Book Description
In this major new work, French philosopher Luce Irigaray continues to explore the issue central to her thought: the feminist redefinition of Being and Identity.For Irigaray, the notion of the individual is twinned with a reconceived notion of difference, or alterity.What does it mean to be someone? How can identity be created, or discovered, in relation to others? In To Be Two Irigaray gives new clarity to her project, grounding it in relation to such major figures as Sartre, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. Yet at the same time, she enriches her discussion with an attempt to bring the elements--earth, fire, water--into philosophical discourse. Even the polarities of heaven and earth come to play in this ambitious and provocative text.

At once political, philosophical, and poetic, To Be Two will become one of Irigarary's central works. ... Read more

Book Description
Elemental Passions explores the man/woman relaitonship in a series of meditations of the senses and the formal elements. Its form resembles a series of love letters in which, however, the identity-and even the reality-of the adressee are deliberately obscured. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Irigaray's most beautiful writings
The prose of Irigaray unsettles the calm assuredness with which the realms of spirituality and the feminine have so often been rendered as subjects without agency, the weaker and subordinate opposite of material,tangible reality. Irigaray demonstrates how to dislodge, disrupt, and destabilize the barriers founded by certain academic standards.She dares to use words todescribe the futility of words.
"...if your words have such seductive power, such a potent charge of investment, is it not because they come to fill the place of a desire deprived of words?Borrowing their strength from energy free from any declaration.A fundamental misunderstanding lies within your language:what it carries of persuasive power does not belong to speech but to what it covers in silence."(36)
Another way Irigaray problematizes the othering of the spirit world is through exploding linear, normative conceptions of time and space in her reconstruction of infinity. She speaks ofthe current model of time as something which holds power by relying on a timeless void as its opposite. She defies this dualistic construction, describing not an abyss which relies on fullness and definition, but a fullness so vast it has the capacity to lodge emptiness within it.
"That invisible presence bearing you, supporting you there where you set up an opposing illusion of indifference as limit to your own desire.As a stasis at each point, guarding against the risk of overflowing which would lead to your downfall. Your vanishing into the immense space where you place that void which maintains your coherence." (Passions, 20)
This book is a delightful contrast to the cold, hard and cerebral discourse most noted for contemporary theories of psychology, philosophy, feminism, and politics! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Oh My, Oh My
A lack of appreciation for these pensees will provoke snide (when not openly livid) dismissals of utter intellectual incompetence wedded to a crude, perfervid misogyny.So I'll be brief and, as is my wont, simplistic.If you want to make Freud look logical, compare him to Jung; if you want to make Jung look logical, compare him to Lacan; if you want to make Lacan look logical, compare him to Irigaray; if you want to make Irigaray look logical ... well ... there's always the Eleusinian Mysteries.

How often do we miss these?
In the analysis of Freud in the first instance, many of the great western philosophers in the second, and Plato noch einmal in the third, we have the opportunity to note the "place" of women in our traditions with a view to how innane it all was. How often in reading the tradition do we miss the speculum of the man for what it was? How much effort would it be to always be aware of this?

Sight Presence
Those unfamiliar with Plato, Descartes, Freud and Lacan will find great challenges in understanding this rather poetic book. Irigary examines these figures in light of the "symbolic order" to detailphallocentricism in the development of Western thought in general as wellas psychoanalysis, revealing what is, according to the author, the natureof feminine sexuality and gender identity. Reading this text, written by aformer student of Lacan's expelled over ideological differences, wastransforming and has left a permanent perspective from which to percieveand critique philosophical arguments as well as science, medicine, andpsychotherapy.

Nice feminist critique of Freud, Plato, and others
The first section is especially wonderful: acomplete analysis of Freud's construction of women's sexuality and development.She has a great style with many a qwirk to keep you entertained.The second section includesfree-form essays on Aristotle, Kant, Plato, Descartes and otherrepresentatives of the Western male philosophical canon.The last sectionis a complete analysis of Plato's Hystera.This is a good text for thoseof us who need to read the foundations of feminist thought . . . thoughsome American feminists (such as myself) may find themselves annoyed withher "essentialism".Enjoy! ... Read more

Book Description

In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is one of France's most versatile feminist critics.Sexes and Genealogies, a collection of lectures delivered throughout Canada and Europe, introduces her writing to a wider American audience.

