to publish translations of individual chapters of the book by the famous phenomenologist Michael Marder "Plants of Philosophers (Intellectual Herbarium)". Out of twelve stories, "Irigaray’s Water Lily" was chosen. The author analyzes the views of a modern French philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose numerous books contain a feminist revision of traditional philosophy and its language. Today, having thrown off the straitjacket of metaphysical reasoning, living thought turns to physicality, marked by finiteness and sexual differences, as well as to the surrounding world, to the rhythms of the earth and the richness of non-Western philosophical traditions. Luce Irigaray's creativity is rooted in all those dimensions of experience that she was able to restore at the sunset of metaphysics. In the work of Irigaray, the vegetable occupies a special place and stimulates the development of her thoughts. Plants provide her with a model of thinking, living and cultivating subjectivity. Cultivation in this case does not mean the formation of the physis in accordance with the predetermined parameters of the mind or the forcible eradication of what grows by itself. On the contrary, cultivating nature, for example, means that we put ourselves at her service, protecting, participating and encouraging myriad plants. Irigaray calls us to listen to the muted vegetative rhythms of our life and thinking, whose growth has been stopped by the prejudices of metaphysics and the arrhythmia of modern existence. Everything that Western philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel rejected and devalued in relation to plants, in her works is lovingly extracted, overestimated and cultivated.

Irigaray Between God and the Indians: Sexuate Difference, Decoloniality, and the Politics of Ontology

In this essay, I situate Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference between the Heideggerian response to the collapse of the project of Western modernity (‘only a god can save us’) and that of decolonial theorist Oscar Guardiola-Riviera (‘only Indians can save our modern soul’). First, I return to Heidegger’s theorisation of ‘planetary technicity’ as the ontology of modernity, arguing, with Heidegger, that in order to respond to this problem we must return to the question of Being. From here, I link Heidegger’s theory of technicity with the work of decolonial theory on the ‘coloniality of Being’, suggesting that one reason for Heidegger’s pessimism is that he did not think technicity from beyond a Eurocentric perspective. The recent ‘ontological turn’ in decolonial anthropology that seeks to study Indigenous thought as ontology, however, shows that there are resources for thinking beyond the onto-logic of technicity. Yet, here, I return to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger for his forgetting of sexuate difference in his analysis of technology to say that a move to a decolonial ontology beyond planetary technicity can only take place if we go through an ontology of sexual difference: because, as Irigaray shows, the onto-logic of technicity that underwrites coloniality and modernity begins in an ontological annihilation of life, sexuate difference, and the maternal debt, the only way to recover this is by thinking the question of sexuate difference. Finally, I conclude by examining the case of the Kogi peoples of Colombia who have warned Westerners that the destruction of the planet can only be stopped if we learn to recompense our common Mother. This case, I suggest, shows how and why the turn to non-Western ontologies as a way out of the death project of modern technicity must reckon with the work of Irigaray.

Precarity and Elemental Difference: On Butler’s Re-writing of Irigarayan Difference

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.

This Biosphere Which Is Not One: Towards Weird Essentialism

This essay uses the thought of Luce Irigaray as a very powerful way to imagine what ecological beings such as meadows and whales are like. For reasons given yet implicit in Irigaray's work, it is possible to extend what she argues about woman to include any being whatsoever. In particular, it is shown that to exist is to defy the so-called law of noncontradiction. Various paradoxes demonstrate that in order to care for beings that we consider to be ecological, such as meadows, we had better relax our adherence to this “law.” Ecological beings are, like Irigaray's woman, not one and not two. They cannot be thought as constantly, presently themselves, or as decomposable into other beings – not without violence. A side effect of the argument is that we can now use Irigaray to think a multiplicity of sexualities and gender identities.

Irigaray's Ecological Phenomenology: Towards an Elemental Materialism

This article provides an interpretation of the ecophenomenological dimension of Luce Irigaray's work. It shows that Irigaray builds upon Heidegger's recovery of the ancient sense of nature as physis, self-emergence into presence. But, against Heidegger, Irigaray insists that self-emergence is a material process undergone by fluid elements, such as air and water, of which the world is basically composed. This article shows that this “elemental materialist” position need not conflict with modern science. However, the article criticises Irigaray's claim that men and women inhabit radically different sexuate worlds. Although this claim has some phenomenological basis, ultimately it is undercut by Irigaray's own elemental materialism, which implies that sexuate difference colours our perception but does not cleave it down a radical difference in kind. We can therefore accept and develop Irigaray's contribution to ecophenomenology without her insistence on radical sexuate duality.

