Book Description
Ethics of Eros sheds light on contemporary feminist discourse by bringing into question some of the basic distinctions and categories that orchestrate it. The work of Luce Irigaray serves as a focus for interrogating the opposition between "French" and "Anglo-American" feminism as articulated in the debate over essentialism.

Tina Chanter defends Irigaray against charges of essentialism by showing that such criticisms fail to consider the theoretical background of her work. Chanter demonstrates that Irigaray inherited and attempted to move beyond the philosophical framework of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Levinas. In tackling the debate over essentialism, Chanter also reconsiders the sex/gender distinction that has been fundamental to feminist theory.

Ethics of Eros seeks to recast the differences between "French" and "Anglo-American" feminism so that they no longer represent opposing views but become capable of productive exchanges. It explains the circumstances in which the debate over essentialism arose and reveals how essentialist misreadings of Irigaray gained currency in feminist theory. The book illuminates Irigaray's writings and demonstrates the insights they hold for current feminist theory and philosophy. ... Read more

Book Description
In Thinking The Difference, Luce Irigaray examines the ways in which women are failed by the cultural, political and legal institutions set up to protect and preserve, regardless of sex. Here Irirgaray addresses the civil domain--where women's bodies, nature, space, symbolism and representation are appropriated by "the people of men"-- --and the need for concrete changes so that women may share in culture as women themselves, thereby gaining an as-yet-unfound full citizenship in the world.

Irirgaray thinks through the difference of sex and sexuality from philosophical speculation to concrete examples. In A Chance to Live, Irigaray writes on the Chernobyl nuclear accident as a representative of man-made destruction, and uses this as a platform for discussion of "mankind's" agression, the construction of patriarchal systems in the world, and how women can create their own inclusive symbology and cultures. The final essay uses mythology and psychoanalysis to re-place the "mystery" of female ancestry and the need to renew these bonds, to make possible an ethics of sexual difference.

Throughout Thinking the Difference, Irigaray maintains that it is imperative that steps be taken to ensure that "our" culture is one for both men and women. Her rigorous and always provocative writings argue that change in the world is a necessity for humankind and the planet. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Fem, published by Difusion Cultural Feminista, A.C. on September 1, 1997. The length of the article is 2018 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: La cultura de la diferencia. (extracto de un libro de la escritora feminista Luce Irigaray)(TT: The culture of difference) (TA: excerpt from the book by feminist writer Luce Irigaray)
Author: Rubí de María Gómez
Publication: Fem (Magazine/Journal)
Date: September 1, 1997
Publisher: Difusion Cultural Feminista, A.C.
Volume: v21Issue: n174Page: p4(4)

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Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of Luce Irigaray, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 2083 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
The essays in this groundbreaking collection stage conversations between the thought of the controversial feminist philosopher, linguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray and premodern writers.The authors address writers ranging from Empedocles and Homer, to Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne.They explore both the pre-Enlightenment roots of Luce Irigaray's thought, and their impact that her writings have had on our understanding of ancient, medieval and Renaissance culture.
Luce Irigaray has been a major figure in Anglo-American literary theory, philosophy and gender studies ever since her germinal works, Speculum of the Other Woman, and This Sex Which Is Not One, were published in English translation in 1985.This collection is the first sustained examination, both of Irigaray's crucial relationship to premodern discourses underpinning Western culture, and of the transformative effect she has had on scholars working in pre-Enlightenment periods.Like Irigaray herself, the essays work at the intersections of gender, theory, historicism and language.This collection offers powerful ways of understanding premodern texts through Irigaray's theories that allow us to imagine our past and present relationship to economics, science, psychoanalysis, gender, ethics and social communities in new ways. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from The Modern Language Review, published by Modern Humanities Research Association on October 1, 2002. The length of the article is 593 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Luce Irigaray and the Question of the Divine.(Book Review)
Author: Gill Rye
Publication: The Modern Language Review (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2002
Publisher: Modern Humanities Research Association
Volume: 97Issue: 4Page: 988-989

Article Type: Book Review

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Book Description
Much of the scholarship on Luce Irigaray has focused exclusively on her psychoanalytic work. The Feminine and Nihilism engages instead in a careful reading of the major philosophical intertexts in Irigaray's Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche. This study is an interpretation of Irigaray's
philosophy of sexual difference and seeks to uncover how she enters into an amorous dialogue with the silent ground in Nietzsche's thinking: the material. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews (3)

Interesting
While there is so much talk about Irigaray's lack of understanding of Neitzsche, it is obvious that previous reviewers have a lack of understanding of Irigaray.Her inquiries are focused around language and how it is used.Her analysis is nothing short of detailed."Man-hating" it is not, patriarchy-hating it is, what is more this book draws attention to the language that perpetuates patriarchal society and the damage it does to women, but also to men.