Irigaray's most famous work,Speculum of the Other Woman, prompted her expulsion from the Lacanin Ecole Freudienne because of its searing depiction of Platonic and Freudian representations of women. NowSexes and Genealogies analyzes sexual difference according to what she terms the double dimension of gender and ideology.

Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis, and literature, such as: the continued neglect by psychoanalysts of the sexual and gender dimensions of therapy, the urgency of female divinity for contemporary feminist movements, and a reconsideration of women's relation to the market economy.Sexes and Genealogies also includes Irigaray's dazzling reading of theOresteia, "Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother," now acknowleged as a feminist classic.

Amazon.com
Between East and West is an attempt to rediscover meaning for Western philosophy and culture by looking outside the Western tradition. Luce Irigaray's passionate intellect is in evidence throughout the book, which she envisions as "a quest for myself, for the world, for the other, beyond illusions, beyond lies." Irigaray, probably the foremost feminist philosopher in France, attempts to "reground" both individuality and community. To do so she examines the experiential aspects of Eastern philosophy, particularly the yogic tradition.

In the original elements of Indian philosophy, Irigaray finds a mythic-philosophic wellspring of ecological and sexual harmony that is predicated on a respect for difference. Ultimately, she wants to show that certain elements of pre-Aryan Indian thought allow us to reconstitute ourselves as individuals and refound our communities. And according to Irigaray, the stakes are high: "Political agendas ... need new formations, perspectives, words and logic," she writes. And if we don't find them, the 21st century "risks being nothing but a pitiful decline of the human species." --Eric de Place Book Description

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity -- and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West.

Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice -- most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings -- particularly Schopenhauer -- have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India -- which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine.

Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements -- air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences -- breathing and the fact of sexual difference -- she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

Customer Reviews (3)

Excellent critique of Freud
This is Irigaray's best known book.Although at times her linguistic approach is difficult (namely when she discusses Lacan), I found these essays & interviews fascinating and meaningful.Essentially she presents a critique of Freud's conclusions on feminine sexuality; in his view, women exist only in relation to men; pretty much to provide pleasure and birth (hopefully male) babies.Irigaray describes how this notion came to be--not because women are intrinsically passive and masochistic, but because historical, linguistic, and social conditions construct this situation.She asks how women can be defined/seen/thought of just as women, not because of sexual capabilities.How can phallogocentric structures of language and commerce (basically our whole worldview) be revised or destroyed to allow women to exist without being objectified and commodified?It is unclear how optimisitc Irigaray is about this possibility, but her questioning has proved significant for many fields of study.In my opinion chapter 4, The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine, is the most succinct summary of her main ideas.

Worth the effort.
I disagree with the previous review, although I agree that this is an excellent book.Personally, I was glad to have studied Irigaray under the tutelage of an excellent professor, otherwise I would have, and I think many readers could, misread her drastically.Irigaray is simply not a clear and easy writer.

Simply put, Irigaray's writing falls under the category of "difference feminism", rather than egalitarian feminism, like most of the liberal feminists we, particularly in North America, are used to.Instead of trying to subsume male and female experience under the same account, Irigaray plays up the differences between the embodied experiences of men and women-- she is not an essentialist, it is more that she doesn't attempt to separate gender from sex in lived experience.

Her work is provocative-- some find it sexy, some off-putting.She attempts, for example, to redefine the ways males and females experience their sexuality, by challenging the central position of the phallus as an organ of domination.Her psychoanalytic language can be difficult to get through if you aren't, as I'm not, well-versed in that particular method.

This Sex Which Is Not One
A must read for those interested in Femenist Theory.Travelling across Freudian and Lacanian perspectives, this book seriously explains, with accesible language, the female sexuality.It simply expresses verydifficult theories, and guides the reader with accesible terminology fromthe outset.In my opinion, after reading this text, one can be said to befluent in femenist issues. I also think it is an extraordinary and seamlesstranslation. ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Book Description
Luce Irigaray is one of the leading French feminist philosophers and psychoanalysts. The Irigaray Reader is a collection of her most important paeprs to date, ranging across feminism, philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics. A number of them appear here for the first time in English. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Query- Regarding Books
Dear Sir,

I wish to know the addresses of following writers email/residential addresses with phone number 1. Luce Irigaray 2. Julia Kristeva 3. Helene Cixous

You are requested to mail it to me atthe earliest my email address is rkpanja@sansad.nic.in.

Submitted for anearly response from your side.

