Luce Irigaray

An/archy and the Dao, Levinas and the Great Teacher

by Donovan Irven

About being-two in an architectural perspective: interview with Luce Irigaray

by Andrea Wheeler

About being-two in an architectural perspective

by Andrea Wheeler

Love in Architecture

by Andrea Wheeler

Philosophy & Philosophising: Reconfiguring the Material of Philosophy and Developing (feminine) Subjectivity with Irigaray and Malabou

by Nicola Rubczak

Philosophy & Philosophising: Reconfiguring the Material of Philosophy and Developing (feminine) Subjectivity with Irigaray and Malabou

by Nicola Rubczak

Gatsby's Mentors: Queer Relations Between Love and Money in The Great Gatsby

by Maggie Gordon Froehlich

Published in Journal of Men's Studies 19.3 (2011): 209-226

This essay examines relationships between men and the role patriarchal capitalism plays in the construction of... more This essay examines relationships between men and the role patriarchal capitalism plays in the construction of sexuality in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby(1925), a novel written during a critical period in the history of sexuality, as well as of gay and lesbian history. The ambivalence about male bonds—in particular the simultaneously loving and abusive dynamics of mentoring—depicted in this canonical work of American literature reveals the author's unease about his relationship with Catholic priest and teacher Sigourney Fay and provides insight into the author's well-known lifelong anxiety about his gender and sexuality.

“Unitive Horizons: Women becoming divine”

by Sarah Nicholson

Spirituality in Australia conference proceedings University of Western Sydney, Psychology and Spirituality group. 2007

The Treachery Of Wetness

by Moynagh Sullivan

Pour une dynamique de la diffèrence des sexes, in "Le passant ordinaire", 50, 2004

by federica giardini

Difference as the recovery of sensible attention. Reflections on teaching Political philosophy

by federica giardini

Sexuate subjects. UCL, 3-5 dicembre 2010

Speculum of being two: Politics and theory after all these years

by federica giardini

“Theory, Culture and Society” (20) june 2003

An Irigarayian politics of livability. Antigone and Ismene reclaimed as feminist-political paradigms.

by Evelien Geerts

Re-edited version of an older paper, with more information on Judith Butler's politics of livability, and Irigarayian... more Re-edited version of an older paper, with more information on Judith Butler's politics of livability, and Irigarayian feminist politics of livability.

The Statue of Hermoine: The Otherness of the Woman as 'Sign'

by Jason Wakefield

This forthcoming chapter from my 'Non - Being' book is a feminist analysis of the statuesque motif in Shakespeare's... more This forthcoming chapter from my 'Non - Being' book is a feminist analysis of the statuesque motif in Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale.The theoretical framework consists of ideas proposed by the female philosophers Kristeva, Irigaray and de Beauvoir. My interrogation focuses exclusively on the last scene.

Antigone and Ismene reclaimed. From tragic female figures to feminist-political paradigms.

by Evelien Geerts

In this paper, I started from an analysis of the current rather tragic situation of female Oedipal rivalry between... more In this paper, I started from an analysis of the current rather tragic situation of female Oedipal rivalry between women in Flemish politics. To counter this, I argue for an Irigarayian inspired feminist politics, in which the figures of Antigone and Ismene play an important role. After an analysis of the more or less ethical Antigone readings of Hegel, de Beauvoir, Lacan and Ettinger, I come to Irigaray's own critical Antigone reception. By focusing on Irigaray's ideas of motherhood and sisterhood, I then argue for a more feminine and feminist politics that could counter this situation of Oedipal rivalry between female politicians.

UnHoming Pigeons: the Postal Principle in Lynn Hershman Leeson & Hussein Chalayan

by Lynn Turner

published in Derrida Today, 5.1. 2012

In this article I bring together Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray’s engagements with Sigmund Freud’s vexed attempt to... more In this article I bring together Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray’s engagements with Sigmund Freud’s vexed attempt to step beyond the pleasure principle. Derrida’s speculations on the name, the house and the practice of Freud find him inadvertently rewriting the conditions of the autobiographical as that which erases as much as inscribes, while Irigaray requires a sexually different modelling of what we call language if the experience of the girl is to be addressed. Yet Irigaray uncannily repeats the teleological gesture of laying claim to a legacy, diagnosed in Freud by Derrida, even as this legacy is newly imagined as that of the feminine to which Freud remained blind. I then interweave these revised stakes of the fort-da game as they are expressed in two experimental films; Lynn Hershman Leeson’s feature Conceiving Ada (USA, 1997) and Hussein Chalayan’s short Absent Presence (UK/Turkey, 2005). One self-consciously concerns the recovery of ‘lost’ women from history (da!), the other investigates the treatment of the foreigner staged with an all-female cast (in which the instability of foreign objects can secure no fortification for the scientific subject). The films differently engage fantasies concerning genetics, and differently engage the projection of a legacy as teleological ambition. Privileging Derrida’s transformation of the pleasure into the postal principle as that which invokes ‘Tele–without telos’, I ask after the transmissibility of this ambition.

