Books by Luce Irigaray

In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.

Luce Irigaray reflects on three critical concerns of our time: the cultivation of energy in its many forms, the integration of Asian and Western traditions, and the reenvisioning of religious figures for the contemporary world. A philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, Irigaray draws deeply on her personal experience in addressing these questions.

Die Gestalt der Maria ist in der christlichen Theologie nahezu abwesend, obgleich sie neben Jesus die Mit-Erlöserin der Welt ist. Diese Abwesenheit Marias in den Texten kontrastiert mit ihrer Allgegenwärtigkeit in der Kunst und widerspricht dem Eifer, mit dem das christliche Volk nicht aufhört, sich an sie zu wenden.Luce Irigaray nähert sich dem Mysterium, das Maria darstellt,und der Rolle, die sie in der Inkarnation des Göttlichen für die Menschheit spielt. Wie kann man nicht von der Tatsache berührt werden, dass die Virginität Marias nicht nur eine natürliche sein kann, sondern vor allem eine Virginität des Atems, der Seele sein muss, die sie dazu befähigt, ein anderes Ereignis des Göttlichen zur Welt zu bringen?In diesem Licht hat Luce Irigaray die so reiche Ikonographie der Verkündigung interpretiert, insbesondere das Erwecken und das Teilen des Atems, zu dem der Engel Maria einlädt. Das Schweigen, das Unsichtbare und das Berühren, so wesentlich für die Gestalt Marias, werden nicht als Zeichen einer bloßen Passivität oder Unterwerfung unter einen beliebigen Herrn interpretiert, sondern als Elemente einer weiblichen Präsenz, die imstande ist, in sich das aufzunehmen und zur Welt zu bringen, was noch nicht geschehen ist, sei es auf der menschlichen oder auf der göttlichen Ebene. Dank der Betonung des Atems und der natürlichen wie spirituellen Qualitäten der Frau erscheint Maria als eine Gestalt der Weisheit, gleich denen, die wir in anderen Kulturen finden, eine mögliche Vermittlerin zwischen verschiedenen Traditionen. Maria offenbart sich also als eine gewissermaßen verhüllte Manifestierung der göttlichen Kraft, dessen Trägerin und Verantwortliche eine Frau ist.

Whilst he broaches the theme of the difference between the sexes, Hegel does not go deep enough into the question of their mutual desire as a crucial stage in our becoming truly human. He ignores the dialectical process regarding sensitivity and sensuousness. And yet this is needed to make spiritual the relation between two human subjectivities differently determined by nature and to ensure the connection between body and spirit, nature and culture, private life and public life. This leads Hegel to fragment human subjectivity into yearnings for art, religion and philosophy thereby losing the unity attained through the cultivation of a longing for the absolute born of a desire for one another as different.Furthermore, our epoch of history is different from the Hegelian one and demands that we consider additional aspects of human subjectivity. This is essential if we are to overcome the nihilism inherent in our traditional metaphysics without falling into a worse nihilism due to a lack of rigorous thinking common today.The increasing power of technique and technologies as well as the task of building a world culture are two other challenges we face. Our sexuate belonging provides us with a universal living determination of our subjectivity ΓÇô now a dual subjectivity - and also with a natural energy potential which allows us to use technical resources without becoming dependent on them.

We are accustomed to considering the other as an individual without paying sufficient attention to the particular world or specific culture to which the other belongs. This book questions the validity of the 'sameness' that sits at the root of Western culture.

In this book, Luce Irigaray - philosopher, linguist, psychologist and psychoanalyst - proposes nothing less than a new conception of being as well as a means to ensure its individual and relational development from birth.Unveiling the mystery of our origin is probably what most motivates our quests and plans. Now such a disclosure proves to be impossible. Indeed we were born of a union between two, and we are forever deprived of an origin of our own. Hence our ceaseless search for roots: in our genealogy, in the place where we were born, in our culture, religion or language. But a human being cannot develop starting from roots as a tree does, it must take on responsibility for its own being and existence without continuity with its origin and background. How can we succeed in doing that? First by cultivating our breathing, which is not only the means thanks to which we come into the world, but which also allows us to transcend mere survival towards a spiritual becoming. Taking on our sexuate belonging is the second element which makes us able to assume our natural existence. Indeed this determination at once brings us energy and provides us with a structure which contributes to our individuation and our relations with other living beings and the world. Our sexuation can also compensate for our absence of roots by compelling us to unite with the other sex so that we freely approach the copulative conjunction from which we were born; that is, the mystery of our origin. This does not occur through a mere sexual instinct or drive, but requires us to cultivate desire and love with respect for our mutual difference(s). In this way we become able to give rise to a new human being, not only at a natural but also at an ontological level. 

Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference.Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.

With an original introduction by Luce Irigaray, and original texts from her students and collaborators, this book imagines the outlines of a more just, ecologically attuned world that flourishes on the basis of sexuate difference.

This work explores the issues of identity, citizenship, community and social rights as they arise in matters of love and sexual difference.

The author, a leading feminist and psychoanalyst, holds an imaginary dialogue with Nietzsche designed to interrogate the philosopher on his views of the feminine. She links their dialogue with a pre-Socratic examination of the elements.

With this book we see a philosopher well steeped in the Western tradition thinking through ancient Eastern disciplines, meditating on what it means to learn to breathe, and urging us all at the dawn of a new century to rediscover indigenous Asian cultures. Yogic tradition, according to Irigaray, can provide an invaluable means for restoring the vital link between the present and eternity-and for re-envisioning the patriarchal traditions of the West. Western, logocentric rationality tends to abstract the teachings of yoga from its everyday practice-most importantly, from the cultivation of breath. Lacking actual, personal experience with yoga or other Eastern spiritual practices, the Western philosophers who have tried to address Hindu and Buddhist teachings-particularly Schopenhauer-have frequently gone astray. Not so, Luce Irigaray. Incorporating her personal experience with yoga into her provocative philosophical thinking on sexual difference, Irigaray proposes a new way of understanding individuation and community in the contemporary world. She looks toward the indigenous, pre-Aryan cultures of India-which, she argues, have maintained an essentially creative ethic of sexual difference predicated on a respect for life, nature, and the feminine. Irigaray's focus on breath in this book is a natural outgrowth of the attention that she has given in previous books to the elements-air, water, and fire. By returning to fundamental human experiences-breathing and the fact of sexual difference-she finds a way out of the endless sociologizing abstractions of much contemporary thought to rethink questions of race, ethnicity, and globalization.

A brilliant new work by Luce Irigaray, one of the greatest living French thinkers, in which she deepens her arguments in relation to sexuate difference.

Irigaray offers the clearest available introduction to her own work. Focusing on power, women, gender and patriarchal mythologies, she lays out what for her has become the central problem for women in the modern world.

In this book, one of the foremost contemporary scholars in the fields of feminist thought and linguistics, explores the possibility of a new liberating language and hence a new relationship between the sexes.

Covering the various key topics that have been central to Luce Irigaray's work, this book offers an insight into her career as one of the world's most important contemporary thinkers. It is suitable for students seeking an overview of Irigaray's thought, as well as those already familiar with her work.

A feminist critique of the accounts of "Being" found in some of the key texts of existentialism and phenomenology, in particular Sartre, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. Knowing the other as beloved is intimately related to a changing perception of the other of the cosmos.

Discusses how language, religion, law, art science and technology have failed women and why. The author goes beyond analysis and commentary to propose concrete changes tailored to women's specificity in all these fields - practical means of ensuring "our" culture is women's as well as men's.

Exploring women's experiences of motherhood, abortion, the AIDS crisis and the beauty industry, this book presents one of the most important thinkers of our day in her own words.

If Western philosophy has claimed to be a love of wisdom, it has forgotten to become a wisdom of love. Asking the question: How can we love each other? Irigaray presents an exploration of desire and the human heart.

Explores the man/woman relationship in a series of lyrical meditations on the senses and the elements; the format resembles a series of love-letters, in which the identity and reality of the addressees are deliberately obscured to avoid conventional, male-imposed conceptual patterns.

A collection of lectures delivered by the author throughout Canada and Europe. Irigaray covers major issues in religion, the law, psychoanalysis and literature, analyzing sexual difference according to what she terms the double dimension of gender and ideology.

A radically subversive critique brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own.