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Summary
A broad exploration of Irigaray’s philosophy of life and living.
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.
“This is a very timely text; it places Irigaray scholarship in conversation with the lively field of feminist philosophies of life, and this is a really wonderful, fruitful match. The collection itself contains many marvelous pieces. Luce Irigaray’s essay is strong and pithy—she reiterates a number of her important ideas, in accessible language, and places them in the context of pertinent questions in feminism.” — Sabrina L. Hom, coeditor of Thinking with Irigaray
Gail M. Schwab is Special Assistant to the Provost and Professor Emerita of French at Hofstra University. The author of many articles on Luce Irigaray’s philosophy, she is also the translator of several works by Irigaray, including To Speak Is Never Neutral.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Part I. Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray
Introduction: Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love Gail M. Schwab
How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation? Luce Irigaray
Part II. Life In and Through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love
The Re-Enchanted Garden: Participatory Sentience and Becoming-Subject in “Third Space” Cheryl Lynch-Lawler
Thinking Life through the Early Greeks Kristin Sampson
Between Her and Her: Place and Relations between Women in Irigaray and Wright Rebecca Hill
Nature, Culture, and Sexuate Difference in Luce Irigaray’s Pluralist Model of Embodied Life Erla Karlsdottir and Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
Between Heidegger’s Poetic Thinking and Deleuzian Affect: Irigaray’s The Way of Love Ellen Mortensen
Time for Love: Plato and Irigaray on Erotic Relations Fanny Söderbäck
Life-Giving Sex versus Mere Animal Existence: Irigaray’s and Badiou’s Paradoxically Chiasmatic Conceptions of “Woman” and Sexual Pleasure Louise Burchill
Freedom, Desire, and the Other: Reading Sartre with Irigaray Gail M. Schwab
Daughters, Difference, and Irigaray’s Economy of Desire Phyllis H. Kaminski
Part III. Revitalizing History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and the Arts
The Age of the Spirit: Irigaray, Apocalypse, and the Trinitarian View of History Emily A. Holmes
Tragedy: An Irigarayan Approach Alison Stone
The Ethics of Elemental Passions in Eugene Guillevic and Luce Irigaray Eva Maria Korsisaari
Deconstruction, Defiguration, Disconcertion: On Reading Speculum de l’autre femme with Derrida and Lacan Anne van Leeuwen
Dewey and Irigaray on Education and Democracy: The Classroom, the Ineffable, and Recognition Tomoka Toraiwa
Discursive Desire and the Student Imaginary Karen Schiler
Building Sexuate Architectures of Sustainability Peg Rawes
Habitats for Desire: Sculptural Gestures toward Sexuate Living Britt-Marie Schiller
The Feminist Distance: Space in Luce Irigaray and Jane Campion’s The Piano Caroline Godart