Between Body and Spirit: The Liminality of Pedagogical Relationships

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy's notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispector's novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray's work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular.

Reclamation from Absence? Luce Irigaray and Women in the History of Philosophy

Luce Irigaray's work does not present an obvious resource for projects seeking to reclaim women in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many authors introduce their reclamation project with an argument against conceptions, attributed to Irigaray or “French feminists” more generally, that the feminine is the excluded other of discourse. These authors claim that if the feminine is the excluded other of discourse, then we must conclude that even if women have written philosophy they have not given voice to feminine subjectivity; therefore, reclamation is a futile project. In this essay, I argue against such conclusions. Rather, I argue, Irigaray's work requires that philosophy be transformed through the reclamation of women's writing. She gives us a method of reclamation for the most difficult cases: those in which we have no record of women's writing. Irigaray offers this method through an engagement with the character of Diotima in Plato's Symposium. The method Irigaray demonstrates is reclamation as love.

An Examination of Irigaray's Commitment to Transcendental Phenomenology inThe Forgetting of AirandThe Way of Love

Although sexual difference is widely regarded as the concept that lies at the center of Luce Irigaray's thought, its meaning and significance is highly contested. This dissensus, however, attests to more than merely the existence of a recalcitrant conceptual ambiguity. That is, Irigaray's discussion of sexual difference remains fraught not because she leaves this concept undefined but because the centrality of sexual difference in fact marks a complex and unstable nexus of phenomena that shift throughout her work. Consequently, if Irigaray is indeed the preeminent thinker of sexual difference, this is not in virtue of her recurrent appeal to a monolithic, readily digestible concept but rather somehow despite the absence of precisely this gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference in Irigaray's work by identifying her persistent, though largely unexamined, commitment to transcendental phenomenology. Indeed, I attempt to show that the complex of phenomena of sexual difference emerges inL'oubli de l'airandThe Way of Loveas a modulation of Heidegger's own revision of transcendental phenomenology. In this sense, the peculiar preeminence of sexual difference does not mark the centrality of a concept but Irigaray's amplification of this Heideggerian gesture.

Between Races and Generations: Materializing Race and Kinship in Moraga and Irigaray

Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga'sLoving in the War Yearsand Luce Irigaray'sSpeculum of the Other Woman, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigaray's work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signifier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light‐skinned Moraga and her brown‐skinned mother. Irigaray's concept of blood deepens Moraga's account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigaray's psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the mother–daughter relation.

Feminism

Feminism

Luce Irigaray: Teaching

This volume brings together essays collected from participants in seminars held by Luce Irigaray at the University of Nottingham over a three-year period. It also includes three essays by Irigaray herself, as well as three by established scholars of her work: Gillian Howie, Helen A. Fielding, and Laine M. Harrington. The volume is well organized around five themes: healing, art, the maternal order, spirituality and religion, and philosophy. Although they share a common theme, the essays within each section investigate a variety of cultural forms: literature, art, music, architecture, and film. They also consider Irigaray in relation to other philosophers, predominantly Merleau-Ponty, Hegel, Plato, Heidegger, and Heraclitus. The collection fills an important gap in current literature by directly addressing Irigaray's pedagogical practice. It demonstrates that Irigaray finds dialogue and questioning central to her students' progress. This sense of dialogue illuminates recognized philosophical approaches developed by Irigaray, but also, and interestingly, captures ideas only partially evident in her published work. Of note is Karen I. Burke's ‘Masculine and Feminine Approaches to Nature’. Coining the phrase ‘cultivation of the environment’, Burke uses Irigaray's theoretical definition of cultivation to highlight the oft-ignored yet irreducible connection between culture and nature. Also of interest is Christine Labuski's ‘Virginal Thresholds’. Labuski considers Irigaray's subjective virginity for women by thinking through the rarely discussed condition of vulvar vestibulitis syndrome. Overall, the essays elucidate and renew well-known concepts such as sexuate difference, morphology, proximity, and the sensible transcendental. They also creatively engage with ideas found in Irigaray's recent connection with Eastern traditions: the breath, being-two, mythical time, the middle voice, and the return. As is customary with collections based on conferences and seminars, the quality of the essays is variable. However, most develop Irigaray's thought in new ways, extending her work beyond its own limits. All of the essays deal with sexuate difference without reverting to essentialism, which demonstrates an overall attentiveness to the most fundamental concept in Irigaray's work. What is perhaps missing from the volume is a critical approach to Irigaray's thought: the essays are illuminating rather than critical. This is understandable given that the volume is based on conversations between Irigaray and her students. For those getting to grips with the more difficult philosophical concepts in Irigaray's work for the first time, the essays provide an accessible avenue to her other publications. However, for those looking for a critical engagement, the collection is less satisfying.