Mother Against Daughter and Daughter Against Mother: Hostile Femininity In the Neo-Victorian Novel

by Barbara Braid

Published in: Andrea Ruthven & Gabriela Mádlo, eds. "Illuminating the Dark Side. Evil, Women and the Feminine." Oxford: Inder-Disciplinary Press, 2010, pp. 91- 98.

The idea that in the patriarchal world men overpower and limit women’s freedom is so obvious that has become a cliché.... more The idea that in the patriarchal world men overpower and limit women’s freedom is so obvious that has become a cliché. However, a closer look at the mother-daughter relationship, following the seminal works of such feminists like Adrienne Rich, Phyllis Chessler and Luce Irigaray, enables us to change the focus from male-female power struggle to the one within female genealogy, where mothers become not just the victims, but also the wardens of the patriarchal prison and perpetrators of the ‘punishment,’ thus leading the daughters either to ‘matrophobia’ or engulfment by the mother. The three neo-Victorian novels on which the paper will be focused represent three examples of deeply ambiguous and often hostile relationships between mothers and daughters. Firstly, in her novel Affinity Sarah Waters presents the world of a Victorian lady visitor in Millbank prison, who seems to be imprisoned by hostile and menacing femininity motherhood, and whose matrophobia makes her an easy target of Selina Dawes’ manipulation. Secondly, in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, Grace’s mother is herself a stereotypical victim of gender roles and patriarchal oppression, becoming an anti-model for her daughter and preparing a foundation for a real mother-figure in Grace’s life, Mary Whitley. In this case, Grace becomes engulfed by her second ‘mother.’ Thirdly, Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White presents an example of an abusive mother-daughter relationship and the resulting ‘matrophobia’ of the main character. All of these mother figures are shown from a perspective of their impact on the main characters’ female identity as well as their own attitude to other women later in life. In its conclusion, the paper will touch upon the issue of neo-Victorian novel as a genre which as its aim has the preservation of female genealogy.

Review: 'The "Weak" Subject: On Modernity, Eros and Women's Playwriting.' By Serena Anderlini-D-Onofrio.

by Hilary Robinson

'Hypatia' v.18 n 3 (Fall 2003) pp 242-5

Seeking a sensible transcendental: an amorous exchange

by Agnes Bosanquet

In The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray suggests that we (Westerners), trained in rigid and coded meanings and senses,... more In The Way of Love, Luce Irigaray suggests that we (Westerners), trained in rigid and coded meanings and senses, forget the requirement of the carnal in our communications. We let pass the opportunity to be “surprised, touched, wonderstruck, called beyond … what we already [are]” (2002, viii). By writing a philosophy that seeks to transform ethical and sexuate relations, Irigaray privileges a mode of becoming that is both creative and unpredictable. Becoming divine is not a staged and regulated process, offering a fixed and knowable ideal; rather, it is a revelation. A dialectic of divinity is therefore an impossibility; instead, a meditation on becoming opens up the possibilities for an amorous exchange with Luce Irigaray’s writings.

Irigaray first uses the term ‘amorous exchange’ in ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, when she seeks a corporeal way of communicating (1991b, 44). An amorous exchange is an invitation to, and a dialogue with, a desiring other in multiple texts and voices. It is also the performance of an intersubjective model of being (at least) two in language and philosophy. Reading and writing in this sense becomes an affective and intimate process of exchange or touch between authors, readers and texts. With this in mind, this work is written in multiple voices. One, a critical and theoretical voice, establishes the contexts within which writers have read and responded to Irigaray’s philosophy of becoming divine, and frames my ideas in relation to these. Another voice presents moments of becoming — or points of saturation — from my own life to demonstrate the pleasures and possibilities of Irigaray’s texts. In this way, I am following Irigaray’s call in the introductory section “Becoming Divine as Two” in Key Writings, to discover and cultivate a language of my own, and to locate this in my body. The words of another are not sufficient for my becoming (2004, 145-6). Entering an amorous or ‘touchful’ exchange with Irigaray’s writing — and the multiple voices which speak in and around it — is a process of ‘becoming’ which forms the basis of a sensible and carnal transcendental, or an inscription of divinity on the flesh (1993b, 147).

Luce Irigaray's Sensible Transcendental: Becoming Divine in the Body

by Agnes Bosanquet

This paper explores the transformative possibilities of everyday life experiences through Luce Irigaray's call to... more This paper explores the transformative possibilities of everyday life experiences through Luce Irigaray's call to become divine women (and men). The paradoxical construction of the sensible transcendental is Irigaray's attempt to imagine a divinity that would be an "inscription in the flesh" (An Ethics of Sexual Difference 147). The paper considers an alternative language for such an understanding, including Romain Rolland's oceanic feeling and Catherine Clement's syncope, both of which locate a sense of a beyond in everyday experience. In contrast to previous readings of Irigaray's divine, which have focussed on the subjectivity offered by the sensible transcendental, I argue that the divine is primarily a passage of becoming and transformation that can be understood as operating intersubjectively. How might we experience such a becoming? The paper offers the examples of free diving, reading and writing to demonstrate an embodied divinity.