Smt. S. Chatterjee ... Read more

Book Description
Margaret Whitford's study provides the ideal introduction to Irigaray's thought, offering a sustained interpretation of her whole corpus, including previously untranslated French texts. Whitford suggests that Irigaray's work should be seen as "philosophy in the feminine," actively opposing the complicity of philosophy with other social practices which exclude or marginalize women. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Another superb performance for Luce
Luce is lucid, floating in transcendence and below to reason to teach us all how to catch the ride of life lived out in love. ... Read more

Book Description
Alison Stone offers a feminist defence of the idea that sexual difference is natural, providing a new interpretation of the later philosophy of Luce Irigaray. She defends Irigaray's unique form of essentialism and her rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture, showing how Irigaray's ideas can be reconciled with Judith Butler's performative conception of gender, through rethinking sexual difference in relation to German Romantic philosophies of nature. This is the first sustained attempt to connect feminist conceptions of embodiment to German idealist and Romantic accounts of nature. Not merely an interpretation of Irigaray, this book also presents an original feminist perspective on nature and the body. It will encourage debate on the relations between sexual difference, essentialism, and embodiment. ... Read more

Book Description
French speakers know that nouns have genders and that verbs have masculine and feminine endings. It's different for English speakers, an "ungendered" tongue that often hides the powerful gendering of every speech. If our society is rife with gender inequities, can the language we speak really be innocent? Speech is never neutral.

Feminist philosopher, linguist, and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray is renowned for her analyses of language, studies that can be precise and poetic at the same time.In this volume of her work on language, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, she is concerned with developing a model that can reveal those unconscious or pre-conscious structures that determine speech. A key element of her method is the comparison of spoken and written language, through which she teases out the sexual and social configurations of speech. To Speak is Never Neutral brings to English speakers important feminist and psychoanalytic insights by one of France's most provocative thinkers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The Tyranny of the Model of Two
I applaud Luce Irigaray for her work to decenter the mono subjective, mono sexualized, patriarchal and phallocratic ontology "suspending the authority of the one" - man. In this courageous work "An Ethics of Sexual Difference" Ms. Irigaray engages with Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Merlau-Ponty and Levinas. Taking apart the core duality of inside/outside and subject/object. Her aim is clearly the dislodging the "model of the one" by dislodging "man" as the center of discourse and the recognition of "woman" as the "other", equal in the discursive process. She does not reduce the two to one, the "other" as the "same" - two separate and distinct. However, by doing so, is she reducing the discourse of ontology down to just two? Can her dream of intersubjectivity include more players? Is she reducing the discourse to the tyranny of the model of two? Her deconstruction is through the "suspending of the authority of one" begins, in her own words in a separate article "The Question of the Other":

"The principal focus of my work on feminine subjectivity is, in a way, the inverse of de Beauvoir's as far as the question of the other is concerned. Instead of saying, "I do not want to be the other of the masculine subject and, in order to avoid being that other, I claim to be his equal," I say, "The question of the other has been poorly formulated in the western tradition, for the other is always seen as the other of the same, the other of the subject itself, rather than an other subject, irreducible to the masculine subject and sharing equivalent dignity. It all comes down to the same thing: In our tradition there has never really been an other of the philosophical subject, or, more generally, of the cultural and political subject."

The problematic for Irigaray then is the starting point is the masculine. Not to reduce her thesis but to jump to a broader thesis - can the problem of "intersubjectivity" be reduced to the masculine contra the feminine? In a truly intertextual and intersubjective world, where we find concentric discourses and discourses within discourses, the duality of the model of two - despite their own space - seems limiting.

In "Place, Interval" her reading of Aristotle, she outlines:

"If I may return to the parallel I have been drawing between the issue of place and issue of sexual difference, I shall affirm that the masculine is attracted to the maternal-feminine as place. But what place does the masculine offer to attract the feminine? His soul? His relation to the divine? Can the feminine be inscribed or situated there? Is this not the only place where he can live, contrary to what has always been assumed? For the masculine has to constitute itself as a vessel to receive and welcome. And the masculine's morphology, existence, and essence do not really fit it for such an architecture of place." p. 39.

As much as she finds de Beauvoir's and Aristotle's Otherness problematic, I too find her "model of two" problematic. However, discussion of these and related issues via books like "The Ethics of Sexual Difference" is a step in the right direction. Caution, lest we limit ourselves to the model of two.