Other Fecundities: Proust and Irigaray on Sexual Difference

Irigaray's early work seeks to multiply possibilities for women's self-expression by recovering a sexual difference in which male and female are neither the same nor opposites, but irreducibly different modes of embodiment. In her more recent work, however, Irigaray has emphasized the duality of the sexes at the expense of multiplicity, enshrining the heterosexual couple as the model of sexual ethics. Alison Stone's recent revision of Irigaray supplements her account of sexual duality with a theory of bodily multiplicity derived from Butler, Nietzsche, and certain German Romantics; but to the extent that Stone maintains the primacy of sexual duality, her revision fails to address the claims of multiplicity on their own terms. In this paper, I interpret a passage from Marcel Proust's novel, Sodom and Gomorrah, in order to develop an alternative theory of sexual difference in which sexual duality is affirmed in relation to a third, unsexed but sexual force which multiplies the possibilities for sexual pleasure beyond heterosexual coupling. Proust's emphasis on sexed ``parts'' rather than sexed morphologies is generative of maximally diverse combinations, all of which are equally natural and equally enhanced through artifice.

Recastings: On Alison Stone'sLuce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference

Following criticisms of Alison Stone's treatment of Judith Butler on nature and embodiment, this article argues that Stone has reconfigured Butler so as to accommodate Stone's interpretation of Irigaray. The project can be used to draw attention to forms of prior reconfiguration that may occur when differing theoretical frameworks are brought into dialogue with each other. The need for such forms of implicit, prior reconfiguration helps draw attention to the differences and relationships between different frameworks and the only apparently similar terms and concepts embedded in them. In the light of a staged encounter between Butler and Irigaray, Stone widens the conceptual space within Butler's project, into which she drops an alternative, reconfiguring understanding of Butler's work as requiring an absent concept: original, multiple, self-differentiating nature. She argues that the concept has the potential to serve as a useful intervention into the work of Butler and, among others, Schelling. Although this potential is not directly addressed by Stone, the reading serves as an occasion to reflect on a number of interpretative questions concerning not only the tacit work that occurs in one author's reconfiguration of another but also the varied methodologies that may be appropriate to the interpretation of Luce Irigaray's work in particular.

‘A Complex Mixture of Fascination and Distaste’: Relationships between Women in Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down, Liza's England and Union Street

This paper explores the women's stories in Pat Barker's three earliest novels: Blow Your House Down , Liza's England and Union Street. Using Kristeva's concepts of temporality from ‘Women's time’, it takes as its starting point the idea that Barker's women are trapped in a harsh cyclical timescale by gender, class and place. Motherhood therefore becomes another form of imprisonment, particularly when father figures are absent. Despite this, there are moments in the texts when women do experience connections that could be described as a more positive version of this cyclical time, one that gestures towards a female tradition, or genealogy. As this suggests, bonds between women in these novels, particularly mothers and daughters, are complex and often troubling, eschewing any easy version of female solidarity. They are more adequately described as bonds based on ‘a complex mixture of fascination and distaste’, evoking Luce Irigaray's work on relationships between women. This paper examines these bonds between women in the light of the work of Kristeva and Irigaray, focusing particularly on the relationships between mothers and daughters, arguably those at the centre of these ambivalent emotions.

The Potential of Theory: Melanie Klein, Luce Irigaray, and the Mother-Daughter Relationship

Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relation’ ship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law.

Oi Mother, Keep Ye' Hair On! Impossible Transformations of Maternal Subjectivity

Motherhood is commonly referred to as a transformational experience. Where the psychoanalytic literature articulates the maternal subject and her development, transformation is figured as a working through of infantile issues prompted by the psychic crisis that motherhood represents. Juxtaposing recent autobiographical accounts of the transition to motherhood with the work of Irigaray, and using my own experiences of early motherhood, I look at the way motherhood as a transformational experience is represented as either the movement from unity towards fluidity, or its reverse, the movement from fluidity to the hardening of desire around the unity of the child. I use a discussion of wigs to show how transformation itself is caught by its own material effects, inevitably failing to pass itself off as the magical movement from one state to another. The transition to motherhood is understood as both the painful and playful realisation of the impossibility of transformation itself.

