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brilliant thinking, feeling the source of life
Not only for feminists, this book is a brilliant commentary upon the western tradition which constantly forgets what is most elemental for human life: air. read it in one line with Irigaray's Entre Orient et Occident, where she's defending a practice of breath. on of the most important philosophers, thinking outside thought itself. ... Read more

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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. ... Read more

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Specifically for architects, the third title in the Thinkers for Architects series examines the relevance of Luce Irigaray’s work for architecture. Eight thematic chapters explore the bodily, spatio-temporal, political and cultural value of her ideas for making, discussing and experiencing architecture. In particular, each chapter makes accessible Irigaray’s ideas about feminine and masculine spaces with reference to her key texts.

Irigaray’s theory of ‘sexed subjects’ is explained in order to show how sexuality informs the different ways in which men and women construct and inhabit architecture. In addition, her ideas about architectural forms of organization between people, exterior and interior spaces, touch and vision, philosophy and psychoanalysis are explored. The book also suggests ways in which these strategies can enable architectural designers and theorists to create ethical architectures for the user and his or her physical and psychological needs.

Concisely written, this book introduces Irigaray’s work to practitioners, academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students in architectural design and architectural history and theory, helping them to understand the value of cross- and inter-disciplinary modes of architectural practice.

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Published in France in 1980,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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

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? ... Read more

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In "Democracy Begins with Two" Luce Irigaray calls for a radical reconsideration of the so-called democratic bases of Western culture. In a series of essays covering the earlier 1990s she argues the urgent need for our society to grant full recognition to both the genders which contribute to its functioning. If we are to look on ourselves as fully democratic 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. Ranging across topics as diverse as happiness, the family, the construction of the European Union, the transition from natural to civil existence and love, Irigaray exploits her resources as a writer - philosophical, linguistic, psychoanalytical, poetical -to their rhetorical limits. She interweaves her personal experience of an emotional and politico-professional partnership with her re-reading of History, past and present. ... Read more

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The importance of Irigaray's work lies n the fact that feminist and philosophical discourses are brought together in a feminist appropriation of Spinoza. The author draws on both philosophy and psychoanalysis in a rejection of traditional literary modes and thus frees literature from male dominance. "Elemental Passions" was first published in France in 1982. It explores the man/woman relationship in a series of lyrical meditations on the senses and the four elements. Its form resembles a series of love-letters, in which, however, the identity and reality of the addresses are deliberately obscured in order to escape from conventional, male-imposed conceptual patterns. ... 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

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In An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Irigaray calls for a new poetics in the sense of both art and life. Rather than a critique from within philosophy, A Poetics of Being-Two tests Irigaray's ethics by extending it to other sites of cultural production. Where Irigaray's method finds stirrings and repressions of sexual difference in philosophy, this project explores that tension in poetics. Building from Irigaray's ethics, the book describes a poetics of being-two as concerns gendered subjectivity in literary poetics and then traces the on-going emergence of a poetics of being-two in the post-symbolist poetic tradition. Irigaray scholars will be interested in the sustained interpolation of Irigaray's ethical concepts as principles for a critical aesthetics and in their hermeneutic application in reading a literary tradition. Readers in comparative literature will find the first sustained feminist engagements with the major French poets Bonnefoy and Perse and an elucidation of their influence on the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Jorie Graham. ... Read more

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Ecstatic Subjects, Utopia, and Recognition is a study in critical postmodern social theory. By engaging a dialogue with Heidegger, Kristeva, and Irigaray, it offers unique insights into Heidegger's heroic embrace of the manly ethos of National Socialism. Against certain poststructuralist feminist tendencies to throw the baby of intentionality out with the bath water of voluntarism, Huntington interweaves elements of Kristevan and Heideggerian thought in order to reconstruct a linguistically embedded, existentially and affectively rich, dialectical model of willed self-regulation. Pressing Heideggerian ontology into the service of a viable social theory, she argues that this ontology accounts for the utopian impulse in Irigaray's search for a critical poetic reenchantment of the lifeworld and supplies Irigaray with the philosophical foundation for a model of ethical recognition based upon asymmetrical reciprocity. ... Read more

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Luce Irigaray's Zaharoff lecture is the latest episode in an extraordinary intellectual adventure begun with Speculum. De l'autre femme (1974) and continued in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977) and Ethique de la différence sexuelle (1984). The present volume not only contains the text of Le Partage de la parole itself but also reprints two earlier essays that bear upon the same topic: Genres culturels et interculturels (from Langages 111) and Femmes et hommes: une identité relationnelle différente (from La place des femmes). Irigaray is a feminist philosopher whose work has always had a practical dimension. In this latest collection, her arguments are underpinned by empirical research on the language of schoolchildren and will have wide implications not only for a range of academic disciplines but for educational policy-makers and for feminism as a political force.

Le Partage de la parole was delivered as the Fall 2000 Zaharoff Lecture at the Taylor Institution in the University of Oxford.

For centuries Oxford has played host to distinguished guest lecturers from across the disciplines. The SPECIAL LECTURE SERIES offers a selection of outstanding lectures recently delivered in a variety of Humanities subjects. ... Read more