Difficult, maybe preposterous, with few comic triumphs
The first thing that I am likely to notice about a book is whether it has an index.This book has no index.I have the 1991 English translation by Gillian C. Gill of Luce Irigaray's book MARINE LOVER OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE in paperback, and between pages 75 and 119, the only indication at the top of the page to show what this part is about are the words, "Veiled Lips."This is not too surprising for a book that seems to be mainly about the attractions of Nietzsche's ideas because it builds on a section of SPURS / NIETZSCHE'S STYLES by Jacques Derrida called `Veils' in which truth is compared to woman as "Nietzsche revives that barely allegorical figure (of woman) in his own interest.For him, truth is like a woman.It resembles the veiled movement of feminine modesty.Their complicity, the complicity (rather than the unity) between woman, life, seduction, modesty--all the veiled and veiling effects . . ."(SPURS, p. 51).

Fortunately, there is an index in WOMANIZING NIETZSCHE / PHILOSOPHY'S RELATION TO THE FEMININE by Kelly Oliver, and "Veiled Lips" even appears in her index, for a discussion of this book in a chapter on Jacques Derrida (3The Question of Appropriation).Kelly Oliver suggests, "Irigaray's criticism could be seen as a lesson in psychoanalytic theory."(Womanizing Nietzsche, p. 81).The theory here is not as interesting to me as the possibility of gaining a woman's perspective on a point at which philosophy seems to be close to humor, if modern comedy is recognized in the playful manner in which Derrida explains the great question "Supposing truth to be a woman--what?" found at the opening of Nietzsche's BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. His translation gains clarity by emphasizing a term of contempt:". . . all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women . . . [and] the gruesome earnestness, the clumsy importunity with which they have been in the habit of approaching truth have been inept and improper means (ungeschickte und unschickliche Mittel) for winning a wench (Frauenzimmer is a term of contempt:an easy woman)?"(SPURS, p. 55).

Do I need to be forgiven for such a rude interruption?By emphasizing the comic aspects of modern society, I often make myself feel that I am interrupting people who have far more serious concerns.This could be a good time for appreciating the earnest efforts of a woman to meet Nietzsche halfway on ideas which he chose, as Luce Irigaray attempts to do in MARINE LOVER OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE.The section `Veiled Lips' opens with a few paragraphs containing words that might be found in joking about which lips are meant:"if not its accessories and its underside.And the opposite remains caught up in the same. . . .With a flip of the coin,"(p. 77).She knew what Nietzsche's laughter was:"And you laughed at having been so blindly trusting.And burned as you reclaimed the flames once devoted to their cult."(p. 53).I have not usually been too concerned with the interpretation which might be placed upon Nietzsche by typical modern scholarship, such as it is, but the problem of the education of women looms large in trying to understand what moderns might consider the worst things he wrote.

Nietzsche had excelled in school in studies of the ancient Greeks, and he was made a professor at the age of 24 in 1869 so he could teach Greek ideas to boys in an educational system that was primarily about dead European males.His first book, THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, praised the Greeks as surviving from one culture to another:

"And so one feels ashamed and afraid in the presence of the Greeks, unless one prizes truth above all things and dares acknowledge even this truth:that the Greeks, as charioteers, hold in their hands the reins of our own and every other culture, but that almost always chariot and horses are of inferior quality and not up to the glory of their leaders, who consider it sport to run such a team into an abyss which they themselves clear with the leap of Achilles."(BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, section 15, Kaufmann translation, p. 94).

Taking such a long view of things hardly helps the modern student who is looking for something useful, but this book is not likely to find readers for whom it accomplishes much.Women having equal access to such an education could hardly fail to make their own proclamations about what might be worth knowing, and the chaos of modern society gets boosted for diversity in the process, but my personal theme of praising the hemlock which Athens granted Socrates as a sentence for engaging in philosophy is not too wild to be found in this book, even where it is not stated explicitly."What are you unable to abandon?What place are you unwilling to leave?What weight always holds you back at the same point?The will to live or to die? . . .Because to receive, without swallowing up what has been given to you . . ."(p. 42).

"Socrates desiring death, and achieving it thanks to a drink given to him by the citizens, signifies his allegiance to the Dionysiac.It is by this means that he will take away its power. . . . the death `for a laugh' of the philosopher whose potion is the logos."(p. 98).

I probably left out the best parts (for everybody but me), but by cherrypicking a few themes and some indication of who might consider this book important, some people might get the idea that guys aren't likely to do great in the humanities anyway, so why try?

Irigaray tries hard but misses her mark
Unfortunately for feminists, the mythology and set of symbols commonly recognized by feminists as "universal" do not apply in a large part with anything Nietzsche writes. Granted, Nietzsche does address similar subjects of discourse as include such symbols, but he doesn't utilize his symbology the way feminists have decided he does. Furthermore, Irigaray intentionally confuses Nietzsche with Man In General, and thus loses sight of Nietzsche as individual, with individual experiences and opinions concerning Woman In General and separately the individual women he loved. The worst part of Irigaray's failed attempt to respond or understand Nietzsche is when she declares *evil* his inability to find greater good in the happiness of others as opposed to his own individual goals! Has she never read Thus Spoke Zarathustra? Has she no idea what this cult of the ego is all about? Humanism is outdated. Nietzsche was probably the first individualist, and she apparantly just doesn't get individualism. She takes his individualism as an attack on gender, which it simply is not. Overall, Irigaray's commentary is only more self-serving man-hating feminist pseudo-intellectual vomit. ... Read more