Dissonant Voices in Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory and Luce Irigaray's This Sex Which Is Not One

With the publication of Days of Obligation and, more recently, Brown, Richard Rodriguez's scholarship has begun to recognize the theoretical import inherent in the Hispanic writer's autobiographical essays. Juan de Castro most clearly makes this point as he states that [t]oday, like Gloria Anzaldua or Jose David Saldivar, Rodriguez can be classified as a of the borderlands (102). This positive assessment of Rodriguez concerns mainly his two latest works which are often read as representing a radical rupture with his first autobiographical essay, Hunger of Memory} In what follows I take de Castro's assessment of Rodriguez as a theorist seriously by uncovering the theory of borderland identities, which I consider to be already implicit in his first and most controversial book.2 More precisely, I compare Rodriguez's epistemology of in-between identities with the theory of subjectivity advocated by the French feminist poststructuralist philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One. If on the one hand, Hunger of Memory can be read as a literary text with theoretical implications, then on the other hand, Margaret Whitford one of Irigaray' s most informed American critics affirms that we should treat Irigaray's work as (23).3 By cross-reading these two literary/ theoretical texts I begin to delineate the points of divergence and the points of convergence of two epistemic models of subjectivity. Put differently, Rodriguez and Irigaray's theoretical opposition and proximity, I will argue, can be found at the complex intersection between literature and theory. Thus, implicit in this double-reading strategy is an attempt at once to theorize and to interpret. It should first be noted that Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory is based upon epistemic, cultural, and political premises that are inimical, if not

Back to the City

In a time when the protection of the rights of individuals appears more threatened than ever by religious thinking, it is more important than ever to consider the question of rights in Judaism. This essay describes a Jewish theology of sexuate rights that appropriates Luce Irigaray's call for sexuate rights rooted in an appreciation of sexual difference and critiques Irigaray's dismissal of Jewish covenantal thought as incapable of accommodating such a perspective. The paper argues that a Jewish theology rooted in an analysis of the passing of the infinite in sociality offers a basis for the category of rights in general and sexuate rights in particular thereby offering an antidote to Irigaray's Utopian hope for the return of an immanent God who alone lends voice and language to a vocabulary of sexuate rights. Irigaray Though largely ignored by Jewish thinkers, Irigaray's work warrants attention by not only Christian theologians but Jewish theologians as well. Irigaray's unique appreciation for the language of rights and the language of theology makes her work well suited for conversation with Jewish thinkers. Of note for Jewish theologians are Irigaray's critique of contemporary discourse on sexuality as well as her recommendations and hopes for the arrival of a second incarnation and her rhetoric of sexuate rights. Irigaray's critique of the subsumption of women into societal discourse dominated by the male subject extends out of her epistemology of desire or eros. Irigaray calls eros the intermediary-in order to describe knowledge as a dynamic and on-going process of lack and attraction between knower and the knowable. Knower and known-persons and things, persons and Gods and persons and persons all relate to one another by a process of drawing near, motored by love as the intermediary or interval that mediates between lack and attraction. Through love, knowledge becomes a third term-the result of the impassioned link between knower and knowable. So impassioned, knowledge traces and describes coordinates of time and place that it wants and needs. Nonetheless, eros' physics and metaphysics are always changeable, never stable. The world of persons, things and gods is a place of passage between the knower and the known. Philosophy, as the active quest for knowledge is not therefore fixed and rigid, abstracted from all feeling. It is a quest for love.1 Philosophy is commentary on love, attraction, desire and the changing face of the world hereby constructed. A celebrant of change Irigaray's philosopher is unhoused, very curious . . . sometimes exuberant, sometimes close to death.2 To speak of a single instance or character of eros is to deny the reality of sexual difference. Desire is double Irigaray argues, as men and women sponsor desires unique to themselves-desires that potentially give rise to varying and changeable world-views. It takes least two Irigaray argues-two philosophers remarking on the link between persons and gods, persons and persons, persons and things. Unfortunately, Irigaray argues, western discourse denies the double-character of desire. Even when aspiring to a universal or neutral state . . the subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man ... It is man who has been the subject of discourse, whether in the field of theory, morality or politics . . and the gender of God, the guardian of every subject and discourse, is always paternal and masculine in the west.3 The masculine monopoly on discourse produces a good many pathologies, epistemological, social and spiritual. Under ideal circumstances, the double character of desire affords the conditions of the possibility of authentic inter-subjectivity between persons. Openness to the desires of the other ought to factor into male and female constructions of reality. The other is and ought to be one feature of reality that is at once unknown and yet desired. Knowledge of the other imparts a dose of epistemological health into the knower so far as it permits the knower to realize alternative schemes of world construction. …