Miguel Llora

A classic of continental thinking.
Irigaray's `rewriting' of philosophy and philosophers is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy these days.It is also a refreshing breath of thought on `Feminism'.The concept of `Place'is presented asWoman, a return to the primordial feminine via `deconstruction' (in thebest possible way) of western patriarchial hegemony.Besides the radicalcontent, it is is beautifully written - clear and profound. Read thisbook! ... Read more

Book Description
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. ... Read more

Book Description
The Way of Love asks the question: How can we love each other? Here Luce Irigaray, one of the world's foremost philosophers, presents an extraordinary exploration of desire and the human heart.

If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. We still lack words, gestures, ways of doing or thinking to approach one another as humans, to enter into dialogue, to build a world where we can live together.

Globalisation represents an opportunity but also a danger for humanity. Sameness has been the key to the construction of Western cultures and societies. Difference - beginning with sexual difference - can open up for us an era of inter-communication, from our most everyday exchanges to the universal interweaving of a democratic global community. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wisdom of love
What is love and why is it so important to understand and explore it?

Since Plato's Symposium (and maybe even longer) the meaning of love has been a significant topic of philosophers. Irigaray's exploration and discussion is refreshingly different. She, in a way, takes on the whole prior philosophic tradition.

This is tough but exciting. It requires a bit of patience to stick with Irigaray's argument for this whole book--both because of the denseness of her philosophic language and a difficult transation that she herself (almost apologetically) took a hand in, changing some of the terms used by her translators. But in sticking with her we learn that her "way of love" is a) really quite down to earth; and b) very poetic and all-encompassing. Both of these at the same time!

One of her most enticing notions is "letting be transcendence."

"To experience this co-belonging implies leaving representative thought and letting oneself go in the co-belonging to Being which already inhabits us, constitutes us, surrounds us. It presupposes, in fact, dwelling 'there where we truly already are' . . . In order to have access to it man has to leave his own world, or rather to partly open its limits. It is not in his house, including that of language, that he will find out how to enter a new historical era, a new speech. The feature referring to the specificity of man has to change place--passing from the relation to things to the relation to the other."

I think of "letting be transcendence" as the best possible communication between persons who love one another. It is a way of relating in which one does not define the other but leaves an open space and listens and watches to see how the other defines him or herself. By not defining or pre-categorizing the other, two together achieve something higher--the "letting be transcendence" which opens up a whole world, and a higher order of thinking and existing in the world.

Besides "letting be transcendence" there are numerous concepts and ideas she reveals along the "way of love" that captivate our imagination and make us want to be participants. Love for Irigaray is not some abstract notion or intellectual category--it is real, existing in the here and now.

It is exciting when you, as her reader, are going along with Irigaray on these flights. She makes love--actual physical, emotional love and being together--to be something transforming and visionary.

It is as though Irigary takes the actual physical proximity that we know of as fulfilling love and expands it outward into a view of the cosmos--and in a way that is the reverse of Plato and other philosophers. In the old fashioned way of looking at things philosophically, love seems more an abstract external concept or force that a man (if worthy) might access or partake of. But for Irigaray it is the concrete, immediate presence of love that generates this spiritual force outward.

Very cleverly she begins her treatise by discussing the word "philosophy" itself, asking the question why we have interpreted philosophy to mean "love of wisdom" instead of the "wisdom of love."

It requires concentration and a surrender to her text (almost like the surrender to love itself) to keep up with Irigaray on her remarkable journey, but the experience is well worth it.




... Read more

Book Description
Luce Irigaray is one of the world's most influential theorists. From, her early ground-breaking work on linguistics to her later revolutionary work on the ethics of sexual difference, Irigaray has positioned herself as one of the essential thinkers of our time. 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, Spirituality, Art and Politics. An indispensable work for students of philosophy, literary theory, feminist theory, linguistics and cultural studies. ... Read more

Book Description

The authors of these essays-among them 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. This groundbreaking volume is the first collection of essays that attempts to go beyond the question of essentialism in order to provide a full critical assessment of Irigaray's contribution to a number of fields, most notably philosophy.

Book Description
In this important new book, a follow up to The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray, one of France's most influential contemporary theorists, turns once again to the concept of otherness.

