Thinking Life With Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love (Suny in Gender Theory)

"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."-- Back cover Contents Acknowledgments Part I: Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray Introduction: Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray: Language, Origin, Art, Love Origin, Maternity, and Relationality Logic, Language, Art Nature Life in and through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love Revitalizing History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and the Arts Notes Works Cited How Could We Achieve Women’s Liberation? At What Freedom Do Women Aim? Not Only Having but Also Being an Origin Discovering and Expressing Faithfulness to the Self Limits and Forms Provided by Life Itself Art as Means towards a New Logic Notes Part II: Life In and Through Nature, Desire, Freedom, and Love The Re-Enchanted Garden: Participatory Sentience and Becoming-Subject in “Third Space” Introduction Disoriented Subjects Abstract Rationalism Wed to Consumer Capitalism The Originary Error in the Split Subject Bridge Building: Participatory Embodiment of “Third Space” Conclusion: Human Ternary Process Notes Works Cited Thinking Life through the Early Greeks Irigaray’s Reading of the Pre-Socratic Thinkers Early Greek Conceptions of Life Life as Growth Life as Cosmic Thinking Life Notes Works Cited Between Her and Her: Place and Relations between Women in Irigaray and Wright The Founding Matricide The Sacrifice of Natural Fertility For Country Never Leaves Its People Nowhere Special Muteness and Silence Irigaray, Sexuate Difference, and the Sensible-Transcendental Toward Articulations of Language and Gestures That Respect Place Notes Works Cited Nature, Culture, and Sexuate Difference in Luce Irigaray’s Pluralist Model of Embodied Life Life and Nature: Irigaray and Nietzsche Philosophy of Life, Organization, and Meaning From the War of Opposites to Transformative Encounters Irigaray’s Philosophy of Natural and Civil Life The Interval Nature and Democratic Politics: From Opposites to Difference and Pluralism Notes Works Cited Between Heidegger’s Poetic Thinking and Deleuzian Affect: Irigaray’s The Way of Love Irigaray and Heidegger’s Poetic Thinking Irigaray and Deleuze and Guattari Irigaray’s Poetic Rebuilding of the World Works Cited Time for Love: Plato and Irigaray on Erotic Relations Introduction The Genesis of Love: Originary Wholeness or Primary Difference? Daimonic Encounters: The Intermediary Nature of Love Conclusion Notes Works Cited Life-Giving Sex versus Mere Animal Existence: Irigaray’s and Badiou’s Paradoxically Chiasmatic Conceptions of “Woman” and Sexual Pleasure Irigaray’s Analytics of Sexual Difference and the Desiring Relation Between the Sexes Badiou’s Axiomatics of Love and Sexual Difference Badiou’s Objections to Lacan— and, by Extension, to Irigaray: Sexual Segregation and Feminine Jouissance Badiou and Irigaray’s Chiasmatic Masculine-Feminine Take on Philosophy? Notes Works Cited Freedom, Desire, and the Other: Reading Sartre with Irigaray Desire Everyday Social Relations: The Other and the They Freedom Notes Works Cited Daughters, Difference, and Irigaray’s Economy of Desire “Any Theory of the ‘Subject’ ”: Daughters and Desire in the Present Economy “Daughter and Woman” “Spiritual Tasks for Our Age” Works Cited Part III: Revitalizing History, Philosophy, Pedagogy, and the Arts The Age of the Spirit: Irigaray, Apocalypse, and the Trinitarian View of History Joachim of Fiore’s Spiritual Men The Spirit Incarnate in the Body of a Woman Incarnation in History Whose History? Notes Works Cited Tragedy: An Irigarayan Approach The Politics of the Tragic Freud and the Tragic Effect The Antigone Complex Radical Tragedy The Tragic: Between Metaphysics and History Notes Works Cited The Ethics of Elemental Passions in Eugène Guillevic and Luce Irigaray Notes Works Cited Deconstruction, Defiguration, Disconcertion: On Reading Speculum de l’autre femme with Derrida and Lacan Introduction Derrida’s Deconstruction of Husserlian Phenomenology Lacan’s Deformation of Freudian Psychoanalysis Disconcertion of Sexual Difference Conclusion Notes Works Cited Dewey and Irigaray on Education and Democracy: The Classroom, the Ineffable, and Recognition Dewey’s Democracy and Education The Ineffable: A Potential Space for Mediating the Vertical and the Horizontal Irigaray’s Critique of Education Irigaray’s Ethical Gesture of Recognition: A Space to Safeguard the Ineffable Irigaray and Cultivating the Opening to the Other in the Classroom Notes Works Cited Discursive Desire and the Student Imaginary Liberating the Student-as-Subject The Other Subject in the Classroom Female Desire and Student Imaginaries Works Cited Building Sexuate Architectures of Sustainability Sexuate Difference and Sustainable Architectural Design A Critique of Technology Sexuate Architectures of Sustainability Notes Works Cited Habitats for Desire: Sculptural Gestures toward Sexuate Living Becoming a Subject of Her Own Desire Spiders A Framework of Permeable Phallicism: Stepping Back from Mastery and Domination Sexuate Living Works Cited The Feminist Distance: Space in Luce Irigaray and Jane Campion’s The Piano Toward Ada: Camera Work and Characterization Violent Spaces Conclusion Notes Works Cited List of Contributors Index