We are accustomed to considering the other as an individual without paying sufficient attention to the particular world or specific culture to which the other belongs. A phenomenological approach to this question offers some help, notably through Heidegger's analyses of "Dasein", "being-in-the-world" and "being with'. Nevertheless, according to Heidegger, it remains almost impossible to identify an other outside of our own world. "Otherness" is subjected to the same values by which we are ourselves defined and thus we remain in "sameness'. In this age of multiculturalism and in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of our values and Heidegger's deconstruction of our interpretation of truth, Irigaray questions the validity of the "sameness" that sits at the root of Western culture. ... Read more

Book Description
In Democracy Begins Between Two, Luce Irigaray calls for a radical reconsideration of the relation between sex and democracy.In order to look on ourselves as fully democratic, she argues, we must first grant full recognition to both genders, male and female, that contribute to the functioning of society. This recognition must take the form of specific civil rights guaranteeing women a separate civil identity of their own equivalent to--though not simply the same as--that enjoyed by men. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Visionary
I disagree strongly with the reviewer who posted before me. The reviewer criticizes Irigaray for being an idealist-- but idealism is important, because it is what allows us to imagine a future where our lives are happier and the world is more just. Plus, this book is full of practical ways in which to think about implementing that vision-- like a discussion of what kind of laws the European Union would need if it really wanted to treat women as though they were equal to men.

This book argues that if we want gender equality, then we need to do some serious thinking about some fundamental philosophical concepts we have, rights foremost among them. And it shows that we can't have gender equality if the yardstick for that equality is always the male one.

Radical, not logical
Luce Irigaray brings up very strong and valid points for the equality of opportunity of women in the workforce, but many of her statements seem to be of an idealistic nature. It places the responsibility on the employer to accommodate the personal desires of the employee. It also seems to remove the personal responsibility from the female employee in regards to working toward more satisfying employment. The generalized statements the author makes about women place limitations on the kind of employment she thinks would be appropriate, that the women would enjoy, and that the women would be good at. It seems as though Irigaray is saying that keeping women off of the corporate ladder is okay and completely acceptable because a women would not be good at, nor would she enjoy that kind of work. ... Read more

Book Description
For Tamsin Lorraine, the works of Luce Irigaray and Gilles Deleuze open up new ways of thinking about subjectivity. Focusing on the affinities between the theorists' views--while addressing weaknesses of each--she offers both a cogent analysis of their often challenging writings on this topic and an accessible introduction to their philosophical projects. Through her readings she articulates an approach to subjectivity as an embodied, dynamic process, one that speaks to beliefs about personal identity as well as to the practical problems people face in their relations with one another. Lorraine begins by distinguishing between "conceptual" and "corporeal" considerations of subjectivity and by reviewing recent interdisciplinary efforts to theorize the body. She then turns to Irigaray and Deleuze, finding in the former's notion of the "feminine other" and in the latter's, unique conceptions of nomadic thinking inspiration for a model designed to overcome mind/body dualisms. Her analysis of Irigaray and Deleuze suggests a conception of humanity which amounts to a visceral philosophy--a way of thinking that is receptive to the fluxes of dynamic life forces. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Superb
As a philosopher with particular interest in the body and the Earth, I found this an utterly splendid book. It is an utterly lucid presentation of the work of Irigaray and Deleuze -- especially compelling for the clarity of thought that it displays, and the real beauty and sensitivity of Lorraine's writing. One of the finest works of philosophical commentary that I've read in years, written by a thinker whose intelligence gleams with warmth and ethical intensity.

Post-phenomenological, post-body, post-representation
There is a hole left by Western philosophy in its (absent) discourse of the body. Recent fascinations with Merleau-Ponty and a phenomenological approach only really go so far to rectify this, but require a reaffirmationof the subject and of subjectivity.

Deleuze (the first half of the book)and Irigaray (the second) are good antidotes to this. There is much thereto investigate in terms of something more 'visceral', but this does notmean simplya 'philosophy of the body'. It discusses and develops ideasgoing around this set of problematics, looking at metaphors of fluidity andbodily experience, as well as theorisations of overcoming and transformingthe bodily.

I am well-read in Deleuze, so Lorraine's treatment was alittle basic, but would serve as a good introduction to some of the mostimportant ideas, including the famous 'body without organs'. But I didn'tknow Irigaray well, and this book was a useful platform from which to jumpinto much of the relevant material. Lorraine quotes often and well, rightfrom across the respective oeuvres, and so would be useful for someone whois not widely-read in this area to launch right in. It helps, too, thatLorraine writes clearly and understandably, and is able to convey some ofthe most complex of ideas in a comprehensible manner. ... Read more

Book Description
Leading scholars examine the relation between Irigaray'searly writings and her later, more political work. ... Read more